Foundations of Human-Computer Interaction - Book Review - The Design of Everyday Things by Don(ald) Norman

Don Norman is a Computer Scientist, Electrical Engineer, a Doctor of Psychology and a professor of Human Centered Design. He has written The Psychology of Everyday Things (later The Design of Everyday Things) to deal with frustration: the frustration of being unable to operate the most simple of devices. This inability, Norman realized, was not a consequence of his own perceived stupidity, but was a consequence of bad user interfaces, in other words, bad design.

In The Psychopathology of Everyday Things, Norman discusses that objects shouldn't need instruction to be usable. Interfaces should have visibility, that is, we should be able to see what an object is capable of. These visible messages are natural signals and the design that takes advantage of those is natural design.

Natural mapping is an expansion of the concept of mapping, a direct relationship between what is perceived as possible and intention. Natural mapping uses physicality and culture as guidelines for those mappings, making this relationship understandable.

Affordances, without a doubt the most interesting concept discussed in this chapter (and maybe the book) are properties of a given object. They describe what is possible to do with an object and are the attributes that make objects tools: they give purpose. Constraints on the other hand are like anti-affordances: they describe what we cannot do with a given object or the limits of what we can do. Putting all of these concepts together gives us conceptual models, the mental image of an object, all you can and cannot do with it and the relationships between intention and possibility.

He concludes saying that designing for people is all about making good conceptual models (therefore, understanding mappings, affordances and constraints) and making things visible.

In The Psychology of Everyday Actions we learn the 7 stages of action: forming a goal, forming an intention, specifying an action, executing an action, perceiving the world, interpreting its state, evaluating the outcome; rinse, repeat. We also learn of the two Gulfs, the gulf of execution, the distance between the intentions of the user and the actions possible with the object (see mapping) and the gulf of evaluation, the distance between the physical (visual, perceptual) presentation of the object and the intentions of the user (see visibility, affordances).

Norman also speaks of naïveté through Aristotle, mentioning that we tend to hold very simple, and often wrong, explanations for the phenomena around us. Coincidence leads to perceived causality, making us see relations between actions and results when they are not there. He also discusses silence, the insistence in not reporting errors that we believed are caused by ourselves. This conspiracy of silence leads to helplessness, the perception that we are simply unable to complete a task. This can lead to its own cycle, of taught helplessness, where we generalize our inabilities (and our fear of discussing them) leading to the habit of not trying, which leads to a self-fulfilling prophecy (you prove your own perceived inability by failing to even try to succeed).

Knowledge in the Head and in the World is about memory. Memory in the head is that efficiently, easily retrieved knowledge that we acquire by learning. Memory in the world is information like mappings and reminders, the information that is external to us but, after retrieval (seeing, hearing) and interpretation, becomes content that we can also use to act.

These two types of memory allow us to have precise behavior without precise knowledge:

- We don't need all the information to be within our heads, we can retrieve it from the world.

- Precision is unnecessary; as long as we have enough knowledge to distinguish right from wrong, so we can interpret the external information to complete a task.

- The world limits possible actions through natural constraints, so we do not need to know all that is possible/impossible, we can infer through interaction

- Additionally, cultural constraints are carried with us through learning, so we know what is acceptable to do with a certain object.

A design model is the ideas of the object's designer on what can and cannot be done with it. A user's model is that which the user develops through observation of this object and a system image is the totality of information available on a given object (affordances, constraints, instructions, appearance). In an ideal world, the design and user model are identical. The system image should also perfectly align the appearance and instruction set of an object with the real affordances and constraints of an object.

Knowing What to Do expands on constraints by attempting to assemble a Lego motorcycle: physical constraints are true limitations of size, weight, mobility; semantic constraints are limitations based on meaning (the windshield goes in front of the driver, the driver points forward, etc); cultural constraints are about accepted conventions (the red light means stop, goes in the rear; text is to be read, so it must be right-side-up, etc) and logical constraints are limitations in logic (all bike parts must be connected to work, no parts can be missing, etc).

Constraints are as important as affordances to tell us what to do. If constraints are deceiving, we are unable to understand what is really possible with an object. If you can perceive more than one possibility from a single part, you are a victim of bad mapping.

To Err is Human is about making mistakes. The most common type of error is a slip, when we end up doing something when we intended to do another thing. Slips can be capture errors (two sequences start the same and you unconsciously move from one to the other), descriptive errors (we confuse two look-alike objects and do to one what we should do to the other), data-driver errors (we retrieve wrong data and work on this equivocal information), associative activation errors (the event gets a similar, but wrong, response), loss-of-activation errors (we forget what we were doing mid-action) and mode errors (objects with several available modes are used without first selecting the correct mode).

Good design uses feedback to prevent or warn about slips by showing there was a discrepancy between intention and result. 

Different levels of complexity are acceptable for different types of tasks:

- Deep tasks cannot be wide, but shallow tasks can (there can be many flavors of ice-cream to choose from without risk).

- Narrow tasks can be deep, but wide tasks can't (when cooking by following a recipe, there can be many steps because there are very little decisions to be made).

Good design deals with human error by understanding and minimizing causes for error, making it possible to undo actions, making errors easy to discover and fix and understanding that tasks are imperfect simplifications of users actions. And if all else fails, designers should resort to locks (forced sequences that prevent users from making mistakes).

The Design Challenge is about designers as human beings. We are at a constant balance between usability and aesthetics and the iterative process of design, analyse for errors and modify (repeat until time/budget/resources run out). We also have limited mental resources and cannot predict everything. Our attention is too focused and too limited. We also are not end users, and most of the times, neither is our client. Lastly, we have a tendency to ignore convention in the name of innovation, sometimes breaking affordances and constraints.

We must also accept that sometimes there are no perfect answers and the best solution is a balance.

Last but not least, the most common design sins: complex is cool or the worshiping of false images and creeping featurism, adding more and more features that add more complexity than utility.

User-Centered Design, the final chapter, is about the philosophy of good design. The chapter revisits every chapter of the book in order to posit what good design actually is.

A good design makes possible actions clear, makes everything visible (actions, results and the conceptual model itself), makes evaluation easy and follows natural mappings between intention and action, action and result and visible information and interpretation. It uses both knowledge in the world and knowledge in the head, it simplifies structure, it bridges the gulfs of execution and evaluation, it gets mappings right, it exploits constraints and it allows for dealing with error.

This was the first time I've read The Design of Everyday Things since my early days of Industrial Design college in 2007. It is one of my two favorite books by Don Norman, together with Emotional Design. Contrary to the opinion of most of my Industrial Design colleagues, I do not think this book is offensive to the profession, but rather a fantastic guide of good, human-centered design. Designers should be less egocentric and understand they are not artists, they are craftsmen who trade in human needs and whose handicraft are useful objects. Re-reading this book made me decide I must read something else Norman wrote between these two of my favorite books, probably Turn Signals are the Facial Expressions of Automobiles.

Foundations of Human-Computer Interaction - Final Concept Map, A.K.A. The Behemoth.

This thing is huge.
Gargantuan.
Confusing.

H. P. Lovecraft would write about it, terrorizing Rhode Island, domineering the Ancient Ones.

Cthulhu has nothing on The Behemoth.

I present thee "The Integrated Concept Map for Foundations of Human-Computer Interaction"

he com̡e̶s, ̕h̵i​s un̨ho͞ly radiańcé destro҉ying all enli̍̈́̂̈́ghtenment, concepts lea͠ki̧n͘g fr̶ǫm ̡yo​͟ur eye͢s̸ ̛l̕ik͏e liq​uid pain,  can you see ̲͚̖͔̙î̩́t̲͎̩̱͔́̋̀ it is beautiful t​he final snuffing of the lie​s of Man ALL IS LOŚ͖̩͇̗̪̏̈́T ALL I​S LOST  he comes the ich​or permeates all MY FACE NO NOO̼O​O NΘ stop the an​*̶͑̾̾​̅ͫ͏̙̤g͇̫͛͆̾ͫ̑͆l͖͉̗̩̳̟̍ͫͥͨe̠̅s ͎a̧͈͖r̽̾̈́͒͑e n​ot rè̑ͧ̌aͨl̘̝̙̃ͤ͂̾̆  H̸̡̪̯ͨ͊̽̅̾̎Ȩ̬̩̾͛ͪ̈́̀́͘ ̶̧̨̱̹̭̯ͧ̾ͬC̷̙̲̝͖ͭ̏ͥͮ͟Oͮ͏̮̪̝͍M̲̖͊̒ͪͩͬ̚̚͜Ȇ̴̟̟͙̞ͩ͌͝S̨̥̫͎̭ͯ̿̔̀ͅ

You have been warned.

Foundations of Human-Computer Interaction - Module 7 - History and Vision

I tried very hard not to use a timeline structure... and failed. I guess I'm hardwired to think of History as linear. One of those things David calls my tendency of being too aseptic, I guess.
It was very cool to revisit this timeline in my head, as I've written extensively about the oN-Line System (NLS) and Doug Engelbart's unsung parenthood of so many things we now take for granted in Human-Computer Interaction: the pointer, the collaborative document, tele-conferencing, hypertext etc.
So here it is, in a timeline-ish shape, the final Concept Map before integration:

Design for All - Main Assignment - Public Transport and the Disabled

Background

This study was made with a personal friend, whose identity I chose to preserve. He is a foreign national living in Estonia, like me, but he has been here for a few years and is an amputee who needs a wheelchair for mobility on a daily basis. He is an otherwise healthy man in his late 20s to mid 30s. He chooses to only move around by car and one day we decided to take a bus ride together so we could discuss the challenges of using public transport when you have a disability.

We chose to stack the deck in our favor and picked a non-busy weekend's day to move between two locations downtown. As he explained to me, Tallinn is a nice place mobility-wise for the disabled, as long as you only look to the streets and sidewalks. Most if not all street corners have dropped curbs that make climbing up and down with a wheelchair fairly easy. Buildings are another story completely, as most buildings have flights of stairs, raised steps or a combination of both to access the interior, including rather modern ones. He lives in a modern building complex that has no elevators whatsoever, and he has to climb up or down several flights of stairs, something he does using his wheelchair as a makeshift crutch in a rather ingenious way, moving it up a few steps and leaning on it to go to the next step, then repeating the procedure until he is up. The process of doing it for several flights of stairs is rather painful and takes an insurmountable amount of time, as I've witnessed.

Once we hit the streets he is quite ambulatory and his youthful strength keeps him moving as fast as everyone in the group. Some dropped curbs are easier to negotiate than others, but on average he has no trouble at all moving within the city. We reach the bus stop and check the timetable. I am completely unable to read Estonian, but he is capable of negotiating a few words of the language (an ability that would come useful soon enough, as we were about to learn). He tells me that the buses with wheelchair accessibility are marked by a blue line under the minutes on the timetable. Luckily for us, Tallinn buses come regularly and the next scheduled bus passing has a blue line under it, so we wait and lo and behold, a bus.

The Problem

The bus driver stopped and, as you can see in the picture above, the low floor on the bus was not enough to enable you to negotiate the distance between the curb and the bus without additional help. We had no idea how to access the bus and were about to give up and let the bus go when my friend rolled to the front door and asked the driver how to board using a wheelchair. The driver stops, opens his personal door, gets a pair of gloves, goes to the middle door of the bus and pulls a handle from the floor. There is a very well hidden, unsignalized ramp on the floor! I pushed him up the ramp, as it looks quite steep, but he said that, for the record, he could do it himself with some effort.

We took the bus for a few blocks, staying in the designated wheelchair space. It has a few seatbelt-like appendages that we assume are to keep the wheelchairs strapped in case of accident, but he jokingly explained that nobody else is wearing a seatbelt, so he does not feel it is a fair option to be the only one strapped to the bus. When we arrived at the destination, I (who cannot speak a word of Estonian) took it upon myself to pull the handle and unfold the ramp so he could climb down. We negotiated a few more dropped curbs on our way to a restaurant to discuss the experience we'd just had.

Discussion

He explained that riding his own car he retains a level of independence that he could not have with the public transport. Since the ramps are not automated and pushing the button inside the bus simply informs the driver that he has to come to the middle of the bus to unfold the ramp, we agree that it breaks the freedom of mobility expected from a true accessible experience, and the fact that we could not find a button to do the same thing from the outside makes us assume the only way to do it is to actually speak Estonian and bother the driver.

We drew the following capability levels scale comparing his actual abilities to the abilities needed to use the accessibility ramp. It is surprisingly difficult to do it, considering you need to communicate your need for it. It also made me feel quite helpless if I were in his place, because I would most certainly not be able to ask the driver to operate the ramp for me nor do it myself from a chair. It is disconcerting to see an accessibility feature that matches so much the actual abilities of the person who needs it that any slight difference might make or break the usability scale.

Conclusions

In further discussion, we reached together the conclusion that the fact that the ramp is not automated makes a lot of difference, but what really makes this option a kludge instead of a real solution is the terrible signalization and communication features. Not having a way to communicate, from the outside, that you need the accessibility ramp makes it borderline useless. It is the only high-demand point in the whole scale, and it needs addressing. I myself felt extremely unable to do the exact same thing if I were on a wheelchair and alone and although I'm a strong proponent of using public transport on a daily basis I could not find any fault in his decision to only move around by car.

Design for All - Essay - Universal Design for Automobiles

As in many other areas, automotive designers are often squeezed between conflicting demands: safety, structural integrity, performance, aesthetics, fashion, marketing, accessibility. It is often very hard to equally satisfy the needs for all of these demands, and economic forces will push designers into prioritizing one against the others: looks over safety, fashion over accessibility. As automobiles are often the object of fetishistic desires from their consumers (and are expensive status symbols), it is often very hard to convince people to prioritize safety and accessibility when purchasing automobiles, making the market a powerful force against universal design.

Around half of older, frailer folk have difficulty entering and exiting personal vehicles. This is not helped by the trend for sportier designs, either of low ceilinged, shallow seated sporty coupés or sedans that aspire to look like coupés, or of high floored, high seated sports utility vehicles (SUV), vans and minivans. The latter two categories are very often the vehicle of choice for people with limited mobility because of the generous space for wheelchair and other walking aids, but the push for SUV-like looks causes most of these vehicles to have a much higher floor than actually needed in their true usage scenarios.

The back seat of most vehicles (the seat of choice for many people who are being transported by their progeny or next-of-kin) is especially troublesome; aerodynamics push the ceilings down, comfort for the driver (the purchaser of the vehicle most of the time) pushes the seats back and down, engineering dictates the existence of a B-column between the front and rear doors, etc. That makes accessing the back seat very difficult for people with reduced mobility, dexterity and stretch. The best-case scenario for these passengers is the use of the front passenger seat on two-doored vehicles. These are also very sough-after by users of mobility aids capable of transferring themselves from chair to seat. For these users, the ability to access the leg-space between front and rear seat using a single door is especially useful for stowing away a foldable mobility aid.

These two-doored vehicles are often of a sporty variety, though. That makes their front seats usually low and shallow, which limits field-of-view and makes accessing controls farther away, like automatic rear-view mirrors, ventilators and even some less commonly-used lighting controls like headlamp angle regulators, as well as external features like toll booths, parking-slip emitters, intercom buttons and other drive-through features especially difficult to operate for people with limited reach and stretch ability. In these cases, the higher-seated SUVs and vans make for better seating, both from a security/visibility point of view as well as for reaching external road features and farther-removed controls within the car. Some of these constraints can be addressed by optional, remote-operated devices such as wireless toll tags, but those solve a single problem by addressing a symptom instead of trying to solve the positioning problem as a whole.

One class of vehicle that has been approaching the accessibility/positioning problem from the right angle are sub-compacts and electric vehicles. Perhaps because their target groups are more open-minded and less focused on sportiveness, most of these vehicles get some or all of these features right: low floors, high ceilings, upright seating, big front doors (usually the only door in the vehicle, but sometimes associated with special, “suicide” rear doors that open in the opposite direction without a B-column in-between). These features usually make for less sporty looking cars, but make for very universal features.

Staying in the area of visibility, aging takes away lots of sensory sensitivity: low light vision, dynamic acuity, visual field, hearing of higher frequencies and overall, etc. This makes for very dangerous situations where drivers cannot assess distance or speed of obstacles, cannot see approaching obstacles from the sides or the rear, cannot hear sirens, horns or other warning signs of approaching obstacles, etc.

There are several aids being developed and some already deployed for these issues: HUDs, night-vision systems, parking aids, rear-view cameras, collision-avoidance sensors, collision-warning systems and other crash prevention techniques.

Night-vision systems are usually deployed in luxury vehicles and employ one or more special cameras to absorb road information in ways the human eyes are incapable like LIDAR (light detection and ranging) and infrared or heat-sensing. Different systems process this information in different ways, but in most cases the information is displayed on a screen in the dashboard. This can be very useful, but also very distracting. It also lacks any kind of depth of view, making judging distances and avoiding detected obstacles very difficult.

Some collision-warning and crash prevention systems build on top of these sources of information by further analysing them and generating warning on assumptions made by image analysis. They can, for instance, infer that an obstacle is human-shaped and warn of pedestrians in the driveway, or use reflected light as a way of measuring distance and warn of impending collisions. Some of these systems use mixed visual and auditory feedback, which makes them more accessible. Some also use haptic feedback, but some drivers cannot tell the difference between a warning vibration and a mechanical defect or vehicle quirk, so proper combination of visual, auditory and haptic feedback is needed.

Some systems go one step further and connect this collision-warning information to the cruise-control and dynamic braking systems, effectively taking decision faster than a human driver could (even a very capable one with perfect vision and hearing). These vehicles can decelerate, shift gears and even apply selective braking to one or all wheels to prevent accidents. This combined collision-warning and cruise control system is called adaptive cruise control.

Another way of giving visual feedback is in the form of HUDs or Heads-Up Displays. This military-born technology uses images reflected on the windshield to give vehicle information to the driver, diminishing the need for moving the eyes from the road. These systems can be used for common visual information (speed, current gear), warning systems (collision warning, reckless driving, impending mechanical failure) and navigation (turn-by-turn instruction), among others. These systems must be used with care, though, because this information still makes drivers shift focus from the road to the windshield (people with limited fields of view can have difficulty adapting to different depths), can cause information overload (especially for older drivers whose sensory sensitivity is diminished and therefore cannot cope with too much information at the same time). It is best to combine HUDs with auditory warnings and to be very selective of what information must be displayed on HUDs.

Speaking of HUDs and sensory overload, one common on-board technology nowadays is navigation systems. Older drivers lose confidence in their ability for path-finding, choosing to only drive in familiar roads. The ubiquity of navigation systems brings confidence back to these drivers, restoring locomotive capacity by instructing them on unfamiliar paths. Most of these systems rely on stored maps and path-finding algorithms, making them extremely limited when it comes to alternate routing and hazard avoidance, though. More modern systems use external sources of information (internet connectivity, RDS Traffic Message Channel) to adapt to situations in real time. But these systems can also cause information overload, generate misunderstanding and cause even more unfamiliar situations. Some drivers will blindly follow information given by navigation systems disregarding surrounding environmental warnings, like shifting lanes when prompted without checking their rear view mirrors first or making illegal U-turns or conversions attempting to follow the system prompts. Some will be put in unfamiliar and uncomfortable situations like driving in highways, making left turns and other driving situations they usually avoid. Adaptive navigation algorithms can learn of these preferences and generate less direct but more familiar driving experiences for inexperienced or older drivers.

Another problem very common to navigation systems is shared with on-board entertainment systems (or infotainment systems, as most integrated, user-faced on-board computing is called nowadays): distraction. These systems take a lot of user input to operate and generate a lot of output, causing distraction, taking the eyes off the road for long periods, causing confusion, etc. Most mitigation techniques are a balancing act between these various perils: simplified input usually generates longer operation periods with higher distraction, shortened distraction periods require multiplexed input techniques that can be confusing. Alternative communication techniques such as voice input and output are very desirable, but are culturally and linguistically limited and are a long ways ahead in development before they can be considered universal. The only safeguard that can really guarantee safety when operating these infotainment systems is to limit their usage by passengers or when the vehicle is not mobile, but both are simply workarounds that generate more frustration from drivers (who are the decision-makers and market drivers, slowing the adoption of these mitigators).

A last area where universal design and vehicle design have still to catch-up to each other is legislation. Many laws can and should be implemented in this area, as leaving marketing forces alone to dictate vehicle design can significantly slow down adoption of very well established academic knowledge on universal vehicle design. Most of the factors analysed above, especially those regarding external and structural design, are caused by marketing efforts nullifying engineering and design efforts to integrate universal design and safety decisions. Like the impact that Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed book had on highway safety legislation and vehicle design regulations in the US in the 1970s, universal design could and should have a significant impact on design decisions for automobiles, but without supporting legislation, there is no way to counter marketing forces pushing in the opposite direction.

Another area where legislation could become more flexible is creating adaptable licensing requirements. Just as most countries have special licensing regimes for younger drivers (like forcing them to signal their learner’s status or drive only on special periods of the day), creating special licensing regimes for older drivers could increase safety not only for them but also for other drivers around. It would also increase older people’s access to mobility by allowing them to retain their license to drive in restricted situations that cover most of their needs (like allowing for urban driving but forbidding access to highways), not forcing them to relinquish their license when no longer fit for dangerous driving situations.

Conclusion

The fast cycle of automotive renovation (although the automobile is a durable good, it has a rather short effective life cycle compared to housing, for instance) allows for very quick adoption of safety and universal design features. Marketing pressures, though, push these adoptions further away. The Trojan horse for the adoption of these design techniques can be the electric and hybrid vehicles. Their status as a niche product and their fresh legislation needs can be used as a way to push universal access requirements to their design features. The smart combination of legislation and fresh market status can push these new vehicles into a status of safe, accessible vehicles that can pull the other, more mainstream automobile categories towards these adoptions as a way to not lose their “cutting edge” when compared to electrics and hybrids.

References

Hakamies-Blomqvist, L., “Research on Older Drivers: A Review,” International Association of Traffic and Safety Sciences (IATSS) Research, 20:91–101, 1996.

Steinfeld, E., M. Tomita, W. Mann, and W. DeGlopper, “Use of Passenger Vehicles by Older People with Disabilities,” Occupational Therapy Journal of Research, 19(3):155–186, 1999.

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, “Vehicle Backover Avoidance Technology Study—Report to Congress,” Washington: U.S. Department of Transportation, November 2006.

Preiser, W.F.E, Smith, K. H., “Universal Design Handbook”, McGraw Hill, 2011

Gary Hustwit's Objectified, reviewed by the three of us: Gabriel, Antra and Eduardo

Gabriel Motta Ferreira

“Good design is honest”

Even though “Objectified” focuses in Industrial design, it was interesting to see rules, concepts and models we studied in the course and that apply to design in general being mentioned many times by interviewees. Visibility was discussed many times through the film with sentences such as “Good design is honest”. Designers from the film logically didn’t mention visibility directly, but talked about it in many ways.

For most of them, a good product design has to show to users what they are suppose to do with it. The product or object has to be “honest” enough to put forward its main affordances in a visible way. And is not an easy task to do so. Another sentence that called my attention was that well-designed objects have to “feel almost undesigned”. The better the design, less explanation needed to make users understand its functionalities.

By watching the film, I remembered my childhood when we were suppose to help our parents to install any kind of new electric device in the house. TVs, CD players, washing machines, ovens, microwaves, fridges, whatever - it was always a pain to understand how it should work. Companies sent (and still do) huge manuals on how to install/use their products in its package. But why would a logical object (even a complex one) need 500 pages of manual? A well-designed one most likely would not.

“ When I started I found out that the most important thing for designers would be to go to the environment, look at people and think about how they experience products as a source of inspiration”

This sentence was fundamental for me to understand how any design needs to be tested with users to understand if it works or not. By paying attention to how people react to our product (being physical or digital), we can understand what is not working, where is it missing to give them a feedback, what kind of false affordances we are showing, etc.

Most importantly, at this moment I also made a connection between Human Computer Interaction and Crossmedia Production. As content producers, an important step of the production of our projects is to go out of the building and test it with our target audiences. How do they react to that specific scene? How funny it was that line? In both cases, having ideas in our heads is something great, but we should also test them in order to understand how right our assumptions were.

Different opinions, different paths for success

Another thing that called my attention in the film was the diverging opinions on how to create good design. For instance, I remember in one part of the film I guess it was Anthony Dune who said that “my job is about what is going to happen, not about what already happened”. Nevertheless, most of the other designers seemed to agree (and I also agree with them) that design is also about what already happened.

As we learned in the course, a designer being industrial, interaction, product or graphical designer, has to take into consideration users’ cultural background and knowledge when in the creative process. Of course, innovation is a key to success and we shouldn’t be afraid to try it out new concepts or new ways of dealing with a design, however, it is also necessary to think why things work this way and if there is a problem with it or not. Otherwise, it can happen that we start changing features that we shouldn’t touch when designing something that already exists.

Anthony Dune, on the other hand, is a famous and successful designer. He probably takes into consideration consumers’ cultural background when designing his products. But what he means is most likely tha innovation is very important in his work and what defines a good designer. In this sense, I also believe that it is the only way for us to move forward as a global society.

Antra Balode

Some thoughts about Apple and design

We all agree that things have to be clear and understandable. Even nowadays the arbitrariness and thoughtlessness in which the things are so often brought to market is shocking. We read the 1988 book “The Design of Everyday things” by Donald A Norman, and were arguing if maybe the three decades with industrial production and ever-raising competition would have helped to fix this problem and a clean, user-friendly design would have became a must, but apparently, as the film argues, it is not yet the case. Why do we still have the chairs that are not comfortable to sit in? Why, instead of not using the GPS device with this totally user unfriendly interface, that would force the designers to make changes in the product itself, we are calling ourselves dumb instead? It is exactly the thing Norman was asking three decades ago, and this is the concern of good designers now.

“Good design is as little design as possible” - this sometimes interferes with the human factor of individual designers and companies. How to stand out? How to be innovative? How to be able to compete with others? Impress the investors and superior employees? This is where the film starts to talk about one company that has managed to stand out from day one. It’s Apple. The Apple designer guy explains how they got to be an industry-wide design example. They know how to use different attributes: material, form. They take into account how does the user connect to the product, what is the key interaction element. They have found out how to get the design “out of the way”. Unlike many many competitors out there, Apple products’ forms are not arbitrary shaped, but are there for a reason - this is where they start thinking about design. As the interviewee points out - design must be almost inevitable, the product should feel almost “undesigned”. 

The feature or part in the product is there only if it does something, that is necessary for the functioning. As a user of the new MacBook pro - I, for example, adore how they even took the “MacBook Pro” sign off the front, leaving the whole thing totally plain simple. They took off all the indicators, lights, everything that is not critical for use - and I did not even notice anything lacking from my previous Probook. Look at Apple keyboards - so simple it’s almost undesigned. But it leaves us with the certainty - this is exactly how it should be. My mother is freaking out when it comes to technology, and when it came to the point she needed a smartphone.. though I am not an Apple evangelist - iPhone was the logical choice.. For the simple reason of it being so “fool-proof” and intuitive, thinking of the user need prior to designing anything. A physical button on the side to switch between silent and ringer modes; its state indicated by red colour, that is not even a digital indicator - wait.. is there even any other way to do it?

“Design is a search for form. usually the hardest part is to remove, remove, remove. Bit by bit, everything that is unnecessary. That gets in the way of the maximum unity.”

Almost all our relationship with the device soon after we start to use it is formed by the interaction between us and what’s happening behind the screen, experience between us and the software. It has so little to do with the physical design. And this is where Apple has been shooting in the target since the early days. Taking all the unnecessary stuff out, and leaving the emotional part to the interaction designers, that create the experience and ease of intuitive usage.

Using this right approach from the start - and you hit the goal. The other companies tried this and that, and what happens now? More and more business-class laptops, for example, look exactly like Apple products. I was looking at the billboard recently and thought, why Asus does not get sued for being designed almost exactly like MacBook Air.

In the film, there was a question raised on designing things, that stand the challenge of time. It is kind of against what the consumer society idea leads us doing, as it is beneficial for the capitalism that we have things and we change them as often as possible. Where is the balance of a sustainable design then? How did Apple manage to create a design that does not “get out of fashion”, but still motivate us to change a phone to a newer version every year?

The film kind of answers to that. We tend to want new things. “new now”, “next now” kind of look. Very well knowing, that this “next” is not going to be “forever” as well. So the biggest task is to design each new thing in a way the previous one looks like “then”. And this is what Apple is doing pretty well without making the “then” things look miserable.

At the same time, we barely ever see Apple’s products piling up in the garbage. Why? Because they do not use lack of quality to motivate people buy newer and more powerful versions of the gadgets. They have discovered the magic of motivating the people with this “feeling” they need the freshest models, at the same time letting the old ones continue living their lives. In the hands of other people with less budgets, in the houses of parents and grandparents.. After all - it still works for maximum possible time.

Eduardo Ferreira Fontes Mercer

Objectified is an amazing movie. Part of a trilogy on design that began with Helvetica using typography as a door to discuss graphic design and ends with Urbanized using cities as a view to urban planning and achitecture, Objectified sits in the middle, using our fetish for beautiful artifacts as a window into usability and industrial design.

Different cultures have different relations to the objects around them. Germans are pragmatic animals, obsessed with function, the French have an uncontrollable need for beauty, to the point of being kitsch, the Japanese are ritualistic beings with a very tactile relationship to objects etc. This reflects in the different approaches to design you see in the movie from designers such as Naoto Fukasawa, the Bouroullec brothers or Dieter Rams.

Speaking of Rams, the movie reflects his status as the father of good design by being filled to the brim with quotes from his ten principles. Those bear mentioning - good design is innovative, makes a product useful, makes a product understandable, is aesthetic, is unobtrusive, is honest, is long-lasting, is thorough (down to the last detail), is environmentally friendly and, last but definitely not least, good design is as little design as possible.

Rams' influence on Jonny Ive is left very evident and Ive is shown as his heir apparent, disciple and magnum opus. Ive's iron-grip on Apple's industrial design, reflective of Steve Job's iron-grip on Apple itself, gets special attention in the movie. Other new-school designers get equal attention: Karim Rashid with his flowing, almost liquid forms and his products that reach from the cheapest trash cans to the borderline objets-d'art, Marc Nelson's fluidic shapes that span from chairs and appliances to automobiles and airplanes and Chris Bangle, the American who took over BMW's design in the 90's (including MINI and Rolls Royce) after stints at Opel and Fiat.

Rams is not the only grand master featured in the movie. The super-studio IDEO (born in the 90's as the merger of Bill Moggridge's Moggridge Associates and ID Two and professor David Kelley's David Kelley Design) is shown as the superpower of American industrial design (even though Moggridge was actually born in the UK). IDEO is responsible for the first laptop, for Apple's first mouse, for Palm's PDAs and several non-electronic gadgets as well (its clients include PepsiCo, Ford and Procter & Gamble, among many others).

Although the movie makes a deep dive into the mind of the industrial designer as a professional and as an individual (showing the 'disease' that some of us feel, as very well exemplified by Jonny Ive, of obsessively overanalyzing other people's design choices and trying to guess at who their target audience was), it lacks something that both Urbanized and Helvetica have: conflict. While Helvetica uses the balance between modernism and postmodernism to lecture the spectator on good design and Urbanized pitches planned and organic urbanism against each other, Objectified misses the opportunity to pitch Rams' ten principles (especially being honest, environmentally friendly and long lasting) to the pressing forces of marketing to build in planned obsolescence and the constant push for consumerism. While it touches these points, eventually, it avoids making this a central point in the discussion.

This defect aside, Objectified is probably the greatest documentary on industrial design, especially from a designer's point of view, as it reminds us that every object, every tool around us has been designed by someone, for someone, to fill a certain need and complete a certain task, even if it was poorly so. It is a great service to the design community and it manages to be very entertaining while doing so. 

Foundations of Human-Computer Interaction - Module 6 - State transition diagrams, Petri nets

This is a real sub-standard Concept map. I am aware of that and I am sorry. I am really burnt out this week :(

Design for All: Finding the good examples around

In this post we were supposed to find good examples of accessible design. I don't know how most people started this search, but I begun by the most obvious place to me: my own computer. Most modern operating systems have accessibility options and Windows 7 is no different: the Ease of Access Center concentrates most accessibility features in a single screen:

When you open this window, it automatically starts reading the options to you out loud. I will also scan through every option, so if you have either difficulty reading or of mobility (or both), you can make your selection by waiting for the system to say the name of the desired option then just pressing the space bar (by far the largest button on the keyboard). Points for limited vision and dexterity. You can also set up alternatives for sound alerts (for the hard at hearing), alternate input devices (for several disabilities), higher contrast and larger fonts (visibility) etc.

Speaking of visibility, these guidelines for blind people are amazing. We had them everywhere in the subway system in São Paulo. Blind people can follow them using their canes, so they know where to go and where not to go. This example is very interesting (it comes from Japan): it moves sideways every time it comes near a manhole, so in the event that it might be open for work, blind people do not risk falling in. It even helps people with good vision: the obvious asymmetry in the design calls attention to the manhole ahead. Points for visibility, no matter if your blind or just totally distracted.

Speaking of moving around, this is a bus stop in Curitiba, Brazil. Even though it is elevated, it was actually designed with accessibility in mind: buses line up to the side of the tube and you board horizontally, with no ramps or stairs. You climb in through stairs, ramps or this amazing elevator for people with limited mobility or mothers pushing trolleys. You also pay when you climb into the tube, not when you board the bus, so there is no fumbling around for money, smartcards or bus tickets. Less lines, faster transit all around.

This is an accessible bathroom: no pesky doors in the way, the sink is low enough to use from a wheelchair (or to be used by children!), there is a very low shelf for the bathing products and rails all around (very nice to the elderly and also to wheelchair users). The dual shower heads allows for a no-compromises bath for people of all different heights and levels of dexterity.

Last but not least, one of my favorite examples of design for all from Robson Square in Vancouver, Canada. Instead of an obvious "accessible" staircase, with signs telling people with limited mobility where to go, ugly rails separating the ramp from the stairs etc, this is just an integrated space where people of all levels of mobility can get from one level to the other. Rails are integrated to the design with minimal disruption and stairs and ramp blend together in a single, beautiful structure. This is the perfect example that a universal design is possible and that accessibility does not need to be an afterthought or be something glued together to the "regular" design.

Foundations of Human-Computer Interaction - Module 5 - Interface efficiency, KLM, GOMS

This module was filled with insights into my master's thesis. Maybe because my thesis is finally (!!!) materializing inside my head, maybe because it simply did have many concepts which bug me constantly, like the quantification of (in)efficiency of human-computer interfaces. But now I'm not only quite sure of what I am to propose as a thesis, but how to defend and quantify the results of the work.

Phew! Thanks Prof. Lamas! It must have been all that cheese bagel I had last week (just kidding, the meeting was great to solidify my ideas on tangible computing).

Without further ado, let's move to the concept map:

In this one I resorted a lot less to quantifications and special colors (maybe because the methods themselves are quite linear and self-explanatory, or maybe because they make sense to me).
Overall, this was a very information-dense module: lots of interesting things to learn from a rather small pool of key concepts. Good information efficiency, I guess!

Ubiquitous Computing Module V Assignment: SWOT analysis and rough timeframe for implementation

BYOD for Asio EduERP/School calendaring

Strengths

• All required technologies are here, just not correctly deployed/integrated
• Easy to assemble a team experienced in development and interface design
• Direct interest of the University in improving the existing system
• Direct interest from users (students and staff) in integrating scheduling in their existing workflow

Weaknesses

• Not all stakeholders might see the use for the system (do not use computer based calendars etc)
• Multiple platforms make for very widespread testing platform (many opportunities for incompatibility)
• Might incur in unpredictable costs (large volumes of SMS messaging, for example)

Opportunities

• Create a de-facto standard for academic calendaring
• Synergies between service providers and universities can bring new partnerships
• Steer universities away from closed-sourced implementations in the future

Threats

• Asio is fully standards compliant, but closed-source, access to code might be impossible
• Asio has own closed source alternative: Asio Edu App
• Resistance to FOSS is still a reality in many Universities
• No sponsorship, no project
• Timeframe is very limited and inflexible - must work within the academic calendar

Rough Timeframe

Getting around Tallinn University in a wheelchair: From Mare to Terra's Room T407

From the parking in front o Mare:

Not gonna use this ramp, sorry!

Sign says this way, but actually the bridge is on the second floor.

Elevator it is!

A-Ha! The bridge.

These doors are mighty heavy by the way.

Across to Silva/Astra

Up to the 4th Floor we go...

Silva, 4th Floor. Terra to the left.

Still to the left. Lots of wheeling around.

In the end of this corridor? No, still to the right.

4th Floor, doors to Terra to the right. Sweet!

Oh no. Stairs! Bummer...

No way. Dead end, right?

Bonus Round: I found a solution!

Go back to the 3rd Floor and back to Astra.

This little door with no sign whatsoever? Secret wheelchair elevator... Sweet!

Accessible buttons. Too bad this elevator is hidden!

Finally in Terra!

Ta-da! Took me a lot of time though :(

Foundations of Human-Computer Interaction - Module 4 - The Human Processor Model, Fitts’ Law

In building this map I had to resist very hard not to follow Card's design of a little user's head when positioning the elements. I am actually glad I did, because I could maintain my habit of aligning equivalent elements (with the exception of working/long term memories, which I had to push diagonally to fit the recognize-act cycle). I wound up using four color codes: light blue for most concepts, yellow for the recognize-act cycle, gray for figures (time, capacity) and green for principles of operation and their consequences.

Not the best map I've ever built, but I believe most concepts are well represented, even if some are left unnamed (I decided some principles of operation were more important for their effects and naming them would be overkill).

Ubiquitous Computing Module IV Assignment: Design Issues

In this post, I will try to analyse what are some of the issues the project of ubiqutifying ASIO EduERP might entail. By moving away from the centralized calendar website to the user's personal choice of calendaring application (be it on the web, on a mobile device, on a desktop or all of the above), we are basically inviting issues of multiple interfaces. There is no predictable point of entry, there is no single interface, but myriad apps with their own sets of features, constraints and limitations. The single most difficult thing, in this case, is knowing when a given feature is or isn't available to the user on his chosen platform - Can he accept/decline invitations?  Can he push changes back to us?

The safest route is to assume no interactivity whatsoever is available on his chosen platform, and implement all of them as web applets[1]: whenever there is need for user input, a simple, responsive website should be developed for the given input. Should the user's platform provide for that functionality, the website is redundant and can be ignored. Should it be needed, the user can resort to the web solution. Communications between system and user should use a widespread platform, such as email or text messaging (user's choice) containing human-readable information and links to the applet solution as well as the WebDAV content (computer-readable), so whatever context the user finds himself in (reading through his mobile device or desktop computer) he can take the appropriate action (open the web applet, receive the WebDAV link and let his application deal with it, leave the message for another time/context).

Likewise, the system should be able to issue and deal with redundant communication[2]. The existence of multiple points of entry dictates that at least some users will choose to, at different moments, use different interfaces for the same information. That must be not only be designed for, but even be encouraged. The system should, therefore, be able to deal with modal changes (some input coming from the web, other through WebDAV, etc) and sometimes modal redundancy (same input from different sources). These multi-modal inputs should never introduce new complexity, but should always simplify communication with the system. Instead of issuing arcane error messages, the system should just deal with it sending confirmation messages that sound like natural conversation (i.e. instead of saying "you reversed a given option", say "you seem to have changed your mind, are you sure?").

In this way, some of the following design issues are addressed: multiple interfaces, smartness, existing practices, feature parity, seamless of interaction and ubiquitous access. Understanding user's needs is also such an important feature that its lack was the main drawback of ASIO EduERP that inspired the creation of this project, so it is also (hopefully) addressed by it.

References:

[1] Hassler, V.; Then, O., "Controlling applets' behavior in a browser," Computer Security Applications Conference, 1998. Proceedings. 14th Annual , vol., no., pp.120,125, 7-11 Dec 1998.

[2] Stanciulescu, A., "A Methodology for Developing Multimodal User Interfaces of Information Systems", Ph.D. thesis, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain, Belgique, 2008.

Foundations of Human-Computer Interaction - Module 3 - Feedback, Errors, Forcing, Gestalt laws, Responsiveness

This one was a doozy, especially because I had to illustrate each kind of error with an example. After I had come up with examples for each kind, I had to come up with a visual style to separate examples from main concepts, something I did using shades of gray instead of the usual black on light blue. Since I had gone through all the trouble to visually identify examples, I decided that I would use the concept in other places as well, and also illustrated the responsiveness deadlines, forcing function types and laws of Gestalt in the same fashion. It might make for an over-populated map, but no complex concept goes unexplained. In the end, I really liked the result, even if, in terms of graphical weight, it turned out a little bottom-heavy.

Ubiquitous Computing Module III Assignment: Enabling Technologies

In 2008, for the first time, laptop sales surpassed desktops [iSuppli]. Sometime between late 2013 [IDC] and 2015 [Gartner], tablets will surpass both laptops and desktops. These trends were made possible by the advances in power efficiency and computational capability predicted by Moore's law, and they are one of the driving forces behind BYOD (Bring Your Own Device), thanks to the fact that most people nowadays consider a portable computer to be their main computational device. This shift in behavior, especially in high-growth markets (such as Brazil, Russia, India, South Africa, Malaysia, Singapore and United Arab Emirates), has been blurring the lines between work and personal devices and between work and personal time [Ovum]. Another enabling technology that has great influence in BYOD behavior are wireless communication technologies. Wireless communication ranges from Near Field (NFC and RFID), passing through Personal Area (such as Bluetooth and Wireless USB), Local Area (Wi-Fi, RFID), Metropolitan (Wi-Fi, WiMAX, Muni Wi-Fi) and Wide Area (WiMAX, 3G and 4G telephony). Most of these technologies overlap and some even make use of one another (Bluetooth Smart or 4.0, for example, can use NFC to negotiate pairing and use Direct Wi-Fi to increase file transfer speeds), and are therefore part of the same IEEE standards family, 802.

Speaking of standards, one of the main forces of adoption of Internet protocols is the adherence to IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) standards. The IETF is an open standards organization, mostly run by volunteers and with no membership requirements, but its standards are well regarded and taken into consideration by other standard organizations such as ISO and the W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium), responsible for HTML and related standards and Ecma International, the European Computer Manufacturers Association. WebDAV and related protocols are IETF standards, HTML is a W3C standard, JavaScript (in the form of as EcmaScript) has been standardized by ISO and Ecma; as has JSON, JavaScript Object Notation. Cerri and Fughetta (2007) classified standards in a gradation between closed, disclosed, concerted, open concerted and open de jure. Although none of the standards cited above reach the highest level of openness in Cerri and Fughetta, they do all belong to the open concerted definition, for they are all developed and managed by an official standardization body or by an open group or consortium. This allows everyone to implement solutions based on these standards, even to base their own standards on these.

The best way to develop a solution based on open standards and to ensure its implementation is through the adoption of Open Source Software. OSS provides for a reference implementation that can be replicated and easily audited by external parties, ensuring there are no implementation mistakes. It also allows for easier adoption, because its replicability leads to widespread dissemination (Davidson and Heineke, 2007).

These are the main enabling technologies and/or strategies that orient my proposed implementation of a ubiquitous solution: portable, wireless communication devices with low-power, high performance processors, in the form of the users own personal computing devices, Whenever possible, respecting the users own choice of software implementation is key, therefore the solution must implement open protocols and standards to allow the user to choose his own solutions to his scheduling and messaging needs. When there are no existing solutions on the client side, or when such solutions do not provide for all the needed functionality, Open Source implementations of standards-based solutions (such as dynamic web applications based on HTML, JavaScript and JSON) can supplement existing solutions without breaking users workflow (i.e. without forcing users to log into a specific website just to complete a given task). All the communication between existing solutions, functionality extenders and the underlying system should also happen using open protocols, allowing for rapid implementation by other educational organizations without forcing them to move out of their existing implementations (save when the organizations have no control over existing implementations, i.e. when they use commercial, closed-source software). This would allow for widespread adoption, not only by users served by ASIO such as the staff and students of Tallinn University but also by other educational institutions.

References:

• Cerri D, Fuggetta A. Open standards, open formats, and open source. J Systems Softw 2007;80(11):1930-1937.
• Davidson SM, Heineke J. Toward an effective strategy for the diffusion and use of clinical information systems. J Am Med Inform Assoc 2007;14(3):361-367.

Bonus round: analysis of existing competing solutions

Fedena is an open source, web-based student information system developed in India for the government of Kerala. It is built on Ruby on Rails and allows for the development of plugins. It is entirely used via a web browser also has the ability to communicate with students, parents, teachers and staff via SMS and but is otherwise unable to integrate with users mobile systems, such as calendaring.

SchoolTool, likewise, is an open-source SIS written in Python and completely web-based. It is included in the Edubuntu Linux distribution. Besides being web-accessible, it is also able to import and export most of its data as Excel spreadsheets and CSV (comma-separated values), but it cannot communicate in real-time with other calendaring systems.

OpenSIS is another open-source SIS, based on PHP and MySQL. It is available as a free community version, has premium paid upgrades and integration features and is also available in a Cloud SaaS (Software as a Service) version. Although premium versions integrate to other systems such as Moodle, OpenSIS also has no BYOD provisions.

SIMS is the closed-source School Information Management System developed for use in the United Kingdom. Although it is commercial, closed-source software, it was paid for by the Bedfordshire County Council and enjoys 80% adoption in the England and Wales. It is based on Microsoft SQL and accessible via web through Microsoft SharePoint. Although the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency has established an Interoperability Framework for British Schools, SIMS does not implement it.

Of all systems mentioned above, probably only SIMS users would have a hard time implementing a standards-based communication and collaboration platform for BYOD, a problem it shares with ASIO EduERP itself, since it is also a closed-source, commercial solutions.