ND Interface Design

TED Talk: Sixth Sense

2009-09-21T14:48:00.000-07:00

The video posted above is from a TED presentation in February 2009, demonstrating a project from the MIT Media Lab called Sixth Sense. The project is a wearable device that consists of a camera, a mini-projector, a cell phone and colored finger caps. The device uses the camera for things like gesture recognition (through the colored finger caps), bar code scanning, and taking pictures. The projector can project on any surface you stand in front of, like a wall, your hand, a product, a plane ticket, or your wrist.

If you go through the examples in the video, you'll probably say "well, my iPHone can do all of that already" and you'd be pretty much right, except for maybe the gesture recognition. But the amazing part of this device, for me, is the absolutely seamless nature of it. Taking a picture is as simple as holding your hands up to form a picture frame. Making a phone call can be done without even taking your phone out of your pocket. It's the blurring of this line that amazes me with this device.

Week 3 - Directed Post

2009-09-13T16:39:00.000-07:00

I wasn't sure if this writing assignment was directed at creating a specific program, or meant the future of software development as a whole, but fortunately, my answer is the same for both questions. Time is better spent on improving the anticipation and learning abilities than on improving the interface. The simple reason for this is that a better interface eventually reaches a brick wall when it comes to increasing user productivity. No matter how intuitive a button click is, I still have to take time to go the button and click it, whereas if the software predicts that I was going to click the button and clicks it for me, it takes me no time.

A decent example of this is the mini toolbar in Office 2007, shown to the right. The mini toolbar pops up whenever you highlight text in a document. This is reasonable, usually people want to apply some kind of basic styling to text when they select it. So now when I want to apply some styling to text, the buttons are right next to my mouse. No matter how much they improved the design of the Ribbon, my mouse would still have to travel all the way to the top of the screen. But by predicting when I would want to style text, it puts the buttons right by my mouse.

Also, in a general sense, predictive/learning interfaces are the future. Voice control interfaces have a learning component to them. Touch interfaces learn handwriting recognition. And for people who are complete novices at what they're doing, having a program say "oh, I know what you're doing, here you go" and do it for them is great. Even experts can use such a function to speed up a task.

Experts, of course, are the main opponents to putting anticipating/learning over interface design. They already know how to do an action, and they don't want a computer to possibly guess wrong at what they're trying to do, and slow them down. Spending time on improving the anticipation and learning capabilities of a program will reduce those errors to an insignificant number eventually, and its the only way to increase productivity beyond the wall that manual actions inflict on us.

Week 2

2009-09-06T16:04:00.001-07:00

This week, I'm going to talk about a really good example of the other great wave of the future: voice control. Just to be clear, I'm calling touch the first great wave of the future. So I'm sure that most of us are aware that Windows offers built in voice control, most of us have probably tried it at one point or another. And then we all switched back to using the mouse and keyboard. With an OS, there's just too many things to do, too many things to predict with voice commands. What about a simpler environment? Like a video game...

I'm sure there's a number of video games that have some level of voice control. But the latest incarnation of that is Tom Clancy's EndWar. The game can be controlled completely through voice control. And unlike some voice control, it's good. It can even understand parrots. Which may be a good or bad thing depending on how you look at it. But the commands are intuitive (and even if they aren't, there's a very nice selection menu that suggests commands as you speak), the voice control is good and the games the RTS genre on consoles a great future.

If you can, play the demo on Xbox 360 and/or watch the video review below.

Week 1

2009-08-30T13:38:00.000-07:00

So for my first post, I'm going to talk about what some people may consider to be an odd choice: video games. Specifically, World of Warcraft. You can see the default interface to the right. It's decent, pretty standard for most MMORPGs. Action bars, buttons for quests and spells, a minimap, your health and your enemy's health. There are a few other things, of course, and more functionality has been added as time has gone on. But for the most part fairly ordinary.

The power of this interface comes from the fact that its completely customizable. Not just a "here's a few options to change things" kind of customizable. But "customizable" in every sense of the word. Here's an example of a customized interface. Getting an interface like this is as simple as downloading and placing files in a certain folder.

This kind of extremely personal interface is the future. People can argue endlessly about which interface is better. Ultimately, the better interface is the one that's better for the individual. Customization like the kind in World of Warcraft will enable everyone to have the best interface possible.

2009-08-27T20:34:00.000-07:00

This post is to introduce this blog, which will be about the System Interface Design class that I'm taking this fall.

We'll be working with the Wii, the Microsoft Surface and possibly other tools too.