SAP's new Mobility Design Center: Services Described in a Cute Animated Infographic Video

The following video was released by SAP to introduce its new Mobility Design Center. The video uses animated infographics to outline the key features of the SAP mobility design process.



RELATED
SAP's new Mobility Design Center uses user-centered design approach
Putting People First,  9/23/12
Develop User-Centric Mobile Apps: SAP Mobility Design Center
Mobile Consulting & Development
Designing for Mobile, Part 1: Information Architecture
Elaine McVicar, UXBooth, 9/25/12  (also see related posts, listed at the end of Elaine's article.)
Mobile Design Best Practices: Joshua Mauldin's UX Charlotte Talk- Photo, Sketchnote, and Slides 

Tools for Knowledge Junkies: Document Cloud, CALAIS , Linked Data

For all of the knowledge junkies out there, here are a few things that might fuel your passion for interactive information exploration and consumption. Although the tools below were adopted by people in journalism/news related fields, I think that they have potential for use in education and other fields. I'm interested in learning more about how people from different disciplines currently use these tools, and I'd also like more to this list.

CALAIS: "We want to make all the world's content more accessible, interoperable and valuable. Some call it Web 2.0, Web 3.0, the Semantic Web or the Giant Global Graph - we call our piece of it Calais. Calais is a rapidly growing toolkit of capabilities that allow you to readily incorporate state-of-the-art semantic functionality within your blog, content management system, website or application." CALAIS is published by Thomson Reuters
MORE ABOUT CALAIS
PR Video for CALAIS:

How CALAIS Works:

CALAIS for Publishers
CALAIS for Bloggers
CALAIS for Software Providers
CALAIS for Content Managers
CALAIS for Developers
Open CALAIS Content Maps by Jer Thorp

"Jer Thorp is a software artist, writer, and educator. He is a contributing editor for Wired UK. He is currently Data Artist in Residence at the New York Times."

DOCUMENTCLOUD
"DocumentCloud runs every document you upload through OpenCalais, giving you access to extensive information about the people, places and organizations mentioned in each."

DocumentCloud Blog from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.
MORE ABOUT DOCUMENT CLOUD
DocumentCloud Merging with IRE 
Amanda Hickman, DocumentCloud, 6/9/11 (Note:  IRE = Investigative Reporters and Editors)
Newsrooms using Document Cloud
Document Cloud: Not Just For Journalists?  (Excellent article!) Konrad Lawson, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 7/8/11 (Konrad is a Ph.D student in the history department at Harvard University.)
For Techies:  Document Cloud's VisualSearch.js | Autocomplete Faceted Search Queries
Losterium Posterious, 7/9/11


LINKED DATA

-linkeddata.org
"Linked Data is about using the Web to connect related data that wasn't previously linked, or using the Web to lower the barriers to linking data currently linked using other methods. More specifically, Wikipedia defines Linked Data as "a term used to describe a recommended best practice for exposing, sharing, and connecting pieces of data, information, and knowledge on the Semantic Web using URIs and RDF.""

Tim Berners-Lee: The Year Open Data Went Worldwide

"....Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together." At TED2009, Tim Berners-Lee called for "raw data now" -- for governments, scientists and institutions to make their data openly available on the web. At TED University in 2010, he shows a few of the interesting results when the data gets linked up."-TED

LDOW2011: Linked Data on the Web workshop


COMMENT
I plan to share more information related to this topic in future posts.  I welcome input and links from my readers!

Saturday Quick Links: Digital Signage and Digital Out of Home (DOOH), via The Digital Signage Insider, Digital Signage Today, and more

The links:

Walmart and Microsoft Talk Up Digital Signage at the NRF
Bill Gerba, The Digital Signage Insider, 1/14/11
Wirespring


NRF: Walmart unveils ROI data for in-store digital signage campaigns
James Bickers, Digital Signage Today, 1/10/11


"C-Tailing" (Converged Retailing)  - NCR
NRF: Convergent technologies on the retail horizon
Cherrhy Butler, Digital Signage Today, 1/11/11

RELATED
Connecting Your Business to Devices and Customers with Windows Embedded

View more presentations from Microsoft Windows Embedded.
Barb Edson, Sr. Director of Marketing, Windows Embedded

Here are a few resources related to this topic:

4th Workshop on Pervasive Advertising (topics)

The Web Outside: Exploring place-based social media 

(LocaModa blog)

LocaModa's whitepapers

Blogs:

Digital Signage Today

Daily DOOH

The Digital Signage Insider

COMMENT
Designers and developers need to think about off-the-desktop technologies as a new form of the web/internet.  Information architects who understand interactive media/transmedia, cross-display/device, cross-platform, and interaction design within a broader context are sorely needed in this space.  


The presentation below, by Chris Thorne, Lead Information Architect and User Experience Consultant working for the BBC, provides a good overview about this topic:

Ubiquitous IA (Information Architecture): Building for change and web 3.0 

View more presentations from christhorne.
Chris Thorne

Stay tuned!

Over the past months I've been gathering video and photos of my encounters and interactions with digital signage as a consumer/customer/user during my every-day activities such as shopping, traveling, vacationing, and so forth, which will be included in a post or series of posts in the near future.   


I have content related to interaction with various QR tags,  interactive kiosks, interactive displays and TV on a cruise ship, an interactive touch screen at J.C. Penny, and more.  If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that my interests include user experience of DOOH, interactive displays in public spaces, and so forth.  


Note:  Despite all of the technological innovations in this converging field, issues related to context, usability, and accessibility are not consistently addressed from a broader systems point of view.

The User Experience (UX) of the 21st Century Classroom - Adaptive Path

Adaptive Path, a User Experience company,  submitted two concepts to Slate's recent Classroom Redesign challenge.  As part of this project, Slate asked students and teachers to take pictures pictures about their schools.  The pictures were part of the "Through Your Lens" exhibit. The project highlights the fact that many of our schools simply aren't geared for what is required of learning and teaching in the 21st century, as many were built to meet the demands of a society from a long-ago era. 


I think that Adaptive Path's "User Experience of Education" spin might generate some innovative thinking about what we need to do differently in our nation's classrooms, including the process of teaching and learning.   I especially liked Adaptive Path's Touch Screen Desks of the Future. Here is the concept overview, taken from Kim Cullen's Adaptive Path blog post, "The 21st Century Classroom, from a UX Perspective":

"Our futuristic concept focuses on the students’ desks, and emphasizes the importance of being able to quickly reconfigure the classroom for different activities. Each student has his or her own square desk, the entire surface of which is an edge-to-edge touch screen. Each desk connects to the wireless network, allowing the teacher to distribute digital lesson materials from a handheld device.

The desks operate independently to support individual student work, or can be combined in groups of two or four. In a group setting, the combined desks form one large screen to support collaborative work. To support certain activities, the desks can also interact with physical objects when placed and moved around their surface.

The surface of the desk is hinged, so that a student can store his or her personal items inside of it. Additionally, when a desk is opened to a fully vertical position, it functions as a stand-up workspace for delivering presentations. If multiple desks are opened to this position, they form a large contiguous touch screen wall."

In schools, flexibility is key, and I think that Adaptive Path's concept for connected is right on target!  


Here is a challenge for Adaptive Path and other folks involved in UX:   Design a system  to support teachers and learners as education "information architects".  I am sure the cross-pollination between UX, IA, and Ed Tech would be fruitful.


RELATED
Descriptions of Adaptive Path's submissions to the Slate competition:
Touch Screen Desks of the Future
Concept 2 The Modern Trophy Case
All entries to the 21st Century Classroom challenge
About Adaptive Path

Thanks to Jonathan Brill for the link!

Words of Wisdom (and more) from Harry Brignull: UX Roots in Psychology, Design, Info Architecture...and so much more!

Harry Brignull is a User Experience Consultant at Madget in Brighton, England. According to his "about" page info, his work involves "building experiences by blending User Research, Interaction Design, and process consultancy."  Harry's 90 Percent of Everything blog is a well-spring of information and inspiration.

Back Story
I came across Harry's work in 2004 or 2005, when I was taking a VR Class (Virtual Reality for Education and Training) and working on an assignment about large-screen displays.   At the time, Harry was a Ph.D. working in the Interact Lab at the University of Sussex on the Dynamo project, in collaboration with researchers from the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham.

I revisited this work again in early 2007 when I was studying HCI and Ubiquitous Computing, and researching information about collaborative interaction on large displays in public spaces.  The following research article inspired me at the time, and looking back, I consider the work of this team to be seminal, and worth revisiting once again.

Izadi, S., Brignull, H., Rodden, T., Rogers, Y., Underwood, M. (UIST'03)
Dynamo: A public interactive surface supporting the cooperative sharing and exchange of media (pdf)  



(The picture was taken from the Dynamo project's website, and shared on my 2007 blog post, Revisiting promising projects, Dynamo, an application for sharing information on large interactive displays in public spaces.)


Links to a few of Harry's useful blog posts:

UX as Applied Psychology:
Clear Reporting & Critical Thinking:  Why User Experience Needs to Remember its Roots in Psychology (10/4/10)

"There was a time, back in the early 1990s, when almost everyone involved with UX research had a background in Psychology.  Back in those days, the term "User Experience" didn't really exist, and the nearest discipline was Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)..."

Comment:
As a school psychologist, I'm well-steeped in the process of research, observation, and data collection.  I also know that the fundamentals of applied psychology are a very important ingredient in UX work.  Don Norman, one of the "grandfathers" of UX/HCI, was a cognitive psychologist.  He was the co-author of one of my psychology textbooks when I was a university student the first time around. Coincidentally, Norman's book, Design of Everyday Things was required reading for my HCI graduate class.

























Mobile Usability Testing for Low Budgets
Mobile Usability Testing Tip: Recording from Two Webcams
In this post, Harry discusses quick and cheap methods of using two webcams for mobile usability testing. This method could be used in other situations, such as developing presentations. (It might also be applicable for use in therapeutic and special education settings.)

Image: Nick Bowmast


UX Brighton Presentation on Dark Patterns: User Interfaces Designed to Trick People
My Presentation on Out of Box Experience Design  (Harry Brignall)
David Ogilvy: We Sell or Else


RELATED
Links to Harry's Blog Posts, By Topic

• Bad Design
• Good Design
• Information Architecture
• Madgex
• Methods & Tools
• Mobile
• Theory
• User Experience

SOMEWHAT RELATED

Essential Interaction Design Essays and Articles:  Dan Saffer's Lists, Don Norman, and Interaction Design 

Design for Emotion and Flow: Trevor van Gorp's Presentation Slides & References

Trevor van Gorp works at Affective Design. He presented at the iA Summit 2010, a conference sponsored and run by ASIS&T, the American Society for Information Science and Technology.

In this presentation, Trevor discusses concepts such as emotion, attention, and arousal, the differences between novice and experienced users, differences in goals, such as experiential, goal-directed, how stress affects arousal and performance, and other topics, accompanied by clear examples, of ways to incorporate "emotion and flow" principles into web and information design.

It should be noted that "emotion and flow" strategies have been consciously implemented in video games by designers/developers for a long time, and these concept most likely have value across various digital domains, such as multimedia journalism, interactive television, and interactive surface or large display applications.

Design for Emotion and Flow

View more presentations from Trevor van Gorp.


Below are the references from the presentation, as posted on SlideShare:

1. References
   
   
   
   • Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. (1990). Flow - the Psychology of Optimal Experience . New York: Harper Perennial.
   • Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. (1990). Flow – the Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper Perennial.
   • Desmet, Pieter, R. (2002). Designing Emotions . Pieter Desmet. Delft.
   • Russell, J.A. (1980). “A circumplex model of affect”. In Journal of Personality and Social
   • Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2008). Creativity, Fulfillment and Flow, TED talk. 2008
   • Fehrman, Kenneth R. and Cherie Fehrman. (2000). Color - The Secret Influence . New Jersey: Prentice Hall, Inc.
   • King, Andrew B. “Chapter 2 – Flow in Web Design.” 2003. http://www.websiteoptimization.com/speed/2/ accessed on January 21/2007.
   • Hoffman, D.L, Novak, T (1996), “Marketing in hypermedia computer-mediated environments: conceptual foundations’”, Journal of Marketing, Vol. 60 pp. 50-68.
2. 
   
   
   
   • Novak, T.P, Hoffman, D.L (1997), “Measuring the flow experience among Web users,” Interval Research Corporation.
   • Novak, T, Hoffman, D, Young, Y (1998), “Measuring the flow construct in online environments: a structural modeling approach”, Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, working paper.
   • Novak, T. P., Hoffman, D. L., and Yung, Y. 2000. Measuring the Customer Experience in Online Environments: A Structural Modeling Approach. Marketing Science 19, 1 (Jan. 2000), 22-42
   • Rettie, R., (2001), An Exploration of Flow during Internet Use, Internet Research, 11(2), 103 – 113.
   • Simon, H. A. (1971), “Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World”, in Martin Greenberger, Computers, Communication, and the Public Interest, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins Press, ISBN 0-8018-1135-X. pp. 40-41.
• van Gorp, Trevor, J. (2006). Emotion, Arousal, Attention and Flow: Chaining Emotional States to Improve Human-Computer Interaction. University of Calgary, Faculty of Environmental Design, Master’s Degree Project

RELATED
Trevor van Gorp's Boxes and Arrows article:
Design for Emotion and Flow (8/7/08)
Affective Design Blog
Some ASIS&T Special Interest Groups:
SIGVIS (Visualization, Images, Sound)
Information Architecture (IA)
Arts & Humanities