Introducing interactivearchitecture.org
Interactive Architecture … is about the potential for digital systems to make decisions about our living environment and then influence that environment.
I need to spend a bit more time on this website but I’m a bit scared I might never leave :)
Check out the resources page for how to make ‘anything unexpected become interactive’.
Thanks to Haunted Geographies for the signpost.
Popularity: 60% [?]
I regularly come across people who are used to not being able to use things. They’ve learnt to accept it. The answer to not being able to perform a fairly simple task is to refer to a manual, or book a training session.
This isn’t because these people are stupid, it’s because the designers of the interfaces they are using made them so difficult to operate sometimes the only way to figure them out is with expert help.
One of the exercises I remember most clearly from my design degree is a time we had to specify all the steps involved in making a cup of tea. It proved - for us usability novices - to be a brilliant example of how apparently simple tasks involve some fairly complex steps - and more steps than you might initially assume (I feel a little competition coming on…!).
My reason for mentioning that is because a lot of the time the tasks we perform on screen are akin to tasks we perform in the real world. And this is (still) so often forgotten by interface designers.
I once filled out an online job application. I spent about a week pruning my CV as the form fields only allowed a very small number of characters. The evening before the deadline I was finally at a point where I’d squeezed pretty much everything into the minuscule text areas and I hit the ‘Submit Application’ button.
To my horror, the page that loaded in front of me said (words to the effect of): ‘Now please specify how your skills and experience are suitable for this role’ - in 2000 words! There was absolutely no indication that this part of the form existed!
In the ‘real world’ I can easily ascertain the size of the form by the number of pages it is printed on. I can have a quick scan of the entire form before filling it in by turning it over in my hands. I can easily and quickly plan what I’m going to write about in each section. If the designers of this particular online application had spent a bit of time considering the real world equivalent it could have saved me a whole load of frustration and panic!
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against user manuals or training sessions, they are sometimes necessary for more complex tasks, but interfaces should at least fundamentally make sense in the first place.
This is especially true the more complex the process. For example, I would like to think that the interfaces used by workers in nuclear power plants are simple enough so that when the big red warning light starts flashing they don’t have to look out a manual to figure out what it means.
Popularity: 29% [?]
Anyone who knows me knows how much I hate to moan about people who struggle with technology. Ahem.
Of course, most of the time the things we use are so badly designed it isn’t actually the person using it’s fault. But sometimes, just sometimes, it can be blamed on sheer stupidity.
People who know me will also know how much I LOVE Charlie Brooker.
I love complex gadgets. What I can’t stand are idiots who don’t know which buttons to press…
Popularity: 18% [?]
Transcendent product design is a matter of philosophy and approach. The reason product development has gone wrong is that people stop at the worst time—when the solutions are most convoluted. What Eastman knew, what Jobs knows, is that you have to go beyond; you have to think about the experience people are having.
Popularity: 23% [?]
I recently helped my Mum set up a blog.
She is an intelligent human being who is frequently made to feel stupid and frustrated because the apps she uses are unintuitive.
I set her up on blogger.com and I was actually impressed! Apart from a few minor conceptual issues, she had very little problem getting started with the interface.
The image uploader was particularly user-friendly, allowing her to re-size her massive straight-from-the-camera files into something manageable without her needing to understand pixel-dimensions and resolution.
It’s not the most sophisticated blogging platform, but I reckon blogger.com gets a few stars for being simple and effective and an application even my Mum can use.
(3 stars)
Popularity: 11% [?]
First I was a web designer at a startup, then I ran some arts events.
