We’ve heard about the global phenomenon of a population that is aging, yet there are very little talks about what design strategies should be used for them. Other than the classical stereotypes – louder volume, slower pace yet not condescending, pitch within a certain range, more information, etc. – the impact this tech-savvy population will [...]
While doing some research on Multimodal Usability and User Interfaces, I ran across a list of Three Main Attributes of Multimodal User Interfaces, which on careful thought, can definitively be applied to ANY User Interface. It was a nice refresher which reminded me of why good design is so difficult to achieve, but very rewarding. [...]
It seems one of the most frequent questions that come up when designing a new user interface is “how many options should appear on any given menu?” which depending on the answer is almost always followed by “how many levels down should the system have?” And believe me, neither one has an easy or absolute [...]
(I found this great article by Jared M. Spool) and decided to do an adaptation) From observation and analysis, it seems teams who focus on the long term objectives of a project and an organization are far more likely to create designs that really pay off for the organization, whereas short-term vision teams end up [...]
I had a very interesting experience recently. I was at a customer’s site performing some on-site multi-modal usability testing that involved participants who could perform some of their day-to-day operations via a palm-based device using the keyboard, the device keys, the stylus, or of course, good old speech recognition. But where things got really interesting [...]
How many times have you been frustrated with a telephone or customer service experience? Some people opt for making their feelings public, and hence we often find videos and recordings of those experiences out in the media. Some others (myself included) like to keep them as “war-stories” that can then be shared during parties or [...]
Considering the latest advancements and the impact of social media in our environment, I think it would make sense to borrow a page from social design and re-think who should be the center or “pivot” of our designs. As Joshua points out in his blog, social software has changed the focus of most web applications [...]
As promised, here’s a copy of my presentation from this year’s SpeechTEK in New York: “Customers Request the Darndest Things – 10 Challenges for VUI Designers” Description: Business owners have business goals, objectives, and requirements. Designers bring experience and advocate user needs throughout the design process. So how can we create outstanding experiences when objectives [...]
There was recently a very interesting discussion on the VUIDs board regarding timeouts and their guidelines, so I decided to share with you the ones I use for “inter-word timeouts” (also known as ep.EndSeconds in the Nuance platform, or as incompletetimeout in the VXML world). By inter-word timeouts I’m referring to how much silence takes [...]
I was reading an article this morning about things we can learn from Social Design. In particular, what I liked was the fact that they weren’t trying to analyze the typical examples – Facebook, YouTube, SecondLife, etc. – but rather learn from the mistakes of other less-known ventures. In particular, there were four “Lessons Learned” [...]
