uxmelina

Have you ever wanted your television to do more?

That was the starting point to the design of SocialTV, the redesign of the television experience. It’s been 8 months in the making, as my 4th year Systems Design project. The amount of work that has gone into it is incredible, and I’m extremely proud of the work my design partner, Katie Cerar, and I have been able to do. I got these fun ideo method cards for my birthday last summer, and they really fueled some fun research including:

- “Fly on the Wall” Ethnography style studies <-watching people watch TV is really boring, but fun!
- Card sorts
- Contextual Inquiry
- “Draw on the Experience” <- users mark up really low fidelity initial designs
- Formal user testing
- Surveys <- a bit boring but good to see trends.
-the list goes on and on….

To analyse all the data we did all sorts of other fun stuff

- coding methods
- affinity diagrams
- social network mapping
- error analysis
- the list goes on and on…

Anyway, Katie and I will be presenting our project formally tomorrow. We will be video taping it, and I hope to have the video up asap. If you are interested in checking out the project or other System’s 4th year projects. The Systems Design Engineering Design Symposium is Wednesday March 25, 2009 and will be held in the Davis Center at the University of Waterloo. It starts at 10am an is an all day event! 

We presented this project to Waterloo Design Exchange and got some great feedback! The presentation we made is available here (use the arrows in the lower right to navigate the presentation). That presentation can give you a sneak peak of the project but you should really come check out the interactive prototype!

Hope to see you there!

As an Engineering student, I wouldn’t consider myself a “typical” female. But never the less, I still wear impractical heels, spend longer then I should to get ready, and own way too many things that are pink.

Today, I pulled up to the Jiffy Lube to get the oil changed in my Civic. I have done this numerous times, and each time I think to myself. Gah…what will they try to sell me? how will I know if I actually need it? hopefully nothing is wrong with my car. I always ask lots of questions, but always leave not really knowing the answers, and feeling slightly dumb (something I know, in my heart, I am not). Overall, it’s not a very pleasant experience. Today was Jiffy Lube, but I’ve had the same experience with lots to shops.

This made me think that if a respected chain like Jiffy Lube, invested in a “women-friendly” design for their shops it could pay off since nothing else exists. I can hear the men already “I’m not getting my oil changed in a shop painted pink”…that wouldn’t by my recommended design

The following things would be important to the image.

1. Customer Service

Old: Train employees to up sell customers. “I’m going to replace the gasket again, it’s only 99 cents, ok?”

New: Train employees to explain, in clear terms what they are doing and if it’s really necessary. “Your car maker recommends you replace the gasket with every oil change, the gasket does ______, it’s 99 cents extra because some customers don’t want to have it replaced because _____, what would you like to do?”

2. Environment

Old: Smells funny, looks dirty, dark colours are unwelcoming, instills a sense of confusion. What is really going on under the car? Are the people down there? What’s with all the random boxes/tools on the walls and springing from the ceiling? I always wait in my car, since I think it’s cleaner then the waiting areas.

New: It’s a shop, it’s going to seem dirty, but the waiting room doesn’t have to be. The shop itself could seem a lot less confusing and intimidating with signs and labels explaining things, or mirrors to show you things that are going on, outside of your direct view. As for a colour scheme, well lite, warm tones like navy blue, olive green, burgundy, could act to add a welcoming feel, and help hid the grease and dirt.

3. Branding

Here I’m referring to logo/slogan/marking . In the past Lowe’s appeals to women shoppers more so then home depot. Both stores are working to appeal to this once-forgotten demographic. Although they both sell the same stuff, you can see some differences in their stores with respect to service and environment. Lets compare their logos.

The shape of a house in Lowe’s logo, use of warm colours, the term “Together” in the slogan, all create a welcoming, open, community feel to the company, something that would appeal to women when they are starting a home construction project. Contrast with Home Depot where their font is rugged and basic, something that will appeal to men shoppers. Home Depot’s slogan is “you can do it, we can help”, although this slogan implies helpfulness and openness, the Lowe’s slogan is clearly better.

Overall, the service, enviroment, logo/slogan all adds together to create an image. If a quick service auto-shop could design a store to appeal to both genders they would have a compentative edge in the market.

Lately I’ve been think a lot about cloud computing…specifically how it’s going to change the way people interact with technology and even more specifically how this will change the way people use technology to collaborate. I’m really excited to be working in technology as we make this shift, because it’s going to be a big one. People won’t have a “desktop” as we see them today. They will have some virtual identity that will house all their “stuff”. This will drive a great shift in interaction methods (from a desktop, from a cellphone, from some dumb public terminal, etc). I’ve been looking at the desktop metiphor and considering if it will still be appropriate.

Will it resonate with novice users like it did in the past? Will we even have “novice” users or will the cloud be something like fridge where everyone knows how to use it, and can’t really pin point when they learned it? Even if we don’t have novice users, do we need a different model?

All those questions made me think. If we aren’t interacting with a desktop, what metipor would be more appropirate? I explained earlier in this post about the idea of humans interacting with a virual version of themselfs. I’m wondering if a person or human metaphor could be something to consider. Here are a few ideas.

Memory: Objects could be stored in a virtual brain or even a pocket (I think this is cute, and would be great for quick assess similar to the “Desktop”)

Software and Programs: These never fit into the desktop metaphor and they would change with the cloud. Their will be a lot more task based workflows as software services become more integrated (see ubiquity) so performing “actions” or “tasks” (instead of running programs) would keep consistent with the metaphor.

Trash: This is actually an element of the desktop metaphor that I can’t think of way to convert to a human metaphor (Unless you wanted to think of bodily waste every time to you hit delete…I think not!). However I don’t think that’s a problem with the human metaphor because why would you delete something in the cloud? I know this is a stretch, because it’s a learned behaviour, both in technology and in life, but look at what archive has done for gmail…no more trash! Out of site out of mind.

That’s all I have for now. I will post more on this later as I think about. Please comment on your thoughts/ideas!

Thanks