Why does Apple think that a stylus is a design flaw?
“It’s like we said on the iPad, if you see a stylus, they blew it.”
Steven P. Jobs – CEO, Apple Inc.
I wonder why is it that Apple considers the use of a stylus as a design flaw?
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…)
TEN: 10 years of Design & Emotion (Workshop Part II)
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.
so, here it goes…. (more…)
Differentiating emotional hotel experiences (EuroCHRIE 2009)
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…)
Panoremo: A tool to assess the emotional experience of environments
Relevant Keywords:
Evaluating emotions, environments, services, consumer experience, online application, prototyping
Design Goal:
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.
- Software development.
- Usability testing.
TEN: 10 years of Design & Emotion (Workshop Part I)The Design & Emotion Society is celebrating this year their 10th anniversary and they decided to organize an event at the Delft University of Technology to commemorate this milestone.
“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…)
emoments: Developing a tool to assess emotions elicited by services
Relevant Keywords:
MSc. Graduation project, evaluating emotions, services, consumer experience, hotels, mobile application, prototyping
Design Goal:
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.
- Hi-Fi prototyping of final concept.
- Usability testing.
Developing a tool to assess emotions elicited by services – MSc. graduation presentation (Video & Pics)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…)
Developing a tool to assess emotions elicited by serviceswell, 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!
Ready, set, GREEN!
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.
Experiential Services: My two cents to understanding them
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:
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…)
TOKENS: Books and libraries of the futureI’ve already made a post before talking about the Personal Area Libraries, one of our concepts in our attempt to design the books and libraries of the future. Today it’s time to show our second concept, the Tokens. You can see the results of our initial research by visiting the previous post so that you can understand why we came up with this concept, but in the mean time and just to give you an idea, here’s the vision we developed as a starting point:
“In a world full of volatile digital media, people feel distant and unconnected from their reading material. It’s so easy to copy and distribute media that its very possession has lost its value.
We want to bring this value back to the people.”
So here it goes:
THE READING MATERIAL:
The reading material is independent of the eReader itself. It is carried individually (more…)
Personal Area Libraries (PALs): Books and Libraries of the futureAs part of a project for the TU Delft and together with my good friends Job Greefhorst and Amine Rhord, we set out to design the books and libraries of the future. We followed some context mapping techniques to understand the domain of reading in general as a first step for our process. I will explain the process in a later post, as it was quite interesting and it will give me a chance to explain some of these context mapping techniques in greater detail, but in the mean time, I’ll just stick to the results of our research which are more than plenty for a single post, and of course I will show you one of the two concepts that we came up with (the other one will also come on a later post).
So let’s get started…
We wanted to know what people thought of their books, how they stored them, why they liked them, why they (more…)
The wonderful Wizard of Oz… Prototype
I’ve talked before about the Virtual Goals project that I worked on a few months back, and in this post I’d like to talk a bit more about one of the techniques that we used during the project: Wizard of Oz prototyping
This technique (named of course after the famous book by L. Frank Baum) is in my opinion one of the most powerful ways of experimenting and developing user interfaces dealing with smart systems, because it allows you to test even when there is no smart system to start with!
The idea is fairly simple: you make a prototype in which all of the actions which will eventually be attributed to the computer system are actually performed by a person.
Let’s illustrate with an example; let’s say you want to make a system that recognizes (more…)
So what do you feel in a hotel???
I haven’t published much lately, due mostly to the fact that I started with my graduation project. But OK, it was time to get back on this, and what a better way than to ask for help with the project itself!
For my MSc. Graduation project, I’m conducting a small study regarding the emotions you experience while in a hotel, and I’d like to ask your help remembering some of the times that you have stayed in a hotel and tell me some of the things you’ve experienced by using the following online survey:
www.bluehaired.com/hotel_survey
It can take as little as 5 minutes to help a bit and I will really appreciate your time and effort.
If you have any questions or comments regarding the study or what I will do with its results, I’ll be glad to answer any doubts, so just drop me a line.
And if you are curious as to exactly what I’m doing with my project, you can take a look at my proposal which is in the PDF below.
[UPDATE: you can now actually find the results and a scientific paper regarding the study HERE]
Low-Fi prototyping: Cheap & easy, but damn good!
Prototyping is an iterative process that allows you to test, evaluate and implement changes to your design during the developing process before arriving to a final solution, and experiential prototyping is no exception to this. The designer is thus encouraged to produce and test prototypes along the whole development process. But since prototyping can be very effort and time consuming, it is important to know what type of prototyping techniques are more appropiate at different stages.
The concept of prototype “fidelity” is defined by the level of detail used in making it, and dus how closely does the prototype resembles the “real thing”. For example, in software and graphical user interface design, low-fi prototyping can be achieved with simple tools such as paper and colored pencils, with which a quick and dirty sketch of an interface can be drawn on different sheets of paper and be tested (and most importantly fixed) on the run before any code is written at all, and it allows people from other disciplines to be able to collaborate.
low fidelity prototyping also adds the extra advantage of a quick and unfinished “look”, which will (more…)
We are a group of industrial designers with a focus on strategy and interaction in product design, and this blog is our place to try and share some of the things we know about and discuss those we would like to know more about.
This website works as a platform to share our experience with some design methodologies & tools, to discuss design related issues and to showcase some of the projects we've worked on.
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