Projects
MusiDash
Posted on | April 27, 2010
MusiDash is the perfect travel companion for music lovers. Its amazing graphics mimic a car dashboard while the app’s easy navigation lets users access their music library for favorite cruising tunes. Change displays, shuffle albums or keep track of the time, your battery level and cell signal – it’s all here in MusiDash. Click “…More” to learn why you should download this App today!
You know how hard it is to call up music from your iPod library while you’re driving. The buttons are so small, it’s nearly impossible to read them without causing an accident while behind the wheel. If only someone would develop an app with large, readable buttons that would make it easy to find your favorite music while in the car! Well, MusiDash has done just that.
MusiDash is a multi-utility app that works for your car or home. The MusiDash application has awesome graphics that look just like a car’s analogue clock with sub dials. This little beauty is going to fit right in with your dashboard, whether you go with a portrait or landscape layout. You can even change the backlight color to match your car’s interior or let MusiDash handle the lighting by switching between daytime and nighttime modes automatically.
My Schedule
Posted on | April 27, 2010
Now you have your schedule at your fingertips thanks to My Schedule application.
Forget having to write down your schedule on papers that often get lost, or which you have forgotten to take with you just when you need them.
Starting from Scratch? http://…
Posted on | April 15, 2010
Starting from Scratch? http://8fnmq.th8.us
Foursquare/Gowalla/Yelp check-…
Posted on | April 13, 2010
Foursquare/Gowalla/Yelp check-in app growth
Twitter Weekly Updates for 2010-04-09
Posted on | April 9, 2010
- Playdate with iPad http://7ob8n.th8.us #
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Playdate with iPad http://7ob8…
Posted on | April 8, 2010
Playdate with iPad http://7ob8n.th8.us
Playdate with iPad
Posted on | April 8, 2010
I finally made it over to the Apple Store today to play with the iPad. While handling it, like most other devices that come out of Apple, is pure pleasure, I still won’t buy it. Here is why:
1) I don’t spend a lot of time traveling on planes and trains
2) I don’t have young children
3) I am not much into games
4) I already have a small laptop and an iPhone.
If you don’t see yourself in any of the use cases listed above, then you are better off saving your hard-earned $500.
San Francisco Apple store has 2 large tables with 10 iPads on each. Most people start by checking the utility/productivity features (Address Book, Email) and then quickly move onto video, books, movies and games. Especially movies and games.
Frankly, I am a bit puzzled by this device. It’s not a replacement for a laptop, nor for your iPhone or even your iPod (too big to drag around). It’s sort of… in between. The problem is, unless you are sitting on a plane, you probably don’t need an in-between solution. It lacks important features like a camera, for example. It’s not very good for doing a lot of typing (better than on iPhone but still awkward and not nearly as good as using a physical keyboard). It doesn’t tilt up. The list goes on.
It didn’t help that I got stuck while using a keyboard on iPad. iPhone conveniently highlights the main action button once you start typing. As a normal lazy person who doesn’t want to think much, I now learned to trust iPhone to let me know what I need to tap to enter the text or prompt the most likely next action. iPad doesn’t highlight the most likely to tap button – and it took me a few hits on ‘delete’ button (back arrow with x), the closest and brightest one, before I found “Go”. Hmmm…
"Go" button on iPad is hard to find
That said, I do think that this device will be a hit with preschoolers and elementary-middle school children. It makes sense to them. It can make reading interactive, it can make education more fun. “Poking” the screen and using gestures is natural for kids, and for that, if I was a parent, I would have gotten an iPad.
I am already being asked to re-design existing apps for iPad, and I encourage my clients to really think whether their iPhone apps will get any use on an iPad. Upon some reflection, the answer is often ‘No’, or ‘Not yet’ for utility, productivity, and many lifestyle apps.
Google Search and OXO Grip
Posted on | April 7, 2010
Much of the discussion on the CHI-KIDS LinkedIn group has been about how kids search for things on the web. Within the group, rumors have surfaced that there is a special lab at Google that is working on developing better ways to search. I designed multiple web and mobile educational apps for children and have some familiarity with this user group, so that got me intrigued, and I did some of my own digging.
A NYT article from December 2009 summarizes Google’s latest findings:
- Pre-teen kids are not well-versed with multi-step keyword searches. Given a task to find out, say, when Lincoln was born, they would often try to type in the entire question into the search box
- Related searches seem to resonate with kids very well (makes perfect sense since it provides a degree of interactive guidance to the kids who have harder time resolving a situation when they are stuck)
- Visual search (both images and videos) is much more effective and intuitive for kids. Interestingly, since “Bing used more imagery than other search engines, it attracted more children. Microsoft says Bing’s audience of 2- to 17-year-olds has grown 76 percent since May”.
- Kids are likely to benefit greatly from good voice-enabled search solutions
While the results of these studies are certainly useful, they are not really revolutionary by themselves – at least for anyone who worked on apps for kids (or simply has kids). It makes sense that kids are looking for visually informative, intuitive ways to communicate with search engines in a human way.
What I thought was more interesting is that Google is seemingly not working on any specialized solution for kids. Instead, Google recognized that what kids want is, to some extent, what everyone wants. Kids naturally follow the most intuitive, straightforward and “human” interaction patterns, such as asking a question when they need information. Of course, then we grow up and learn all those synthetic keyword search strategies and other tricks – in other words, we give up our natural way of doing things in order to communicate with computers. But once technology catches up, we are happy to go back to our natural ways for a superior user experience, given such option. Google smartly recognized that creating a search experience that would work for kids would also work for adults.
Roll the tape back to the late 80s. The founder of a small housewares company observed that elderly people with diminished dexterity due to arthritis and other progressive issues had troubles gripping narrow sleek handles of kitchen utensils. Sam Farber developed his line of OXO Grip kitchenwares with thick, non-slip, rubbery handles specifically for the aging segment of the market, but as soon as the product went to market, it became a hit with everyone – not just the elderly! Everyone recognized a superior, more usable product – even people that could manage the thin handles with no pain preferred the comfortable, secure feel of a thick, rubbery (yet stylish) one.
These are just 2 examples from 2 very different industries. Often people that are in charge of designing products (or interfaces) have learned the rules of the game way too well for their own good. It’s hard to get out of that mental shell and look for really intuitive, natural patterns. Looking to the ‘bookend’ user groups, such as children, or elderly people, or perhaps another user group that falls out of the mainstream for clues can be quite enlightening. Designing for marginal groups may often result in a better solution for all.
For now, we do know that Google has already extended the length of its search field which can accommodate longer queries and questions. What’s next?
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