21May / 2011

Rethinking About User Experience and User-friendliess

What is user experience design? What is user-friendliness?

I used to think of these two terms as synonyms while commenting on almost anything I encounter, from web design to my experience navigating a busy subway station trying to found a way out. Hack, I felt smart to just complaining about stuffs that I don’t like with big design terminology.

But as I started my new job as an UX designer recently, it becomes necessary to carefully and thoroughly re-examine my fundamental understanding of these two D-word — UX design and User-friendly design — especially when I need to effectively communicate with Japanese teammates using these concepts in both Japanese and English.

User-friendliness

Feeling something to be “user-friendly” is a pretty subjective emotion. A user may comment on a product as user-friendly, yet find it very difficult to explain such conclusion with logical reasons or verify that with quantitative evaluation. It is like saying “this rose is prettier than that carnation”; that might just be a comment from intuition, with no particular explanation on why it is.

For example, a Japanese flip-phone with numeric keypad and a very sophisticated word prediction software would be considered user-friendly to the local Japanese users. However, with the same form factor and a T-9 input, it would be very difficult to create a satisfying experience to English speaking users.

User-friendliness can be affected by a lot of factors, such as personal preference, education, cultural background, basic values, language, age, and the life-experience of an individual.

Researchers could prove with matrices that one design is more effective than another, such as the time required to complete specific tasks. However, that’s just a way to show the effectiveness of the product design as a whole, but cannot directly conclude that user’s satisfaction to the product.

User Experience Design

User experience design, on the other hand, is like magician playing tricks in front of the audience. As a magician, your job is to lead the audience to believe that you are really cutting a live person into half or walking through a solid wall, although in reality you are actually doing something else behind the scene to make it appears so without the audience realizing it.

UX designer would hide the detail mechanics of a system, and present to the user with something simpler or even different but easier to understand — deliberately guide users to form a carefully designed mental model in their mind — and let them think that this model is their own idea.

Still a lot to learn to be a good user experience designer. Keep walking.

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05Mar / 2011

Richard Buchanan’s Keynote at IxDA 2011

Richard Buchanan: Keynote from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.

Today IxDA releases some of the keynotes from Interaction Conference 11 at Boulder, Colorado. Richard Buchanan is one of the main keynote speakers. It’s a rather long keynote, but one of his key points is that, interaction is how people relating to people through the mediating influence of product. Instead of focusing on just the product’s form and function and treat it as the centre of your design goal, designers should step back and think from the people, as a social creature, and design the product that helps them to interact freely. Product is a loose definition, which can be a law, an organization, a software or UI, video, audio…etc.

IxDA Website is a Good Example of an Interactive Hub of a Professional Community

By the way, I really like the web design of IxDA official website (http://www.ixda.org). It is one of the best professional community websites. On top of regular features such as membership, discussion and job board, the resources page is a very convenient tool for the conference attendees and non-attendees to recap the speechs and materials.

Opening the resources to the public for free not only benefits the knowledge development of the community as a whole, it also makes the community and the industry more desirable to the public. It is a powerful promotion. People might think it is stupid to release all the important keynotes and materials that attendees are actually paying the tickets, flight and hotel for, but in fact what’s even more valuable and worth paying for attending a conference is the opportunity to network, interact, and participate with real community members.

I really hope to find a way to further encourage such a mentality of sharing and collaboration near my home, Asia. I am still working on building my network in Hong Kong, China, Japan and Asia, and the world. I will walk, step by step, toward such a goal. これからもよろしくおねがいします。今後請大家多多指教。

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27Feb / 2011

Pumpkin Seed Eating Instruction Comics

I was back to Hong Kong last week for the UXHK conference and brought back some local snacks for my Japanese colleagues. One of them is Roasted Pumpkin Seed (瓜子) which is a common delicacy usually served during the Chinese new year. The hard shell is inedible, so without any tool people usually just bite open the shell with their front teeth and eat the white heart of the seed.

However, since most of my Japanese colleagues had never tried such local food, it’s necessary to tell them the proper way of consuming it. In order to avoid confusion and potential danger of somebody choked by the seeds, I decided to sketch the following instruction note:

To my surprise, everybody forgives my broken Japanese and gets the idea of eating the pumpkin seed almost immediately. It’s tricky, but at least nobody was hurt. I was relieved.

My Thoughts

Comics has become increasingly popular and commonly seen in websites, especially in those complicated web services where plain words is almost a sure failure for non-techy users to follow. One example is Google’s Chrome Browser Comics, where the dev team tries to explain some pretty technical concepts, such as sandboxing and malware prevention, with the use of comics.

Book: See What I Mean

There are increasing interests in using comics for usability applications and a legitimate communication tool for projects and business environments. Usability Publisher Rosenfeld Media is teaming up with Kevin Cheng to publish See What I Mean – HOW TO USE COMICS TO COMMUNICATE IDEAS, a book that is dedicated to using comics as a documentation and communication tool in usability. From the introduction:

In See What I Mean, Kevin will walk you step by step through the process of using comics to communicate, and provide examples from industry leaders who have already adopted this method.

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26Jan / 2011

Google Places Sticker and NFC Technology

This is the Google Places window sticker of LABI Shibuya/Yamada Denki which has a QR-code printed on it. I was a bit excited to see that the first time, confusing that with the new NFC-enabled “Recommended on Google Places” tag. Well, it turns out that such touch tag from Google is currently being experimented only at Portland, US, so I was just over-reacting.

“Touch to Download” — Near Field Communication

Similar to Japan’s own Osaifu-Keitai technology featuring Sony’s Felica system, the Google Places Sticker and Nexus S are also using Near Field Communication technology, which means that data can be exchanged when waving the sensing device near the tag, without any contact. I have previously blogged about a touch-download map in train station in Tokyo. However, with serious marketing push by big telecom like AU and Docomo to Android-powered mobile phones, it might not be such a wild dream to hope that more Google backed NFC applications will be coming to Japan any time soon. There will even be more motivations for Japanese business to use compatible NFC systems if the newly rumored Apple’s iPhone/iPad NFC support becomes reality.

Intro video about “Recommended on Google Places” NFC touch tag and its usage with Nexus S.

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06Jan / 2011

Business Card Gadget PITREC

PITREC from King Jim Co. is a business card management gadget that scans, OCRs and stores your collection of business cards. Sporting a 3.5 inch screen and a 27,300YEN price tag, PITREC promises to store about 1800-2000 pieces of business card data on a 2GB microSD card, or 9999 pieces on a 16GB microSDHC card.

Additional Information

The name “PITREC” is a made up word of “Pit in” and “Record”. When a card is scanned, the machine will make a *PIT* sound effect of confirmation.
It takes 20 seconds for scanning and OCRing one business card, or 5 seconds for scanning only.
You can edit the database from desktop computer using the special software “PITREC on PC”. No Mac.

My Thoughts

To be honest, I have never played with a PITREC so my comments can only based on their website information. As far as I know there are no less then a handful of iPhone apps that offer similar or better functionalities of this gadget: Capture (using built-in camera), OCR (in English and Japanese), Store in the phone contact list, and even more conveniently, directly call a phone number or send email from your iPhone.

Also for iPhone, there is no need for a separate desktop software for managing the data, as you can fix any mistakes with the touch keyboard. The PITREC however doesn’t seem to have a keyboard nor convenient way for correction. You’ve got to rely on the power of OCR.

Security might be a concern too. Altho the machine is password protected as stated on the website, there is not mention of any encryption being applied to the data if the memory card is taken out. Still need further confirmation with that.

So what is the market that this device is trying to target?

Possibly business person who doesn’t own an iPhone/smart phone, non tech-savvy, who prefer a tangible and dedicated separate item that induces a sense of professional, trust and security. This seems very domestic as well, since there’s also no mention about English business card recognition capability.