At least since publication of the Cluetrain Manifesto, with its meme that markets are conversations, observers noted the importance of what customers say about a brand, online and off — but especially those online. However, a somewhat subtler point from Cluetrain is increasingly relevant to brands and social media. The point was made in the book’s Thesis 39: “The community of discourse is the market.” In fact, the thesis actually consists of several ancillary ones: Read the rest of this entry »
Brand Dialogue Strategy in Social Media
November 18, 2008
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Brands, Customer Communities, Customer Experience, Experience Design, Social Media, Web 2.0 | Tagged: brand, cluetrain, dialogue, emotion, Social Media, Web 2.0 | 
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Posted by Larry Irons
CABA’s Connected Home User Interface Project
November 14, 2008
I received an email alert from the Contintental Automated Building Association’s (CABA) Connected Home Research Council indicating it is initiating a new project on the Connected Home User Interface. Our last post discussed these issues in the relation to Whirlpool’s CentralPark Connection and questioned designs that depend on a single user interface to “intelligent” appliances and, by implication, homes. CABA’s Connected Home Research Council’s research agenda on the Connected Home User Interface characterizes the issues in the following manner.
The evolution of the digital home lifestyle has been, in part, created by consumer demands that are driving tremendous industry change and opportunity. The connected home offers various promises to simplify interaction and engagement of consumers with family, entertainment, career and home system solutions
Two of the open questions that have yet to be answered is (1): How do product developers and managed solution/service providers best aggregate data into potentially, one single user interface that is both intuitive and adds value to the holistic connected home? And (2): How does the user interface solution support the delivery of the digital lifestyle promise?
CABA’s Connected Home Research Council (CH-RC) is sponsoring a consumer research study that will define the specific attributes or baseline criteria of a ‘connected home user interface’ for consumers when managing the connected home.
Current Steering Committee members seek answers to some of the following questions:
- What type of information and/or control do consumers really want (passive versus interactive data)?
- What type of access, convergence of services and data set to home service content is desired?
- How can the whole home solution enhance the digital lifestyle?
What do you think about the questions posed by the Connected Home User Interface project?
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Leave a Comment » | Experience Design, Ubiquitous Computing, User Experience | Tagged: caba, digital home lifestyle, Ubiquitous Computing, user interface | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Metaphorical Refrigerators, Design, and Ubiquitous Computing
November 11, 2008
Whirlpool CentralPark Connection
I’ve been meaning to write about Dan Saffer’s Masters Thesis since reading it a couple of years ago. A recent post by Mike Kuniavsky provides an opportunity to do so. Also, it appears that Dan left his position at Adaptive Path to found Kicker Studio, a product design company. In The Role of Metaphor in Interaction Design, Dan noted that metaphors help users/customers understand new products and services by providing cues that orient and personify the experience of the familiar with the new.
In other words, metaphors help us understand one thing in terms of another by highlighting similarities between the two, while at the same time implicitly recognizing differences. Dan also added that metaphors introduced to facilitate adoption of a new product can also limit its innovation in other ways. He specifically pointed to the Workspace is a Desktop metaphor, which conceptualizes the computer as an office tool primarily. I would add that the metaphor contributed to the myth of the paperless office by obscuring the differences between desktops and graphical user interfaces. Specifically, Dan contended that,
it could be argued that the desktop metaphor has hindered the development of ubiquitous computing as much as some hardware factors (p.22).
At the same time, he observed that the desktop metaphor was much more effective in gaining the widespread adoption of computers when compared to the previous metaphor, i.e. computers as programming environments. He recommended that whenever designers use a metaphor in a new product they need to begin with what is new, the subject of the metaphor, rather than what the metaphor refers to. In other words, don’t force functionality into a metaphor. Use the metaphor to support a concept rather than the other way around. The point builds on the design principle of Cooper, Reiman, and Cronin in About Face 3.0 to, “Never bend your interface to fit a metaphor” (p. 279).
14 Comments | Customer Experience, Experience Design, Ubiquitous Computing, User Experience, Web 2.0 | Tagged: Ceiva, clutter, Experience Design, intelligent refrigerator, metaphor, Ubiquitous Computing, whirlpool | Permalink
Posted by Larry Irons
Skilful Minds 