UX nerd

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’

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’

Some time ago, I had a lecture by Bert Bongers on the use of sensors and actuators to enhance interfaces. Besides discussing the different existing sensors and actuators and their usual and unusual applications, he introduced the concept of device parsing and mentioned some topics from The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman. And, in the end, we got to work during one week redesigning a toaster and building a prototype that could be used as a proof of concept and eventually to run user tests. So, this is what this post is about:

• The book, or part I: The Design of Everyday Things
• The clock, part II: an intro to device parsing, and the parsing of a clock as example
• The toaster, part III: our redesign of the toaster, using a different combination of sensors and actuators, following Norman’s principles

(I’ll leave talking especifically about sensors/actuators for some other day, I have a rather ambicious project on them, but it’ll have to wait until I finish with the emoticons and the pagination :)

So, today: the book.

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