Interesting glimpse into the approach of Adobe and Wired to magazine publishing and new touch platforms.

Tweeted this pre-iPad, quietly hoping it would be realised when Stevie took to the stage. General disappointment followed however this prototype stayed with me. Firstly because it’s a fantastic example of prototyping an idea. Further to this and despite the interaction on display being nothing particularly new, it is an insightful glance into where publishing is headed. Look around you and you will see Kindles, iPhones, Androids and all manner of touch enabled devices stuck to people’s digits. Their presence becomes more ubiquitous each day.

An end in sight

Specifically to do with publishing the observation that wins for me in the below example is how a magazine is finishable. I like this, seems pretty obvious but the impact as a design idea is central to the UX and at odds with our daily experience of the web.

As a magazine atoms become bits the opportunity to provide exhaustive content is apparent however can be at odds with the audience need. As someone who subscribes to Wired’s printed publication I get that. I want the editors insight. In the brief time I have available to read through a magazine this skilled encapsulation of a theme and coverage of an interest area is essential. Not only does the editor as cultural explorer bring all this good stuff together they can give me the hooks to undertake future sorties myself and goes some way to damped the information overload endemic in daily net living.

^ Mag+ touch screen protoype

The curiousness of children is infinite. My 18 month baby is into everything, looking, pointing, grabbing, pulling. As any parent will tell you, it is pretty relentless as the world is explored anew. With each discovery comes the instinctual need to communicate with us what they are thinking and feeling. It is phenomenal how much is actually being taken in but of course without language, deciphering the baa-baa-beedahh-dees feels like a task for Bletchley Park.

What has been incredibly enlightening however was how gesturing through sign language can help to bridge that gap. After several months of “Sign and Sign”, which is a baby group to teach basic sign language, I was able to communicate about specific things; abstract and literal. For example, if she sees a star then fanning the fingers out from a fist tells us or if she is hungry or has a pain then a simple gesture lets us know. The recognition of understanding and being able to communicate is self evident, it is what we all continue to try to achieve even after the nappies are off.

The parallels between this and gestural interaction are clear. If you can communicate with your audience using simple gestures they are likely to become engaged more easily as the threshold to participation is lowered. I no longer need to coordinate by hand with the mouse to cause a cursor to move to a specific point to click…baa-baa-beedahh… I just press, or circle or swipe.  It is inherent, immediate, intuitive and why these types of interfaces are becoming woven more tightly into our social fabric.

You can’t miss the current onslaught of media coverage pushing the new Windows 7. Despite some pretty irritating adverts the arrival of windows 7 has brought with it a couple of features in particular that I’m excited about; “Play to” and “Touch”.

Of these the Touch addition, buried at the bottom of the list?! represents the biggest new playground for designers. Whilst touch interaction is nothing new, the native support for it into what will become the most installed OS around is huge.

Having Touch not only changes the way we interact with information but changes the way the information should be displayed.

Getting your screen hands dirty

As you’d expect the inventory of flicks, swipes, twofingercombomoves, taps and pinches is all there. Using the simple flick gestures we are able to move around the interface dragging up, down, moving back and forward as well as performing tasks such as copy, paste, undo, and delete, right there in and amongst it. w00t!

Practicalities aside what gets me hot is that this method of interaction allows the user to really get stuck in or as Ben Shneiderman would say directly manipulate the interface. It brings with it the high probability that we will see more minority report UI’s but more importantly it presents opportunities to break down the engagement barrier of having to operate a mouse and keyboard and in doing so opens up new richly immersive environments and online services where involvement is more than cerebral, it’s physical.

In doing so our audience suddenly got a lot broader. Gestural interaction lowers the threshold to participation, just look at the way the Wii has found a home in households. It means generations of older folk and those who do not work with computers everyday can do the things they want to without technological intimidation or hangups.

Look and Feel

A new aesthetic is also required to play in this world, one that takes cues from kiosk applications and the burgeoning world of iPhone and its immitators. Input controls need to be bigger to deal with our low fidelity fingers (sounds odd saying our fingers are low fidelity..) than the pixel perfect pointer.

Controls also need to be spaced further apart. This means throwing menus tight into the edges of your application isn’t the best move for Touch as it makes activating them more difficult. This changes what we’d traditionally expect according to Fitts’ Law which sates “the time required to interact with a target depends upon the size of the target and the distance to it. The smaller a target is, and the further away it is, the harder it is to use. But due to the large surface area of the fingertip, small controls that are too close together can also be difficult to target precisely.” MSDN guidelines

With the advent of Touch we are also seeing a renewed interest in haptic feedback. The lack of this has been one of my gripes with the iPhone and I’ll often turn on sounds to use the phone keypad as a way to give the buttons some weight. With haptic we can do things like vibrate the device when a button is pressed or use it to signal an event. This facet provides another way to make our Touch experience authentic and I’m interested to feel the nuances in design as interfaces and brands differentiate themselves through vibrations.

*Waves goodbye*

As Touch enabled computers permeate the market it means designing interfaces just got a lot more exciting. It also means things have got a lot more complicated as now we need to consider interaction across a new input device and all that this tactile one brings with it. In some ways it reminds me of creating a Flash site and an HTML site, both to essentially convey the same information albeit via a different experience. How do you design for both concurrently without compromise? Are users likely to stay in a mode or is it constantly in flux dependent upon task? How does it change what we already know about usability? What new services are going to appear that enrich this form of interaction? How will current ones adapt?…

How we choose to design for this will take time as we become au fait with the experience. In turn expectations will change and with it new patterns will undoubtedly arise. I’m currently working with the talented folk at Splendid who have developed some great applications and concepts for MS Surface and are inventing some of this future. More about this another time.

If you have worked on or seen some really great examples of multi-touch interfaces let me know about it in the comments, would love to check it out..

Related reading

Dan Saffer wrote a book about gestural interfaces
Microsoft’s Touch guidelines

The 4th plinth hit the headlines again last week. I’m interested in the idea and openness of what Gormley proposes as well as the participatory function of the art work. It is his concept that resounds most strongly for me, as the role of normal art consumption is inverted by turning the viewer into the viewed however in doing so the spectacle wains.

I recently watched someone sitting on the plinth, looking bored and as I did it seemed to me that I was just expecting too much. By putting a person on the plinth, the expectations the viewer brings to the experience is altered so no longer is it enough to simply look at the figure knowing they are capable of more than statuesque silence.

Participatory interaction

Another plinth that changes the role of the viewer into that of a participant is Greyworld’s “Monument” behind the Tate Modern. In this case the viewer is mimicked by the figure, which tracks their movement using cameras and strikes a pose in response. It is not obvious that this statue is anything out of the ordinary. There are no signs or reasons to interact, so I assume that was a deliberate design choice to create surprise although it was either broken or taking a break when I tried it out and nothing could rouse the statue. The result was a interesting piece of interactive design in concept alone.

Interaction values

These two plinths tried to do something different and succeeded but also lost a lot of people along the way. It’s an interesting reminder that when the context is changed one also needs to consider what the viewer user participant brings with them in terms of expectation as this will alter their resulting experience.

I noticed these wonderful accessibility “point symbols” on the Eden project website. They are pictorial depictions of words… icons, which are used for to assist people with low literacy, learning difficulties or where English may not be their first language.

Enabled using AJAX the user interacts with the site text by rolling over a word which highlights and displays associated symbols. Despite the symbol illustration production values being fairly low, they succeed in their simplicity to communicate meaning.

^ Eden project’s point symbols

The system has been developed by Widgit online, with more than 7,000 images covering a vocabulary in excess of 40,000 words.

I’m a fan of this kind of contextual interaction. At times the way to interact may not be obvious, but once learned it allows greater information density within the same display area. There are limits of course but for simple tasks giving the user some additional contextual help and feedforward benefits their experience.

The New York Times implement a sweet little dictionary. By highlighting a word, a question mark bubble appears that enables the user to look the word up.

^ New York Times dictionary lookup

Another incidence of contextual interaction is over at Ask.com’s search results. Rolling over the binocular icon displays a thumbnail of the destination website.

^ Ask.com search result feedforward

If you’ve seen any decent implementations of these ideas drop a link and comment below.

People often talk about finding inspiration for their everyday work by looking outside of their immediate industry or practice. I agree with the sentiment, it broadens personal outlook and is more likely in my opinion to present new ways of thinking and doing that can filter back into the day job.

The video below illustrates this line of thinking perfectly. Tinker Hatfield is a talented guy - Nike’s Vice President of Innovation Design - who trained as an Architect and transitioned to Product Design whilst working at Nike. He is responsible for the classic Air Max and drew significant inspiration from the Pompidou Centre. “If I had not seen the building I might not have suggested we expose the air bag and make it visual and let people see inside the shoe.”

Having the idea however is only one part of innovating… as he goes on to say, it also takes courage to see it through “When you do something different you have to have a pretty thick skin, people are going to take shots at you. They are going to criticise what they don’t understand.”

It’s an inspiring short, have a watch, thicken up your skin and go see a new bit of the world.

^ “Respect the Architects” by Thibaut de Longeville.

^ Sam Potts, “Putting Tweets On Paper Since May 26, 2009.”

Received my Twitter-by-jpg. Very exciting. Futile in many ways but hugely appealing and valuable in many more. The initial idea was that you could request a tweet on paper, which you’d receive by post…. living outside the US I could only request the .jpg option.

The subversive concept intriguing of it - without wanting to disappear into a stenching art critique hole - but also the craft. It reminds me of Dada and Fluxus artist’s who used the postal system to create and collaborate on art work as well as the participatory art of Sophie Calle who will often use the correspondence between herself and the subject as part of the final work.

Remote villagers

Doing a quick search around for other services and sites that do this kind of thing I stumbled across a few companies that will turn your emails into atoms, integrating with Salesforce.com, offering API’s the whole shebang but it was the justification suggested at Digital Inspiration that appealed the most:

“1. Some of your relatives live in remote villages where they don’t have computers let alone access to Internet.

2. Your grandparents know computers but they’ll probably feel more happy if you could send them emails and photographs in paper form that they can read in the lawn outside.”

All very worthy and especially amusing when it comes to thinking about Twitter.

…My last tweet was “Vision going.” Some more interesting reading about postal art. If you would like to send me a Tweet: 6 Salem Road, Bayswater, London W2 4BU

The other weekend was a beautiful Spring day. Sun in the sky, warm and perfect for browsing a local second hand book sale taking place in something that resembled a scene from Miss Marple. Among the jostling grannies were some fantastic finds from George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” to “The Seven dials Mystery” by Agatha Christie and Vigina Woolf’s “The Common Reader.” All original Pelican classics, dusty and yellowing from the hours.

Permanence

In amongst the jumble I discovered an old jewel, a 1945 impression of “A Book of English Poetry - Chaucer to Rossetti” which had secrets hidden between the covers.

A small black and white passport photo was attached with a short inscription on the first page inside the cover. A man in his 30’s or 40’s sat in what I guess is his front room, the edges of the photo faded away over time, give a glimpse into the books history and sets the imagination off into other lives and eras. What was the connection between him and the Jannice to whom he gave this book? How did the book come to be here? Which poems did he read to her?…

^ Inscription found on the inside cover

As a designer I’m well aware of the gradual erosion of the printed medium in communication. This book however reminded me of the wonderful quality of print. The tactility and substance of the object. Something that changes with age as the pages begin to yellow and the smell of life permeating its leaves…we imbue it with character through ownership. The ability to alter it and eventually its fragility.

Digital products with Soul

It makes me wonder what would it mean for digital products to take on some of these characteristics? There is a soul to this book. Meaning conveyed through design, smell and touch but what marks this and some of the other older books out is the aging process itself.

Could time affect and enhance the emotional response of users?.. I think it could as within the fabric of social interaction people embed personality into systems that remember, that connect. It is the ability of a site to reveal, enable and promote this exchange that engenders its digital soul.

Finding the right page

The other delight was the way the book dealt with navigation. At the back of the book are two look up tables; an “Index of authors” and an “Index of first lines.” I love the way the latter is defined. It considers the perspective of the reader and how they may know only a snippet of a famous opening to a poem but not who it is by. In much the same way that I remember a song lyric but not the band who sang it and punch the line into Google, this indexing system addresses the reader’s mental model and provides a way for them to navigate the information.

^ UCD indexing

^ UCD indexing. [+] click image to enlarge

I attended an inspiring interview with Nolan Bushnell at BAFTA last night. A wildly successful charismatic character, in an unassuming kind of way, Bushnell of Atari and Pong fame took us on an informal excursion into his innovations in gaming c1970 through to his current uWink business.

Avoid missing ball for high score

The common thread which ran through his anecdotes was one of unfailing optimism and self belief coupled with a fascination for play. He built the Atari console after being unable to convince an established game publisher to take on Pong - ball missed; Chuck E.Cheese because he understood that kids do not want to sit still and talk quietly at diner but want to run around and cause havoc. Chuck E. Cheese now turns over $1bn a year.

It was refreshing to hear about these adventures. Like many designers intent on developing interesting ways to engage with people, his ‘let’s just do it’ attitude is what we seek out in others and often precisely what is needed. The experimentation of investigation that leads to new understandings any connections.

Engineering in fun

His work is the precursor to so much of modern gaming, many view him as the founding father of computer gaming. The underlying sense of philosophy to games and motivation can be seen directly in today’s Nintendo Wii. When Bushnell talks about social gaming he is interested especially in the embodied physical social experience rather than the distributed network experience of online gaming, predicting the continued growth and development of gestural interaction to a point where participation is simply a matter of moving ones body to effect change, negating the need for an additional input controller.

Other stories included his decision to incorporate “reflexing” into gameplay. Everyone is aware what it is like to play a game against a more skilled opponent. It’s great to improve your own game but also a little demoralizing. Bushnell introduced a simple handicap system whereby the difficulty of play altered in response to the players skill. So in multi-player Pong this meant that the more a player hit (“hogged”) the ball, the shorter their paddle became until it eventually disappeared. This meant that the player had to depend on their team mates.

When asked about his preference for modern game pads compared to the joystick he found that players could excerpt a massive amount of energy when they are getting beaten and there was no way to make an affordable joystick robust enough to withstand the reflected punishment or as Bushnell observed “Physics killed the joystick.”

Related links

Google tech talks: Nolan Bushnell

The event was being recorded so I’ll post a link here when it is online.

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here’s the video link http://bafta.org/learning/webcasts/nolan-bushnell,727,BA.html
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