Monday, May 18, 2015 - 15:46
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By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D.
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Internet of Things, IoT, User Experience, UX, smart devices, smartphones
If you are not yet honing your design skills for the Internet of Things (IoT), I’m about to light your fire. I don’t generally buy into technology hype. As designers, we tend to remain calmly skeptical about incitements coming from our business and marketing departments. However, the predicted growth and market penetration of smart devices is frankly staggering. I can only imagine that user experience (UX) design skills for smart devices will be in huge demand.
Before the introduction of smartphones in the early 2000’s, IoT devices were estimated at about 50 million worldwide. The emergence…
Tuesday, May 5, 2015 - 10:45
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By ICS UX Design Team
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UX, UI, user interface, Usability, modern visual design
Where did the buttons go? Significant aspects of modern visual design have made a huge impact on the development of graphical user interfaces across web, mobile, desktop and embedded systems. While flat-design holds many attractive qualities, implementation of the style has potential to undo usability principles formed through decades of extensive research in the field.
The flat-design approach has gained increasing popularity for its overall simplicity in layout, color and iconography. Although this new design trend breathes a fresh aesthetic into the digital space,…
Monday, April 20, 2015 - 13:46
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By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D.
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IoT, User Experience, UX, Internet of Things
Users find it frustrating and reluctantly accept the fact that connection to the Internet sometimes has glitches. Wait times are the norm. Users are accustomed to the cursor loading slowly, popping up periodically and at times needing to try a second or third time in order to connect to an online site.
However, users perceive devices that are part of the Internet of Things (IoT) differently. These new products are more black box in function than a computer, tablet or phone. The fact that a device is dependent on a connection to the Internet to operate properly is not so obvious to the user.…
Thursday, April 9, 2015 - 11:52
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By Jeff LeBlanc
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Customer Experience, touch-enabled devices, digital signage, retail, UX
“The Times They Are a Changin’” – Bob Dylan, 1964
How many of you have noticed a change in the buying behavior of consumers today?
As Bob Dylan so aptly stated more than 50 years ago when major disruptive social change was occurring, change comes with a force that shakes the walls and windows. The times, they are indeed changing. And for everyone in retail today, times they are a changin’ yet again.
View the Its All About The Customer Experience On-Demand Webinar
Technology has changed everything, including consumers’ expectations of how and when they buy. This affects everyone…
Wednesday, April 8, 2015 - 13:47
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By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D.
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IoT, Content Strategies, Innovation, Internet of Things, Interactive Retail Kiosks
Digital signage (DS) is one of the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) technologies that are invading our lives, for better or worse. I recently attended the Digital Signage Expo 2015, ₁ where I had the opportunity to lead a round table discussion on “Content Strategies for Interactive Retail Kiosks.” ₂
Why talk about kiosks at a DS conference? Interactivity, of course, is one of the cutting edge elements of digital signage. An interactive digital sign is essentially the same thing as a simple interactive kiosk.
Interactivity is a natural evolutionary direction of DS technology. It’s a…
Monday, March 2, 2015 - 16:47
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By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D.
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Internet of Things, IoT, User Experience, UX
When designing a user experience, we usually assume we are engaging a user’s center of attention, albeit short. We design an experience that will be a user’s primary focus or foreground activity for the duration of their engagement with a device, whether it be on a desktop, laptop, phone or tablet. In an attempt to provide added utility, we design reminders, such a notifications and badges that can inform users of unread messages and overdue updates.
Personally speaking as a user, I already have notification overload. Although the idea is sound, notifications and badges may be too…
Tuesday, February 17, 2015 - 16:47
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By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D.
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Internet of Things, IoT, in-vehicle, navigation, robots, usability design, User Experience, UX, GUI, NUIs, context of use
So often, the Internet of Things (IoT) is discussed in terms of the technology that enables it, particularly focusing on cool, smart gadgets that will propagate in our lives. There is inevitably mention of in-vehicle entertainment and navigation, smart home appliances, wearables and robots. At its foundation, the IoT represents a whole lot of technological innovation, albeit driven by certain human desires, but herein holds many opportunities for usability design!
User experience (UX) designers will need to meet the challenge of making all of these new devices and services a success with…
Thursday, January 29, 2015 - 15:18
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By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D.
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Internet of Things, IoT, User Experience, UX, context of use
As the Internet of Things (IoT) proliferates, some user experience (UX) designers will migrate to working on unique one-off computer appliances rather than platform specific apps. On IoT projects there are likely to be more context of use issues to consider because:
Devices can exist in a myriad of locations
Devices will not always depend on existing platforms with pre-designed interaction patterns
The most appropriate interaction modality will have to be selected from a list of options including pointer, keyboard, speech, touch and air gestures.
Context of Use Definition:
“…
Monday, January 19, 2015 - 11:34
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By ICS UX Design Team
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User Experience, UX, team building, team formation
Welcome back! Today I’ve been pondering team formation and team building. While I try to avoid buzzwords, team building is often about synergy – that moment when a team comes together and the overall team performance is even more impressive than individual contributions alone. Teams in general, often go through four phases - forming, storming, norming, and performing. ₁ Each of these stages presents its own challenges for the team, whether it’s determining team or project objectives, how to build trust, learning to resolve conflict, choosing how to work together as a team…
Monday, December 22, 2014 - 16:48
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By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D.
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Internet of Things, UX, User Experience, touchscreens
During 2014, the user experience (UX) group at ICS worked on our usual fare of mobile and desktop apps, but we also saw a large expansion of embedded device projects that fall into three categories: kiosk information systems, in-vehicle infotainment systems (IVI) and robotics control systems. Each area presents unique and complex challenges for a UX designer. However, we noticed some common requests between all three of those areas: the preference for touchscreens and the desire to be connected to the Internet. This implies that the UX challenges tend to fall into two categories: the tangible…
Welcome back for a chat about user experience (UX) in the real world. Today, I want to talk about user experience and coffee. Now, I know not everyone drinks coffee, so for the sake of discussion, let’s assume that you want to drink some coffee.
Initial Decision
Once you’ve decided to drink coffee, the next question is what kind of coffee. Instant? French press? Maybe take it black, with milk, with cream, sugar or no sugar, espresso or flavorings? The list goes on and on. Which factors will determine the type of coffee or caffeinated drink you will select? Possibly personal…
Monday, November 24, 2014 - 15:19
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By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D.
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UX, User Experience, User Experience Design Principles, UI
In a previous blog post (Defining a Natural User Interface) I explained how finding a clear and concise definition of a Natural User Interface (NUI) was not easy. Finding a clear and concise list of user experience design principles for a NUI is even more challenging. An obvious reason for this is that NUIs encompass a broad range of possibilities, and it’s difficult to be general enough to cover the range and at the same time specific enough to be useful. After searching for lists of design principles that have already been published, I ended up making my own list. Here it is.
1. Choose an…
Tuesday, November 11, 2014 - 13:06
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By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D.
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ViewPoint, Scrolling and Eliding Text, natural user interface (NUI), Scrolling with Fading Effects, Make Your Content Shine: Design Choices for a Qt Touch Kiosk, Qt Developer Days conference in San Francisco
We recently made a presentation at the Qt Developer Days conference in San Francisco, entitled Make Your Content Shine: Design Choices for a Qt Touch Kiosk. In the presentation we talked about numerous issues related to content display in our touchscreen kiosk product, ViewPoint and explained the best practices that we used to solve those issues. In this post, we are going to focus on a couple of issues with scrolling and eliding text.
Text has a tendency to not always fit into the allotted space on the screen and mechanisms need to be implemented to deal with those instances…
Tuesday, October 28, 2014 - 12:56
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By Jeff LeBlanc
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The Business of UX 2014, User Experience, UX, product development, customer-focused, Design, Steve Jobs
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…
Monday, October 27, 2014 - 10:30
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By ICS UX Design Team
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Mental models, User Experience, UX, design thinking, user interfaces, workflow, gesture
Welcome back to the coffee corner!
I hope that you’re doing well and enjoying your user experience (UX) rock star status on any project you may be working on, no matter your role. Today, we’re going to be chatting about Mental Models - what they are, why we should care about them and how we can leverage them to inform design thinking.
What are Mental Models?
Mental models are essentially just that - mental representations for how people view and make sense of the world. When people interact with new information or a new consumer device for the first time, they make sense of…
Tuesday, October 14, 2014 - 15:34
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By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D.
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Natural User Interface, NUI, gesture interface, User Experience, UX
Natural User Interface (NUI) is a concept that sounds simple enough at first but then it defies a simple, one-sentence definition. A command line interface (CLI) and graphical user interface (GUI) can both be described concisely, as in “the user types commands to the computer in the form of text” and “the user directly manipulates graphical representations on a computer screen with a pointing device.” A NUI, because it is not limited to particular input and output technologies as CLIs and GUIs are, have exponentially more possibilities for realization and thus are more difficult to define.…
Monday, September 15, 2014 - 17:05
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By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D.
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UX, user interface, kiosks, ViewPoint, interface hints, natural user interface (NUI), Hint animations, discoverable, Consistency, Prompt feedback, easy to learn, learnable
When a person encounters a kiosk or computer device in a public space, such as a sales or museum kiosk, they can only benefit from it if they can figure out how to interact with it rather quickly. So one of the requirements of public interactive devices is that they be very easy to use, or easy to learn to use. But the learnability must be part of the user experience design. Depending on the content, a design may use very common interactive navigation patterns such as “next” and “previous” buttons that leave no questions about how to interact with them. But likely, the content needs more…
Tuesday, September 2, 2014 - 13:54
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By ICS UX Design Team
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Usability, User Experience, UX, good design
I just made it to my daily 10:30am coffee break (the one where I refill my coffee mug, since I already drank my 8am coffee) and wanted to spend a moment to chat about usability/user experience (UX) and project management (PM).
Now, I’ve never met you, so you might be on the usability side, the PM side, or juggling both roles. Or you might just be someone interested in either the UX or PM worlds. Nevertheless, I only have a few minutes while the office Keurig works its magic, so let’s assume that you’re a PM who’s ever so slightly skeptical about UX. What do you think are the…
Monday, August 18, 2014 - 12:25
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By ICS UX Design Team
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Usability Testing, usability test, device design, User Experience, UX
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Just between the two of us, I think the first 10 seconds of a usability test are the most important, not because you’re already running the test - far from it. It’s what happens even before testing begins. Your participant who is already seated, might be perusing the consent form or pre-test questionnaire they found on the table. More likely, though, the participant is looking around the room, trying to figure out what they just volunteered to do and hoping they “pass”. Yes, I intentionally put “pass” in quotation marks, since the folks who perform usability testing…
A while back, I spoke about how I’ve been noticing User Experience (UX) becoming more of a differentiator across various industries. From airlines to fast food to automobiles, it is the entire experience someone has with a particular brand that brings people back for more, often trumping price as the driving reason people spend their money. I can speak from personal experience on this. I recently upgraded my satellite DVR to support TiVo instead of the standard interface on the box. Sure, it costs me an extra 10 bucks a month, but I’m willing to pay it for that enhanced…
Tuesday, July 22, 2014 - 14:09
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By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D.
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User Experience, UX public kiosks, Usability, duration of use, duration of your content, kiosks, Users' Attention, User Interaction
Common user experience (UX) wisdom says that you have a short period of time (approximately 3 seconds to 3 minutes) to attract, seduce and convince a user to use your app, site or device. Once you capture their attention, you need to sustain a long-term relationship by offering the user real value (Skype), enduring enjoyment (Candy Crush) or at the very least, an obligation to be a participant in popular experiences (Facebook). Do the same principles apply to public kiosks, such as ticketing, retail and museum kiosks? The answer is yes and no.
Yes, Kiosks Depend on Attraction, Enjoyment and…
With the recent announcements of Apple’s CarPlay® and Google's Android Auto In-Vehicle Infotainment Systems (IVI), in-vehicle systems in general have recently been pulled from relative obscurity into the limelight. IVIs are becoming a much more integral part of everyday life with people spending more and more time in their cars. Having an easy to use system that integrates with technology you are already using (e.g., Smartphone, MP3 player, Tablet, etc.) lets you better enjoy your driving experience.
In this article, I want to introduce a recent user experience (UX) project and the…
Tuesday, July 1, 2014 - 12:55
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By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D.
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touch gestures, Touch Gesture, Touchscreen Kiosks, touch-enabled, wall-mounted screens, Interactive Kiosk
When installing a touchscreen kiosk, the angle of the screen is a major consideration. First, it affects how quickly people perceive the device as interactive and also touch-enabled. (See my previous post, Is That a Kiosk? How to Best Position Your Public Touchscreen Display for Use.) Second, it affects how comfortable it is for users to perform touch gestures.
On a mobile device, the angle of screen is a non-issue because the user can hold the screen in whatever way is most comfortable for them. They can also change the angle depending on the task they are doing and/…
Monday, June 9, 2014 - 16:58
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By ICS UX Design Team
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User Experience, UX, designing for embedded, navigate, good design
Whether you are designing the user experience for mobile, embedded products or a website they all have elements that when applied consistently can make any product or website successful.
One website that most of us are either familiar with or have used is eBay. The online auction and buy-it-now site has been around since the mid 1990’s, and has millions of users (as of a year ago, there were approximately 84 million active, registered users (1). This is a website that many people from various technical and non-technical backgrounds can and do use daily.
Some people use…
Tuesday, May 27, 2014 - 16:36
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By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D.
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UX, Touchscreen Kiosks, angle of a display, interactive tabletop devices, zone of viewability, screen angle
At Integrated Computer Solutions (ICS), we recently have begun marketing a touchscreen kiosk product that we call ViewPoint (www.viewpointkiosks.com). ViewPoint is a kiosk-authoring environment that currently runs on Windows 8, Android and Linux and can scale to various resolutions. As a result, it can be installed on various types of hardware and on various screen sizes and, a variety of housings can be selected. We have begun to deploy kiosks to customer beta sites and the user feedback and observations we have received are quite interesting.
As you might expect, size and angle…
Monday, May 12, 2014 - 11:28
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By Jeff LeBlanc
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UX, User Experience, Design Patterns, ROI of UX Design
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…
Here at ICS, we pride ourselves on hiring the best people, wherever they are located. We have staff located in Massachusetts, California, Canada, Denmark and Poland to name just a few places. To facilitate communication and a sense of community, like many companies, we use Skype. On any given day, I probably have a dozen individual or group chat windows going. When projects are coming due, keeping up with them all seems like I’m playing a game of whack-a-mole. So, when a recent update to the Skype user interface (UI) caused an unexpected change in focus, I was not…
Tuesday, April 15, 2014 - 09:57
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By Dorothy Shamonsky, Ph.D.
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UX Design, User Experience, red, contrasting color, UX
When designers create user experiences, red is the color most often chosen in interface design to draw attention and signify an alert or warning. A message in red text might say, “Email is a required field” or “Invalid username or password." Sometimes red is just used to draw attention. The question becomes, is red especially suited to this task, or just a handy contrasting color that is not often used for primary interface elements?
If an interface were mostly red tones, could green work to signify an alert equally as well? I can imagine you are thinking, “a mostly red interface? Ugh…