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  • Lextant Fall Fry 2010 > Columbus, Ohio
    TBA

    Fall will be here before ya know it- and with that comes our Fall Fry Cookout Event!

Insights & Blog_In Here and Out There

Our observations of the world around us

  • Why is my smart phone so stupid? by Katie Kimble on February 05, 2010

    Dear major mobile phone manufacturer,
    I think something has been forgotten in the design of the latest smart phones. It’s a phone, first and foremost, for most users. I realize that innovation has to move quickly, and that there’s a lot of competition out there in the mobile industry, but basic user needs seem to be lost time and time again. With the iPhone came major innovation. It could perform a lot more functions than anything most of us had ever seen. But with that came frustration where usability was concerned. We should be learning from this. Why is it that my new phone is still suffering from interface problems that are enough to outrage me as an interaction designer? Why aren’t we standing on the shoulders of those who have gone through this before? It seems that with my smart phone, the biggest problem is that the designers were so excited over new technology that they forgot that 90% of the time, I would be using it as a phone. The phone portion of the interface is infuriatingly difficult. I dial with my face. I mute and hang up on people anytime I try to pin it against my shoulder. As a workaround I tried to plug in a headset. Oops! I guess now I have to go out and buy a blue tooth headset because my phone isn’t built to accept a traditional ear piece. The back panel falls off leaving my battery exposed. I can’t dial with gloves on, yet I need to use the touch screen to access the voice recognition interface (so I end up having to take my gloves off anyway). But it’s ok, all I need is some duct tape, no gloves (even in the 10 degree Ohio weather) and a blue tooth headset and this phone will be all that it was cracked up to be. But hey, it sure can tell me how to find the nearest Olive Garden!

    When making design decisions, let’s get back to remembering how this product will be used. New innovation is amazing, this progress shouldn’t stop or even slow down, but we can’t let other features fall through the cracks as a result. Especially when these features constitute the bulk of the use cases to which we should be designing. 

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  • Design Thinking by Dan Rockwell on January 15, 2010

    Last year Chris Rockwell, CEO of Lextant, wrote a tasty article for DMI’s Design Management Review magazine entitled The Mathematics of Brand Satisfaction.  It’s a very good read.  Readers can see application of multi-sensory participatory research and translation in the article.  The article was so good that its been added as a chapter in Thomas Lockwood’s Design Thinking book that’s just been published.

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    The book is organized into three sections that focus on using design for innovation and brand building; the emerging role of service design; and designing meaningful customer experiences.

    You can find the book on Amazon and in bookstores everywhere.  Chris has no shortage of observations when comes to design and experience- if you’re looking for more goodness- check out his new personal blog, The Experience Shack.

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  • Information Architecture is Here to Stay by Jess Bailey on January 08, 2010

    Over the holidays, the UXD team came across a blog post from Thomas Memmel’s blog on usability and user experience. While he touches on the industry’s “war of terms,” we were most interested in his statement that Information Architecture is going to begin disappearing from the scene in 2010:

    “I believe that information architecture (IA) will disappear from the scene, because the web becomes increasingly interactive. IA was especially associated with an expertise in building content and navigation structures that rather had a static form. Today, technologies like Silverlight, AJAX and Flash turn the web into a highly interactive media. Because the design of interactive systems is headlined with the term interaction design (IxD), it will absporb IA as a discipline. Naturally, this comes with an increasing need for IAs to enhance their knowledge and design capabilities beyond static forms of content representation.”

    We can agree that IA is changing, but we don’t think it is going away any time soon. IA’s rarely deal with static content and structure. There will always be information that needs to be organized – whether the technology delivers it in a static form or not.

    Engaging with the interactive web isn’t like floating in a sea of nothingness. There is still information there, and that information may just be dynamic or interactive. Just because it is dynamic doesn’t mean it is structure-less. We will sometimes explain IA to others with an analogy of a skeleton in the human body. Without it, the other components cannot form a meaningful structure.

    For us, IA is the middle layer. The technology layer (system architecture) is below and the visualization layer (user interface) is above. The IA is the immutable, abstract understanding of the information at hand. It defines the scope and relationships of this information and it is enduring over time. The underlying technology may change or the physical manifestation may change, but the IA remains constant. This constancy and relationship to the user’s wants and needs is what creates a more ideal user experience with a product.

    So, what are our predictions for IA in 2010? We have to look beyond the technology. IA isn’t going anywhere so long as there is information to be had. Information is constantly growing, and technology is constantly evolving. Someday they will run in parallel, and the experiences will be out of this world!

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