GPS should make people feel better of themselves, so as other softwares.
Yesterday at Hugh Dubberly’s class, Chris, Paul, Phil, Kyle and I were studying some UX theories.
For some reason Chris began to complain how much he hated his Garmin GPS: It apparently gives him sort of connivence and freedom of exploring a city, but at the same time it makes him lose the ability of way-finding, as he said he wouldn’t be able to make anywhere without his GPS in Pittsburgh, where he already spent two years in his life. As he begins to be dependent upon a tool, his life choices are restricted to a certain level, and the original good feeling diminishes – Well, I have the same feeling about my iPhone before I abandoned it.
People talked about GPS like this all the time. However, it makes us think, what is the criteria of a good software?
I think a good software needs to “perform” two fundamental functions:
A. Functions as a tool to help people accomplish tasks in its most convenient and considerate way.
B. Empowers people to feel better of themselves. Let people have a better control of their life, meaning, a GPS has the responsibility to make people feel they are a good driver, not some stupid followers that obey a machine.
A good and successful software = A + B
One thing I don’t like User centered design is that users are given too much meaningless burden, either for concept generation or usability testing, however, in real life users adapt to what they already have, and its’ interaction designers’ responsibility to make the software more humane. I appreciate brave designers impose their own bold visions onto a product, which is a more artistic way of designing softwares – make the users your audience to enjoy the performances, at the same time, give their the authority to twist the product better.
Luxurious software
Sounds intriguing, I know. Software as a luxury. I had a hard time propose and market this idea to my peers. It indeed comes from my terribly artistic psyche, but that’s also a buzzword hidden in all the things we talk about today, User-centered design, web 3.0, SNS, etc., I have been thinking about this for a while, and I define the thesis work I have been working on as a cutting-edge luxurious software for collectors to express themselves, manage their collections, and fundamentally, turn their mundane everyday life into a scared, ritual journey. (You may see this work in the next CHI conference).
I want to start with the term luxury. Luxury is the state of great comfort and extravagant living, it is an inessential, desirable item that is expensive or difficult to obtain. This sounds like so contradictory to the definition of a software, which is, traditionally, viewed as a tool that suppose to help people to accomplish a certain task, instead of fulfilling some extravagant emotionally needs. I also assume “luxury software”’s core concept will not be associated to luxurious price, but luxurious experiences.
There’re a lot of existing softwares deal with luxurious experiences, the popular ones are facebook and twitter, perceived generally as social softwares, but essentially contain a large part of luxurious component.
As the concept of luxurious experience comes to the digital domain, we do need a deep study of what existing conventions in the physical world should be borrowed, and which conventions should be abandoned to achieve a better luxurious experience in virtual world. The transition of old-form software(productive product, desktop apps) to new-form software(experience product, web apps) is phenomenal. I tried to avoid the concept of “software as an art form” but “software as an luxurious product”, however, I do see a lot of opportunities for traditional artists, filmmakers, composers and product designers to participate into the process of user-centered design, helping interaction designers to impose better pitches for the creative leap.
UX + Branding case: a Chinese web 2.0 beauty website that expands fantasy.
Recently I’m attending CHI at Boston. I got a chance to hang out with my high school friends who happen to attend harvard and MIT here. I’m happy to find my best friends are way more successful than I do – I’m impressed that they(who used to be my crappy highschool mates)becomes the leader of Chinese industries. Leo Guo(Founder of tongxue.com) recommends me this website that I began to fall in love with: Moko.cc. It’s a Chinese website that gathers the prettiest girls, uses can rate them online based on their judgement of “beauty”. This idea is bold, I expect to see a similar web service in US soon.
Obviously they have a very good user experience designer, the website looks consistant, energetic and bold. Here’s a screenshot of their website:
I know, a beauty industry 2.0.
The most impressive thing is, I’m amazed by their advanced user experience ideo, they integrate the user experience and branding rightly, and creates a very user-friendly look and feel. It proves the moto:”User-centered design’s biggest failure is, users only adapts to what they have, and real cool experience emerges from talent design.”
Here’s a list of cute icons.
1.Fashion model. 2. Magzine model. 3. Car model.
1. Fashion photography. 2. Advertising photography. 3. Personal photography.
1. Makeup artist. 2. Hair stylist. 3. Nail artist.
1.Producer. 2. TV/Movie director. 3. TV/Movie supervisor.
1. 3D designer. 2. Visual effect designer. 3. Visual Designer.
1. Fashion designer. 2. Architect. 3. Interior designer.
1.Industrial designer. 2. Interaction designer. 3. Game designer.
1. Painter/Illustrator. 2. Writer. 3. Dancer.
1. Drama performer. 2. planner/Coordinator. 3. Caligrapher.
1. Visual artist. 2. Behavior artist. 3. Collector.
1. Sculptor. 2. Drama director. 3. Talk show artist/Acrobatics artist.
1. President. 2. VP. 3. CEO
1. Actor. 2. Scriptwriter. 3. Photographer/Camera people.
1. Agent. 2. Lawyer. 3. Nurse.
1. TV photographer. 2. MC. 3. Post production producer
1. Visual effect director. 2. Movie/TV producer. 3. Body Model
1. Music producer. 2. Singer. 3. Music player.
1. Landscape photographer. 2. Post-production artist. 3. Fashion stylist/consultant.
1. Graphic designer. 2. Interaction designer. 3. Illustrator.
1. Flight attendants. 2. Pilot. 3. Programmer.
1. Drum player. 2. DJ. 3. Scriptwriter/ Composer.
1. Recorder. 2. Music post-poduction producer. 3. Music related people
I love those icons and think they are very innovational. It’s a good branding + user experience stragtigy as well.
Bonus:
the moko man
MOKO: cannot find the user.
The future web trends talk
I gave a talk about future web trends the other day, here’s a link for the original Vimeo video:
Design or Die – Innovation, UCD, Web and Life (Mozilla Labs Design Challenge: Spring 09) from Mozilla Labs – Concept Series on Vimeo.
I listed four themes for the future web, they are:
1. Data. Open, linked data and Metadata.
- Semantic web
- Human computation
2. Self. Self representation.
- Personalization
- Self extension
3. World. A connected world.
- Tangible interaction
- Contextual awareness
4. Life. A digitalized life.
- Virtual reality
- Service web
I also raised about the topics of:
1. What is design?
2. Designer’s multiple roles
3. Where indeed does innovation come from?
4. Custimazable user centered design process.
The science of love VS Human Computer Interaction
The science of love, Inspired by a marvelous video by Helen Fisher, I wanna borrow this metaphor and apply that to human-computer interaction, since J. Bronowski told us: Innovation is the creation of the unity in what is diverse by the discovery of unexpected likeness.
According to her theory, there’re three types of love, and all three types are independent from each other. They are:
1. Romantic love
2. Sex drive
3. Long-term attachment
She concluded that a human being can have the same feeling at the same time to his/her lover, or have the same feeling at the same time to different lovers.
I would love to extend her theory to Human-Computer interaction by categorizing my own digital products to these three groups.
1. Long-term attachment.
Example: my desktop computer(my wife). Trust, Reliability and security-guaranteed.
2. Romantic love partner
Example: My laptop(my lover), Promotes possession, motivation and intense energy on a platonic level.
3. Sexual partners.
Example: my other digital devices, Satisfy my curiosity and short-term excitement.
I’m sure a through exploration and understanding of Helen’s “love”theory will inspire digital product development strategy. The different ways people expect and treat their three types of lovers, are quite similar to the ways they treat their digital products. Furthermore, as the digital products(and their softwares )evolve, they will eventually own the ability of “memory-based prediction”, and most of these digital devices will become an extension of physical human body. We all know the ability to love, is one of the fundamental abilities that God assigned to human beings, we can assume, a simulation of the loving behavior of human being(attachment, sexual, romantic), will push the digital products development into a new era.
The beauty of a second language, and how this matters to UI design
English is my second language, I began to contaminate this language when I was 21. The learning process brings me so much pain. Even today I vividly recalled in my dreams of my first year in US(when I spoke and understood none English)that how scared I was all the time. After a long silence acquisition process, I entered the phase of “focus listening”, when I understood all, but wouldn’t be able to speak fluently. And then slowly, I entered the phase of “rigid speaking”, when I spoke a lot and eventually acquired a mastery of grammar.
At the third stage, I experience ecstatic when I speak English. There’s a reason I use the word”ecstatic”, notice that’s not because I finally can express myself freely, but because when I speak English, there’s NO FEELING attached to me. I understand exactly every word’s meaning and I used them appropriately all the time, but I don’t have any previous experience associated to each word, when I speak “Screwed up”, I cannot picture this symbol and contextualize it into my environment. Consider language is an important channel for human beings to interact with their outer world, it functions as an interface. This interface has two-folds, productive and experiential, meaning, you use language both as a communication tool and a self-embodying game. And for me, in order to effectively use English as a communication tool I sacrifice my engagement of trans-experience. When people said “your English is fantastic”, I smiled and self-talked”You have no idea what fantastic means to me”. I feel ecstatic when I experience the separation of the two folds, how cool it is this, I’m literally function as a computer’s interface right now, because my interface(my language ability) is just independent of my sensory memory. And I name it as “the beauty of a second language”.
And I’m an interaction designer. Every human behavioral patterns means a lot to me. I learned that people are not always concern about usability. In an software interaction cycle, if we break down the process into individual patterns, there’re times people value experience more than productivity. They’d rather spend sometime on something that is meaningful to them, whether it is learning and reflecting a second language, fulfilling a religious duty, or spending time with an important person in your life. This allows them to turn the profane to scareness, turn tiny activity into a ritual, a performance, during the process they can either transcend themselves, or gain meaningful “ecstatic” in their memory.
We cannot misuse this concept in software design. For example, one of my friends said, in order to change his password in XiaoNei.com(a popular facebook-like Chinese website), he had to scan his ID, emailed it to validate. And we all know “password-changing” behavior is not an activity people want to turn into a ritual. However, people like to change their profile pictures on facebook, that’s one of the ways they express themselves and validate by others, they may don’t mind if we turn this “profile picture changing” a bit complicated because they enjoy the process. I think someday I’ll have a name of “the beauty of UI”, when the software’s UI behavior design, can satisfy every aspects of human needs, from functional, to ritual.
from Knight Rider to Ubiquity
Knight Rider has always been my favorite TV show. Yesterday during an unexpected insomnia I re-watched the recent 18 episodes, and interestingly, K.I.T T reminds me of Ubiquity. I dreamed about my browser could do what KITT can do yesterday, when I waked up, I believe the first thing I should do is to give my browser a special name(as cool as KITT), and it made me laugh – naming my browser officially announce my ownership of my browser, my browsing habits and patterns, my browsing history, and my future browsing continuity. So I jumped up at 5AM in the morning, tried to discover why my browser appears to be alive in my subconsciousness, I figured that’s essentially because of Ubiquity. Indeed, the life-enhancing experience in which Ubiquity gives me is NOT an accident.
Life-enhancing software
The most attractive attributes of KITT is not his appearance – the look and feel of the car, the fancy interfaces, but his action and behavior encapsulated in his language and his semantic response, which is a very symbolic life-seeking and life enhancing pattern to human beings. That’s exactly the key feature I found in Ubiquity, and I’d love to categorize Ubiquity as a life-enhancing software. And the concept of life-enhancing software will eventually replace our old term “artificially intelligence”. I also learned that Ubiquity’s user interface must be as minimal as possible, life-reducing forms and metaphers should be avoided, in fact the existence of interface will block the task flow and break human perception of ownership.
Human Behavior Pattern System
Ubiquity is a language-based system, and I think it should be pushed further to capture human behavior patterns. Design pattern was originally suggested by Christopher Alexander, who framed it as “Design pattern captured the essence of successful architectural solutions and can be used as a way to solve recurring problems”, the descriptive(and prescriptive) nature of patten languages could help Ubiquity to be organized in a better way. Here’s an example of one pattern that I created, inspired by Aza Raskin’s video:
Pattern NAME: Host a party
Pattern behavior process description: 1. Email to notice friends. 2. Give map and directions. 3. Give a restaurant review. 5. Summarize participants. 4. Shopping for party. 5. Reminding friends. 6. Meet at the party.
Pattern problem: The whole process is energy-consuming.
Pattern solution: 1. tell U(short to Ubiquity) party hosting behavior pattern. 2. U provides friends lists. 3. U gives maps, directions and restaurant review, and marked your and their calendar 4. U sends feedback to you about friends participation. 5. U creates a shopping list for you. 6. U reminds your friends before the party. 7. After the party, U collects your friends review(or photos)about this party on facebook, twitter and flicker. (notice this process involves with multiple accesses to different web softwares and apps)
Pattern context: Party hosting
Pattern variables: such as only perform tasks 1.2.3.6.
The benefits are obvious. By analyzing and creating a series of human behaviors patterns(since we couldn’t really create a pattern language for now), we could easily “ubiquitize” a real-world task to a virtual -world task. This transformation is meaningful both for mobile(physical context) and web(virtual context). I think this method may formalize Ubiquity’s syntax as well as empowering user personalization.
This pattern thinking was originally proposed by my adviser John Zimmerman, who is an awesome design thinker and practitioner.
Feb 17th, 2009.
Design advises for non-designers who participate Mozilla Labs challenge
Recently I got many emails from the Mozilla community asking about design process, since I cannot reply every email I received, here’s a tutorial about how to design as non-designers.
Hi #:
I understand your concern as a non-design-professional and I’m sincerely happy for your passion. So here I’d love to talk a bit about the design process, hopefully this simple tutorial will help you land on the right track.
1. Design process step one: Exploration stage.
The topic of conceptual browsers is too broad to start with. So it’s important to reframe the problem before you move into the design phase, in interaction design process we usually generate a territory map, in this way we’ll understand the context and lands on a good direction. We call this stage “exploratory stage“. A user-centered design research(usually involves interviews and field study) is usually conducted right at this stage and go through all stages, but for individual project, we don’t usually have budgets on the research, luckily we are all browser users, so we can ask ourselves the needs and wants.
The form of territory map can range from extremely casual, some doodling on whiteboard, to extremely formal, a diagram that shows all the relationships. Here’re two examples:
casual territory map
formal territory map
By the end of the stage, if you work in a team, you should have a shared definition of the problem, and a raw direction you’ll pursue later. You also holds some basic understanding of the user needs. For example, if you are going to design the tab system, after the first stage, you’ll be able to answer questions like”what do we need for a tab system and why”.
2. Design process step 2: Generative stage.
With all the data you collected in the first stage, you’ll begin to do the design. There’re many way to do it. I’ll only introduce three common methods for you to start with.
(1)Brainstorming and bodystorming. They are proven to be very effective ways to pitch. Gather a bunch of people and try to generate as many ideas as possible, that’s brainstorming. Give those people a senario to act, during the process be free to stop them and ask questions”what feature do you need right now”, called bodystorming. We gain great ideas from brainstorming, and build empathy on users through bodystorming.
(2)Personas and Senarios. Very simple, make up a user, such as “John is a 30-year-old male who works in accounting industry and a web power user”, and then make up a user story”John is trying to transfer some money from one bank to another but is noticed to visit and bank so he google-maps the place…” During the process of making those stoires, try to satisfy all the user needs to every details. Personas and Senarios are proven to be an effective way to refine designs.
personal example
senario example
(3)Models. Using models to generate ideas keeps you cool down and gives your inspirations.
This sounds very academic, but it’s really not as complicated as it looks like, this model implies, we cannot design blindly, we need to simplify the current situation to an existing model, and optimize this existing model to a better one, in order to imagine the future solution.
model example
- A pattern approach. Look at existing patterns and gain inspirations. You can also look at people’s daily behavior patterns and transform that into digital metaphors. For example, people use backpack to store files, and there’s an existing website “backpack” to do the same thing in virtual world.
By the end of this stage, you should be able to have a concrete focus and several images mock-ups of the key features.
mock-up UI
3. Design process step 2: Evaluative stage.
At this stage we evaluate mock-ups with users, get their feedbacks and refine the concepts. Wireframe may be used as a tool to structure the whole experience, however, because of the limited-time, we usually only show a partially working prototype which only covers the main features of the app. You can click here to view a demo video sketch(press the “click to view video button”).
I hope those tips will help.Please be free to email me if you have extra questions. I’m one of the tutors for the design challenge, and I’m very glad to talk with you about design.
Wei Zhou
Mozilla Design challenge
As I always love design challenges, here’s the email I received from my adviser, I’m glad to know it finally becames a course project, which I originally wanted to do here in basic interaction design class I TAed last semester.
“Dear CMU designers, Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox web browser, has just announced the Mozilla Labs Design Challenge. We’re inviting design-focused students from around the world to develop new ideas & prototypes for the future of the Web. The Design Challenge will be held in two stages: In the first stage students submit mockups of their ideas; during the second phase we will run an exclusive three week tutoring & mentoring program during in which the students will turn their static mockups into dynamic prototypes. Final polished prototypes will be posted, and honors for “best in class” will be bestowed. We would like to invite students from your faculty to join us in the first Design Challenge. It would be great if you could point your students to the website, and invite them submit their ideas.
You’ll find more details about the Design Challenge on the Mozilla Labs blog at: http://labs.mozilla.com/2009/01/introducing-the-design-challenge/ Further information can be found in the following article published by WIRED magazine: http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/01/envisioning-the.html We are looking forward hopefully to working with you & your students.”
As one of the luckiest people who had the chance to participate in this project earlier, I’d love to share some extra thoughts if someone will do the job.
1. Rethink the future. My definition of future web browser evolves with time, and now it’s completely different than it was in the summer. When I designed my piece “Lifestream”, I thought about today rather than the future, mostly on how to improve the current situation, less reflection on the society we will live in tomorrow. However, tomorrow, our younger brothers and sisters will live a digital life which they took granted, HTML and web design will become high school required courses, software becomes an art form, computers exist everywhere and web is no longer looked like the form that of today. What is their definition of a browser? Is a browser a extension of brain, a tool to access, store and process information, or a self-presentation medium? or something completely out of imagination? With those questions in mind, use one sentence to summarize “what is a browser”, and come back to examine what we had today, we may gain cool insights.
2. User behaviors, always. I didn’t do much of that during the summer, so-called user-centered design research. But it’s a very powerful tool, I admitted. Not just examine what people do on the Internet, but observe what they do in their contextual daily life, what do they need in a specific situation, then construct patterns, transform ideas, to digital world. It turns out we use browser in a highly contextual way, it stores our daily memory in the browser’s history, and represent our virtual self in a form that might be different than our real self. For me, it is meaningful, because in the near future, personalized semantic content representation will be the key to any successful user experience design, and popular browser companies, such as Firefox, should take the responsibility.
3. Focus and Concrete, use a story. I’d suggest you, designers, focus on one thing rather than the whole experience. You may end up only design an experience for book collectors who use browser to search antique books, but that’s people’s everyday browsing life.
So much for today. Wei at weizhoudesign.com
Another reason to hate live search
I searched “wei zhou” in live search, pretty much just for curiosity, then this result pops out first:
Buy Wei. You may get 8% off with PalPal if eligible. – eBay…Wei Zhou, an interaction designer, currently pursuing her master degree in Carnegie Mellon…
I wonder how this could happen!
Also, here’s a recent poster for a social networking website development plan:The pattern of extended Self in interaction design research
And yap, a video sketch for service design class – if you are still familiar with Steve Won and Maria Emerson, two interns in Mozilla last and this summer, you’ll be surprised because ” they are going to have a baby!”… the video is done within 35 hours – of course, continuously 35 hours.
Check it out! it’s really fun!I’ll update my portfolio in the winter.
