{"id":391,"date":"2007-04-05T14:10:07","date_gmt":"2007-04-05T13:10:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.leapfrog.nl\/archives\/2007\/04\/05\/ux-designers-should-get-into-everyware\/"},"modified":"2008-04-28T14:08:54","modified_gmt":"2008-04-28T12:08:54","slug":"ux-designers-should-get-into-everyware","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/archives\/2007\/04\/05\/ux-designers-should-get-into-everyware\/","title":{"rendered":"UX designers should get into everyware"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been reading Adam Greenfield\u2019s Everyware<\/em><\/a> on and off and one of the things that it has me wondering the most lately is: are UX professionals making the move to design for ubiquitous computing?<\/p>\n

There\u2019re several places in the book where he explicitly mentions UX in relation to everyware. Let\u2019s have a look at the ones I managed to retrieve using the book\u2019s trusty index\u2026<\/p>\n

On page 14 Greenfield writes that with the emergence of ubicomp at the dawn of the new millennium, the user experience community took up the challenge with \u201cvarying degrees of enthusiasm, scepticism and critical distance\u201d, trying to find a \u201clanguage of interaction suited to a world where information processing would be everywhere in the human environment.\u201d <\/p>\n

So of course the UX community has already started considering what it means to design for ubicomp. This stuff is quite different to internet appliances and web sites though, as Greenfield points out in thesis 09 (pp.37-39): <\/p>\n

\u201cConsistently eliciting good user experiences means accounting for the physical design of the human interface, the flow of interaction between user and device, and the larger context in which that interaction is embedded.\n\nIn not a single one of these dimensions is the experience of everyware anything like that of personal computing.\u201d (p.37)<\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s a clear statement, on which he elaborates further on, mentioning that traditional interactions are usually of a \u201ccall-and-response rhythm: user actions followed by system events.\u201d Whereas everyware interactions \u201ccan\u2019t meaningfully be constructed as \u2018task-driven.\u2019 Nor does anything in the interplay between user and system [\u2026] correspond with [\u2026] information seeking.\u201d (p.38)<\/p>\n

So, UX designers moving into everyware have their work cut out for them. This is virgin territory:<\/p>\n

\u201c[\u2026] it is [\u2026] a radically new situation that will require the development over time of a doctrine and a body of standards and conventions [\u2026]\u201d (p.39)<\/blockquote>\n

Now, UX in traditional projects has been prone to what Greenfield calls \u2018value engineering\u2019. Commercial projects can only be two of these three things: fast, good and cheap. UX would support the second, but sadly it is often sacrificed for the sake of the other two. Not always though, but this is usually dependent on who is involved with the project:<\/p>\n

\u201c[\u2026] it often takes an unusually dedicated, persistent, and powerful advocate [\u2026] to see a high-quality design project through to completion with everything that makes it excellent intact. [\u2026] the painstakingly detailed work of ensuring a good user experience is frequently hard to justify on a short-term ROI basis, and this is why it is often one of the first things to get value-engineered out of an extended development process. [\u2026] we\u2019ve seen that getting everyware right will be orders of magnitude more complicated than achieving acceptable quality in a Web site, [\u2026] This is not the place for value engineers,\u201d (p.166)<\/blockquote>\n

So if traditional projects need UX advocates on board with considerable influence, comparable to Steve Jobs\u2019s role at Apple, to ensure a descent user experience will it even be possible to create ubiquitous experiences that are enjoyable to use? If these projects are so complex, can they be even gotten \u2018right\u2019 in a commercial context? I\u2019m sorry to say I think not\u2026<\/p>\n

Designers (used broadly) will be at the forefront of deciding what everyware looks like. If you don\u2019t think they will, at least I\u2019m sure they should. They\u2019re not the only ones to determine its shape though, Greenfield points out that both regulators and markets have important parts to play too (pp.172-173):<\/p>\n

\u201c[\u2026] the interlocking influences of designer, regulator, and market will be most likely to result in beneficial outcomes if these parties all treat everyware as a present reality, and if the decision makers concerned act accordingly.\u201d (p.173)<\/blockquote>\n

Now there\u2019s an interesting notion. Having just come back from a premier venue for the UX community to talk about this topic, the IA Summit, I\u2019m afraid to say that I didn\u2019t get the impression IAs are taking everyware seriously (yet.) There were no talks really concerned with tangible, pervasive, ubiquitous or ambient technologies. Some basic fare on mobile web stuff, that\u2019s all. Worrying, because as Greenfield points out:<\/p>\n

\u201c[UX designers] will best be able to intervene effectively if they develop appropriate insights, tools, and methodologies ahead of the actual deployment of ubiquitous systems.\u201d (pp.173-174)<\/blockquote>\n

This stuff is real, and it is here. Greenfield points to the existence of systems such as Octopus in Hong Kong and E-ZPass in the US. Honestly, if you think beyond the tools and methods we\u2019ve been using to communicate our designs, IxDs and IAs are well-equipped to handle everyware. No, you won\u2019t be required to draw wireframes or sitemaps; but you\u2019ll damn well need to put in a lot of the thinking designers do. And you\u2019ll still need to be able to communicate those designs. It\u2019s time to get our hands dirty:<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat fully operational systems such as Octopus and E-ZPass tell us is that privacy concerns, social implications, ethical questions, and practical details of the user experience are no longer matters for conjecture or supposition. With ubiquitous systems available for empirical enquiry, these things we need to focus on today.\u201d (p.217)<\/blockquote>\n

So, to reiterate the question I started with: are there any UX designers out there that have made the switch from web-work to ubicomp? Anyone considering it? I\u2019d love to hear about your experiences.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been reading Adam Greenfield\u2019s Everyware on and off and one of the things that it has me wondering the most lately is: are UX professionals making the move to design for ubiquitous computing? There\u2019re several places in the book where he explicitly mentions UX in relation to everyware. Let\u2019s have a look at the … Continue reading UX designers should get into everyware<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[625],"tags":[341,14,10,53,343,104,19,152,13,11,342,578,74,334,151,344,54],"class_list":["post-391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","tag-adam-greenfield","tag-ia","tag-ixd","tag-ux","tag-ambient","tag-books","tag-design","tag-everyware","tag-information-architecture","tag-interaction-design","tag-pervasive","tag-physical-computing","tag-quotes","tag-tangible","tag-ubicomp","tag-ubiquitous","tag-user-experience"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}