Even battery technology is getting to become thinner and more flexible which allows more usable products in our everyday life (e.g. in combination with flexible displays).
via GIZMODO.de, see also news.RICE.edu
July 8, 2012
July 4, 2012
Bubble display
This new technology seems to be too wet for me.
via GIZMODO.de
June 25, 2012
Augmented vision
Seems as TV is going to be extended to stimulate our peripheral vision.
via GIZMODO.de
June 12, 2012
Double-sided touch
That looks interesting. It can optimize usability e.g. in case of reading and therefore scrolling a lot on smartphones.
May 29, 2012
Haptic experience in 3D
For an room size interaction we may need very big magnets. That seems to be counterproductive.
May 24, 2012
New touch input options
First some advancement in touch input devices:
[this blog] Ongoing with appetizers (only)
I have no time to discuss any piece of information I find / have found in detail. So I think I will begin just to post some snippets. At least this ‘blog’ will be ongoing…
February 27, 2012
Which cloud belongs to me?
Today there are several cloud services (from Google, Amazon, Dropbox, Box.net, Mendeley, and so on) which offer some free webspace and in case some space extra for that you have to pay some money. And as time goes by there are joining more and more companies this trend.
That’s not what the users want or need, I think. Again it’s a technology / functional driven service design. All the cool new features are thrown to the users by thinking to bind them to the company. But no one asks what the users want nor what they are struggling with. These services are confusing the users after a while!
For example a user has a service A with 2GB free webspace of which he uses the half to store private images. With another service B he can synchronize all his digital files between different devices. But in order to do so he has to pay money because the free space of 5GB doesn’t fit his 20GB music data. So he pays for 50GB and 30GB of that are mindless (paid (minus that 5GB free)). And to do some research the user makes use of a cool service C which allows him to synchronize research papers for his devices with his notices in parallel. And because the 500MB aren’t enough the user pays for another 5GB of space in the cloud of which he needs only 2GB.
And as all this specialization and fragmentation goes along the user will be left alone with his countless accounts and paid subscriptions. He pays for a lot more of webspace then he really needs, falls in danger to loose the overview, and therefore get’s frustrated.
Many clouds are on the sky. Which one is mine?
That’s why I’m proposing another perspective to this problem aka cloud services. My concept is to allow a user to get some free and maybe some paid webspace and all from one provider. The amount has to be nearly freely customizable so that every user can select the best for him with regard to his needs of space and feasibility to pay for it. And on top of that one space for one user every cloud service company may be able to request the offer of their own product / service (by using the one before mentioned user space). Maybe the user then has to pay extra money for the services. But in my opinion he will be more choosier and therefore the companies have to build even better services because that and not the amount of space will be the unique selling point.
That’s user centered cloud service design.
February 12, 2012
Emotions and our brain
The following video can be a bit disgusting. It shows real human brains and how they are anatomized to analyze their structure even at genomic level.
For me it’s interesting if we can analyze genes and their cooperation in view of producing a mood or emotions. What are the preconditions for an emotion like happiness? Would that be possible? Or does people have to much differences in their genomic preconditions? Or are there any other influencing factors we couldn’t measure (yet)?
February 7, 2012
Design then develop HMIs
Recently I changed the title of this blog because I want to broaden the spectrum of articles in this blog from mainly technology oriented (HMI – Human Machine Interface) to add a bit of a psychological point of view (UX – User Experience). These are topics I’m interested in and so I’m reading a lot and want to write about them.
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When we discover UX we have to do some design for web pages, in industrial sector and so on. Cameron Koczon wrote an interesting article at alistapart.com where he argues that it is An Important Time for Design. As he says there are too few startups with designers in a partner role rather than a required appendix or even no designers at all. In my point of view the output is primarily driven by developers and their technology and only “The products that take design seriously and incorporate it from the start are going to be the ones that connect with people in a way that really makes an impact in the world.”
We need to have some designers on board who knows how people perceive, interprete the informations and act based on that. So designers have to analyze user groups, e.g. build personas on that and extract user needs with this technique. Or let them do user interviews to gather what users really need or want to change. To get the most usability problems out of your product you only need five test users as Jakob Nielsen says. But “zero users give zero insights“. (Actually there may be a distinction between a user experience researcher and a designer but I’m considering both jobs in designer in this article.) Furthermore startups (beside all other companies) need to have designers to transform this knowledge into real prototypes in an iterative way so that the products will become more useful and hopefully more emotionally touching. Because emotions are the big part of UX, they connect people to technology – to products. Developers instead often think in functions which can cause bad user emotions which in turn are able to disconnect user and product. So let’s make an impact in the world – with designers and developers at eye level.