design stories in everyday things
Korean grocery store uses QR-code and mobile phone to create a unique, convenient grocery shopping experience in subway station.
Instead of going to the actual store, customers can find huge posters in subway stations with picture of the grocery items and their corresponding QR-code. Customer can use their mobile phone to snap the code and place the order, which will be delivered to their doorstep as soon as they arrive home.
Posted in Design, Experience
Many smartphone apps are using built-in GPS in the device to track user’s location as part of their features. Naturally, when designing the user interface of such apps, designers has to communicate the location awareness using icons and visual controls. However, there seems no one universally agreed upon pictogram to convey such idea, so many designers come up with their own design for that. After a bit of research, I found 4 commonly used pictograms that are being used by various location aware apps on iPhone.
A. Rifle Sight — looks like a metaphor related to rifle shooting. I’m guessing that it is originated from the North American with tradition of hunting wild animals.
B. The “Google” Tag — my first impression of the tag is from Google Maps. To me, this icon indicates a tag of a place, rather than an accurate coordination.
C. A Pointer — seems originated from the map “Pointer to North” orientation marker. Now it is the official GPS icon on the iOS status bar. The icon is suitable for showing the active/inactive state of the GPS feature.
D. Pin — also used by Google Maps, especially the iOS native version of Maps. A pin is a metaphor that is more commonly seen in our daily lives – pinning something on a cork-board, or putting a pin on a map. However, Some apps also use the “fastening something in a specific location” metaphor for the toggle button that keeps an auto-hide object on screen (disabling auto-hide). For example, some desktop apps for MS Windows has such UI. Use with caution and don’t confuse your users.
My Take
If I have a project that utilizes the GPS, my preference for the UI elements would be C (Pointer, indicating the state) and D (Pin, pin-pointing a coordination on map) depending on the situation and the usage.
A potential follow-up with this idea is to set up an online usability tests with the pictograms. If you are interested in doing so and would like to use my visuals, please feel free to contact me.
Posted in Design, Visual Design
Last Saturday I attended a meetup in Shinjuku from the Tokyo iOS Developer group. The organizer is Matthew Gillingham, and the group consists of experienced iOS engineers, designers and entrepreneurs.
In the first hour of the meetup, Matt gave a presentation to share the technical information he got from WWDC, briefing to us a bunch of new capabilities and possibilities with the upcoming version of the iOS. We then go on had some discussions regarding these new features and the future of iOS business. Here are some topics that I had discussed with the group.
iCloud and mobile Internet service — with the new iCloud and data storage/syncing over the web, will it introduces more trouble to mobile Internet service? I’m an E-Mobile user and is already suffering slow data transfer rate and occasional disconnection in places. With the promised push syncing with iCloud, I can only imagine more difficulties using the existing networks. Not sure about the U.S., but the mobile Internet over the cel-phone network in Japan aren’t very speedy to begin with, and the situation is probably going to be much worsened after the introduction of iCloud.
NFC and mobile payment — While Google and it’s developers are actively exploring the possibilities of mobile payment with the NFC technology, the next iOS doesn’t seem to deal with that issue. While we see third party solutions like Square who are trying to tackle the mobile payment demand, it’s a natural move for Apple to integrate the NFC and provide a smooth experience in the near future.
By the way, I recently notice increasing traffic to my previous mobile payment posts (http://www.calvin-c.com/blog/tag/mobile-payment/). Perhaps more people are interested in the topic now?
Prototyping, how designer and engineer communicate — surprisingly, this question seems to amaze everybody. I got answers like paper sketch and wireframing, PowerPoint for interactive presentation etc. A lot of “talking” is required as it’s the only effective way for designer to express the interaction between controls and views.
Yet, the way of “talking” is also tricky. Designer and engineer must have a common language in, for instance, describing the rich transitions of views and screen objects. Core Animation, Core Image, Open GL, UIKit, video buffer…these are hard-to-digest stuff designed for engineers but not the designers. So here’s a potential project to create an open-source dictionary of these under-the-hood technologies in layman terms for “normal people”.
I told the group about the recent prototyping app Prototypes, and they seem to be very interested about it.
The next XCode will hopefully coming with a “storyboarding” feature. Not a lot of people are talking about it at the moment, but I really hope that it’ll be as easy to use as the Prototypes app.
However I’ve learned about Flurry, the user interaction logging and tracking service that can be useful for usability testing of apps. It’s works like Google Analytics which programmer can include a lightweight library and tracking code into your beta or production app, and your interaction will be send to the Flurry server for later research and analysis.
Money — App Annie is the only service I know that can track and keep you some idea about the app market. However, what I’m looking for is a more powerful market research tool that can show number of downloads, estimated revenue, etc.
Some folks I’ve met at the event
It’s been a few busy weeks since I last updated by blog. In fact I am now almost a month into my new job as a mobile UX designer, and my first project is an iPhone app. Although mobile app design is a new territory for me, this is a great opportunity to enter this new industry that I’ve been interested in since the launch of the iPhone.
As an UX designer, my responsibility are on the usage, visual design and overall experience that will be delivered to the user through the use of an app. I need to take into account various factors of the target audience, such as their language, social behaviour, age group and cultural value. I don’t need to worry too much about engineering, although my programming knowledge actually helped me quite a bit while communicating with engineers in programming the visual and interactions.
In spite of that my teammates are all Japanese and our primary communication must be in Japanese, here are some more things that I’m concerned about:
Posted in Design
Human Factor International periodically prepare online video on topics focusing on usability and human-centered design. I came across to this video from Apala Lahiri Chavan — “Cross Cultural Design“.
The topic feels very close to me, as I am currently working in Japan and experiencing similar cross-cultural issues in my design projects as well as daily life experience. But more interestingly, I’m mesmerized by the presentation of the video. It uses comic sketching that synchronizes with the voice over to deliver a smooth flow of information. I find it very easy to visualize and organize the concepts in my head.
Good Points:
More animation videos from HFI:
Posted in Design, Experience, Usability