Named G-speak this “spatial operating system” is just gorgeous.
More videos on Vimeo.

Thanks to Alok, I had the opportunity to get my hands on the new Philips “Living Color” line of LED lamps. He asked for some insight for a similar, yet much more interesting, project of his called Arkalumen.
Here is the beast:

The lamp has an adventurous design, it actually looks like a mix of a harman/kardon speakers and a jelly fish made of (very) cheap plastic. It is quite ugly and feels terribly awkward, but this is not my point.

My point is the remote control (yeah, I don’t like them) and how the user experience has been contaminated by engeneer thinking.

From top to bottom here are the controls: On/Off toggle, color wheel, color saturation (in the center of the wheel), and brightness.

All graphic artists know that a color can be defined using different formulas. A very useful one is called HSB (Hue, Saturation, Brightness), it is quite easy to understand yet a bit abstract for people (consumers) who legitimately don’t give a damn.

Yet, Philips engineers really figured out that the HSB formula would be the best way to go, and they designed an interface (the remote) to give access to the full spectrum of colors, shades and intensity the lamp is able to produce.

They probably thought that the mere possibility of lightning our living room with an infinite variety of colors is the greatest thing in the world, and it worths being familiar with the HSB concept.

What can we learn from this?

1st: tech specs must be carefully insulated from the user experience to propose real useful features.

2nd: features must be infered from real-life narratives, never from spec sheets.

Philips’ flawed narrative is: “A lamp able to produce every color in the world”. As if we craved the possibility of illuminating our rooms with an infinite palette of colors. As if we were even able to choose a suitable color from a million possibilities (too much choice is an embarassment, “less” is always better than “more”). And eventually: as if light equals color!

A much better narrative would be: “A lamp able to produce every kind of light“, and by “light” I mean the “quality” of light: warmth, coldness, softness, hardness, etc. All the qualities we, human beings, are attaching to the concept of light and the importance they have on our moods and biological rythms.

If Philips had applied this narrative, they would have produced something more inovative, yet closer to our humanity, and much simpler to operate.

Epilogue. As for the remote control, please, no more of that useless c**p ! We are already wasting our evenings looking for the damn TV remote! Now one remote for each lamp in the house? Nooo! Try this instead!

Every once in a while I bump into one of Logitech’s unholly offspring.

Last time was when I discovered that Wired gave 8 of 10 to the hideous Harmony One universal remote control. This kind of device is the ultimate  symptom of a grave illness that plagues most of our home appliances: the feature cancer.

I won’t argue about the value of the device in itself. Maybe it is not that bad after all… But, besides its ugliness, what’s interesting is the failed narrative that supports its inception.

The narrative is: cram all your remote controls in a single big one, and become the master of the living room, yeah! This narrative fails because 1° the thing is a monster of complexity, 2° the thing is always hidden behind a sofa’s cushion like a vulgar non-universal remote control, and 3° because the devices you are supposed to control are themselves suffering from feature cancer, so you’re still trapped.

We have basically swapped a broken system for another one with very questionable gains. The universal remote control concept is an inefficient plaster on an open wound.

As always, the solution will come from a change of narrative. I can suggest this one:

“Get a standard interface to link and access any devices at home”

Thus any devices becomes a member of a system. Our new gizmo, let’s call it Logitech Bridge, will serve features and actions (like “listen to music in room X”, “view Channel Z on screen Y, etc.); to any, say, WiFi or Bluetooth enabled device that will become de-facto universal remote controls.

Maybe Logitech could built this “Bridge” and set a standard for home devices communication via WiFi or Bluetooth, WiFi would be better of course.

Because there is no standard protocol used by home devices (to my knowledge anyway), here is how one may envision a way to make the Bridge a reality:

Step 1: device recognition. The Bridge has a list of all current remote controls on the market. The list is updated live through the internet. Once the Bridge is installed, the user presents all his remote controls to the Bridge. He presses a few buttons, which is enough for the Bridge to recognize the device’s signature and activate its features.

Step 2: operation. The Bridge hosts its own protocol and interface to represent and link togeteher devices and features. This interface is a standard web service usable from any web capable device (computer, smart phones, whatever gadget to come). The user can easily manipulate the devices and their features from any capable device; and the bridge relays user’s inputs back to the home devices using their primitive IR protocols.

Step 3: consecration. Constructors start producing devices compliant with the Bridge’s protocol. They stop appending ugly remote controls to their products (thus producing less crap to be dumped a few years later) and they concentrate on making usable and open products.

I assume that you will think of other narratives more powerfull than this one. That’s the beauty of narratives: you can have several equally valid and elegant narratives, and different interfaces to support them. But the first one who sets a strong narrative and a good interface to support it, will most of the time set a standard.

Sure thing is Logitech, and other universal remote controls constructors, are missing the point in assuming that a physical remote control is going to rule over the legion of remote controls that infest our homes. The solution lies in the metaphoric sphere.

Thanks to Fred.

(…) 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 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 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.

The new address is

5445 Av de Gaspé, Suite 215
Montréal, QC, H2T 3B2, CANADA
514.995.6135

This is the work of my friend Rodolphe Gonzalès and his team at Université de Montréal.

This prototype connect heterogenous data about forests in Canada, and make them easy to browse geographically, through time, and hierarchically.

After watching this video, I felt sad. Windows bashing leaves a bitter taste in my mouth now, I’d like to help.

Come on Microsoft, what are you doing? What we see on the video is just a lame copy of an Apple demo, the passage with the piano is so embarrassing. Your engineers are brilliant — and numerous — people who can do much better than that.

I have a simple suggestion for you (yes, I know, I am actually talking to Microsoft…): develop something entirely new without backward compatibility whatsoever. Impose us your vision, if you have one. Leave the Apple way of thinking UXP. It’s a brilliant way, but it is not the only one, by far. Never forget that Mac OS X is a good looking and very smart version of paradigms invented in the early 70s.

First hint: we all remember the freaky talking paperclip in early versions of MS Office. That was a miserable failure, because the little guy faked intelligence with constant blabber, which is absolutely insulting. But I think it is time now to work again on day-to-day usable artificial intelligence. I think our computer are powerful enough now to support humbly intelligent OS’s, that really start to understand what human users are doing with their machines, so they can help (but without ever raising their voice in front of adults).

Second hint: it is time to impose the distributed model of the web into our plastic boxes. A new OS should allow (force) applications to fuse with the OS, core services and other apps.
To take a simple metaphor, installing an application is now like adding a stone in a bowl, it should be like pouring water into the same bowl — next step : get rid of the bowl, but we’ll see that later.

Anyway, I’d like to have a new kind of OS on my computer. My Mac OS is beautiful, but it is still blind, deaf and plain stupid.

Findloo.com is a niffty meta search engine. It gathers and organizes search results by obvious categories (web, images, videos, items for sale, dictionaries, etc.) and by popular providers (Google, YouTube, Ebay, Wikipedia, Amazon, etc.).

I’ve added it to my default search tool in Firefox, and I’m happy because it works all right.

They announce RECEPTION, a web based tool that offers a completely new angle to the recruiting and online job market space.

The team, led by Ben Yoskowitz and Fred Ngo, gathers nice individuals with audacious coding skills. I personally had the pleasure to modelize tricky UXP issues into simple stories for some nifty features included into RECEPTION. I won’t say more, of course.

… and, by the way, they also raised 2M$, which is good for the long road to come.

Apart from the nice looking e-ink display and the apprently correct design (though not awesome, the keyboard is really tacky) what really is genius in Amazon’s Kindle resides in this discreet excerpt from Amazon’s sale pitch:

Unlike WiFi, you don’t have to find a hotspot. Amazon pays for Kindle’s wireless connectivity so you will never see a monthly wireless bill for shopping the Kindle Store. There is no wireless setup—you are ready to shop, purchase and read right out of the box.

That’s what I call something huge in term of user experience: no sync via a PC, no WiFi hot-spot hunting, no subscription fee, no subscription at all! It’s a naturally connected device.

By simply wiping the wireless access issue out, Amazon understood that a brilliant user experience does not come only from a combination of features and design, but from disruptive business practice too.

Kindle is a breakthrough.

iPhoney simulates how mobile Safari renders pages on an iPhone. You can rotate and zoom, and it looks good too. It requires Safari Beta 3 to benefit of all the cool features like zooming.

I’m currently brainstorming with the excellent David Turgeon, founder of the music label NoType (which offers free music on line to experimental music’s lovers since the late 90’s!), for a fun and simple service dedicated to iPhone and iPodTouch owners.

À suivre…

It’s absolutely outrageous, and I simply don’t understand how artists can silently let the RIAA sue their freakin’ fans!

Influent music artists trully have the responsibility to end this mess. They can’t hide any more behind the fatality of copyright laws when an ordinary woman gets a $200K fine for 24 allegedly “stolen” songs!

Here is the list of the cool pop stars with attitude that didn’t even issue a communiqué saying “Not in my name”:

Guns N Roses , Vanessa Williams , Janet Jackson , Gloria Estefan , Goo Goo Dolls , Journey , Sara McLachlan , Aerosmith , Linkin Park , Def Leppard , Reba McEntire , Bryan Adams , No Doubt , Sheryl Crow , Richard Marx , Destiny’s Child , Green Day

Digital media distribution is a great challenge, and Radiohead came these days with a pretty good idea: you can buy here the download version of their upcoming album at the price you want.

Good UXP can be build upon such an approach, but it is not exactly what a Sony-BMG told before the court in Duluth yesterday when asked if it was okay for consumers to make just one copy of a track they’ve legally purchased.

“[that's] a nice way of saying, ’steals just one copy.’”

… enough is said.

Read full report in Wired.

Greyish blue on blueish grey
Mini-feed I sha’n't swallow no more
Future needs re-work

It has been a very good year, and a very instructive one too. Here are several things I realized, and some crucial points that I need to focus on for the coming years:

The industry really cries out for a new approach in usability.

The way usability specialists are commonly involved in projects proves not to be adequate in some cases.

• Usability has too often an intellectual and hermetic approach to problems that would require creative and emotional involvement instead to be solved.
• Usability jargon is not understood by the clients, and is often seen as a way to hide a blatant incapicity to bring real solutions.
• Usability sometimes justifies itself by imposing irrelevant set of rules to designers and coders who see it as an obscure, intrusive and dictatorial thing. As a result they also tend to ignore the usability recomandations.

… but the needs are HUGE, and the architectural approach to interface design can really fullfill them. Here is how interface architecture should find its way accross the development process of a web service, a software or a device:

Notice that user testing and focus groups come during the production process to validate and re-align the concept in a more constructive way.

Notice also that wireframes are also part of the production process and they are associated with general documentation and design guides.

My recent contracts more than validated the term “Interface Architecture” applied to the discipline. The role of an Interface architect is to build and describe a complete User Experience that users and makers alike are excited to embrace.

When I started all this, Frank Gehry, the great architect, was my main inspiration; his disruptive approach of architecture brought something fresh and incredibly powerful to city landscapes. He achieved this by taming technology to his unique vision with no respect for the rules and what others do.

I really think systems and machines can be seen as work of art with strong personality and specificity. They are “places” or “spaces” or even “moments”. They convey specific messages to their users, they tell stories of their own. Some of them can be much more than commodities.

That’s the reason why I’m going to keep my distance from the academic rules of usability, and focus entirely on creativity.

From there, I really intend to widen the gap between the classic usability approach and the architectural approach. Industry needs creativity, specificity and soul. That’s all architecture is about: elegance, commodity and humanity by a smart and inspired use of the same basic building blocks.

Now is the time, as technology tends to flood us with wasted power and features, to add this layer of interface Architecture in the development process.

Best vs. Special

This year was also a year of immersion into endless and sterile arguments about Facebook vs. Myspace, Second life vs. real life, Mac vs. PC, etc. etc. The blogosphere is full of this rhetoric and I too fell into this trap.

It’s easy to be a follower and spend one’s time to influence the other followers. Social Media have this weird twist that they entice many to enter the battle for opinion leadership, thus, instead of setting new rules, just making new kings with very questionable legitimacy.

While everyone is guessing, with a weird fascination, who’s is going to rule the web, it clearly appears that the mass of users actually don’t give a damn; and they can easily deal with a diversity of experiences. People can appreciate many different places, forms and stories. There are actually no rules, no best practices, only good propositions. It’s an ecosystem out there, not (only) a battle field.

So I won’t try to be the best usability specialist in town, but I will increase my difference, polish my method and make my customers proud of what they get. I’ll put all my energy in being creative for people who need something special for their products.

Tool

Speaking of Frank Gehry, this guy developed his own CAD tools to build the crazy shapes and volumes he has in mind.
There’s obviously a need for such a tool in interface architecture to fill the gap between designers and coders. This tool should free the creative process by taking care of the building aspect of things.

It’s a crucial challenge, it’ll take time, and I’ll need the help of people interested in breaking some rules.

… and, THANK YOU.

Let’s make a simple analogy with the real world: we know that different buildings serving the same purpose, may (hopefully) offer various architectural experiences. Le Louvre doesn’t offer the same experience to its visitors than the Guggenheim Museum. Both are museums, but it is absolutely pointless to compare them in terms of performance, or ease of access, or whatever kind of objective criteria. Both museums are unique and serve their own purpose very well, “simply” because they provide great experiences to the visitors.

The same consideration will apply for any system involving human-machine relationship. Mac OS is no better than Windows, and vice versa, they just propose different experiences. In clear, they tell users different stories, and each story is absolutely relevant and valuable for different people, different purposes in different contexts.

I was just wondering that, right now, a system or a web service, should tell a specific story to its user. That best pratices in usability and interface design should be the basic tools used to build a place that was carefully thought and designed by an architect’s — or writer’s — mind.

In today’s burst of ideas and concepts, making something unique carries a lot more value than trying to outperform the competitors.

Diversity has always been the key factor of success for an ecosystem, be it natural or man-made. Many example can be found in recent technological innovations; my favourite is certainly Nintendo and the Wii: necessity — i.e. inability to follow Sony and Microsoft in their race for raw power — pushed them to write a different story of games: what humans do when they “play” ? Certainly not counting the frame rate and the number of polygons processed… Nintendo proposed a unique experience. Not the best. Just something different, a new “story”. In the other hand, Sony and Microsoft are competing with the same story. One will have to lose, but Nintendo won’t lose (this time) because Nintendo is now out of their fight.

The punch:
1° - Seeing User Experience Design as Story Telling appears to be a key to connect with an audience and, even more, to create an audience. Then, as in litterature, diversity and possibilities become endless.
2° - Take serious care of User Experience, at the early stages of your project, and build your own ground, instead of entering the others’ battleground.

Your comments on this envolée are welcome!

Ref.: “Experincing experience” by Tom Guarriello in UXmag (Oct. 10, 2006)