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User Experience Design for Ubiquitous Computing

Wine Rack
I think 2005 was the year we began living in the world of commonplace ubiquitous computing devices. That year Apple put out the screenless iPod Shuffle, Adidas launched the adidas_1 shoe, and iRobot launched the Discovery-its second- generation vacuum robot. Sadly, even though we live in that world, the user experience design of most everyday ubiquitous computing devices-things you see in gadget blogs-is typically terrible. That’s because we do not address ubicomp user experience design as a distinct branch of interaction design, much as we did not treat interaction design as separate from visual design in the early days of the Web. In the last couple of years, I have conducted research for and designed a number of ubicomp user experiences. In the process, I’ve seen some of the seams between industrial design, interaction design, architecture, and ubiquitous computing user experience design. In this article, I have tried to pull together some approaches that seem particularly valuable in the ubiquitous computing user experience world. None is unique to it: They’re all general design guidelines, but they seem to apply particularly well to the particular design challenges of this field.

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Add a Comment* Comments on this Article

[…] Kuniavsky di ThingM ha scritto articolo sul design di esperienza dell’utente nell’ubiquitous computing per interactions […]

Posted by Stu Collett on November 25th, 2008 at 8:52 am:

Great article,

Thanks,

Stu collett.

Posted by Jon on November 22nd, 2008 at 10:04 am:

Mike’s personal blog, over at Orange Cone, has some more great insights into ubiquity and technology.

Posted by Kicker Studio on November 13th, 2008 at 6:55 pm:

[…] Follow Bruce to his Wired article, Things Overheard at the Internet-of-Things Symposium. “It’s not about a new race of blessed objects, but about connecting mundane, already-existing objects.” In that article is the cryptic line “Shadows and Manifestations… an exciting, interesting and profound change” which refers to Mike Kuniavsky’s PICNIC talk Shadows and Manifestations (pdf) or watch the video. Mike expands on his thoughts in a post called PICNIC08, Directories, and Buffers, which is an examination of the glue that will hold together the IOT. Mike also has an article in the Nov/Dec Interactions Magazine on User Experience Design for Ubiquitous Computing. […]

[…] Kuniavsky of ThingM wrote an article on ubiquitous computing user experience design for ACM’s interactions magazine. The user […]

 



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