October 2007 Issue
Marketing Isn't a Dirty Word
Published: October 22, 2007
Think you’re not into marketing? Think again. As UX professionals, we share much in common with our close cousins, the marketers. We all seek to understand customers—needs, preferences, behaviors, attitudes, and more. We all seek to create positive touchpoints with customers and, in turn, a positive affiliation with our product or company brand. We all know the importance of communicating effectively with customers and evaluating the performance of our work.
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Category: Columns
Where Are You Now? Design for the Location Revolution
Published: October 22, 2007
Of all the digital information delivery systems people use, mobile devices offer the greatest opportunity for satisfying people’s wants and needs by providing context-specific, time-sensitive interactive experiences. But, in order to truly take advantage of this potential, experience designers need to transition from designing for a single, static space—the desktop—to imagining the broad possibilities of the geospatial Web. For digital products and services, the next dimension of user experience we should consider during design is location.
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Category: Columns
Book Review: Sketching User Experiences
Published: October 22, 2007
Sketching User Experiences is a rambling stream of consciousness through Bill Buxton’s head—spanning a treatise on the role of design in business, a history lesson on sketching, and an analysis of specific design solutions. The topics—shifting gently—are often intriguing, and their overall trajectory is completely unpredictable. As, in my current professional context, I am struggling with communicating the power, strategic importance, and benefits of design to the business, I was extraordinarily pleased to find the book speaking about these very topics. You wouldn’t know that you’d find this information in the book from reading the cover or even the first 100 pages.
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Category: Reviews
Scalable Design
Published: October 8, 2007
You’ve spent the last six months toiling away at a product design. The last few weeks were especially rough—tying up loose edge cases, closing out bugs, polishing up interaction and visual design details. And now your product has launched, so its time for some well deserved rest, right?
Unfortunately, Bruce Sterling, science fiction author and design professor, got it right when he said, “Design is never done.” Before you know it, there are new features to add, new markets to conquer, and new updates to your application’s content.
Your seemingly elegant design begins to bloat with features, tear under the pressure of localization, and nearly keel over under the weight of new content that pushes it to its breaking point. Before long you give up. It’s time to redesign—again.
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Category: Columns
The Composite Intelligence of Virtual Assistants
Published: October 8, 2007
As early as 1968, influenced by visionary movies such as Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its fictional computer character HAL 9000, we envisioned omniscient, intelligent machines that could easily contain the whole range of human knowledge. Then, in 1987, the Knowledge Navigator video
from Apple Computer struck our imaginations and greatly boosted our expectations of what computers would be able to do for us in a few years’ time.
It is now 20 years later, but technology is still very far from fulfilling such hopes regarding virtual assistants:
- Voice recognition isn’t immediate.
- People adapt to machines’ lexicons rather than the other way around.
- Computers cannot easily transcend the scope for which they have been programmed.
- Self-learning machines are still experimental.
- The generation of high-quality graphics representing emotionally rich, 3-D avatars is far from being real time, cheap, or extensively available.
Category: Features