On my birthday in 2009, I bought myself one of the first IoT consumer devices – a cute electronic rabbit, called the Nabaztag.
It was brilliant – it could rotate its ears, read out messages, tell the weather and air quality forecast, play music, “sniff“ and recognize RFID tags, blink lights, and even act on voice commands. I consider the Nabaztag to be the great-grandfather of Alexa and Cortana.
“If you don’t have people that care about usability on your project, your project is doomed.”
— Jeff Atwood
Occasionally you’ll encounter people that question the value of user experience design. My advice is: don’t try to convince them. And don’t be goaded into an ROI (return of investment) discussion of UX with „non-believers“.
Make the case for user experience design and for its contribution once, maybe twice, as people may be unfamiliar with it. But don’t you don’t want a repearing “why this is actually needed?” discussion.
Nowadays it’s easy to learn the lingo and the approach of user experience design. It just takes an (online) course or two, and a few books. This teaches you the basics – so you are told. Unfortunately, it will not turn you into a UX designer.
UX design is a craft. And a craft needs practice and real-life practical experience. Without practice, you are just playing UX design. There is no substitute for hands-on, practical experience.
Made-up projects demonstrate that you know the steps of the UX design process. And that you can apply design methods. They show your method and process knowledge. They show that you know the basics and that you know the moves. But they cannot replace practical experiences.
I recently stumbled over the Atari Portfolio. It is the first handheld computer, released in 1989. It runs a (compatible) version of DOS 2.11 and is sheer beauty!
I got one on eBay to play with it and soon realized that it’s mainly a pretty plastic brick as you have a hard time accessing it with modern computers.
In 2003/04 I spent a year in the United States, working as a User Interface Designer for Siemens Medical. To document my stay I bought the smallest camera I could find. (Yes, this was before phones had cameras or were smart). I picked the Pentax Optio S4i.
The S4i was my first real camera.
It fits in the palm of my hand and I always carried it with me. It had glorious FOUR megapixels and it was shiny and perfect – but only until the S5i came out. The S5i had even FIVE megapixels and it allowed me to customize two buttons (instead of one). This was just too good. I bought the S5i and took some good pictures with her over the years.
Actually, I took my best picture with it.
Here is the link to part one of this series, you might want to start there.
Based on the before stated principles and requirements for the prototyping platform I came up with the following architecture:
On the left, you see the web server where the HTML of the Prototyping tool will be stored. On the right, the different hardware components (sensors and actuators, e.g. buttons, rotary encoders, LEDs) are connected to ESP8266 microcontrollers. In broad terms, ESPs are similar to Arduinos but also offer WiFi connectivity for a low price. In between sits a server to broker and translate the information coming from both sides.
Hey, long time no hear. I hope you are still around and haven’t given up on me. The last two months were quite busy, so I didn’t find the time to write. Sorry for that.
But I have a long list of things I want to tell you. This post will be a short update on the things that have kept my attention.
When I tell people that I build physical prototypes (a.k.a things with knobs, displays, and wires, which demonstrate how physical user interfaces of products that are going to get built will work) they usually smile, often sadly, and say: „Yes, but that’s easy for you since you are such a nerd.“
That’s of course a grand misconception. Of me (probably) and the general situation as a whole. People still believe that extensive programming and electrical engineering skills are needed, but that is no longer true. The nerd barrier has been torn down in quite a few places.
The avid and attentive reader of this blog might have noticed another (silent) relaunch of my blog – the giveaway was the change of design.
This is the result of aspirations meeting reality. As I mentioned before, I wanted to use a small and lightweight engine for this blog and say goodbye to the behemoth called WordPress. Back in September I picked Kirby, since it ticked all the boxes. I bought a license and a decent theme, and loved the fact that I could now write my posts in markup and simply upload the files to the server.
“Umwege erhöhen die Ortskenntnis” (detours expand local knowledge) was a common saying of my philosophy professor after he went on a tangent during class.
I love the saying and I know the feeling pretty well – it frequently happens to me when I start to get interested in a topic. I start to research something, then I notice another interesting aspect, then another, and then another, and then… I guess you can see a pattern there. It’s similar to the process Dory experiences when she is trying to do something in Finding Nemo.