on haptics, mobility, and the out-of-touch future
Just got back in from an interesting session at UBC, featuring two speakers for an "HCI Industry Colloquium" -- UBC prof Karon MacLean and Nokia N-Series UX designer Ryan Opina talked about what they do for a living to an audience of UBC CS undergrads, grads, profs, and a few odds-and-ends "industry types" (of which I suppose I include myself).
A somewhat appropriate photo: my hand holding Matt's Nokia N91, one of the N-Series devices designed here in Vancouver
Karon's talk was entitled "Building a Haptic Language - communicating via touch" and highlighted her research into the area of interfaces that you touch and they touch back. Or as she so poignantly said on one of her slides, "What can 'feels' mean?"
Karon also pointed to much of the haptic interface research going on at the HCI and SPIN labs at UBC, including Colin Swindells' PhD thesis which attempts to answer the question, "What relationships exist between the kinesthetic feel & behavior of a rotary manual control, and visceral emotional responses?" -- or said another way, "What makes turning a knob feel 'right' or 'good' and how do you quantify that?" I've probably vastly oversimplified Colin's PhD thesis, but I found it interesting to see how the measurement and quantification of human emotion figured prominently in the abstract, a philosophically meaty topic to be sure.
With a background in engineering, robotics, and psychology, Karon provided a content-rich presentation that left me looking for more. Force-feedback video game controllers and vibrating mobile phones aside, haptics is clearly a rich area of investigation for designers as it allows for a third dimension, a third sensation (versus the standard auditory / visual modes) to provide information to the user. Karon used the metaphor of only being able to represent things in black and white and suddenly being able to use colour, also pointing out that no such verbal language for things like hue, saturation, brightness, and contrast have been invented for this new mode of representation. It's early days for touch-based interfaces.
And of course, what a timely seminar to attend, given all of the hullabaloo about everyone's most wanted touchy-feely device, the iPhone.
And who better to follow Karon's talk than a designer from a company very concerned with the introduction of such a device into the mobile marketplace, Nokia. Ryan Opina is part of the User Experience Group for the N-Series in Burnaby and talked a bit about what he did (not so much about what he's doing... as that's all very hush-hush as one can imagine) as part of that team.
As someone who's owned an N-Series device for the last 6 months, I was interested to see and hear Ryan talk about the process they go through, get a sense of some of the collaborative forces that have an impact on the design of such a device. Marketing, manufacturing, industrial design, software: the user experience group has to juggle all of the above in coming up with appropriate hardware and software designs.
Ryan asked the audience what they all wanted in their next phone, with some predictable responses: GPS, music, cameras, better battery life, etc. A few brought up durability, nearly no-one mentioned longevity. And no-one pointed out the number one feature that I want from my next phone: a reasonable data plan to go along with it.
I talked to Ryan after his presentation and shared some comments about the frustration of having an N-Series phone and not being able to exploit all of its network-driven / data intensive features. User experience, hardware design, and software design are all great and offer a lot of potential, but if you expect people to pay $500/month in data charges to carry one of these things around, you've really limited your market.
Of course, that really has nothing to do with the designer of the phone and everything to do with the carriers. And beating up phone carriers, especially here in Canada, is a bit like shooting ducks in a barrel. So I'll stop there.
Ryan had a Nokia N95 with him that I took a quick look at - lots of reviews out there and I've spent a fair bit of time reading them. Similar to the N80 in general form, it is what Nokia is touting as their "multimedia computer" platform. Certainly has all the bells and whistles you'd expect from a next-gen device.
The N95, photo: Nokia.com
We'll now have to wait to see if the carriers change their billing model and make owning one of these devices worthwhile. I'm not holding my breath...
A somewhat appropriate photo: my hand holding Matt's Nokia N91, one of the N-Series devices designed here in Vancouver
Karon's talk was entitled "Building a Haptic Language - communicating via touch" and highlighted her research into the area of interfaces that you touch and they touch back. Or as she so poignantly said on one of her slides, "What can 'feels' mean?"
Karon also pointed to much of the haptic interface research going on at the HCI and SPIN labs at UBC, including Colin Swindells' PhD thesis which attempts to answer the question, "What relationships exist between the kinesthetic feel & behavior of a rotary manual control, and visceral emotional responses?" -- or said another way, "What makes turning a knob feel 'right' or 'good' and how do you quantify that?" I've probably vastly oversimplified Colin's PhD thesis, but I found it interesting to see how the measurement and quantification of human emotion figured prominently in the abstract, a philosophically meaty topic to be sure.
With a background in engineering, robotics, and psychology, Karon provided a content-rich presentation that left me looking for more. Force-feedback video game controllers and vibrating mobile phones aside, haptics is clearly a rich area of investigation for designers as it allows for a third dimension, a third sensation (versus the standard auditory / visual modes) to provide information to the user. Karon used the metaphor of only being able to represent things in black and white and suddenly being able to use colour, also pointing out that no such verbal language for things like hue, saturation, brightness, and contrast have been invented for this new mode of representation. It's early days for touch-based interfaces.
And of course, what a timely seminar to attend, given all of the hullabaloo about everyone's most wanted touchy-feely device, the iPhone.
And who better to follow Karon's talk than a designer from a company very concerned with the introduction of such a device into the mobile marketplace, Nokia. Ryan Opina is part of the User Experience Group for the N-Series in Burnaby and talked a bit about what he did (not so much about what he's doing... as that's all very hush-hush as one can imagine) as part of that team.
As someone who's owned an N-Series device for the last 6 months, I was interested to see and hear Ryan talk about the process they go through, get a sense of some of the collaborative forces that have an impact on the design of such a device. Marketing, manufacturing, industrial design, software: the user experience group has to juggle all of the above in coming up with appropriate hardware and software designs.
Ryan asked the audience what they all wanted in their next phone, with some predictable responses: GPS, music, cameras, better battery life, etc. A few brought up durability, nearly no-one mentioned longevity. And no-one pointed out the number one feature that I want from my next phone: a reasonable data plan to go along with it.
I talked to Ryan after his presentation and shared some comments about the frustration of having an N-Series phone and not being able to exploit all of its network-driven / data intensive features. User experience, hardware design, and software design are all great and offer a lot of potential, but if you expect people to pay $500/month in data charges to carry one of these things around, you've really limited your market.
Of course, that really has nothing to do with the designer of the phone and everything to do with the carriers. And beating up phone carriers, especially here in Canada, is a bit like shooting ducks in a barrel. So I'll stop there.
Ryan had a Nokia N95 with him that I took a quick look at - lots of reviews out there and I've spent a fair bit of time reading them. Similar to the N80 in general form, it is what Nokia is touting as their "multimedia computer" platform. Certainly has all the bells and whistles you'd expect from a next-gen device.
The N95, photo: Nokia.com
We'll now have to wait to see if the carriers change their billing model and make owning one of these devices worthwhile. I'm not holding my breath...
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