(…) three products generated the most passion in the gizmosphere: Nintendo’s Wii, Activision’s Guitar Hero series, and Apple’s iPhone. (We know, they were released earlier, but in 2008 they dominated the zeitgeist.) What do they have in common, besides creating happy shareholders and long lines at stores? They all integrate the digital world into the physical world in a straightforward way. In fact, you could argue that with devices like these, a sci-fi-like mashup of the real and artificial has quietly taken shape.

Speaking of Nintendo Wii:

Turns out you don’t need total immersion to interact naturally with a digital world: The games of Wii Sports allow you to perform the same actions you do in the athletics they simulate.

Speaking of the iPhone:

(…) iPhone’s multitouch interface shows the way to harness the Web’s annotations to our physical reality.

It reminds me of a discussion I had at Mitch Joel’s blog about tangible interfaces. At the time I wrote:

Machines are showing more empathy toward our physical nature, they are more complacent to our sense of nuance (approximation ?) and to our lack of logic.

I think technology wil not augment reality (…) it will augment our body, (our) senses and (our) mind. Like any tools do. Technology could be a halo of tools around our physical person.

Steven Levy is reaching the same conclusion when he writes:

We once talked about cyberspace as a distant cosmos, a digital outland that left the physical world behind. (…) This year, breakthroughs like the Wii, Guitar Hero, and the iPhone showed that 21st-century reality is a blend of the digital and physical, with a borderline so blurred it’s not really a line at all.

Read “Steven Levy on Melding the Digital and Physical Realms“

French subscription-based channel Canal+ and Canal Sat are launching a brand new set-top box for HDTV, IPTV and VOD named “Le Cube“.
The box and the user experience has been designed by Yves Behar at fuseproject (designers of Jawbone, OLPC among other great products).

It is sometimes uneasy to explain why I use the term “User experience architect” instead of usability expert, or something equivalent.

It is mainly because I consider that usability is a set of tools the UX architect uses to reach a higher goal: building a system’s experience, i.e. the relation between humans and systems.

As an architect, I always base my work on narratives and not on usability rules. These rules are applied when it is time to shape the narratives into an actual system (system= web site, web app, software, physical machinery, etc.).

Why is that? It is because narratives are always more powerful than rules, methods or analyse. For example, it is not rare to see systems with badly flawed usability, but with a very strong narratives, being praised by users: MySpace, Windows, mobile phones, etc. In each case, it’s the narrative that makes the product used even if it is hardly usable.

A narrative is a simple phrase that would describe a system in a very human way. For instance the narrative of a mobile phone is “you can call and receive calls from anywhere”. With such a strong narrative, anyone can produce and sell very unusable phones because the narrative remains intact even with the worst phone, providing it sends and receives calls.

Now, how to build a better experience on a mobile phone?

As we can see, even with a very thorough usability treatment to the phone’s interface, users won’t get hooked because the narrative remains the same. Then the mobile phone industry is stuck, and competition is based on very weak arguments: design, coolness, feature list… but nothing really change for the users.

Worse than that, phone manufacturers tend to pile up irrelevant features into their products for the sake of offering “more” to their customers (i.e. agendas, chronometre, truncated web surfing, fake e-mails, etc.). But these features are not supported by strong narratives. In most users’ minds, a kind of web experience equals no web experience at all.

So, as soon as a new narrative pops up, it’s an immediate success. See for instance: “you can really send and receive e-mails from anywhere, anytime”, and here we have the Blackberry. Then again: “you can really surf the real web from anywhere”, it’s the iPhone. What next ? What about “you can keep your full profile anywhere, anytime, on any available device”.

Once the architect has extracted the core narratives, he can put his skills at work to draw the interfaces that will materialize the narratives. Then he can apply usability rules to maintain consistancy and user-friendliness. He may also set new usability paradigms if required by the narratives.

There is not one - or “best” - way to materialize a narrative into an interface; but the first materialization of a new narrative has a very big chance to set a standard. Not because it is better, but because it is unique when it appears.

Conclusion:

• The UX architect will extract and strenghen the narratives hidden behind your project.
• The UX architect will materialize the narrative into an Interface (relying not only on his usability skills, but also on his own sensitivity).
• The UX architect will deliver a blueprint of the system’s experience (interface mockups + map)
• The UX architect will support the building of the system (visual design, coding, implementation) as a guardian of the narratives, and a helper to sort issues during production cycles.

Conclusion of the conclusion: good usability is not enough to diffenriate your project, narratives are its real substance in the users mind.

I spent a big chunk of 2008 working on a unified user experience throughout all Canoë/Quebecor Media properties. Sorry, cannot be more specific at that time… I’ll keep you posted when releases are starting to blossom.

I had the great opportunity to help the Standoutjobs.com team to tame their incredible creativity at developping crazy features for Reception, specifically the business cards paradigm and candidate tracking concepts.

I also worked for the SmartHippo.com venture which, quite appropriately, shakes the mortgage market in the US by introducing independant reviews and comparison tools.

Also notice my participation in some exciting stealth projects like Talkio.com, Omni-Med, YourTeleDoctor.com, and a B2B web application called GPro developped by Montreal based Dev-ID that handles ERP interconnection in supply chains.

… And I’m quite proud to have been granted with great comments about my work by my customers.

… and I had a baby girl too.