Interaction Design

The Kinect, for Microsoft’s Xbox 360, came out almost a year ago. It’s a control interface that uses only motion sensors and voice recognition to control the gaming console.

One of the primary draws to mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets is the ability to download and install apps on the device. The paradigm of an application storefront began in early versions of Apple’s iOS, and has since been adopted by all smart device operating systems. Now what interests me the most about these storefronts is how people use them.

This topic is a staple of UX. The basic idea is that there are two slightly different components to usability: the ability to discover the feature when attempting an unfamiliar task, and how easy it is to accomplish the task using the feature.

With developments in computer vision technology such as depth-sensitive cameras, engineers are innovating new means of interacting with machines.

Last week a friend of mine (smart, successful entrepreneur) was telling me about a copier he’d leased for his office of 20 people. Their old copier was no longer up to the task and they had decided to lease a new machine from a big copy machine company. They have the need for both oversized printing and colour scanning so the machine is they need pretty complex.

One of the things I am most intrigued by in the world of portable technology is the explosion of mobile social networkers. With Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Myspace all available on the latest mobile devices, it is now possible to broadcast all of life’s happenings in real-time from the convenience of a portable handset.

Last Fall, Karyn, Jessica and I attended the Gel Health Conference in New York. It was an amazing experience.

http://wave.google.com/

Around the time Alan Cooper was giving his really great talk An Insurgency of Quality at this year’s IxDA, I was giving a talk that came to some of the same conclusions from a different starting point.