Here at ICS we’re excited about how the Internet of Things (IoT) is changing the lives of people every day — a topic we’ve been covering from all angles. For instance, my colleague Jeff Tranter described how IoT fits into the Qt ecosystem while Dorothy Shamonsky has written about the design challenges posed by the expanding number of IoT devices. Me, I’m most intrigued by the way connected smart devices are transforming healthcare. According to Gartner (1), there will be more than 8 billion connected devices in use worldwide this year and close to 21 billion by 2020. But what does it take...

For connected IoT devices — including smart home and medical devices — to be truly transformative they need to deliver a well-designed and intuitive user experience. Running. It’s my thing. My favorite form of exercise. A way to clear my head. Usually, running loves me as much as I love it. But not always. On a rainy day a few months back, while training indoors for a road race, I got into an altercation with a treadmill. Treadmill 1. Meniscus 0. Fast forward to April when I finally gave into the pain and went under the knife. My recovery had me couch-bound with just my Norwegian...

Participants in ICS’ recent webinar UX Design for Software Engineers posed a slew of interesting questions. I'm tackling a few here. Look for an upcoming blog with answers to even more of your UX-themed questions. You recommended designing for 80% of users but isn't that a lowest-common-denominator approach? Won't a UI designed for a 65-year-old frustrate a 20-year-old digital native, for example? This is a question designers wrestle with often. Like all technical problems, there are a lot of "it depends on..." parts to answer this. You have to consider many aspects of your...

When I was an engineering student at WPI, one of the non-technical classes I took required us to read Mary Shelley’s classic book Frankenstein.  As a young geek, I had already read it, but not with the intent of analyzing the very important theme running through it that all technologists should consider: just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do something. Victor Frankenstein was so obsessed with conquering death that he didn’t stop to think through the repercussions, and the results…. Well, if you don’t know, read the book. There are many stories that follow a...

A regrettable consequence of getting older is that both our senses and our memory tend to be less acute.  While I scoffed at this notion when I heard about it in HCI class back in my 20s, it is now a fact of my daily life.  The National Institute of Health (NIH) describes how changes in our brains as we get older may cause us to take longer to learn new concepts or remember information. Even at our best, our working memory can only handle so much information at once.  In 1956, psychologist George Miller introduced the world to the theory of Chunking.  This notion says...

Shneiderman’s Rule 5 is the one that I suspect is most often violated by software developers, and I say that looking back at 20 years of writing code.  When writing software, developers think in terms of edge cases and data validation.  The rule of thumb is that, for example, when a user enters a value that is outside of the expected range, you will want to display an error message and ask them to try again. I think this mindset goes back to the early computer classes that engineers take.  I remember some early computer classes when we wrote simple command-line programs that...

While I missed the recent 2015 Qt World Summit, I have been to and presented at Qt Dev Days for the previous three years running.  Each year, I presented two topics.  The first was related to a recent project or piece of software that we had been working on, including such fun items as an In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) system for Intel or the latest in voice recognition and gesture-based interfaces.  My second talk was actually the same each year: “Introduction to User Experience for Engineers”.  I made tweaks to the talk every year based on new experiences or research, but...

If you’ve been anywhere near a media source in the last few days, you’ve probably heard about the epic gaff (http://money.cnn.com/2015/12/21/media/miss-universe-2015-donald-trump/ ) made by poor Steve Harvey at the 2015 Miss Universe pageant.  It's hard to imagine a worse mistake at a beauty pageant than to announce the wrong winner!  However, in the world of User Experience (UX) design, we never blame the user for mistakes; rather, we look to see how changes in design would have prevented the error from happening in the first place.  Preventing errors is on the Ben Shneiderman...

At the expense of some minor spoilers for a seven-year-old movie, the post-credit cut scene in Iron Man (2008) showed Tony Stark walking into his dark home and calling for his virtual butler J.A.R.V.I.S. to turn on the lights. Fast-forwarding to 2015, we can now do that, more or less, courtesy of the Internet of Things (IoT). Here at ICS, we’ve been working with IoT technology for some time now, and it’s been very exciting work. Some of my colleagues have written various blog posts on the topic over the last several months such as the Internet of Things: Easy to Use is...

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke As technologists, we are privileged to be working in a time of magic, or at least working with technology that would have seemed magical to our grandparents. Many of us have more computing power in our pockets than was used to put men on the moon.  Even Hollywood is finding it hard to come up with technology to show in movies that is much beyond what we use and envision daily.  With the Amazon Echo coming out, my hope of having my own personal J.A.R.V.I.S. running my house is...

Before getting the opportunity to run a design team, I worked as a Qt developer and trainer for many years.  This has given me some insights into the development pipeline that I think a lot of people have missed. I’ve heard both developers and designers complaining about one or the other many times, but the reality is that both disciplines are more alike than many people would believe.  I’ve blogged about this previously (Lean UX and Agile Development: Not So Different After All ) and I have to say that the similarities grow stronger the more I think about this....

Join us for The Business of UX 2014 in San Francisco If you are in San Francisco Nov 6, 2014, please join us for The Business of UX 2014 Summit . This event is a one-day opportunity for product and engineering management professionals to connect and learn about the business impact of UX on your product development. We will have expert speakers and panelists and real-world examples of how leading products really do lead with UX first. Register before Oct 31 and save.  What is the real business value of UX? Well, that is the big question for many in this age of customer-focused...

Years ago, the concept of design patterns made a fundamental change to the way software engineers approached design problems. The idea, for those who are unfamiliar, is that in software development we often find ourselves     confronted with the same problems over and over, but in a different context.  For example, the need for there to be one and only one instance of a particular data object gave rise to the Singleton Pattern. The idea of patterns grew out of Christopher Alexander’s seminal work on A Pattern Language, back in 1977 and its findings were first detailed in the...

Everyone remembers his or her first car.  Mine was a ’72 Pinto that I traded a busted CD player to get.   My dad and I pulled a radio out of my brother’s truck so I could have some tunes while cruising.  The tape deck occasionally got hungry and needed to be fed a mixed cassette or two to appease its appetite.  I’d like to say I look back at it fondly, but I remember a lot of cursing.  Fast forward to 2014, we find the field of In-Vehicle Infotainment Systems (IVI) is a lot flashier than when I got my first car, but there still seems to be a lot of cursing...

What can you do in 30 seconds? Well, according to Instagram founder Kevin Systrom, one thing you can do is lose a potential user of your application. If your application doesn't grab the interest of a potential user in 30 seconds, they may move on. It’s the user experience that generates that crucial emotional reaction to your software, not the other pieces. No matter how cool your code is, no matter how fast your server-side logic is, if the user doesn't say "Wow!" in those crucial first seconds, your app will be sent to the back of the market queue. Remember that when you're deciding where...

June is usually one of my favorite months.  Summer is starting, the bugs are clearing out and vacations are upon us; it’s a generally nice time of year.  This year however, apparently several of my electronic devices are in collusion to change that. In the software industry, you get used to the idea of new product releases.  Version 4.5 fixes bugs in 4.4 and maybe adds new features that someone felt would be useful.  Of course, as anyone in the business knows, with new versions also come new bugs that weren’t there before.  It’s the nature of the beast and we’ve...

Here is a piece of advice for both developers and designers that come from the words of Wilfred Hansen: Know Thy User. Many developers make the critical mistake of thinking they are developing for the user, when in fact they are developing for themselves. Does your target customer share your technical or cultural background? What about their demographics – Are they the same age and gender? Do they share your goals and motivations? If you cannot answer these basic questions, you may very well be creating the wrong product for your customer! Now, with the understanding that our user is not...

I hope everyone is enjoying the New Year so far. Our winter wonderland here in New England is underway -- the seasons seem to move quickly and although winter has its finer points… the warmer weather will be welcomed when it arrives. The last couple of months have been spent leading a UX design effort on a rather interesting project. The project was developed using an Agile / Lean UX methodology (which was good) and on an insanely tight timeframe (which was not so good). We’re rather pleased with the end result, and the project has given me blog musings for months to come. For instance...