As designers, we always concern ourselves with graceful product life cycles, re-use, recycling… anything that can deliver us form the trendiness-issued pile of garbage that we don’t want to leave as our footprint. I know I do, you can read about it here, or go for this article by the director of the London Design Museum, that says it much better. We live under one belief: however obsolete, broken, passé you think something is, it holds the seed of something new. This is the Ying-Yang of design.
A long time ago I attended a workshop with Alan Dix that applied this principle to leverage ancient (failed) wisdom for design inspiration: how to produce a good idea out of a bad idea. How does it work? You can have a look at the example Tomaso, Ting, Maria, Valentina and I worked on. Continue reading ‘Ying-Yang Design’
After analyzing the results from the survey, we decided to create a concept that would afford piler and filer styles. We had to create a 3 minute video and a prototype. I think I’ll post the prototype, for which we made a comic, just because we had to scrape so much off the concept to make it to the required video length that I don’t think the video does a great job portraying the idea :S
I would have preferred to have a working mock up, but as we were all doing this as a side project and we had so many features, this proved impossible. So a comic had to do. Should we have done something simpler which was easier to convey? Well, time was a constraint, there were no clear guidelines, no client, nothing at stake, so I think we just indulged: it’s a lot more fun to develop an idea than a prototype. And even if the philosophy behind the group of features we presented wasn’t explicit and we could be accused of lack of cohesion, the audience were experts in the industry, we expected them to be knowledgeable enough and trend-aware enough to put the pieces together and see the concept behind :)
You can see the prototype here.
Some months ago, I asked you to complete a questionnaire about your tabbed browsing habits. Thanks! I got 99 responses. What follows is a brief summary of how I analyzed the data, the results I got and some analysis. Later we used the results to design an alternative to tabs for the Mozilla Labs Design Challenge summer 09 (with Maria and some help from Nico), but I’ll write about that later.
Continue reading ‘Tabbed browsing usage results’
This post has been in my drafts for a long time, it looked like I’d never get around to finishing it. Probably it was because the design of a remote control for the elderly is not my favorite subject. However, I really enjoyed working on this project and I think we got a neat result, and a quite original one if you think of how many remote controls for the elderly are already in the market. Also, I didn’t want to omit this project because to me it shows how there’s still room for substantial improvement even in long standing commercial product ranges, and how you wouldn’t even think there’s something wrong until you introduce a UX designer and then it seems unbelievable that no one came up with these simple but life changing tweaks sooner. And, no, it’s not about boosting our egos, it’s about bursting those of the people who think they can do without us :P
I worked on this project, some time ago, with Wenzhu, Valentina, Paulo. When I was told we had to design a remote control for elderly people, I googled it, and then sighed. Usually I try to avoid the “yet another…” projects but this time it was not up to us, so I set to work thinking at least that socially it was quite a relevant project. Actually I learned that most developed countries have around 10% 65+ people (I knew it was a lot, but 10% is mind blowing) and that they watch TV an average of 3,5 hours a day, so it makes sense to want to adapt remote controls for their especial use. Continue reading ‘Design of a remote control for elderly people’
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’
I want to find out how people use and manage tabbed browsing. To do it, I need your help answering this questionnaire. It has only 7 questions and shouldn’t take you more than 10 minutes to answer. Thanks for your time :)
THIS SURVEY IS NO LONGER ACTIVE
Continue reading ‘Some research about tabbed browsing’
Around a month ago, I got to do my first solo project. With great power comes great responsibility and, luckily, the ability to choose the subject that better suits my interests :) And this is how I embarked on the redesign of browser error messages.
Browsers are old. It’s weird. I would have thought that major industry players would have figured out this kind of core issues by now. Error messages are not about new or experimental interactions, their design is probably as linked to basic UX design principles as can be. That’s why I was startled when I started to get the answers to my questionnaire… users mistaking DNS errors with HTTP 403 response codes and attributing SSL certificate warnings to malware. There’s a lot of educated talk on the web about how bad some error messages are, these however are savvy users’ rants and none of them come close to describing how the average users misses on their web experience, one of my participants even describing the experience as “distressing” :S
Anyway, after a week of questionnaires, qualitative analyses, guideline drafting and prototyping, I came to understand why error message design is not a popular discipline and some other interesting conclusions.
Continue reading ‘Browser error message redesign’
Hi, my name is Luz Caballero. I'm a User Experience designer/researcher.