UX nerd

Emoticons were officially born on 19 September, 1982, when Scott Fahlman suggested that people use :-) to distinguish jokes from literal messages on a message board at Carnegie Mellon. Since then, people did a lot of research on the impact of emoticons assuming that emoticons are the facial expressions of IM, even applications have been developed to help capture facial expressions and turn them into emoticons. However, after spending considerable time reading about it, we couldn’t find a clear origin for the assumption that emoticons are equivalent to facial expressions. On the other hand, there is evidence that emoticons were created as punctuation marks, for which depicted faces acted only mnemonics. So what is it: facial expressions or punctuation marks? And what difference does it make? At first glance, this may seem a rather academic discussion; but you may want to reconsider how important it is to get the gist of emoticons in a world where people are increasingly relying on mediated communication. And if not, think of the efforts the MIT Media Lab is putting into affective computing and news on patents such as the Nokia glow and follow the smart crowds.

In any case, last month, Toon, Dominika, Valentina, Maria and I designed and run an experiment to test if emoticons are actually the facial expressions of IM. Are they used in the same context a real facial expression would be appropriate? Is there a correlation between use of emoticons and real facial expressions produced during an IM conversation? This is how we did it and our results.

Continue reading ‘Emotions and emoticons: are emoticons the facial expressions of IM?’

So we (Natasha and me) finally didn’t work on the GPGP application I posted about. You can’t always make things that make you proud but you can always make things in a way that makes you proud. So, I guess I reconciled with the world, in a selfish way.

We ended up working in a kind of calendar/to-do/agenda/personal assistant application that prompts the user to carry out a task in the optimal context in time and space. This application would help the user manage his/her activities. For tasks that have a fixed scheduling, its functionality is limited to providing reminders, exactly as a regular calendar application would. However, for tasks that may be executed freely at any time before a given deadline, it suggests the best moment to do something using information about the nature of the task and the user’s preferences, live monitoring of his/her level of busyness, time, location, etc.

Before I explain how it would work, and because I can picture you shaking your head and tightening your lips, let me say something. This idea sounds familiar to you? Yes, to me too… When talking about applications that are supposed to be smart enough to suggest what you may or may not want to do, there’s a very thin line separating awesomness from complete failure. That’s what, I think, when you present an idea like this to people, makes people stand in two very distinct camps: either you love it or you hate it. There are few things, in UX, as polarizing as agents. I was very sceptical about this idea at first. Then something happened.

Continue reading ‘What we finally worked on’

In Buenos Aires, you can often find women selling home grown produce at the entrance of supermarkets. They lay a blanket on the sidewalk and sit on it, next to multiple fruit boxes. In one of these boxes, they usually have a baby. These babies never cry. Actually, the babies are never awake because they give them alcohol to sedate them. This is what allows the mother to work undisturbed from the early morning to the late evening, in the 40°C we get in the summer and the 0°C that are normal during the winter, it’s easier than having to tend a child while they work. The moral of this story? Firstly: these women need help. But also: not everything that makes your life easier makes the world a better place.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is an area estimated to be twice the size of Texas that acts as purgatory for all our modern conveniences. Why take your TV to the repair shop when you can get a new one for only twice the price it’ll take to fix it? Like the new iPod 2282th generation? Non-returnable plastic bottles FTW, it’s such a hassle to take bottles back to the store…

Every day, in my job, I come across many “opportunities to make people’s lives easier”. Sometimes you get to choose what you work on, sometimes you don’t. Sometimes, like today, you have a day when you’d rather spend the largest part of it just staring through the window. Continue reading ‘The Great Pacific Garbage Patch (with edit)’

Finally, part 3: the toaster. A toaster is a small electric kitchen appliance used to toast slices of bread. It has been around, almost unchanged (in its mainstream version) for more than 100 years. Our interaction with it, I suspect, hasn’t changed much either:

During our week-long course with Bert Bongers; Maria, Valentina, Dominika and I redesigned a toaster. You may also want to read part 1 and part 2 of this series of posts to learn about the concepts that we put into practice. Part 3 presents our analysis of the current toaster, and our redesign.

Continue reading ‘The book, the clock and the toaster. Part III’

This post is the second part in the series: the clock. As I mentioned before, I had this lecture with Bert Bongers where he introduced the concept of device parsing, which he came up with (if I’m not mistaken). There, together with Dominika, Maria and Valentina, I did the parsing of a clock.  In this second part, I would like to explain what device parsing is about, illustrating the explanation with our own experience parsing the clock in the image on the left.

Continue reading ‘The book, the clock and the toaster. Part II’

You’re surely familiar with the talk about how designers should not consider ourselves to be average users because we’re experts. There are many anecdotes about systems or products that are perfect for us in so many ways (effectiveness, efficiency, aesthetics) and yet fail to please users. That’s why we run user tests, and that’s why we have shifted from good old “usability” to the more subjective “user experience”. But an interesting by-product of this well-meant attitude is that we (designers) have grown to consider ourselves above the influence of such whimsical subjectivities. Every designer I know is always perfectly capable of producing a rational explanation of why something is good or bad: we have formal methods for it, we have been trained to do it, we make a living out of it.

That said, this is what happened to me today… Continue reading ‘Dog Food’