Category: technology

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Design Jam Bristol: gallery UX challenges

On Saturday 16th June myself and around 20 other strangers rocked up to Spike Island* in Bristol for a user experience (UX) Day called Design Jam Bristol.

As with the typical wonder of discover I found out about the event from a RT on twitter from a London UX pro.

Ever since I started to create ‘things’ for other people I have been interested in how those things are discovered, used, misused or neglected. The summary of the day grabbed my attention:

Design Jam is a one-day design session, during which people will team up to tackle engaging User Experience (UX) challenges. Similar to developer ‘hackdays’ the aim is to get UX professionals, designers, developers (and more) together to learn and collaborate with each other while working on actual design problems. The sessions champion open-source thinking & sharing and are non-profit, run by local volunteers.

After a tour of the building (they do a lot!) we got chunked into random groups (me, Keir, Robin and Tom) and cracked on with the task which was to explore how to encourage everyday folk to visit art space and galleries like Spike that were compelling and rewarding. The following are some of my own thoughts as well as the group around making art spaces a Celebration:

  • We ARE the user – most of us had never been to Spike island before
  • discovery ain’t easy – even when you are near the building you’d have no idea. We thought of ‘maplines’ to offer various guides around the stuff on offer
  • Art spaces can be intimidating
  • The experience starts from the very first interaction with the words/building and should be considered part of the staff/artists remit. Three states: pre, during and post-visit
  • What should anybody care about these spaces?
  • Let us talk, take photos, videos and make our our interpretations
  • How can digital be used to help the artist and visitor make connections e.g. put communication methods with the work
  • ‘speak to the curb’ attract passing traffic – from the outside what does the building communicate?
  • Consider ‘the wall’ which mixes physical communication and captures online
  • Destroy and rebuild what these spaces are for – this non typical event dragged my carcass to spike
  • View the PDF (12mb) of some of our thoughts used for our presentation

I like free stuff, used to paint a bunch, made digital pieces and like to support local events… yet rarely do I dip into the art spaces available across the uk. For me personally it is partly due to being completely unaware of what is happening. I now mostly discover things from my networks such as twitter so it is essentially art spaces not only have a presence here but realise that it is likely a link removed from the organisation itself that will get me through the door. Make it easy for us to point to you, ask you questions and reflect on our points of interaction. Come to us, help us and we’ll reward you with visits and actively spread the word.

I would like to thank the organisers, other teams and my own team for a thought provoking and entertaining day.

* This was my first visit to Spike island…..

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Getting Real from 37signals

Getting Real is now available for free as a PDF book. It has been a few years since I last read it but I remember it fondly:

Want to build a successful web app? Then it’s time to Get Real.
Getting Real is a smaller, faster, better way to build software.
Getting Real is about skipping all the stuff that
represents real (charts, graphs, boxes, arrows, schematics,
wireframes, etc.) and actually building the real thing.
Getting real is less. Less mass, less software, less features,
less paperwork, less of everything that’s not essential (and
most of what you think is essential actually isn’t).
Getting Real is staying small and being agile.
Getting Real starts with the interface, the real screens that
people are going to use. It begins with what the customer
actually experiences and builds backwards from there. This lets
you get the interface right before you get the software wrong.
Getting Real is about iterations and lowering the
cost of change. Getting Real is all about launching,
tweaking, and constantly improving which makes
it a perfect approach for web-based software.
Getting Real delivers just what customers need
and eliminates anything they don’t.

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The Verge reviews – ebook readers

The verge has a fantastic collection of product reviews for dedicated ebook readers on the market. Believe it or not the Amazon Kindle is not the only reader on market. Be sure to make use of the sites ‘filter’ feature which makes comparing products an enjoyable experience.

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What do we now hunt when buying books? Data

Craig Mod writes about hacking book covers:

…with the present digital inflection, the role of the cover is changing radically; disappearing in some cases. It doesn’t need to shout anymore because it doesn’t serve the same purpose.

This shift presents a wonderful chance for designers to break from thinking of a cover as an individual asset, and certainly a chance to break from a tight coupling with the marketing department. In a sense, it’s a chance to play again. To hack. And I can’t help but feel that elements of the design of our future digital books should take to heart the craftsmanship and metered rationality embedded in so much Japanese book design.

It is the same with music, I only use the data views within itunes and never the cover flow view.

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Print books better than ebooks for learning?

Tony Bates points to some new work from the University of Leicester that suggests physical books may be better for deep learning:

This excellent article looks at research done at the University of Leicester, and also draws on experience from a number of people, that suggests that ‘physical books are best when you want to study complex ideas and concepts that you wish to integrate deeply into your memory……This doesn’t mean that there isn’t a place for e-text books or computerized courseware, however. Different media have different strengths.’

Check it out for yourself  Do we learn less from e-books?

I have been scooping up ebooks to learning web design related topics very happily, and I don’t make notes in the margins of print books either. Tony comments that some of the problem may be the ‘experience’ of the devices we read on.

I will keep an eye on this.

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Uses for ebooks

Despite having been around for years, ebooks are still very underutalised in education. There are two types of ebook to consider. Firstly, those books made available from the publishers and other writers. Secondly, self-published books that you produce yourself. I am not sure how much we can shape the path that the academic publishers are on at present so will focus on self-publishing of digital books.

There are plenty of uses for print books in education and currently the main driver for education ebooks is to replicate existing print books in digital form.

For the most part this means simply scanning print books and using Adobe PDF as the ebook file format. The scans are often of poor quality and do not take advantage of the power features of the format.

This underlying theme will continue but the most exciting area will be finding new uses for books that take advantage of what being digital can offer.

Why now?

The growth of commercial ebooks led largely by the ease with which we can now distribute and view ebooks on our mobile devices (laptops, phones and dedicated readers) has shone a light on applications for education.

There hasn’t been much recent research on producing digital books for eduction so I hope posts like this and the work JISC will be doing this year will contribute to the start of something bigger.

ebooks can be accessed and read  across multiple  platforms:

  • There are dedicated ebook readers (to remain niche?)
  • Mobile phones
  • Computers and tablets
  • Printed out

Uses for digital books

  1. Text books (ebooks textbooks)
  2. Course supplement
  3. Promotional books e.g. prospectus
  4. Course handbooks
  5. Workbooks
  6. Reading lists
  7. Reference book
  8. Monograph
  9. Research e.g. journals
  10. Collecting themed work e.g. blog posts

In a future post I will explore the unique opportunities that digital books can offer.

References

JISC – Digital monogragh technical landscape study

JISC Digital Media – Introduction to ebooks

JISC Digital Media – Getting started with ebooks

Craig Mod – Post-artifact books and publishing

 

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BUG: The Top Ten Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People

Susan Weinschenk gave an evening talk to the Bristol Usability Group on “The Top Ten Things Every Designer Needs to Know About People“. These are 10 things from her book 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People. Below are my highlighted notes:

  • We have 3 brains (new, Mid and Old) which affects our view and reaction to the world.
  • People use their peripheral vision more than their central vision. Eye-tracking may not be as useful as we think as it is our ‘central’ vision – be careful
  • The Fusiform Facial Area describes our facial recognition system. We pay attention to faces, particularly those staring back at us (e.g. images on a website). Uses our mid-brain. Mixing multiple faces is creepy to us – think Tom Hank’s character in The Polar Express.
  • People want choice but too much choice de-motivates us and we choose nothing. The often referenced 7+/- two items (George Miller) that humans remember 7 items, is a myth. It is more like 3-4 items (Nelson Cowan 2001) and we only focus on one thing at a time. Thus limit choice.
  • We tend to design in a way that works for us rather than the users. This confirms that user testing is vital.
  • Understanding mental models is very important so that we don’t just design for ourselves. Our experiences between the ages of 8-12 shape our views for life. The demographic (30-40) are designing most of the UX experiences, yet are the smallest demographic which is a problem.
  • The speaker and listeners brain’s sync ‘speaker-listener neural coupling’ (Stephens, Grey + Husson, U 2010). Hence why video is so powerful as it has movement to grab attention and then the audio allows us to get in sync unlike text.
  • People have ‘weak ties’ of 150+ and ‘strong’ ties of -150 according to Prof Robin Dunbar. Something like Facebook is typically used for fewer people and is an example of a strong tie. Twitter, where people tend to follow larger number of people is an example of a weak tie.
  • Beauty is important to us. Based on research, websites should take advantage of beauty. A site could aim to be clear yet slightly unpredictable. People prefer curves to straight things). Beauty is in the eye of the unconscious, Tractinsky, et al.
  • Story telling is great. The brain processes information best when told a story.
  • Images can tell a story. For example if we hear a story about pain we know we are safe but our brain still acts like we are in pain without the ‘physical’ pain. Singer, T., et al. (2004). Empathy for pain involves the affective but not the sensory components of pain
  • People expect technology to follow human to human interaction.

 

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Make expressionengine links work

In Expressionengine, if you want to make a custom field work as a URL / link instead of plain text,  under channel preferences for the required channel ensure ‘Automatically turn URLs and email addresses into links?’ is set to NO.

Otherwise the link on the page will add the URL of the page you are currently on e.g example.com/url-of-custom-field which of course won’ t work.

This catches me out often enough that I need to document it here.