Designing for the iPad
This article came through the ol' inter office mail today and I was immediately intrigued. It lays a great critical eye to the all the glitz and glamor of the newly launched iPad that should give a sobering set of rules to an potential design looking to dive into it's interface. The article was written by iA, a two office production of 7 people that have made some impressively large and well designed sites. If you don't read the article, at least take a look into the work they've done at this company. That should give some credence to them.
Lightroom 3 beta release…and a nod of the hat
Exciting news for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom (hereby referred to just as Lightroom) users today: the beta of version 3.0 has been released! Don't know what Lightroom is? Well that's where my hat comes in...sort of.
I have to start off with my nod and I've been meaning to post about this for a while. I've been using Lightroom since its first iteration and I absolutely adore it. It's by far my favourite Adobe product to date - and I've used many of them. Lightroom is obviously targeted to professional photographers and I'm no pro; but this doesn't stop Lightroom from providing me with a wide variety of useful features for managing my photography. Everything from organizing, tagging, sorting, rating, editing, publishing and printing is done within Lightroom's logical and usable interface.
Like many software programs, I essentially jumped into the deep end with Lightroom. But it was the first Adobe program that I quickly and intuitively started paddling around in - there wasn't AS many embarrassing moments of floundering while I poked around. Other Adobe programs do have their own level of ease of use but that's because you become familiar with the interface features that are consistent between them. Lightroom was an entirely different interface and yet I still managed to pick it up rather quickly. Being the interaction nerd that I am I believe therein lies the reason why I believe I like this product so much.
Once I was sufficiently enthralled with the product I did some research on how it was developed. Go figure, development diaries and documentation on the program indicated that it involved huge amounts of interviews and testing with its primary user group: photographers (usability testing wins again!). I knew there was some intelligent process at work here;the difficulties of working with thousands of photos were dealt with so naturally in Lightroom's interface.
Now, when it comes to photography I consider myself an enthusiast but I am indeed a technically savvy individual so this program may not be for everyone. The best thing to do is read up on it a little yourself and try it out. Just remember, Lightroom is not without its problems.
And that brings us to Lightroom 3 beta. It was released today and it seems to hold a lot of great improvements. My favourite is publishing to the web. Check it out.
Siftables – Absolutely Bloody Brilliant
David Merrill gave a humble but mind boggling inspiring speech on how we can change the face of how we interact with information and technology. I've seen and heard concepts that are very similar to what Siftables do, but this is the first time I've seen them implemented in such a real and fluid manner. We desperately need to find new ways to on how we interact with our digital information so that we can make it more accessible to all demographics. As a species we've developed an understanding of our surroundings through the use of our 5 senses, but our technology today uses maybe 2 of these. These genius little blocks could have such a profound impact on how our children learn by being able to grasp hold of their information and physically interacting with. Amazing work.
Be sure to check out the video from TED.
Video Game Research – with a UX twist
photo: dave.camera at Flickr
Researchers Nate Bolt and Tony Tulathimutte from Bolt|Peters wrote an article that was featured in the January edition of the Boxes and Arrows. It summarized a year long usability study they conducted in conjunction with the development of the recently released video game Spore by Electronic Arts. In the article, they noted that a lot of current research practices for game development surrounds focus groups and surveys. Knowing several individuals involved in the game development (specificially from EA) I can concur that this seems to be the predominant approach.
As noted in the articled, the problem with this form of research, especially in something as personal as gaming, is it takes a user outside of their typical environment. It may not be immediately noticeable, but pushing users into a unfamiliar room in order to throw around some Q&A and paper work typically does not generate the most 'usable' research results. In this context, a user will immediately be placed into a sort of "defensive" mode - something similar to how you would react when you're a guest in someones home. Even if you try to make the approach as casual as possible, subconsciously the user knows where they are and what they're doing. The user won't provide insight that are nearly as "casual" or "natural" to how they might react in the comfort of their own home. I've read numerous times how this can be the case and how you can solve it, but it's refreshing to read an article that puts this into a real case study.
Due to legal implications the research participants could not just take the game to their home, so the people at Bolt|Peters instead worked within their constraints by recreating a separated room that was as reminiscent as possible of a "home environment"; they termed this a "simulated native environment".
The results? They definitely seemed to be quite "stream of consciousness," but you should really check it your self.
Via Boxes and Arrows