That Apple can activate remotely!
…why else would they tell you to wave your phone around like an idiot?
Category Archives: Design
Fragment
June 18, 2009
Phew.
Long day. One last jam-packed ride on the 49 Muni to Japantown for Andrew Crow’s closing Interaction Design workshop for UX Intensive. An intense day of prototyping followed by a closing party, complete with an open bar and wonderful new friends with Minnesota and Bay Area connections alike. Then, a dash across town to the Adaptive Path office, for further drinks and entertaining in our inspiring design space.
Back to work tomorrow, with sketching on the menu. Sketching, sketching, sketching.
It is a good life.
Task Flows and Character Counts
June 16, 2009
Another busy night catching up on work. You might do better trying to catch me over at Twitter.
Hugs,
Dane
The Ganache Guru
June 15, 2009
Today we kicked off UX Intensive with a rousing session of Design Strategy, hosted by none other than Brandon Schauer. It was a great time and we got to wield Sharpies and Post-It Notes and drafting dots with reckless abandon, all the while being fed like kings.
It’s gonna be like this all week, with heavy-duty learning during the day and working during the night, so my contributions to the Ether will be light.
A summons to all your foolish blood.
June 14, 2009
826 Valencia is an amazing, wondrous place. I want to live in their world. I want to write again. I want to make people experience these things.
An Owl’s Life
June 12, 2009
Dan just posted the first public transmission regarding our project, with a slick little banner of my design, and now I’m at a bit more liberty to talk about the work I’m doing at Adaptive Path.
Smart.fm is a website dedicated to helping people accomplish goals and learn stuff they want to know, in a supportive and socially collaborative atmosphere. AP just wrapped up a project helping the folks at Cerego clearly define their user experience goals with the site, and now we’re in the process of designing, developing and launching an iPhone application to complement their web-based learning tools. The really cool thing is that these guys are super open about the work they do, and are more than happy to have us share our process as we craft their application.
Alexa and Dan just got back from Tokyo, where they were busy meeting with the brilliant brains behind Smart.fm and scoping out million-dollar cantaloupes in their free time. As we continue our design process we should find ourselves posting regular updates to the Adaptive Path blog, but I’ll try to chime in at this venue however I can.
For now, it’s time to grab some sharpies and start sketching, sketching, sketching!
I can’t wait to tell them about the exploding moon.
June 11, 2009
I woke up at 6:30 this morning and realized I had to give a 30-minute presentation to the company at noon, introducing myself to the entire gang. I was gunning for a largely visual deck and had flagged a number of photos in Aperture for this purpose, but I hadn’t even started assembling the presentation in Keynote.
It was definitely a cram and I think I pulled it off, but I did learn a thing or two about narration. If you introduce a character, say a car named the “Green Dragon Wagon”, your audience will become confused and uncomfortable when you replace it, unannounced, with a silver Subaru. Then, your audience will become downright hostile if you present a photo of an old pickup truck, unintentionally suggesting that this is your car, with nary a mention as to what happened to the Dragon or the Subaru.
You see, people interpret and grow attached to things, be they rhetorical conveyances or characters in a narrative. If you unintentionally toy with their emotions by flippantly dismissing or substituting these characters, they’ll call you on it. If they like you. If they don’t like you they’ll silently judge you for it, for the rest of their lives.
Also, in wrapping up my presentation I described to the company our concept work for Dane and James’ Lost Dreams, which is, for those who have forgotten, what you get when you combine a cruise ship with a roller coaster (you get Awesome, with a capital AWE). Yes, Dane and James’ Lost Dreams is a true work of user-centered brilliance, a cruise ship designed for the type of person that is most often attracted to cruise ships in the first place: chiefly, people who wear faded black Harley Davidson shirts with the sleeves cut off. Upon reflection, I wish Andrew could have been there for the “sharing out” of this, given his career history. Even so, we got some largely positive feedback on our work:
“Are you insane?!”
Probably. They’ve got eight more weeks of this, and they don’t even know the half of it yet.
Oliver’s Simple Fluid Dynamics Generator
June 10, 2009
God damn this is cool. Click and drag in the black square to make the magic happen. Works best in the smokin’ Safari 4.0, because this beast is heavy on the Javascript. In any other browser you’ll wonder what in the hell I’m gettin’ so worked up about.
Stuff like this just feeds my existing obsession with introducing deliberate thought and consideration into the texture and materiality of our digital interfaces. Seriously, computer interaction that exhibits natural physical properties, either felt, observed or otherwise perceived, really gets my blood going.
Zoom, Zoom, Zoom
June 9, 2009
I started using Safari 4.0 yesterday, and I like what I see so far. The new Javascript interpreter is fast. The controls for Google Maps are so quick they’re frightening. Just try using your scroll wheel (or two-finger gesture on the trackpad of your new non-removable-battery MacBook Pro) to zoom in. If there’s a faster way to reach the surface of the earth from space, I’m sure Burt Rutan is working on it.
Err, the opposite, I’m sure he’s working on the opposite. Sheesh.
Anyway, I will leave you with the coolest, blockiest typeface I have ever seen in my life. Seriously, check out these titles:
Beautiful. Let’s get a little closer, shall we?
And once more, for the people in the balcony:
Man.
Sublety and Nuance in Physical Interaction
June 5, 2009
I had a great conversation during tea time at Adaptive Path this evening with Jesse James Garrett, about the role of subtlety and nuance in physical interaction design. Central to the conversation was Microsoft’s Project Natal, an upcoming system for the Xbox 360 that lets you use your full body to control games.
While large motions, like punching and kicking the air, make for an impressive flourish, it’s interesting to consider what a system like this would look like in a few years, as it becomes increasingly fine-tuned. What if it knows where each one of my fingers is, like a musical instrument? What kind of interactive applications could this have in a non-game environment? Or, as Jesse mused, how can we learn from gaming to bring more game-related themes, from the concept of play to the interactive vocabularies we establish therein, into everyday computer-mediated interactions?
Part of Jesse’s work on the Ajax approach to web development was based on a desire to make web interactions feel more game-like in nature. Before we had instant asynchronous updates, whether backed by XML or not, the web had a distinctly evaluative feel to it. The cost of submitting web input was high, as it resulted in a long pause before I would know whether or not my submission had been accepted. Games typically offer instantaneous feedback and so this delayed, high-cost transaction felt more like taking an exam than playing a game. Thus, the web-two-point-oh-social-media-user-generated-content revolution is not about Ajax or Prototype or Scriptaculous or jQuery or MooTools, but about removing the barriers of time and cost previously associated with contributing to the web.
And so, with sophisticated physical input devices on the horizon, how can we use the most familiar input devices ever, our own bodies, to enhance our computer-mediated experiences? Further, given the fine-grained control we have over our physical selves, how can we draw on the rich human tradition of having a body and allow people to interact with a system in a more subtle and nuanced manner?
Just something I’m pondering.
