Archive for the ‘Interaction Design’ Category

Vision in Product Design (The ViP approach)

Vision in Product Design (the so called ViP approach) is a design framework developed in the mid 90′s by Paul Hekkert, Matthijs van Dijk and Peter Lloyd at the faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in the Netherlands.

For those of you interested in innovation and design, my opinion is that this IS the way to go. And apparently a couple of big names such as Audi, Pininfarina, Nokia and Whirlpool also seem to think the same way.

Here’s the scoop:

ViP is a design approach that has three starting points:

Design is about looking for possibilities, and possible futures, instead of solving present-day problems.
Products are a means of accomplishing appropriate

EVOthing about interaction design

I helped Evi to make a few minor adjustments to her site recently, and with a tweak here and there, I have to say that it really looks fantastic! This is trully one of my favourite websites. A very nice and clean design: Simple, beautiful, elegant and playful at the same time.

The website, of course, is Evi Malisianou’s portfolio site, an interaction designer from the TU Delft with a background in interior architecture and product design. On it, you will find a bunch of her very inspiring projects (would love to have a few of those on my own portfolio), along with pictures, videos and detailed reports of her work.

If you are into quality interaction design (with a strong background of user centered research), you should definitely take a look at her website: www.EVOthing.com

VirtualGoals: enhancing the playability of football through the use of interactive technologies

Relevant Keywords:

Football, interactive technology, prototyping, user testing, wizard of oz.

Design Goal:

At playgrounds, the sport courts are very popular and are used intensively for playing football. It is however strange that these sport courts are hardly used by girls, despite the strong growth in the popularity of girl football in the last few years. Our design goal was to develop an interactive installation for sport courts and in particular the Cruyff courts. By adding interactive technology to the game of football we want to enhance the playability of the playgrounds.

Project duration and team:

120 hours, 3 interaction designers (David Güiza Caicedo, Nouschka Tijdeman, Ferdinand van Oostrom)

Methods used:

Experiential prototyping

Wizard of Oz prototyping

Mid-Fi prototyping

User testing

Virtual Goals: Technology in the Cruyff Courts

So, this is the final paper that we wrote regarding our Virtual Goals project. It’s quite interesting to take a look at it to follow the full story of how we developed the concept and how we tested it with various prototyping techniques.

Here’s the abstract:
“The Cruyff courts are very popular outdoor, public sports facilities in The Netherlands, but unfortunately they are not as attractive to girls as they do not like playing with boys. In this paper we describe our attempt to apply new technology into these fields in order to attract girls to them without making them less attractive for boys. Various experiential prototypes were built to test our proposals.”

To read the full paper click on the link below:

LINK : Virtual Goals: Technology in the Cruyff Courts (PDF)

PALS & Tokens: Conceptual design for books and libraries of the future

Relevant Keywords:

Reading, books, future scenario, conceptual design, context research

Design Goal:

As part of a design exercise at the TU Delft we were asked to research the domain of books and libraries and to propose a concept design of how these would be like in a future scenario. The focus was laid on the concept and interactions rather than on technical details of the products.

Project duration and team:

75 hours, 3 interaction designers (David Güiza Caicedo, Job Greefhorst, Amine Rhord)

Methods Used:

Vision in Product Design (ViP) was used as a design framework throughout the whole project

Cultural probes

Creative session

Presentation videos

ipNext: Usability testing and redesign of an office phone

Relevant Keywords:

Telecommunications, office environment, user research, usability testing, icon validity testing, redesign, office telephone

Design Goal:

The goal of this project was to evaluate the usability of the Alcatel-Lucent IP Touch 4018 office phone and to propose a re-design of the phone according to the findings of the performed tests. The team consisted of 6 Design for Interaction master students of the TU Delft working directly for Alcatel-Lucent, a global telecommunications corporation.

Project duration and team:

225 hours, 6 interaction designers (David Güiza Caicedo, Tine Lavrysen, Amine Rhord, Meike Mak, Steven Fokkinga, Marjolein Hartog)

Methods Used:

Product analysis in terms of aesthetics and functionality

Online user survey & interviews with experienced users to understand how they perceived the current phone.

Usability tests of the current phone with novice and experienced users.

Online icon validity test performed with an international sample of people.

Interaction prototyping to assess the new interaction model proposed with the redesigned phone.

Virtual goals: introducing new technology into the game of football

For our Interactive Technology Design (ITD) course as part of my Design for Interaction master (TU Delft), we were asked to work on introducing interactive technology into the Cruyff Courts (free access outdoor football fields throughout the Netherlands) so that we could enhance their playability and attractiveness, with an specific emphasis on integrating more girls into the fields, as it was found that they were not making much use of the courts even though they like the game and girl-football is on the rise.

We came up with the concept of “Virtual Goals”, which consists of replacing the normal goals and nets we have today by two large surface areas on each side of the field, in which different types of goals will be displayed according to

Beerbuddies: Using the personality of cartoon characters to define people’s personalities

As a part of my Design for Interaction Master’s degree, I took part of a project called Exploring Interactions, for which I was trying to empower bartenders against unwanted behaviour in their bars.

As a field research, I organized some group interviews with local bartenders and made use of some generative methods (such as collage making) in order to gain more information regarding their context and the interactions involved in their job, specially those regarding the customers and more specifically those involving customers showing some sort of unwanted behaviour. After thorough analysis and fiddling with different ideas, the Beerbuddies were born.

The BeerBuddies are meant as a tool to reflect the personality and mood of bar-goers through the use of beer coasters with cartoon characters on them.

BeerBuddies: Empowering bartenders against unwanted behaviour

Relevant Keywords:

Work, Leisure, Horeca (Hotels, restaurants, cafes), interaction, evident, explorative, involved, dominant, submissive

Design Goal:

To empower bartenders against unwanted behavior. The project was performed for the “Exploring Interactions” course, as part of the Design for Interaction Master of Science at the Delft University of Technology.

Project duration:

225 hours

Methods Used:

Context mapping research through group interviews and generative methods (such as collage making) with local bartenders to gain rich visual and contextual information from them (field research).

Online survey to assess how people perceive the personalities of cartoon characters in terms of dominance and friendliness.

Baaramee: Interacting with a 3D island in Dubai

Relevant Keywords:

Graphical user interface, 3D environment, single point touchscreen, communication & marketing

Design Goal:

For the marketing and communication efforts of Baaramee, one of the islands of The World project in Dubai, an interactive 3D environment was conceived to allow possible investors and buyers to visualize and interact with the project. I was asked to develop a graphical user interface with which users could interact with the system through a touchscreen interface.

Project duration:

100 hours

Methods used:

System flowcharts to communicate with programmers

Interactive concept presentation to communicate with programmers and management

Bill Buxton: Product design by sketching user experience

I assume that everybody at the TU Delft heard from the presentation that Bill Baxton (Principal researcher Microsoft – http://www.billbuxton.com) has done on monday (nov 19) at the Industrial Design faculty, entitled “Product Design by sketching user experience”.

For those of you who missed this very interesting lecture, I recorded it and placed it on the internet for you guys to watch. Video quality is not optimal, but it’s more about the story being told than anything else, so for that goal it’s good enough.

Click on the READ MORE link beneath to see the video.

3D capacity – Flash based project management system

This is a project management system that I put in place for 3D capacity‘s website. It is made in flash supported by xml files containing the project data. With it, it was possible to keep all the relevant information (delivery dates, contacts, file folders and communication) in a single place for both 3D capacity staff, as well as for the clients.

By clicking on the screen-shots below you can see a demo of how it works (except for the possibility to save data which is not supported).

Assesment of existing tools for the measurement of emotions and their application in consumer products research

A while back, and as part of my bachelor for Industrial Design Engineering at the TU Delft, we performed a research project in which we took a deeper look into the world of measuring emotional responses, and reported our proceedings and findings in a scientific paper. We also performed a field test with two of the most promising tools that we identified in order to have a better understanding of how they work and how they could be improved. These tools are PrEmo (developed at the TU Delft) and the Geneva Emotions Wheel (developed by the Geneva Emotion Research Group)

If you are interested in this field I highly recommend you take a look at it.

Here’s the abstract:

“This paper introduces the subject of emotions in consumer products research; what are they, how to define them and most importantly, how to quantify and qualify them. A brief background research is made to clarify the concepts involved and to identify existing tools to measure emotions. Furthermore, a small field research was performed to test the validity that two of the most promising tools have on the field of consumer products research.”

To download a PDF version of the study’s report or the poster, click in the links bellow.

LINK 1: Assessment of existing tools for the measurement of emotions (PDF)

LINK 2: Poster (PDF)

Muse – an MP3 player with an e-ink/touch based interface

Muse 2 As part of a design exercise at the TU Delft we were given the task to design a logo and an interface based entirely on typography for an MP3 player. The player was in the shape of a cylinder and would use e-ink and a touch sensitive surface as a use interface.

By clicking the image below, you can open an interactive model which I made in flash, to illustrate how the interface looked and worked.