Finally! After a good couple of months of research and analysis, our UI+Interaction Trend Report ’10-’11 is finally finished and ready for our clients to take advantage of it.
The borders between purely physical products and the digital world are becoming increasingly blurred. Over the last 40 years, with the price and size of components steadily dropping and microprocessor capabilities constantly increasing, products have the potential of becoming more and more intelligent. This translates into new, exciting features for the users, but it also poses challenges for designers on how to manage the added complexity through an easy to use and efficient interface that allows smart products to fulfill their promise of making life a little easier and more pleasurable.
We at VanBerlo, believe that a proper understanding of the present and future of people’s interaction with products will create great new possibilities in the world of design and therefore, as part of my work at one of Europe’s leading design studios, I had the responsibility to develop our very first trend report focusing on the world of interaction and user interface design.
These award winning trend reports are part of VanBerlo’s 360 creative services offer and they focus on providing up to date, global and detailed insights into the relevant trends in product development.
As a special treat, here’s a sneak preview of some of the content (including high resolution photos and HD videos) you’ll find in our full, 160 pages long report. (more…)
Bill Buxton was coming to the Design by Fire 2010 conference in Amsterdam. That was the only thing I needed to hear to sign up for it. The man is a legend in the human-computer interaction field and his talks are usually very interesting, inspiring and full of great insights. Of course he did not disappoint.
I had to stand on the back of the room where his talk was taking place, just so that I could video record the whole thing without disturbing the people sitting behind me with my camera blocking their view. He started the talk by addressing the audience in perfect Dutch and putting on the jersey of the Dutch national team with the name “Buxton” on his back, in a gesture to celebrate the fact that Oranje had trashed Sweden 4-1 the night before (you gotta love the man!). He then proceeded to delight us for about an hour with his view on what Natural User Interfaces are really all about.
And I was a happy man! I could just enjoy the moment and would be able to review it later on in the comfort of my house to make notes and take it all in… that is IF my stupid camera hadn’t decided to break down 0,0005 seconds before the end of the talk and erase any data that had been saved so far on my SD card. Disaster! (more…)
Last Tuesday I attended a short presentation at the Delft University of Technology, where Kay Hofmeester (former UX manager for Microsoft Surface) told us a bit about how the Surface team tried to handle the new challenges posed by designing user interfaces under the new touch interface paradigm. I took the liberty to record it to share it with whoever is interested (Kay if you’re out there reading this, I hope you don’t mind ).
It was a very interesting lecture with some nice and concrete examples of how wrong it is to try to directly translate old user interfaces for new input devices such as touch screens.
The Spanish speaking pointer and the Italian speaking finger
In the lecture, Kay explains very nicely and in depth some of the main practical differences between interacting with a classical GUI and with a touch interface, but I’m gonna give it a go with my own metaphor.
Think of the following scenario. You’ve been speaking Spanish all your life. You know the ins and outs of your language. One day you move to Italy and all of a sudden you find yourself surrounded by Italians. Sure! your Spanish might help you get by to a certain level due to the language similarities, and you (more…)
A few days back, I was invited to give a short presentation at the TU Delft to the new first year students of the Design for Interaction (DfI) master of science. Apparently being a DfI alumnus working at the biggest dutch industrial design studio made me an interesting profile to talk to Delft’s future interaction designers… or maybe I was the only one who accepted to come
I was asked to talk a bit about my experience during the master, especially during my graduation project and how it’s been so far as an interaction designer “in the wild”.
To be perfectly honest, I didn’t have much time to practice it very well, but anyway since the faculty recorded the presentation I figured “why not publish it?”. So here it is…
I understand where Steve is coming from and as an interaction designer I agree that a touch interface should NOT depend on the accuracy offered by a stylus to be usable, but c’mon! (more…)
During the last few days, I’ve been doing a lot of internet surfing at the office in search for good examples of trends in user interface (UI) design for one of our award winning360 Trend Reports.
On it’s on, that is already quite a daunting task, as there are so many things out there that it’s difficult to pick and filter everything out. To top it off, there seem to be a lot of overlapping terms to define different types of interfaces which doesn’t make it any easier when you try to organize and classify them.
But anyway, going straight to the point, one of the most interesting user interface paradigms I’ve come across not only during my search but also during my studies, is the Tangible User Interface (TUI), so I decided to dedicate this post to explaining what they are and to show a few great examples of (soon to be) products which make use of this type of interaction.
To start up, here’s my definition:
A tangible user interface is one in which the user interacts with a digital system through the manipulation of physical objects linked to and directly representing a quality of said system.
The idea with TUIs is to have a direct link between the system and the way you control it through physical manipulations by having an underlying meaning or direct relationship which connects the physical manipulations to the behaviours which they trigger on the system. (more…)
A while back I wrote about the workshop organized by the Design & Emotion Society to celebrate their ten year anniversary, and I said I would make a second post explaining the rest of the workshop and the results… well, after finally making some time to sit down and go through it, here it is!
If you haven’t read the first part, I suggest you do so here, because that will make the coming lines much more clear to understand.
I’m finally back home after attending the EuroCHRIE 2009 conference in Helsinki for a few days, and I have to say that it was quite an interesting experience for me, since it was not really in my professional field as a designer, but it did have to do with what I’ve been working on for the past few months first as part of my MSc. graduation project and now as an interaction designer/researcher for SusaGroup.
The conference dealt with experiences in the hospitality and tourism industry and I was actually there presenting a working paper which came from a small exploratory study I conducted at the early stages of my graduation project with the aim to identify what type of emotions people felt the most in a hotel environment and towards what exactly. (more…)
During my Design for Interaction MSc. graduation project a concept was developed that was deemed very interesting and promising for the potential assessment of emotions experienced towards a physical environment. This concept was later developed even further in collaboration with SusaGroup in order to bring it into the market as a fully functional instrument that can aid in emotional design research.
Methods Used:
Early prototyping to perform user testing of working principle.
“TEN – 10 years of design and emotion” was a one day workshop held at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering on the 28th of August and luckily I was there to participate. In this post I’ll explain what the workshop was all about and I’ll give a brief explanation of what we did in the first half of the activity. In a later post, I’ll show some of the results that were obtained at the end of the day. (more…)
Various methods are available for measuring emotional responses elicited by products (design) or human-product interaction. Up to this point however, no instrument was available that could be used to assess emotional service experiences. The aim of the project was to extend the possibilities of assessing emotions to the realm of experiential service design. As a case study for the project, the focus was laid on the `hotel experience’, that is, the experience of a guest while staying at a hotel.
Project duration:
5 months (full time)
Methods Used:
Thorough literature research to become acquainted with the project domain.
Online survey to identify the most common types of emotions experienced by hotel guests and the stimuli associated with these experiences.
Creative session organized with a panel of users and designers to generate ideas.
Early prototyping to perform user testing of concepts.
Creation of wire-frames and navigation flow-charts to define the software’s architecture.
Well, it’s kind’a cool at the deep end of the pool. Two months into my current status as a Master of Science I’m having lots of fun working on a temporary basis (let’s hope that changes soon) with the good people at Susa Group, the company that I worked for during my graduation project.
And it’s lots of fun because I’m doing something which I really enjoy, and we are working on transforming one of the concepts I developed during graduation into a fully working and marketable tool which hopefully people will be using in a very, very near future.
It’s still a work in progress, but the idea is to develop a tool that can help in measuring and evaluating emotions towards physical spaces. This opens up the door to a plethora of possibilities and applications: evaluating an urban environment to know how people feel about their surroundings (emotions in architecture and urbanism), finding out how people feel about that new interior design that you are developing for a new store (emotions in retail design) or identifying the critical emotional points of a restaurant or of a hotel lobby (emotions in experiential services) are but a few of the examples I can think of. (more…)
So… it’s been a little over a week since I did the presentation for my Design for Interaction MSc. graduation project (Developing a tool to assess emotions elicited by services), and since I went off on a short one week vacation right after that, I didn’t have the time to post the video and some photos of the presentation during that time.
But as I promised some people, today I finally got back and had some spare time to upload everything. So above,you can take a look at the video of the presentation (takes about 45 minutes including the questions round). The file is quite big (around 500 Mb) because I couldn’t (more…)
well, it’s almost here… on the 26th of June I will be giving the presentation for my Design for Interaction MSc. graduation project and I’d like to invite anyone interested in the subject to come along to the presentation.
It will be held at 3:45 pm at the faculty of Mechanical, Maritime & Materials Engineering (Mekelweg 2, 2628 CD Delft) of the TU Delft, in Room F.
In the mean time, wish me luck finishing up the project!
Last Thursday I finally received the green light from my graduation supervisory team, which in fact means that they are confident that I will be able to finish up my MSc. graduation project within the coming 6 weeks and that no matter what, on the 26th of June somewhere in the afternoon, I will finally be leaving my eternal student status behind to officially adopt my new role as a jobless professional with a Master’s degree (albeit, hopefully for not too long).
So anyway, if there are people out there in the Netherlands (or the vicinity) who are interested in the project (“Developing a tool to assess emotions elicited by services”), I will be performing a public presentation of the project on the 26th of June, at the Delft Univeristy of Technology. More details regarding location and time will come shortly.
I’ve been so busy with my MSc. graduation project that I left this blog completely unattended. Today, I decided that it was time to do something about that, and what better way than to post something related to the project itself.
My project is titled “Developing a tool to assess emotions elicited by services”, and as such I figured that the first step on the road was to do a bit of research and try to find out what exactly was meant by services, and more especifically experiential services.
But what the hell are experiential services??? well, here are my two cents to try and understand this concept better.
First of all, a little background info:
A shift towards an “experience” economy
For centuries, the agrarian economy was based on Commodities (products grown, or extracted from the land), but in the wake of the industrial revolution Goods (manufactured or processed products) became the predominant (more…)
I'm an industrial designer with a focus on interaction within product design, and this blog is my place to try and share some of the things I know about and discuss those I would like to know more about.
This website works as a platform to share my experience with some design methodologies & tools, to discuss design related issues and to showcase some of the projects I've worked on.
You can learn a bit more about me by clicking the link underneath.
Finally! After a good couple of months of research and analysis, our UI+Interaction Trend Report ’10-’11 is finally finished and ready for our clients to take advantage of it.
We at VanBerlo, believe that a proper understanding of the present and future of people’s interaction with products will create great new possibilities in the world of design and therefore, as part of my work at one of Europe’s leading design studios, I had the responsibility to develop our very first trend report focusing on the world of interaction and user interface design.
Last Tuesday I attended a short presentation at the 
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