My name is
Jack Moffett. I am an Interaction Designer with over ten years of experience. According to
Herb Simon, that makes me an expert, so I must have something worth sharing. I have started this venture as an exercise to spur critical thinking about my chosen profession. I hope that others may find it thought provoking as well.
DesignAday will present a brief thought about Design every weekday.
The Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh has a lot of good things going for it, and my kids had a great time there Sunday afternoon, but there were a number of details that left me dissatisfied.
- It has been a couple of years since we last visited, but not much has changed.
- My daughter begged enough that my wife gave her a quarter to put in the fortune teller. The animatronic woman moved, the crystal ball lit, she spoke, and then nothing came out of the slot where you are supposed to receive your fortune.
- The temporary Bob the Builder exhibit was mostly kid-sized versions of the construction vehicles from the show. Children could sit inside them, but signs indicated that they shouldn’t, for example, climb on top of the dump truck.
- Some of the interactive exhibits just didn’t work very well. There was a dollhouse that had a camera inside. A dial in the side of the cabinet on which it sat rotated the camera. However, turning the dial as far as I could in one swipe barely moved the camera. The dial was not particularly noticeable, and the picture quality was horrible. I observed no children even attempt to use it.
- The two paper towel holders in the craft area were both empty.
- We saved the outdoor playground for last, only to find that it closed thirty minutes before the rest of the museum.
- Admittance cost more for adults than it did for children, even though the adults would not be doing the crafts, playing with the toys, or manipulating the exhibits.
The children were oblivious to these details, and admittedly, they are the target audience. However, adults are the ones that make the decision on where to take their children on a Sunday afternoon, so they must be considered in the experience design for such an attraction. There is a reason we haven’t visited in a couple years, and it’s unlikely we’ll be going back anytime soon.
My Weber grill is several years old, and there are a few parts that need to be replaced: the grates, the burners, etc. I went to Weber’s site expecting to have to dig into my filing cabinet for the manual so that I would know the model number and thus be able to find the right parts. I was very pleasantly surprised.
At the bottom of the homepage for their store, it says, “Replacement Parts - Begin by choosing the type of Weber® grill you own.” Then it has three illustrations labeled Gas Grill, Charcoal Grill, and Portable Grill. Upon selecting “Gas Grill”, the next page asks how many burner control knobs my grill has—one, two, or three—with photos. I selected “2”. The next question asks what material the work table is made of and again presents three options with photos. Selecting “Thermoset”, the final question asks if the thermometer is on the right or in the center of the hood. Mine is centered, and this final selection loads a new page with all of the replacement parts for my grill.
I didn’t have to know any abstracted information, just what my grill looks like. It was quick; it was painless; it delivered exactly what I needed. This was an enjoyable experience that reinforced the positive associations I have with their brand.
I had a good excuse for missing Monday’s post. My daughter broke her arm Sunday afternoon, and I spent the majority of my time until Monday evening at the hospital. Children’s Hospital, part of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), is one of the best pediatric hospitals in the country. I was quite pleased with the doctors and nurses we interacted with. Aside from the fact that my daughter was scared and in pain, it was a generally good experience. However, it only takes one hole to sink a ship.
My daughter was the last operation performed Sunday, and it was after 11:00 pm when she and my wife were settled in a room for the night. As I prepared to take my younger daughter home, the nurse explained that I should stop in the security booth outside the ER to have my parking validated. So, I arrive at the security booth late at night, completely exhausted from witnessing my daughter’s ordeal, and ask to have my parking validated. In a surly tone, the officer berates me for not having it validated during the hours stipulated for it. I didn’t say anything, but my thoughts ran along the lines of, “Look, lady, I just spent the past eight hours watching my daughter suffer from excruciating pain and the fear of what was going to happen to her. Your parking regulations are rather low on my list of priorities!”
A broken arm is fairly minor in the grand scheme of things. What if I was the father of a child with cancer or another serious affliction? What if I was leaving the hospital after sitting with my spouse during her final minutes of life? Service Design is extremely important in a hospital, and it must be considered at every touchpoint from the surgeons on down to security officers, parking attendants, and cafeteria workers. There is no excuse for mistreating people that are likely there for unpleasant reasons.
Sound often gets overlooked in user interface design. Sometimes it is intentionally ignored. Given that so many people work in public spaces, sound can be a real annoyance. My co-workers have never complained about my snap-to-grid sounds in Freehand, but I often worry that it bothers people. I find them to be very useful, so I haven’t turned them off. Typically, sound is only used for notification. Sounds alert me to reception of a Skype or iChat message (and differentiate between them), reception of email, alerts from iCal, and errors. I also use the feature that speaks the time on the hour. “It’s 8:00.” This helps me stay aware of my chronological context. Sound works well in this role because it is utilizing a channel that isn’t already occupied.
I find it interesting that very little has been done with auditory cues on the web. CSS 2 includes “aural stylesheets” specifically for accessibility purposes that work with screen readers. I’m not too surprised that general audio “styling” hasn’t been included—as I said, sound often gets overlooked. There is huge potential for it to be abused. If you think the blink tag is bad, just imagine what could be done with audio. At the same time, I think there is potential for useful applications.
This is probably one case in which the potential for misuse has won over the opportunities for true utility.
Interaction ’09 was mostly held in the Four Seasons Hotel, and that’s where I was staying. When I checked in, the desk attendant asked if I would like a Deluxe-View Room—I had reserved a Superior Room. The former touts city and mountain views from the top floors of the hotel, while the latter claims only “city views”. I told her I wasn’t interested in paying any more for the room, and she told me that my room still had a nice view.
I was rather amused when I looked out the window.
Dumpsters, garbage bags, building materials, wheelbarrows—quite the view, don’t you think? It reminds me of the time that my high school jazz band played at Disney World. Before the performance, we were “backstage”. We were in an area that only employees see. We prepared in a junky little building with poor lighting, dirt on the floors, broken furniture, and scuff marks on the walls. There was litter on the ground outside. The magic didn’t extend there. It wasn’t part of the experience.
The difference here is that this roof scene is in plain view of, I assume, about a quarter of the rooms in the building.
Public restrooms can be an interesting design space. Matters of privacy, crowd control, cleanliness, accessibility, maintainability, and security must all be considered within a very limited space. This results in a lot of interesting products, such as touch-less flush urinals, motion-activated towel dispensers, the airblade, and self-cleaning restrooms, among many others.
I was recently in a public restroom in a relatively new office building. The restroom was fairly spacious, as it was serving a lot of employees. There were about five or six stalls. When I first walked in, I thought they were all occupied, as all of the doors were closed. So, I went back out into the hallway. After observing someone leave the room, I went back in. All of the doors were still closed. I knocked on the door of the last stall and then opened the door. The door fell closed behind me.
Whether by design or by lack of it, the doors on every stall closed of their own accord, making it impossible to know which stalls were occupied. This then leaves the awkwardness of knocking on doors, interrupting people you don’t know in a very private activity.
The doors should at least be balanced so they remain in the position they are left. They could be made to automatically open unless locked. The best stall doors have an occupancy indicator that changes when the door is locked.
When Steve Jobs announced the new push features for iPhone 2.0, I thought, “That will make a lot of people happy, but it really won’t affect my usage much.” In fact, I ended up turning it off for my email, as I’m really not interested in having my phone alert me that I’ve received new mail every few minutes. “Oh, look! More spam!” I’ll check my mail when I have time. I turned push on for my calendar and contacts.
So I was sitting at my desk in the office yesterday, and iCal threw up an alarm to remind me that I was supposed to be meeting friends for dinner in 45 minutes. It would take me no more than 30 to get there, so I told it to remind me again in 15.
15 minutes later, my phone chimed, informing me that it was time to leave. That’s cool.
Dan Saffer has made quite a name for himself over the past few years. He graduated from my alma mater, Carnegie Mellon University, with a masters degree in Interaction Design. Since that time, he has been working at Adaptive Path. He has published an excellent introductory book to the field and has another book on the way. He has been speaking at conferences regularly and co-chaired the first IxDA conference. Now he’s up to something new.
Dan is leaving Adaptive Path to start Kicker, a new product design firm. The corresponding blog has only two posts, but then it has only been two days since it went public. I’m betting we can expect good things.
So, here’s to you, Dan. Congratulations on your fine years at Adaptive Path and best of luck in your new venture. I’m looking forward to reading all about it.
During my second year of grad school, back in 1998, I proposed a spatial representation of websites to evolve the web. I even went so far as submitting it to CHI, but it wasn’t accepted, as it was only a concept demonstrated without research to back it up.
I am proposing the evolution of the page metaphor to a spatial metaphor. It is time to stop loading webpages, and start visiting webplaces. Harrison and Dourish describe the difference between space and place in their paper “Re-Place-ing Space: The Roles of Place and Space in Collaborative Systems”.
“Physically, a place is a space which is invested with understandings of behavioral appropriateness, cultural expectations, and so forth. We are located in ‘space’, but we act in ‘place’. Furthermore, ‘places’ are spaces that are valued.”
The web will truly prove its worth when it becomes a place; when we carry memories of events which have taken place there; when we talk about going somewhere on the web.
There were two components of the concept, the first being the addition of co-presence awareness, allowing website visitors to see, communicate, and interact with each other. I demonstrated scenarios in which companies would staff their websites with receptionists, and visitors would chat about the content of the site, be it informational or retail. The second component was the spatial metaphor, relating to issues of wayfinding. The location of a person’s avatar would indicate the information they are interested in, or the conversation in which they are participating.
I was listening to Businessweek’s Innovation of the Week podcast today, in which Nortel’s CTO and innovation chief, John Roese, talks about their new venture, Web.Alive.
One of the first applications of Web.Alive is around e-commerce. Imagine going to a website to buy something. Today, you show up at the website and you may as well be the only person on the internet when you’re at that website. It’s two dimensional. It might be very pretty. But you don’t know that you’re there with anyone else. But most of the time when you try to buy something in the real world, it’s a social experience. You want to interact with sales people. You want to interact with your friends. You want to see what other customers are actually buying, and you want to actually do it in real time with audio and with visual cues. If you have Web.Alive on a website, what happens is, instead of just going to the website, you maybe now see a little window. In the window are virtual people—avatars if you want to describe them that way. Those people are a reflection of the other people that are on the website with you. If you choose to, you can step through that window and become part of that virtual experience. But instead of just being in some random virtual world, you are in a virtual environment that is in fact the website that you just went to. The people in there with you are also trying to buy the same goods and services. The employees of the company you are interacting with know that you’re there to interact for that purpose.
Their solution involves a VR space (similar to Second Life) that is separated from the content of the webpage, rather than a direct integration, but the concept behind the design is identical.
Obviously, Chuck E Cheese doesn’t sell pizza. They sell an experience for kids that includes pizza. And while their pizza is underwhelming, the experience more than makes up for it. My daughter turned eight last week (interestingly, on 8/8/08), and she had requested a party with her friends at Chuck’s. There are many components to the overall experience, but the one that really got me thinking is the ticket muncher.
For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, I’ll explain. Chuck E Cheese has an arcade, in which many of the games reward you with tickets. These tickets may then be redeemed for prizes. The more tickets you win, the better the prizes you can afford. Now, when I was a kid, I went to a similar franchise run by the same parent company called Showbiz Pizza. I counted the tickets and handed them to the person running the prize counter. These days, the house of the other mouse utilizes a machine to count the tickets. Somebody recognized that this was another opportunity to enhance the experience, so rather than just having a machine, they have a muncher.
You slide your string of tickets into a slot, and the muncher eats them, emitting loud munching sounds as it tallies. Once you have fed all of your tickets into the slot, you punch a button, and it prints out a receipt with your total that you then take to the prize counter. Kids have as much fun counting the tickets as they have playing the games to win the tickets.
You can see the ticket muncher in action on YouTube.
