ACM’s Interactions magazine – Jan/Feb ’09 online

ACM publishes a fantastic journal on human-computer interaction. They’ve made the Jan/Feb ’09 edition publicly available online.

Interesting article titles I skimmed from the “Contents” page:

  • Social Network Sites and Society: Current Trends and Future Possibilities
  • 90 Mobiles in 90 Days: A Celebration of Ideas for Mobile User Experience
  • The Washing Machine That Ate My Sari—Mistakes in Cross-Cultural Design
  • Design Versus Innovation: The Cranbrook / IIT Debate
  • Can “Wow” Be a Design Goal?
  • The Value of Visual Design in Software Development
  • What is Interaction? Are There Different Types?

Link source from experientia.

Gravity-Operated Interface: Muji Multi-Functional Clock

Muji Multi-clock novel interface

I bought this multi-functional clock from Muji which features a fantastic gravity-operated design. You simply rotate the device the “Feature”-way-up to activate that mode. As you can see, it’s currently on Calendar mode. I rotate clockwise to get to the “Alarm” mode.

Very simple operation. A “beep” signals that the mode has changed. The settings are done via two buttons, located behind the device.

It’s price? £6.80.

With batteries included.

It did, however, spell “calendar” wrongly. A “calender” apparently means something else.

Muji Multi-clock simple interactions

UPA-UK event: Credit Crunch

I attended the credit crunch event organized by UPA last week, and Gerred Blyth gave a brief presentation about the recession in general and opened the floor to another speaker (I can’t remember who) who spoke from his experience in previous recesssion.

Gerred kinda went through a list of industries which were benefiting from the recession and industries which were clearly losing out. Though not entirely revelational, it was good to get us started thinking about the topic.

Recession is bad news for:

  • Housing
  • Financial
  • Financial
  • Automotive
  • Retail (there are exceptions, as you will see below)
  • Advertising Expenditure
  • Venture Capital

Good news for:

  • Poundland, Morrisons
  • UK tourism (£ is cheap)
  • Do-it-yourself
  • accountancy/law
  • adult industry (not sure about this one)
  • church?
  • online retail (big one here)
  • mass merchandising (related to online retail)
  • beauty
  • home and garden (people staying at home?)
  • business software services
  • online advertising

It seems the message seems to be that online is good, and that traditional biz is bad. But both good and bad reports are coming from usability professionals regarding the recession. Perhaps it may be that less projects are being awarded these days. Who knows.

The point of it is that the recession is apparently here, and so in order to “make” it relevant to us, we broke into three teams to brainstorm ideas about how to combat the recession. The teams consisted of:

  • agencies
  • in-house
  • freelancers/individuals

Since my classmate and I were not part of any group, we decided to go into one we thought we’d best fit in – individuals. Ms. Be facilitated our session well as we brainstormed all the different ways in order to stay relevant in the business.

Of all the different things we shared, portfolios seemed to come up quite a lot, as well as networking. Staying professional and being on time was another. Another one you’d think would be difficult to do during a recession also appeared – smiling. I guess everyone around the table was maintaining a postitive attitude, a good reminder that we’re all human.

The speaker whose name I can’t remember said that if you’re good, you’ll get hired eventually if you do get fired. So, what about the not so good ones? Well, that will probably lead to other questions.

Some people mentioned that companies do hire graduates, for whatever that’s worth. Then I heard a blurb that it’s not easy for graduates to get freelance jobs. Either way, I think the signal is that it’s not impossible, but it’ll take some work.

However, I kept thinking to myself – there must be something we’re missing. People are still spending money, just in different ways. And if it’s not folks here in the UK, then there are people who are outside the UK spending that money.

And I even suppose some work wouldn’t even require money. Favors, perhaps. Who knows. I’d be interested to hear success stories.

As for me, I think knowing yourself is key to getting the job you want. I don’t think all jobs are made alike – so there’s no real competition here, and it’s always good to know what you want anyway.

This just scares me

…many students from HCI programs don’t emerge well trained in experimental design, statistics, methods for consumer research, content analysis, or ethnography. These gaps in their research skills limit them when it comes to opportunities in other influential business roles, including promotions beyond the usability function.

– Lynn Cherny, Interactions 2007

This just scares me.

This quote, the final paragraph of the article, is the proper frame of context:

We can’t just talk about the importance of good design. If we don’t create good design, user experience and product innovation won’t be coming from us, but from someone on the engineering team. And we’ll be lucky to be asked to evaluate it.

– Lynn Cherny, Interactions 2007

Beyond the browser: Usability in Mobile Interaction

I was at a UXCorner meeting last night, and it was organized by the kind folks at UXMedia. They had some interesting speakers come share their experiences about mobile user experience.

Mobile Design

One of the speakers, Anthony Ribot, gave some insightful bits about user experience from a mobile perspective. Maybe it’s the fact that I haven’t spent that much work on developing real-world mobile applications – but he’s right in saying it’s really competitive to be in this space.

“A single early failure = non-returning user”

… it said on one of his slides. That’s enough to put shivers down a lot of developer’s spines.

“data snacking”

was another term he mentioned, referring to a common european trend for users to log-in to check for new messages, posts, news, updates. “simple but repetitive”.

Another 2 tips for mobile developers/designers:

  • miniaturization != mobilization
  • design reward-based exploration (he mentions Opera Mini a lot here) – using convenient keys to allow for more direct access (hotkey-like, almost) to useful functionality (e.g. tree menu traversal)

The slides are here.

UX in London vs. US

I was chatting with Scott Weiss from Human Factors International, who was also one of the speakers, about his experience between the UK and US user experience industries – which one did he think was more “ahead of the game”. To my surprise, he seemed to think that UK has it together a little more than in the US. And I think he may have been referring to how tons of companies still aren’t very into this kind of stuff, not counting most of the major cities.

In fact, speaking to one of the folks from UXmedia, I didn’t realize that they’re not based in London, although they do a lot of work in the city. The Southampton-based agency is certainly getting more active in London, but I was humbly surprised to find so many small but great agencies doing this kind of stuff around the country.

2009 – a UX year?

This is one of three UX events that area already taking place the first month of the year. Can’t wait to see what’s in store for the rest!