Aghillo

UX Honeycomb from Peter Morville

I had an interesting conversation the other day about sustaining the ubiquitous computing experience – prompted by the limited user experience provided by the augmented mobile browser Layar.  Layar provides graphical information overlays which are geo-located through the use of geo-data. They are then visible through android based phones such as the HTC Hero. Unfortunately, at the moment it seems as it has only novelty value and my colleague grew bored after half-an-hour of use.

This got me thinking about engaging user experiences. I’ve noticed myself that there are some websites, devices or applications I use once or a couple of times, then never use again. At other times, they seem to fit in with my short-term activities and are really useful resources. Indeed there are some that I would class as providing a sustained experience - i.e. an engaging experience that is more than a passing fad. As an example, I use my 5 years old Nokia mobile phone all the time for texting, checking email and even making phone calls. A slightly more complicated example is my use of Twitter, where it peaks around sporting events I’m interested in.

It seems to me that there are a few themes around the question of how we can make user experiences sustainable – perhaps it is related to content and how often it’s updated, perhaps it’s related to the overall aesthetics of the experience or maybe it’s to do with personal narratives and how will the experience fit into that?

I love low-fidelity prototyping – in particular I love the way it often provokes a conversation which wanders well away from the original topic under discussion. The beauty of low-fidelity prototyping is it allows the viewer to fill in all the missing bits from their own perspective – it gives a really personal account of what they would want, on how they are already visualising it. It allows the imagination to run free.

This came back to me whilst at a workshop last week with Daria Loi, Lucy Suchman and Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino who were discussing design prototyping. The ethnography work from the UX group at Intel looked interesting – but it seemed to be as much about shaping future markets and selling utopian science fiction stories as it did about understanding social practices. There was much talk of the political economy at work here – big organisations can bring all the clout of the mass media and celebrities to the table. Does this really free the imagination? Or does it simply provide an unavoidable view of the future?

I’ve been looking at graffiti again for The world is your canvas project I’m working on with Kevin Smith – the idea is we’ll  design support for graffiti tagging (see TAKI 183) in the digital space – but you can only tag (and see tags) when you’re in the physical area through your mobile phone. They beauty of this is we get to play with tagging styles (fills, pieces, rollers, wildstyle…) and tagging practices (owning a black book, capping…) We’ll also get to see how we can re-interpret shared spaces and throw in new media types as well. Should be fun!