Pencils Before Pixels: A primer in hand-generated sketching

Drawings and sketches can be powerful and persuasive representations of ideas, events, sequences, systems and objects. As part of a larger collaborative design process, hand drawing can serve as a key method for thinking, reasoning and exploring opportunities, yet inherently differs from wire-frames and conceptual models. Innately, interaction designers employ a variety of methods for representing ideas and information, both internally in a cognitive sense, and externally in the devices we employ to record, share and reflect…

More at interactions

Microsoft: MiX Essentials

Die MiX Essentials bietet Ihnen am 19. Mai die Möglichkeit eines Einblicks in die Strategie von Microsoft rund um User Experience und Webentwicklung. Lernen Sie dabei von internationalen und österreichischen Vortragenden die Anwendung neuester Technologien wie Silverlight 2.0, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) oder ASP.NET 3.5 kennen.

Interessant sind dabei vorallem die Speaker Los Reyes aus dem Surface Team und Rémy Pairault von Windows Live.

SIGCHI conferences in 2008

I just found this quite extensive list of SIGCHI conferences for 2008. Awesome that there is a special International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction in Aeronautics 🙂

E x c e r p t:

CHI Impressions 2008 (part 2)

As mentioned, the CHI report is being continued…

Mobile Devices, Touchscreens and Maps

iPhone, HTC and other mobile touch devices brought up a strong, fresh trend. The user experience seems to be new and a bit unusual, so I’m pretty sure we will see a lot of upcoming applications, which of course also need their own interaction design.

Escape: A Target Selection Technique Using Visually-cued Gestures

This is a nice solution to reach several targets on a small mobile device using “thumb-gestures”. The question that came up was how can we display more informations concerning these (huge amount of) targets. (And would I display so much targets at all ?!)

Multiuser Touch

For me it came out very clear that the challenge of multitouch used by more than one user is not the technology itself but much more the behavior between different users. We saw a great video of a (really huge) touchable wide screen placed in the city of Helsinki, were people could interact with. Besides “How can people interact together on these screens” of course the question came up, “Which kind of applications are useful in such an environment?” Quite interesting.

Short introduction

Helsinki citywall used by more than one user

And further …

DRAGON A Direct Manipulation Interface for Video Navigation.
The video is available here.

K-Sketch: A “Kinetic” Sketch Pad for Novice Animators
A Video-Prototyping Tool

CHI Impressions 2008 (part 1)

Puuh… well I personally found it great. One exciting thing for me was the difference between high technology in the conference halls on one side and the historic flair of the old town of Florence on the other hand. That was quite impressing for me.

First I wanted to mention that I describe my personal view of the CHI and this will be seen through a designers glasses. So I am not a scientist, not a student or teacher, nor am I working for Microsoft or Google Research.

For me the CHI is the best place where you can discuss with interaction designers from all over the world (except the vienna IXDA scene – CURE, wienweb and Keith Andrews kindly excepted ;). And you have the chance to meet the guys from Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, … and discuss with them. And that is really great.

Ok, first I wanted to start with a quick overview. The trends as I saw them …

  • Mobile Devices, Touchscreens (and Maps)
  • Multiuser Solutions
  • Social Networks
  • Data Analyzing
  • and a bit of Agile

So far, so good. Quite exciting also was a presentation of Bill Buxton and Saul Greenberg (University of Calgary) named Usability Evaluation Considered Harmful.
Very free and short summarized: “… Usability Evaluation is good to
find out what the current situation is about. But we also need methods
to find out what the future of interaction designs can be…” This
paper was very controversial and the hall quite full. These are the
slides:

to be continued …

CHI 08: Agile panels

Hallo,
Leider kann ich mir die CHI heuer weder finanziell noch zeitlich leisten. An die Glücklichen, die dort sind: falls sich jemand eines der Panels über Agile anhört, würd ich mich über einen Erfahrungsbericht freuen. Grund: meine Masterarbeit. Ich beschäftige mich mit UX in agilen Projekten, insbesondere untersuche ich ob und wie der Enduser einbezogen wird. (Falls jemand eine Meinung dazu oder Erfahrungen hat: bitte darum). Danke!
Grüße aus dem sonnigen London,
Johanna

40. interaction design stammtisch am 8.4.2008

der nächste interaction design stammtisch findet am:

dienstag, 8.4.2008 um 19:00 uhr
im werkzeugH, 1050 wien, schönbrunnerstrasse 61, statt. [öffis: u4 pilgramgasse, 14a, 13a, 12a, 59a]

“bring 2 folien” hat bei den letzten stammtischen super funktioniert und darum: jeder der möchte bringt 1-2 slides über sachen, die ihn gerade im bereich interaction design, usability, … beschäftigen/interessieren mit, und stellt sie vor.

der interaction design stammtisch findet jeden monat am 2. dienstag statt. jeder der sich für die themen interaction design, usability, accessibility, user interface design, … interessiert ist herzlich eingeladen. anmeldung ist keine notwendig.