Tangible User Interface - Understandable, Ergonomic, Aesthetic

As I am always on the lookout for user interfaces it was delightful to see the bridge and the engine room of the Queen Mary with truly tangible man-machine-interfaces. Large wheels and all sorts of knobs, cranks, and levers are there to operate the many functions. At a first glance they look nice, intuitive, and easy to use - but are they? Looking closer it becomes clear that many user interface elements were built primarily to enable mechanical control and not because of ergonomic considerations. The size of physical controls (e.g. the length of a lever) is often due to the fact that certain forces must be created to control the machine. The size and visibility of the mechanical properties are helpful for the user to understand the operation and to some extent foresee the impact of the operation. At the same time many of these user interface elements make the operation very visible to co-workers - you do not have to tell that you change the speed as everyone around you can clearly see it from your actions. It seems that ergonomic properties are of lesser importance in many of these controls, e.g. some controls require strong forces or large physical movements. All in all I would conclude that these tangible controls (that are designed due to physical constraints) are helping with the understandability of a user interface but are not necessarily a good model for creating ergonomic controls.


In some recent examples of tangible user interfaces I feel that people took the worst from both worlds - they argue for the physical controls - and all they get are less ergonomic UIs (e.g. needs more forces, movements, etc.) which are less understandable as the physical constraints do not map to the constraints of the digital system… Hence I think it is important to keep this in mind: the physicality of the controls should be used to make interaction understandable and the design should not compromise ergonomics (as we do not live in the mechanic era anymore).

One further thing that can be learned for these mechanical interfaces is the beauty of the design and implementation. Some are in shinny and polished metal, others are nicely decorated, and on others it is just pleasant to touch the wood. Beauty and esthetical qualities play a major role - and we know this for screen based UIs from Noam Tractinsky's work [1,2] as well as from the market success of devices like the iPhone.

[1] Noam Tractinsky. 1997. Aesthetics and apparent usability: empirically assessing cultural and methodological issues. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '97), Steven Pemberton (Ed.). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 115-122. DOI=10.1145/258549.258626 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/258549.258626

[2] Tractinsky, N., Shoval-Katz A. and Ikar, D. (2000) What is Beautiful is Usable. Interacting with Computers, 13(2): 127-145.

Meeting the Maker of littleBits due to Canceled Flights

I got up this morning before 4am… that is really early. Arriving at the airport I found out that the 5:40 flight was canceled. I should have checked the flight status before getting out of bed (or TAP/Lufthansa could have sent me a SMS). It was not a complete surprise as yesterday someone mentioned that due to the strong rain some flights did not arrive in Funchal.

I was rebooked on a later flight and met by chance Ayah Bdeir, who was at TEI and on the same flight to connect vi FRA. At the demo session I saw her product: littleBits (http://littlebits.cc) but did not talk to her.

littleBits is a set of different hardware modules that can be connected by small magnet. On the website it is described as

"littleBits is an opensource library of discrete electronic components pre-assembled in tiny circuit boards. Just as Legos allow you to create complex structures with very little engineering knowledge, littleBits are simple, intuitive, space-sensitive blocks that make prototyping with sophisticated electronics a matter of snapping small magnets together."

The approach is very interesting and shows one trend that is currently ongoing in the TEI community: enabling a wider set of people to create functional interactive products by lowering the barrier and effort for prototyping systems that consist of physical components, electronics, and software. The target audience ranges from designers to artists, but also includes the education domain. A point that makes littleBits interesting is that they will be open source. They are not yet available, but one can subscribe for further information on the website: http://littlebits.cc there are also some cool videos...

At TEI it was great to see so many toolkits and platforms appearing. When we did our first open source hardware/software platform in 2002 with Smart-Its we followed a DIY-approach for building the hardware (having a step by step photo tutorial to building the modules) and having a lot of options for programming it. Additionally each module had wireless included. At the time we consider this a good idea - we thought it will empower the developers. Looking back this limited the number of people that would be able use it - but allowed the one's how made the effort to do very forward looking prototypes. We summarized some of the experience in [1]. The current research and products seen at TEI focus much stronger on making it easy for a large set of people to use it - it will be exciting to see if and how this speeds up the creation of new products in the next years.

[1] Gellersen, H., Kortuem, G., Schmidt, A., and Beigl, M. 2004. Physical Prototyping with Smart-Its. IEEE Pervasive Computing 3, 3 (Jul. 2004), 74-82. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MPRV.2004.1321032

Handheld Laser Projector

Enrico got for his project a handheld laser projector. The nice thing about this technology is that the projected image is always in focus - it does not matter if you move the projector or if you project on an uneven surface. The AAXA L1 Laser Pico Projector (even though there are plenty of things that can be improved, noise for a start) provides some inspiration what will become possible if these devices will be common in mobile phones. In Lancaster Enrico explored already 2007/2008 some of the usage scenarios and interaction techniques [1] and I am really curious of further ones. There was a workshop at Pervasive 2010 looking at current research on personal projectors [2].

With this piece of technology we can also move on the idea of a device where interactive shell and functional core of a product is separated. We have published the concept as work in progress at CHI [3] and perhaps it is now time to look into a realistic implementation using such a laser projector.

[1] Hang, A., Rukzio, E., and Greaves, A. 2008. Projector phone: a study of using mobile phones with integrated projector for interaction with maps. In Proceedings of the 10th international Conference on Human Computer interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (Amsterdam, The Netherlands, September 02 - 05, 2008). MobileHCI '08. ACM, New York, NY, 207-216. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1409240.1409263

[2] UBIPROJECTION 2010 http://eis.comp.lancs.ac.uk/workshops/ubiproject2010/

[3] Doering, T., Pfleging, B., Kray, C., and Schmidt, A. 2010. Design by physical composition for complex tangible user interfaces. In Proceedings of the 28th of the international Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Atlanta, Georgia, USA, April 10 - 15, 2010). CHI EA '10. ACM, New York, NY, 3541-3546. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1753846.1754015

Breakfast reading: tabgible UIs, brands, and user centred design

The current issue interactions (http://interactions.acm.org) features some interesting articles - at least scanning through it and reading some of them prolonged my breakfast today considerably ;-)

The cover story gives an already in its title a very interesting definition of tangible interaction (Tangible Interaction = Form + Computing) [1]. Their view is very much from a design perspective, but provides a good introduction to the topic.

The article by Jay Chaeyong Yi on a success story from Korea is a very good case study of how to apply UI research [2]. It shows (1) a comprehensive example of user driven research and (2) the value and importance it contributes to a product/service. Even though the article describes a project from 2005 I find the topic of messaging on phone still exciting and the example of IM vs. SMS can still tell a lot. Personally I am really interested in where messaging on the phone goes - perhaps there is some time next week in Tampere to discuss this.

Not central on user interfaces but still quite interesting is the article on operationalizing brands with Web 2.0 technologies [3]. The example of eBags.com shows interestingly what is currently possible. Thinking and imagine a bit further and considering the opportunities that arise from the web/internet of things (e.g. where you know from the bag how it is used and can communicate this) some real change will be ahead. And some companies are slowly getting to the point of bringing first products that go into this direction (Ali pointed me to http://greengoose.com).

After setting up some IKEA furniture with my daughter (model BENNO as bookshelf for paper backs and not for CD/DVDs) I found Don Norman's article where he discusses the issue consuming vs. producing or spectator vs. creator quite interesting [4].

[1] Baskinger, M. and Gross, M. 2010. Tangible interaction = form + computing. interactions 17, 1 (Jan. 2010), 6-11. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1649475.1649477

[2] Yi, J. C. 2010. User-research-driven mobile user interface innovation: a success story from Seoul. interactions 17, 1 (Jan. 2010), 48-51. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1649475.1649487

[3] Yohn, D. L. 2010. Operationalizing brands with new technologies. interactions 17, 1 (Jan. 2010), 24-27. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1649475.1649481

[4] Norman, D. A. 2010. The transmedia design challenge: technology that is pleasurable and satisfying. interactions 17, 1 (Jan. 2010), 12-15. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1649475.1649478