Abstract
Our industry’s long wait for the complete, strategic guide to mobile web design is finally over. Former Yahoo! design architect and co-creator of Bagcheck Luke Wroblewski knows more about mobile experience than the rest of us, and packs all he knows into this entertaining, to-the-point guidebook. Its data-driven strategies and battle tested techniques will make you a master of mobile—and improve your non-mobile design, too!

In a short review, Peter Morville writes:

“I devoured my advance copy of Mobile First in less than three hours. Not a second of that time was wasted. Luke has packed oodles of data, scads of examples, and years of experience into this admirably brief book. It’s a brilliant explanation of why we should design for mobile first, and how.

Every information architect and experience designer should read this book. It will change the way you work today and how you think about tomorrow. In short, Luke Wroblewski has gone big by going small. You should too!”

“Social interests involve two psychological insights: that users are interested in others generally (social activities, or what’s going on); and users are interested in others particularly (another user).

Each of these is doubled up by the self-reflexivity of social action: users are interested in how they themselves appear to others in general (one’s self image, impressions made, the stuff of “self-presentation” common in social media); and another particular user’s relationship to him or her (e.g. their interest in us).

From this we can quickly see that social media are not a matter of straightforward goal-oriented interaction design. As users, we are aware (if not consciously) of what and how social activities proceed. We become interested in ourselves, in how we are perceived, and in the relation others take up to us.

Thus the interest captivated by social media is twofold: it’s a self-interest and an Other-interest. And the habits that engage users with social media engage users are not just the interaction between a user and the site, but between the user and other users. In the course of using social tools, reciprocity by others, and our mutual recognition of each other, deepens our interests and interactions.”

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The difference between Facebook’s Like and Google’s +1 seems superficial, but ends up influencing the behaviour of the users. Choosing the words you use to define actions in an interface is the most important part of interface design.

In “Getting Real” Jason Fried wrote that Copywriting is Interface Design, yet five years later copywriting is almost always where interfaces fall to pieces.

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During Copenhagen Design Week, Marko shared Nokia’s thoughts on how design will shape and influence the patterns of human interaction in the future at a Nokia event at Bella Sky Hotel.

He then discussed the design of the N9 smartphone, as an initial example of what Nokia is planning in the interaction design/user experience design of its upcoming phones.

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The setting for the course is mobile web applications.

43 video sessions in all.

The New York Times imagines the kitchen table of the future
August 30, 2011
The Times Co.’s R&D Lab is betting breakfast will be less about sharing out newsprint and more about swiping through stories, ambient commerce, and the quantified self.

Mirror, mirror: The New York Times wants to serve you info as you’re brushing your teeth
August 31, 2011
Meet the R&D Lab’s latest: a proof of concept in the form of a “magic mirror.”

Previous articles

The New York Times envisions version 2.0 of the newspaper
May 11, 2009

At the New York Times, preparing for a future across all platforms
May 12, 2009

The New York Times would like to join you in the living room
May 13, 2009

If The N.Y. Times were mounted on your wall, it might look like this
May 14, 2009

In the Times R&D Lab, the future of news is the future of advertising
May 15, 2009

She delves into the matter in a longer article that acts as a preview for her forthcoming Rosenfeld Media book “The Mobile Frontier: A Guide for Designing Mobile Experiences“:

“The natural user interfaces (aka NUIs) found on most modern mobile devices are built on the psychological function of intuition. Instead of recognizing an action from a list, users must be able to sense from the presentation of the interface what is possible. Instead of “what you see is what you get” NUIs are about “what you do is what you get.” Users see their way through GUI experiences, and sense their way through NUI ones. Unlike GUI interfaces with minimal differentiation between interface elements, NUI interfaces typically have fewer options and there is more visual differentiation and hierarchy between the interface elements.”

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“At its best “Talk to Me” makes you aware of how our relationship to design has become more emotional and intuitive. Ms. Antonelli points out that “we now expect objects to communicate, a cultural shift made evident when we see children searching for buttons or sensors on a new object, even when the object has no batteries or plug.”

And the show is certainly a brave undertaking for a design department that’s still strongly associated with 20th-century modernism. It’s a big step from a Corbusier chair to an iPhone, or as Ms. Antonelli puts it, “from the centrality of function to that of meaning.”

But from a viewer’s perspective MoMA’s messianic embrace of smartphones in galleries is enervating. Call me a reactionary, but I’m convinced that looking, not scanning or tweeting, is still the primary purpose of a museum visit.”

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“It is the emphasis on user-centered design that has made American interface design so successful and difficult to replicate or export outside of the United States.”

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“After steady year-on-year improvement, Ford has plunged from fifth position in 2010 to 23rd in the 2011 Initial Quality Study released by J.D. Power & Associates on Thursday. Lincoln, the luxury subsidiary of the Ford Motor Company, was ranked eighth last year, but fell to 17th this year. [...]

Primarily, the steep decline was attributed to consumer complaints about MyFord and MyLincoln Touch, the company’s in-car telematics systems that use a touch screen, dashboard display and voice commands presumably to help drivers operate radio and climate controls, as well as the navigation system.”

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Acclaimed designer Alan Cooper provides further reflection on the matter:

“Automobile manufacturing companies like Ford need to acknowledge that they are no longer making automobiles with attached computer systems. In reality, they are making computer control systems with attached motion mechanisms. The digital computer is increasingly dominating the driver’s attention, even more so than the steering and brakes. If auto makers don’t give equivalent attention to the design and implementation of these digital systems, they will fail, regardless of the quality of the drive train, interior furnishings, and other manufactured systems. [...]

Back in the 1960s and 70s, it was efficient for an automobile company, with core competencies in big manufacturing, to outsource dashboard electronics to specialized vendors. but now those little radios have become all-encompassing telematics, and Ford, whether it likes it or not, has to integrate the design of its electronic solutions with the design of its manufacturing business. It’s the riddle for the information age again: Ford isn’t a car company with digital capabilities, but it is a computer company with big manufacturing capabilities.

Designing and building a better automobile cockpit is the tip of the iceberg. The biggest task facing Ford and other car companies is changing the way they think and the way they work.”

“Digital technology is enabling objects to become so complex and powerful that we now expect to interact with them. If you hand an unfamiliar object to a small child, he or she will instinctively search for buttons or sensors to operate it.

Though the same same microchips that enable things as small as smart phones to fulfill hundreds of different functions also make them more opaque. In the industrial era when form generally followed function, you could guess how to use an electronic product from its appearance. You can’t do that with a tiny digital device, which is why designers face the new challenge that Ms. Antonelli calls “script writing,” in other words, ensuring that the object can tell us how to use it.”

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Make sure to also check the very rich online journal.

Its main objectives are to advance knowledge in the field and to support museum and library communities, practitioners, experts and policymakers in developing new missions and forms of museums and libraries “in the age of migration”.

During the upcoming four years the team will reflect on the role of museums and libraries, dealing with several complex and crucial issues such as history, socio-cultural and national identity, the use of new technologies and, last but not least, exhibition design and museography.

MeLa intends to define new strategies for the multi/inter/transcultural organization, conservation, exhibition and transmission of knowledge in ways and forms which reflect the conditions posed by the migrations of people, cultures, ideas, information and knowledge in the global world. It aims to evaluate how much these changes can interfere with the physical structures and the architecture of the exhibition places.

The project is coordinated by the Politecnico di Milano, and also involves the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (Denmark), the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (Italy), the University of Glasgow (UK), the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (Spain), the Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle (France), the Royal College of Art (UK), Newcastle University (UK), and L’ “Orientale”, University of Naples (Italy).

Check also the MeLa project blog and their first newsletter.

“Few people need an excuse to spend time in Florence, so it speaks volumes for the organisers of Frontiers of Interaction, a two-day gathering focused on design and digital interaction, that they attracted a strong enough line-up to draw participants away from the glory of the Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore and the Uffizi. Other than a thought-controlled drone emerging through dry ice and — this is Italy, after all — an excellent lunch, the highlights enjoyed by a lively, engaged crowd included [presentations by Zdenek Kalal, Lynn Teo, Chris Cunningham, Amber Case and Mark Coleran].”

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“Social circles are an approach to privacy user experience that takes us a step closer to the main point of social networking: To let the user have control of her social fabric in order to leverage the most from social and data effects. Ultimately the design of social interfaces should help users to communicate more effectively, be less misunderstood and increase tolerance while protecting the user’s privacy and personal situation- whatever that may be (defined by them, not the system).

If you are involved in designing a compelling customer experience with social media, social networking site or app or social software, you should pay close attention to the approach of the social circle. One of the proven benefits of conducting field studies is to extract real-world social phenomenon and accommodate for it in your interface and user experience strategy.

Google’s Social Circles if anything opens up the conversation toward what might be a better social networking user experience. It’s also a potential signal from a major player with a lackluster track record in privacy, that privacy does matter to user adoption, as a CNET analyst noted.”

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Seven chapters – Action Research, Bifocal Display, Data Visualization for Human Perception, Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Interaction Design, User Experience and Experience Design, and Visual Representation – are already online (all with highly qualified authorities as authors) and 49 more are to come soon.

All content is available free, for downloading, reading on line, and even excerpting (don’t forget to give proper credit and citation), all under a Creative Commons copyright agreement.

Citation: Soegaard, Mads (Ed). Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction. http://www.interaction-design.org/encyclopedia/

As a craft, design for printed media has a rich history. Several generations of designers have pushed its boundaries in countless directions. It has been shaped over several hundred years as both a functional and aesthetic discipline, with a deep foundation of principles, practices, theories, and professional dialogue.

In comparison, Interaction and UI Design is still a relatively young field. Its history has largely been driven by technology and functional goals. The dialogue around it has been centered on usability, which has been its purpose in the context of technological advancement. The visual language of UI has evolved from that standpoint: that it should evoke the familiar, analog experience of tools, buttons, knobs, and dials. That foundation has led to a very specific visual language in interactive experiences.

In the past ten years however, the relevant technologies that support the design of Interfaces – displays, processing speeds, and rendering engines – have matured to a point that they provide a more capable canvas for design. Meanwhile, our culture has become visibly more comfortable with the technologies that surround it. These combination of trends are creating an important inflection point for designers. The aesthetic experience of the digital surface can now be considered and explored in a more sophisticated manner.

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Her very interesting Ph.D. project – which aims to inspire new B&O products – is called On the move – creating domesticity through experience design. It is part of the larger research project Mobile Home Center, which receives funding from Danish National Advanced Technology Foundation.

The project explores how to achieve a sense of home for people who travel extensively.

Together with researchers from The Danish School of Education, Aarhus University and the Aarhus School of Architecture, Aviaja Borup Lynggaard sets out to map how people manage a mobile lifestyle and to develop prototypes and concepts for products and services.

The project is guided by home researcher and anthropologist Ida Winther’s definition of the phenomenon home as an activity, ‘homing’, defined as something one does to achieve a sense of being at home, wherever one is currently located.

The goal is to study how interaction design can help promote this sense of home and facilitate homing.

Aviaja Borup Lynggaard’s project is focused on people who have an extremely mobile lifestyle, including B&O customers with heavy travel activity between multiple homes or hotels.

The project applies a user-centred design process that actively involves the customers in the design process from start to finish through ethnographic studies, interviews and trials of concepts and prototypes for new products.

The Ph.D. project will foster a range of products and services for subsequent development at B&O.

Three recent papers provide more background:

Home awareness – connecting people sensuously to places (pdf – 09/2010)
People living a global lifestyle connect remotely to their families while away from home. In this paper we identify a need for connecting with a home as the physical place itself. For this purpose we introduce the concept of Home Awareness that connects people sensuously to remote places through sound, light and feeling of temperature. A working prototype has been successfully tested and we present some results from early user studies.

Tactics for homing in mobile life – a fieldwalk study of extremely mobile people (pdf – 09/2010)
For many people home making is an activity, which extends beyond a single house. We introduce the terminology of Homing as the act of home making, when in a primary home, secondary home or more temporary spaces. By point of departure in existing literature on home making and through ethnographic studies of extremely mobile people we identify general tactics for homing. We present the identified tactics and show how people deploy not only one but several tactics in their intention of making a homely feeling despite not being in their primary home.
Reviewing the mobile technologies currently in use we argue that several of the tactics identified are currently not well supported. We discuss how technology design can learn from this study through pointing to the potential in designing mobile technologies to better support these unsupported tactics.
We consider the tactics as a tool for deeper understanding of mobile practices and thus informing the design of more relevant future technologies for people engaged in a mobile lifestyle.

On the move : creating domesticity through experience design (pdf – 10/2010)
This paper is a summary of the Ph.D. project about home and mobility. The project concerns design for mobile life and through various prototypes it is an investigation of how to support the act of home making away from the primary home.

This is the image engineers and designers from Toyota Motor Europe (TME) and the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID) had for Toyota’s “Window to the World” vehicle concept, which was recently exhibited at the ACEA exhibition: “Our Future Mobility Now”.

The concept re-defines the relationship between passengers in a vehicle and the world around it, by transforming the vehicle’s windows into an interactive interface. Using augmented reality, what used to be a pane of glass, begins to provide passengers with information about landmarks and other objects as they go past. The window can also be used as a canvas for drawings, which then interacts with the passing environment.

Engineers and designers from TME’s Kansei Design Division teamed up with CIID to develop this concept in the context of near-future mobility. Instead of creating a concept simply with strong visual aesthetics, they aimed to create beautiful and intangible experiences to address specific needs and desires, to bring genuine value to the vehicle’s passengers.

Through the latest advances in augmented technology, TME Kansei Division and CIID developed five concepts for Toyota’s “Window to the World”.

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The MAS in Interaction design at the University of the Applied Sciences and the Arts of Southern Switzerland is a master that combines design, new media, robotics, smart systems and high–tech materials in one study program addressing the realization of projects in which the interaction between the design culture and the technological development allows to generate design driven innovations.

Experientia partner Jan-Christoph Zoels will be teaching at the program.

Others in the teaching staff are Massimo Banzi (Arduino), David Boardman, Massimo Botta (who heads the master), Thomas Brooks, Gianluca Brugnoli, Pier Luigi Capucci, Bill Keays, Marco Mancuso, Luca Mascaro, Alvise Mattozzi, Riccardo Mazza, Fabio Sergio (frog design), Lorenzo Sommaruga, Roberto Vitalini and Fred Voorhorst.

The MAS is a one year program, courses are held in English, and partial scholarships are available upon the evaluation of portfolios and CVs.

“Magic, or enchantment, is the right metaphor for the future of computing. [...]

Magic is a convenient metaphor of connected things because the affordances are there. You understand the object… and this motivates the incremental function. [...]

We can take a lesson from the history of the future to figure out what enchanted things will succeed or fail. The ones that satisfy primal wishes or fantasies will succeed. These primal wishes are revealed through narratives that we know and can analyze. It’s a psychology problem. Especially for Cinderella’s narcissistic stepmother. I’m not sure what robots wish for, but I can tell you what humans want:

We wish for six things that enchanted objects tend to satisfy:

For Omniscience, for human connection, for protection, for health (immortality is better), for effortless mobility or teleportation, and for expression (or creative manifestation).

These are the killer apps.”

- View video of talk
- Download talk slides

Check also David’s recent reflection on the topic of “juicy feedback,” a term that comes from game design and describes when a small action produces a surprisingly large reaction. He uses this paradigm to develop six design ideas relevant to products intended to change people’s behavior.

David’s thinking was inspiring for an article in this month’s Wired Magazine, which argues that by providing people with information about their actions in real time, you give them a chance to change those actions, and push them toward better behaviors.

David Rose is a product designer, technology visionary, and serial entrepreneur.

Currently David is Chief Executive at Vitality, a company that is reinventing medication packaging with wireless technology.

Rose founded and was CEO of Ambient Devices where he pioneered glanceable technology: embedding Internet information in everyday objects like light bulbs, mirrors, refrigerator doors, digital post-it notes, and umbrellas to make the physical environment an interface to digital information.

Rose founded Viant’s Innovation Center, an advanced technology group for Fortune 500s including Sony, GM, Schwab, Sprint and Kinkos. He helped build Viant to over 900 people, $140M and a successful IPO.

In 1997 Rose patented online photo-sharing and founded Opholio (acquired by FlashPoint Technology).

Before the Internet he founded and was President of Interactive Factory (acquired by RDW Group) which creates interactive museum exhibits, educational software and smart toys, including the award-winning LEGO Mindstorms Robotic Invention System.

Rose taught information visualization at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and currently teaches a popular course in tangible user interfaces at the MIT Media Lab. He is a frequent speaker to corporations and design and technology conferences.