Ascent light sculpture

Using nature as a basis for aesthetic, Ascent is an interactive installation that both blurs and highlights its surroundings. A mesmerising sight of smooth lines and soft light, the sculpture creates a harmonious relationship between human aesthetic and natural landscape. Intimately connecting it to its site, Nocte’s abstract reinterpretation of the mountainous backdrop was the visual focus of The North Face NightRay Fest. In collaboration with Octagon, we were able to connect with likeminded individuals. Attendees tweeting #neverstopexploring were invited to interact with and influence the behaviour of the geometric visual.

Dancing Cubes Signal Festival LED Light Sculpture

Lit glass cubes will set the National Theatre's piazzetta at the 2015 Signal Festival on 15th - 18th October. The creation of the "DANCING CUBES" installation for the 3rd year of the Signal Festival has followed on from other work by the studio VACEK & SMID undertaken for PRECIOSA ORNELA. The glass light silhouettes of the moving cubes have been created from glass pressing rods from the PRECIOSA Traditional Czech Glass brand.

Project Soli touchless interactions

Project Soli is using radar to enable new types of touchless interactions -- one where the human hand becomes a natural, intuitive interface for our devices. The Soli sensor can track sub-millimeter motions at high speed and accuracy. It fits onto a chip, can be produced at scale, and can be used inside even small wearable devices.

New Layouts for the Multi-Device Web. Most Web page layouts rely on design patterns created for laptop and desktop computers equipped with a mouse and keyboard. As the variety of devices being used to access the Web has grown, these patterns haven’t been keeping up. Designing for today’s Web means considering single-handed thumb use on smartphones, two handed touch interactions on tablets, mouse and keyboard input on traditional PCs, hybrid devices, and more. Web layouts have to evolve to support this new reality. Source

Branded Interactions

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One or two key functions. Well designed apps master their core interactions. The best are unique and become associated with the brand itself. You could even call thembranded interactions.

Clear

Clear‘s primary interactions are adding and clearing to-do items. Swipes are the main gesture in Clear and none is more fulfilling than crossing off an item as complete. Animation and sound are used to make it fun, fulfilling and even at a small psychological level, it encourages users to cross off items again and again. It’s either coincidence or genius their app is named after this core interaction. I’d go with the latter.

Mailbox

Mailbox is the newest hyped mail client for iOS. Once you get past their waiting list and start using it to manage your messages, the main interaction is moving mail out of your inbox. It’s similar to Clear with horizontal swipes controlling the state of items, but it’s obvious this interaction had a ton of thought put behind it. It is literally what differentiates Mailbox from other mail clients.

Swiping right shows a green color with a check mark, which lets you archive the message. Swiping further right gives a red background and an X, letting you delete. To the left, you get a yellow color with a clock icon, letting you to send the email back to yourself in the future. Go further left and you get a green background and can add the email to a list.

This is the big innovation of Mailbox: they’ve made it fun to sort your messages in four ways with a swipe and get down to inbox zero.

Sunrise

Sunrise is a calendar app combining your Google Calendar and Facebook events with daily info like birthdays and weather. Instead of different views for daily, weekly, monthly, etc., Sunrise has a single screen combining a two week view and daily agenda.

Scrolling into the future through the agenda, you run into the problem of how you get back to ‘today’. The creators solved this by making a button fade in on the lower left. The arrow points back to ‘now’ by angling up or down, relative to where you are in. Press the button and you move back to your real-time view.

Vine

Video has always been a pain to create on smartphones. Figuring out how to make it fun was critical for Vine.

Based on the number of Vine videos showing up on Twitter, it seems they’ve solved this challenge. Use Vine and it’s easy to see how. To record, you press and hold on your screen. As you hold, the progress bar fills. Release and your recording pauses, allowing you to go find your next shot. They chose wisely to force users to ‘edit in camera’ instead of giving them a suite of video editing tools as other apps have.

They’ve made creating and sharing video a fun experience that lets you express yourself in a new and creative way.

Path

Path is for sharing your life with the people closest to you. The most important interaction in Path is adding content. They focused on that activity and made the process playful. Just press the red plus icon and your different sharing options fly out. Tap it again and they hide.

The attention to detail on the animation makes it engaging. Imagine if they just had the different buttons spread out on the bottom of the screen like other apps. It wouldn’t be as memorable and they would have lost out on a good opportunity to tug on the user’s desire for play.

Google+

While Google+ took a pretty standard approach to sharing content, they excel in what’s turned into a bit of a ‘peacocking’ area of app design: the loading indicator. They use the ‘pull down’ interaction to load new content, but their animation is very memorable. As you pull down, four bands appear and stretch out the more you pull. It seems if you pulled too far, the bands would actually snap. I find myself trying to do that whenever I use Google+ and imagine what sort of Google Vortex would open if I were successful.

How to bring branded interactions to your app

Think about the core function of your app very early on. What do you want people to do over and over again? If you’re lucky, like with Clear, and you might be able to get your app name from the interaction. By focusing on that core activity you want your users to be doing, main other things can fall into place to support that action happening more often.

All of the examples above use elements of play. While not everyone is a gamer, we all can appreciate when our tools are fun to use. By taking the extra effort to play on the emotional needs of users, we open our apps and products up to a new level of user appreciation.

“By employing emotional design in our app, we’re consciously shaping positive memories of our brand that not only encourage users to stick around, but also turn them into evangelists for a product they love.”
- Stephen P. Anderson, Seductive Interaction Design

When the interaction is unique, your users can begin to associate that interaction with your product. If you can own an interaction, that’s a very strong level of branding in today’s interface-filled world.

Design Practices for Touch-free Interactions

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Touch interaction has become practically ubiquitous in developed markets, and that has changed users’ expectations and the way UX practitioners think about human–computer interaction (HCI). Now, touch-free gestures and Natural Language Interaction(NLI) are bleeding into the computing mainstream the way touch did years ago. These will again disrupt UX, from the heuristics that guide us, to our design patterns and deliverables.

HCI Is Getting “All Shook Up”

With touch, people were given a more natural, intuitive way to interact with computing devices. As it moved into the mainstream, it opened up new interaction paradigms. Touch-free gestures and NLI, while not exactly new, are just now moving into the computing mainstream thanks to Microsoft and Apple, respectively. If they catch on, these interaction models may open up further paths toward a true Natural User Interface (NUI).

Touch-free gestures

Microsoft’s Kinect popularized this interaction model for the Xbox gaming platform. Following that, they havemade the Kinect available for Windows, and smart TVs like Samsung’s are moving touch-free gestures out of gaming and into our everyday lives.

Kinect for Windows has an interesting feature called near mode, which lets people sitting in front of a PC use the touch-free gestures without standing up. A benefit for productivity software is the reduced need for interface elements: on-screen artifacts can be manipulated more like physical objects. Another benefit is the ability to use computers in situations when touching them is impractical, like in the kitchen or an operating room.

Natural-Language Interaction

The idea of talking to our computers is not new, but only with the success of the iPhone’s Siri is it coming into the commercial mainstream. The best part of NLI is that it mimics the ordinary way humans interact with each other, which we learn very early on in life.

Not only does NLI (when done well) make the interaction with a computer feel very natural, it also primes people to anthropomorphize the computer, giving it a role as a social actor. Giving voice to a social actor in people’s lives bestows immense power upon designers and content creators to build deeply emotional connections with those people.

Fundamentals of Interaction

While new technologies offer greater opportunities for richness in interaction, any such interaction occurs within the context and constraints of human capability. As we move forward to welcome new interaction models, we are building a knowledge infrastructure to guide UX practitioners in taking advantage of them. HCI fundamentals serve as our theoretical basis.

Bill Verplank’s model of human–computer interaction describes user interactions with any system as a function of three human factors:

• Input efficacy: how and how well we sense what a system communicates to us
• Processing model: how and how well we understand and think about that communication
• Output efficacy: how and how well we communicate back to the system

By using design to support these elements of the user experience, we can enrich that experience as a whole. These human factors serve as a useful thought framework for envisioning and evaluating new design heuristics and patterns.

Heuristics

While the heuristics we know and love still apply, some additional ones will help us make better use of touch-free gestures and NLI. Here are some examples:

1. Gestures must be coarse-grained and forgiving (output efficacy) - People’s hand gestures are not precise, even on a screen’s surface. In mid-air, precision is even worse. Expecting too much precision leads to mistakes, so allow a wide margin and low cost for errors.
2. A system’s personality should be appropriate to its function(processing efficacy) - When speaking with something, people automatically attribute a personality to it. If it speaks back, its personality becomes better defined in users’ minds. Making a productivity program (e.g., Excel or Numbers) speak in a friendly and understanding way could make users hate it a little less. Making an in-car navigation system firm and authoritative could make it feel more trustworthy. Siri makes mundane tasks such as planning appointments fun because Apple gave her a sense of humor.
3. Users should not be required to perform gestures repeatedly, or for long periods of time, unless that is the goal (output efficacy - Repetitive or prolonged gestures tire people out, and as muscle strain increases precision decreases, affecting performance. If the idea is to make users exercise or practice movement though, this doesn’t apply.
4. Gestural and speech commands need to be socially appropriate for user’s environmental contexts (input and output efficacy) - The world can see and hear a user’s gestures and speech commands, and users will not adopt a system that makes them look stupid in public. For example, an app for use in an office should not require users to make large, foolish-looking gestures or shout strange verbal commands. On the flipside, including silly gestures and speech into a children’s game could make it more interesting.
5. Affordances must be clear and interactions consistent (processing efficacy) - As Josh Clark andDan Saffer remind us, interface gestures are more powerful but less discoverable than clickable/tappable UI elements. The same goes for speech. Gestures and speech in an interface each adds an additional interaction layer, so clear affordances and consistent interaction are critical for those layers to work.

Patterns

Since touch interfaces became mainstream, gesture libraries like this one have appeared to help designers communicate touch interactions. Not limited to the X and Y axes on a screen, touch-free gestures allow designers to leverage depth and body movements. Combined with natural speech interaction, designers can create rich multi-modal interactions, where, for example, a user’s hands control one aspect of the system while her voice controls another.

"Near Mode" Gestures (Explicit Input)

The original Kinect uses full-body gestures, but near mode is what makes the new version so special. Here are some “sitting in front of your PC” gestures, with illustrations based on this gesture library by think moto.

1. Swipe, Spread, and Squeeze: These are the most basic gestures and represent full-hand, touch-free translations of finger-sized touch gestures.

   

2. Push and Pull: Users could use these gestures to move on-screen artifacts closer or farther away.

   

3. Grasp and Release: Hand-level Spread and Squeeze gestures can be used for interface-level zooming actions, so finger-level pinching can be used to grasp on-screen artifacts. When a user “takes hold” of such an artifact, she can manipulate it using dependent gestures.

   

4. Twist: One such dependent gesture is Twist. Now that artifacts can be manipulated in a third dimension, a “grasped” artifact can be twisted to change its shape or activate its different states (e.g., flipping a card or rotating a cube).

   

5. Throw: Besides twisting an on-screen artifact, a user can throw it to move it a long distance quickly. This could trigger a delete action or help users move artifacts in 3D space.

   

Body Sensing (Implicit Input)

In addition to new opportunities for gestural input, a Kinect sensor on PCs could detect other aspects of our body movements that might indicate things like fatigue or emotional state. For example, if gestural magnitude increases (e.g., if a user’s gestures become bigger and wilder over time), the system could know that the user might be excited and respond accordingly. With productivity software, such excitement might indicate frustration, and the system could attempt to relax the user.

Another implicit indicator is gestural accuracy. If the system notices that a user’s gestures are becoming lazier or less accurate, the system might recognize that the user is tired and encourage him to take a break. And although it’s not a strictly implicit indicator, sensing whether a user is seated or standing could enable different functions or gestures.

Speech Interaction

The complexity of human languages makes it less straightforward to create discrete patterns for NLI than it is for gestures. However, there are structures inherent in language that could provide a basis for such patterns.

For example, there are two major types of user input: questions (to which a system returns an answer) and commands (which cause a system to perform an action). Looking deeper, individual sentences can be broken down into phrases, each representing a different semantic component. Books such as Speech Technology, edited by by Fang Chen and Kristiina Jokinen, show how the fields of linguistics and communication provide valuable insight to designers of natural-language interfaces.

Deliverables

Perhaps the biggest challenge with using novel interaction models is communicating with stakeholders who are not yet familiar with those models. Visualizing things that don’t exist is difficult, so UX designers will have to find new ways to communicate these new interactions.

Specifications

Interaction design specs are still two-dimensional, because that’s all they need to be. For some touch-free gestures though, variables such as “distance from the screen” or “movement along the z-axis” will be important, and those are best visualized in a more three-dimensional way.

Speech interactions are even more complex. Since a user’s interaction with the system literally becomes a conversation, the design needs to account for extra contingencies, e.g., users expressing the same command with different words, accents, or intonations. A natural language interface must accommodate as many of these variations as possible.

Also, there are more variables that play a role in the way a system communicates to users. Its tone, choice of words, cadence, timbre, and many other factors contribute to how a user perceives that system.

Personas

Because speech-enabled computers will become social actors in people’s lives, their (perceived) personalities are of critical importance. Thankfully, we can apply existing skills to doing that.

UX professionals have traditionally used personas to illustrate types of users. With computers communicating like humans, the same technique could be used to illustrate the types of people we want those computers emulate. System personas could be used to guide copywriters who write speech scripts, developers who code the text-to-speech engine, or voice actors who record vocal responses.

For a system to show empathy, it could measure changes in users’ speech patterns, again recognizing excitement, stress, or anxiety. If a user is getting frustrated, the system could switch from an authoritative persona (showing reliability) to a more nurturing one (calming the user down).

Prototyping

Responding elegantly to users’ body movements and speech patterns requires a nuanced approach and clear communication between stakeholders. Along with specifications, prototypes become more important because showing is more effective than telling. This holds true for both testing and development.

For now, there is no software package that can quickly prototype Kinect’s touch-free gestures; downloading the SDK and building apps would be the only way. For speech though, there are a few freely available tools, such as the CSLU toolkit, which allow designers to quickly put together a speech interface for prototyping and experimentation.

Until prototyping tools get sophisticated enough to be fast, flexible, and effective, it looks like we’re going to have to get back to basics. Paper, props, storyboards, and the Wizard of Oz will serve until then.

The Big Wheel Keeps on Turning

User interfaces for computers have come a long way from vacuum tubes and punch cards, and each advancement brings new possibilities and challenges. Touch-free gestures and natural language interaction are making people’s relationship with computers richer and more human. If UX practitioners want to take full advantage of this changing relationship, our theories and practices must become richer and more human as well.

Let us move forward together into this new interaction paradigm and get closer to our users than ever.