Smart Things

Key Features

Tackles design of products in the post-Web world where computers no longer have to be monolithic, expensive general-purpose devices

Features broad frameworks and processes, practical advice to help approach specifics, and techniques for the unique design challenges

Presents case studies that describe, in detail, how others have solved problems, managed trade-offs, and met successes

Description

The world of smart shoes, appliances, and phones is already here, but the practice of user experience (UX) design for ubiquitous computing is still relatively new. Design companies like IDEO and frogdesign are regularly asked to design products that unify software interaction, device design and service design -- which are all the key components of ubiquitous computing UX -- and practicing designers need a way to tackle practical challenges of design. Theory is not enough for them -- luckily the industry is now mature enough to have tried and tested best practices and case studies from the field.

Smart Things presents a problem-solving approach to addressing designers' needs and concentrates on process, rather than technological detail, to keep from being quickly outdated. It pays close attention to the capabilities and limitations of the medium in question and discusses the tradeoffs and challenges of design in a commercial environment. Divided into two sections ? frameworks and techniques ? the book discusses broad design methods and case studies that reflect key aspects of these approaches. The book then presents a set of techniques highly valuable to a practicing designer. It is intentionally not a comprehensive tutorial of user-centered design'as that is covered in many other books'but it is a handful of techniques useful when designing ubiquitous computing user experiences.

In shot, Smart Things gives its readers both the ";why"; of this kind of design and the ";how,"; in well-defined chunks.

Readership

Primary audiences

Industrial designers. Many people who are primarily industrial designers (at firms such as IDEO, Ziba, Pentagram, Lunar, etc.) are hired based on the perception that the design of anything that any non-software consumer product needs to be designed by industrial designers. Since they get tapped to do work that includes interaction and service design, this book will help them understand what needs to be done (and what skills they can look for in team members).

Software or Web Interaction/Interface designers. The first Web designers came to the medium from traditional graphic design and discovered how different it is, even though it looks like it should be a similar set of skills. Now software and Web designers are discovering the same thing about designing for mobile an ubiquitous products and are looking for resources to help them understand where the differences lie, so they can avoid reinventing the wheel.

Ubiquitous computing designers. Exclusively the concern of corporate and university research labs until recently, the emphasis in ubiquitous computing was primarily on technology, and not on design. However, many people now find themselves designing ubiquitous computing systems (maybe under the heading of entertainment, peripheral or appliance design), and some may even recognize the relationship to ubiquitous computing.

Mobile application designers. There is a growing population of designers created applications for mobile services full-time. Their design challenges regularly intersect with the ideas of ubiquitous computing user experience. Other than informal networks and competitive analysis, there are few sources of information about the design process of interactive products for this medium.

Secondary audiences

Developers working in mobile media. Programmers always end up doing some amount of design (and, too often, all of the design) of the products they're coding for. Programmers are especially comfortable looking in documentation for solutions to their problems. Although this book won't have the kind of "cut and paste" easy solution for them, it'll have guidance for what's worked in the past, which is often as useful.

Project/Product managers. Much like programmers, product managers, whose job requirement is to balance user and company needs, end up being the designers of the services they're shepherding.

Contents

1. Introduction: The Hidden Middle of Moore's Law

People typically read the Moore's Law chart as a trend in the number of transistors. What's implicit in the trend, however, is that it is the product of a conscious decision in the context of a semiconductor marketplace. The prices of new CPUs has stayed roughly the same over the last 25 years, generally between $500 and $1000 at the time of introduction. Thus, another way that to read the chart is that as transistor density increases, the price of older technology proportionally decreases.

This price drop means that ubicomp, first postulated in the late 80s/early 90s has just become a practical reality: the price of a new CPU in 1990 was $1500 in today's dollars, the equivalent amount of processing power can now be purchased for 50 cents. This means that the CPUs that brought us the Web explosion'ones that have the power to operate a multitasking, networked computer'can be put into just about any device at virtually any price point.

PART ONE: Frameworks

2. Broad Concepts

This chapter will introduce the background issues that underlie some of the broad conceptual frameworks

The relationship between industrial, interaction and service design

The importance of context

When designing ubiquitous computing devices, suddenly your frame is no longer the chrome around the browser window, but the world. It's an inversion of traditional computing attitudes, moving out into the world.

The design of social devices

Networking means that devices can communicate with each other, and people can communicate with each other through the devices.

Technology adoption patterns

Each new class of ubiquitous computing devices is essentially a new tool. People react differently to these tools than new pieces of software, which'even if new new'essentially exist in a familiar box. Tool adoption takes a while and follows a familiar pattern. When designing devices in this field, it's valuable to understand whether you're designing something new or extending something existing.

3. Information is a Design Material

Embedded information processing acts like a material and creates new capabilities, and imposes new constraints.

Behavior as competitive advantage

When a designer can include information processing in a product for very little cost, the calculation becomes not one of engineering complexity, that's relatively cheap, but one of competitive advantage. Including a CPU to produce behaviors becomes a line item in the competitive analysis of making an object, just like the calculation about what to make it out of. What you do with that CPU becomes part of the design of the product and needs to be designed with the same attention to the other parts as any of the materials being used.

Toys leading the way

Many new toys depend not just on their physical appearance, but on behavior created by information processing, for their competitive advantage.

Example: Cuddle Chimp

Some qualities of information as a material

Real-time change

Responsive behavior

Can manipulate symbols that have meaning, but not meaning

Requires power, storage

Embodied interaction

The difference between a virtual object and a physical one

4. Information as Material Case Study: the Whirlpool centralpark Refrigerator

The history of the screen fridge

Starting in 1998, one screen fridge introduced every couple of years

All suffered from the same problem: they stuck what amounted to a tablet PC to the front of a fridge, with little understanding as to how people would use it

Very little adoption, since the model didn't fit people's life practices

Whirlpool's third try

The centralpark uses a plugin architecture that allows a variety of different applications to be plugged into it. Each is a self-contained computer, but they're not presented as computers, but as digital picture frames, calendars, etc.

5. Information Shadows

Nearly everything manufactured today exists simultaneously in the physical world and in the world of data.

A digital representation is the object's information shadow.

Information shadow can be examined and manipulated without having to touch the physical object.

Coates' ";Age of Point-At-Things";

Examples:

Amazon ASINs

Mutanen's Thinglink

YottaMark/CertiLogo

Sterling's wine bottle

RFIDs and fiducials

These are the hooks that connect the everyday object to its digital representation

Once hooked, they can be mashed up

6. Information Shadows Case Study: Disney Clickables Princess Charm Bracelets

Description

"; When a girl touches her band to her friend's and presses a button, her band will glow to confirm that a Fairy Friendship has been made [in the online community Disney has set up for the purpose].";

A short history of smart bracelets

Design of a physical/virtual social network

7. Devices are Service Avatars

Networking brings dematerialization

The same information can be accessed and manipulated through a variety of devices.

Value shifts to the information, rather than the device that's communicating it.

Devices become secondary, they become temporary representations of information-based services.

Devices become projections of services

A number of familiar appliances--cell phones, ATMs--are worthless without the networks they're attached to. They are physical manifestations, avatars, projections into physical space of services, but are not services themselves. You really start to see this in purely information entities: what's a plane ticket? what's money? what's a book? They become subscriptions and agreements, for which a device becomes a nearly disposable channel.

Service design

When designing user experiences for ubiquitous computing, the design of the service becomes as important as the design of the device. The iPod is an avatar of the iTunes Music Store. The Amazon Kindle, as questionably designed as it is, is a physical manifestation of the Amazon Kindle Store.

Objects become subscriptions

Right now most of these services are information or media related, but that's changing.

Example: City CarShare

8. Service Avatar Case Study: the iPod

Description

The MP3 player in 2001

The iPod as an iTunes avatar

The iPhone

Design process

9. Applianceness

Defining applianceness

When computation is cheap, we no longer have to make general-purpose computers