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Interaction 12 in Dublin - Highlights of Day 3

mprove — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 11:15:17 +0000

Dublin, Feb-4, 2012. The forth day of Interaction 12 – actually the third day with a regular conference program in the Conference Center Dublin. BTW_ The CCD reminds me of a database drum, much like the architecture at Oracle’s headquarters in Redwood, CA, just a little bit tilted.

Interaction's workshops were held on Wednesday, which I did not attend because I conducted "my own" VDI workshops with my engineering colleagues at Oracle in Dublin.

Biomimic Infographic

The most beautiful presentation – both visual and by content – was given by Pete Denman. Pete argued that typical business charts only express very simplified aspects of data sets. To demonstrate the flaws of pie-charts he compared the famous illustration of Napoleon's war against Russia 1812-13, made popular by Edward Tufte, with a typical modern pie-chart: 95% French men fucked, 5% kind of fucked (see slide 5 and 6 below).

Pete found inspiration in nature to better represent huge data sets on screen. He developed an app for iPad to display medical data. The photos on slide 9-14 can only give a faint idea of the beauty of animated flowers of data. Very well done. And hopefully an example that encourages other to go into the same direction as well.

View more presentations from mprove

In anticipation of the conference, core77’s interview with Pete.

Rage Against the Machines

The closing keynote by Genevieve Bell was an entertaining Rage Against the Machines – Designing our futures with computing. She joined Intel in 1998 with a fresh PhD in anthropology. Her boss told her to do research for Intel on two questions:

Women - half of the population on earth!
ROW – rest of world – in the sense of "everything outside of the USA"!

Well, others complain about more restrictive research agendas... As said, a very amusing talk.

She continued to provide an short overview on the history of mechanical automata, like the Digesting Duck by Jacques de Vaucanson (1739) and the Mechanical Turk by Freiherr von Kempelen, that eventually lead to a meetup of generations between Furby and Siri:

However,
Mrs. Bell lost me when she indicated that it was Joe Weizenbaum’s intention to pass the Turing Test with his Doctor Script for Eliza. In my opinion it is irritating to bend history just to make it fit into a story line. When such things happen, I start to mistrust other facts and conclusions drawn by the presenter as well. A missed opportunity for a good closing keynote at Interaction 12 in Dublin.

Interaction 12 in Dublin - Highlights of Day 2

mprove — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 22:58:28 +0000

Friday, the second day of Interaction 12 in Dublin. US folks were suffering under jet lags – I had a little hang-over. Did I mention that the conference took place in Dublin? Between 750 and 800 people attended the fifth interaction conference, the first one in Europe. IxDA itself started in 2003 as a mailing list after Tog has pointed out the enemy: Us. Since then IxDA grew as a nonprofit organization to several thousands of people; 28,000 on IxDA discuss, 35,000 on LinkedIn. But now back to Friday_

Sketching sometimes involves coding

Exploring, Sketching and Other Designerly Ways of Working was the keynote by Jonas Löwgren. If you know Bill Buxton and his book Sketching User Experiences - Getting The Design Right and The Right Design you are already familiar with the idea that sketches are not necessarily limited to pencil on paper. Jonas presented several examples that involve – drum roll – coding! Sometimes story boarding, wireframing, and mockups are not sufficient to explore the user experience of a new product, site, or service. Pinpoint is a design study of an interactive visualization to find people with related interests in large organizations (ACM 2010). Jonas and his team developed several iterations until the crowd moves in a natural way. You can also call this approach prototyping, and then consider prototyping one way of sketching. Voilà.

Pinpoint demonstrator video

I just wonder how many people can be visualized before the screen gets too crowded.

Another example. Mediated Body is an acoustic device that senses the aura (vicinity) of human bodies and translates it into sound – same principle as the Theremin. Now, show me how this experience can be predicted without building and using the thing.

Mediated Body /video

Understanding Us

...reminds me of Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan. Big shoes to fill. Dirk Knemeyer chose this title for his passionate talk about unsolved issues between people.

/more photos

Dirk argued for more human and psychological properties in technology (instead of abandoning technical tools at all, and going to the park to play with your kids. Well the truth and future should be somewhere in between.) Starting from C.G. Jung, he presented several psychological models, and built the path to a social web that takes individual mental strength and weaknesses into account. I hope a webcast will be available soon to re-listen to his considerations. Until then, the slides must do.

Sculpture

I love listening to talks that open a new point of view. Rachel Bolton-Nasir used her passion for skulpture as a design lens, to better understand design. And she discussed the dimensions of form / multiple viewpoints / physical parts / bodily empathy / multi-sensory and context for zipcar.

Sculpted! Using Sculpture as a Design Lens

Usability Testing does not test for Social

Dana Chisnell made the point that the artificial situation of usability testing often neglects the social context. In her example a usability test should evaluate the design of a site to calculate your rent, and to choose between several options. The participant started to cry because she never does such decisions without asking her dad, but her dad recently passed away. Very often the context is larger than the space between the user and the screen.
Dana gave another example, the failure of Google buzz. Despite the fact that Google has used and tested buzz internally for quite some time, the product was a failure. Testing does not help, if your test group does not represent the user base.

And the winner is…

For the first time IxDA run the Interaction Awards. This Friday night was the impressive ceremony to announce the winners. Several of the finalists and, of course, the winning projects are presented at Interaction Awards Winners 2012.

Interaction 12 in Dublin - Highlights of Day 1

mprove — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 14:58:15 +0000

Exactly a week ago, Interaction 12 was kicked off by the mayor of Dublin. I mean the real mayor rather than the one in 4square. He talked about (sub)urban planning and the public bicycle system in Dublin. He was proud to say that a minor change in the interaction design prevented the theft of many bikes. Other than Paris (they lost hundreds), the pole to get a bike is not prominently highlighted in a way that everybody can take the bike as soon as it unlocks. Just two bikes were stolen and both were returned. Clever briefing, or clever mayor – you decide.

Disrupt

After a while I decided to like the opening keynote by Luke Williams. He tackled the general problem of large companies (hey, this should apply to Oracle as well) that they are obviously unable to create new disruptive markets. If they have a business, a successful business, they focus to exploit it as long as possible. But they neglect to go for niche markets, because the dollars are earned in the main stream. Blockbuster Video ignored Netflix. Kodak ignored digital photography. Nokia ignored Apple and Google in the mobile phone market...

Luke offered the idea to do exactly the opposite of the (current) cliché. Why –the heck– are socks sold in pairs? – My mind kicked in and said, "yeah, if ~~I have a hole~~ if a friend has a hole in his sock he can buy just one sock to complete the pair. Makes sense!" But Luke continued to explain that a company built a business on selling socks in sets of three. And none of them has the same pattern! Kids and girls in specific love the brand.

/a few more images

Videos shown by Luke_

National Leprechaun Museum

The disruptive highlight of the day was Tom O’Rehilly’s talk on Imagination and Identity. Tom started his career with selling luxury furniture, until he recognized that he was in fact selling experiences. Welcome Tom, to the field of user experience and interaction design. I do not remember why he told the story of Brasil, an island on the shores of Ireland that only appeared every 7 years. But I do remember his stories about the Leprechaun, a little Irish wizard or dwarf that is very hard to track. Tom runs the National Leprechaun Museum in Dublin, which is called a museum for the lack of a better word. It is an experience that turns the visitors into little Leprechauns themselves. You enter through a wooden tunnel that changes its diameter while you walk though. It must be a spectacular effect like Alice through the rabbit's hole.

_{/photo cc by The National Leprechaun Museum}

Interview with Tom O’Rahilly, core77

What If...

The second keynote of the day should be mentioned: What If... crafting design speculations by Anthony Dunne.

/more photos

In addition to the summary at core77, I will try to add more video links for the projects_

Menstruation Machine by Hiromi Ozaki, 2010
Crowbot Jenny by Hiromi Ozaki, 2010
Sushibot Yukari by Hiromi Ozaki, 2010
Design for an Overpopulated Planet
Dromolux by Ludwig Zeller, 2011 - what will happen to the digital natives when they become old?
New Needs in an Augmented World by Ludwig Ziller, 2011 - a device to focus your attention
EM-Listeners - highly visible spectrum police

Related_

Johnny Holland: Interaction 12, Day 1

Shit Interaction Designers Say

mprove — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:09:47 +0000

Last week in Dublin...

Tips'n'Tricks for WebCenter #3: How to display custom page titles in Spaces

mprove — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 09:56:21 +0000

If people don’t know where they are in the web, they tend to get lost in cyberspace. This can be prevented by displaying the page title for your pages in Oracle #WebCenter Portal Spaces. (At least they won’t get lost in your WebCenter space.) All you have to do is to create a custom page template and use it as default in your space. Its head section will contain a few code snippets to display the title. Add an HTML box and enter e.g. <h1>#pageDocBean.title</h1>:

That's it. That is the basic idea.

Caveat: This does not work for wiki pages and HTML pages because they do not have a specific title in WebCenter. #pageDocBean.title will just return 'Wiki' or 'Resource'.

Now let's get a little bit more sophisticated. A space has a title as well. So let's use it:

<h1>#spaceContext.currentSpace.metadata.displayName – #pageDocBean.title</h1>

Are you ready for level 3? Now I want to add more styling, and I want to have a special treatment for the home page to display the tagline for the space. Here is a preview of the final result, first the home page, then any other page in the space:

To accomplish this behavior, I have to use a conditional statement #{ BOOL ? CASE1 : CASE2 }. WebCenter's expressions cannot be nested, hence the conditions will be tested several times to get the desired result:

<h1 style="margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px;">

			<span style="color: #9a9a9a; font-size: 80%;">

			  #{pageDocBean.title != 'Home' ? spaceContext.currentSpace.metadata.displayName : ''}

			</span>

			<span style="color: #9a9a9a;">

			  #{pageDocBean.title == 'Home' ? spaceContext.currentSpace.metadata.displayName : ''}

</span>

			<br />
 

			#{pageDocBean.title != 'Home' ? pageDocBean.title : ''}

			<span style="font-size: 80%;">

			  #{pageDocBean.title == 'Home' ? 'Information Matters' : ''}

			</span>

			</h1>

First I apply an inline style for h1 to remove some space above and below the heading.
Then I ask for the page title, and if it is not 'Home' (every page but the home page) then I display the space name at size 80% and gray.
Just for the home page I display the space name in size 100%.
New line for the page title.
Now the same distinction fot the page name. For every page but the home page I display the page title.
If this code is executed on the home page then I display 'Information Matters' – the tag line for the space – instead of the page title.

Yes, you are correct. Thanks for paying attention. The image of the lady is missing in my code example.

Tips'n'Tricks for WebCenter #2: How to create an Admin menu in Spaces and save a lot of time

mprove — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 16:00:39 +0000

Objects in Oracle #WebCenter Portal have a visibility flag that is set to true or false. But you can also enter conditions. To make something visible just for moderators, you have to replace true by #{WCSecurityContext.userInScopedRole['Moderator']}

I use it to create an Admin menu. The visibility of the folder item in my custom navigation is specified as above. That means that all menu items under that new Admin menu are only visible for space moderators.

One candidate for such an Admin menu would be the Analytics menu item because it is not necessary to reveal it to all space members.

Another item that is extremely useful is a shortcut to Pages and Spaces Actions > Manage > All Settings. If you are a space admin you know how often you have to go there, and how difficult it is to navigate the mouse to the submenu item.

So under my new Admin menu I’ve added an item 'All Settings' with a link to http://YOURWEBCENTERDOMAIN/webcenter/spaces/YOURSPACE/admin.

You can get the link for your space via Pages and Spaces Actions > About > Share Link and append /admin. Note, that you have to check the Redirect flag under Options to avoid the frame-in-a-frame problem.

The following set of screenshot might guide you to create an Admin menu in your space.

#1 - Add a folder to the customized navigation:

#2 - Set the Visibility to mods only:

#3 - Add links to the new Admin menu:

#4 - Set the target path to Manage All Settings, do not forget to check the Redirect option under the Options tab:

#5 - The customized navigation with the new Admin menu:

#6 - The customized menu applied to your space:

_{Republished at theappslab.com}

Tips'n'Tricks for WebCenter #1: How to apply custom resources in Spaces

mprove — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 12:20:04 +0000

This is the beginning of a little series of tips'n'tricks for Oracle #WebCenter Portal Spaces. The background is our migration from Confluence – that we used at Sun – to WebCenter Spaces as a collaboration tool for the VDI engineering team. I want to share my insights so that other teams and users can get a smooth(er) start with WebCenter.

As a space owner and administrator you might have been to Pages and Spaces Actions > Mange > All Settings

… then opened the Resources tab, and skimmed through the lists of page templates, navigations, and skins. And you might have asked yourself, "which of these is actually used in my space?"

It took me quite some time to figure it out. And that's the reason for this posting. You are looking at the wrong spot! You have to go to Pages and Spaces Actions > Mange > All Settings > General to look at the right column under Display Settings. This is the control area where you set the default Page Template, Skin, and Navigation for your space:

So in order to customize any of these for your space, you have to copy an existing resource, add your changes, save, go to the General tab and select your new Page Template, Skin, or Navigation. If you go now back to your space you can see the change in action, a new page template, an updated look and feel, or a new menu bar.

_{Republished at theappslab.com}

Merry XMas and a Happy 2012!

mprove — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 05:20:24 +0000

You can influence life

mprove — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 10:40:00 +0000

Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that you will never be the same again. - Steve Jobs

One Year Oracle SocialChat - The Movie

mprove — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 09:00:00 +0000

Tweet | Like | Watch on Vimeo | Watch on YouTube

You’ve just watched – hopefully – my first short movie. Thank you! Here is a bit of the back stage story.

About 6 weeks ago colleagues from SNBC (Social Network and Business Collaboration) announced a Social Use Case Competition. It was expected to submit a video of 2 to 5 minutes duration on the Social Enterprise (our internal phrase for Enterprise 2.0). Hmm – I had a few vague ideas, but no script – no actors – no experience in film making. Really the best conditions to try something!

I chose our weekly SocialChats as my main topic. But if you don’t do Danish Dogma cinema, you still need a script. Hence I played around with the SocialChat’s archive, and all of a sudden a script and even the actors appeared in front of me. The words that you have just seen are weekly topics. Slightly abridged and rearranged to form a story.

Exciting, next phase. How to get it on digital celluloid? I have to confess I am still impressed by epic. (Keep in mind, epic was done in 2004.) And my actors – words – call for a typographic style already. The main part was done over a weekend with Apple Keynote. And I even found a wonderful matching soundtrack among my albums: Didge Goes World by Delago. I picked parts of Second Day and Seventh Day. Literally, the rhythm was set, and I "just" had to complete the movie. Tools used – apart from trial and error: Keynote, Pixelmator, GarageBand, iMovie.

Finally I want to mention that I am extremely thankful to BSC Music for granting permissions to use the tracks for this short film! Without this sound it would have been just an ordinary slide show.

NeXT startup retreats

mprove — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 13:39:00 +0000

20 minutes on the initial retreats of NeXT Computer...

Frank Ludolph's Last Working Day

mprove — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 14:00:52 +0000

Hi Frank,

today is your last day at Oracle. I cannot belief that retirement is an alternative to designing software and improving products for decades. I might figure it out myself in a couple of years.

Our ways have crossed several times. And I am extremely thankful for that. I still remember my first session on an Apple Lisa. It must have been around 1985. I was still in school, and we were visiting the University of Hamburg to get some orientation on the departments. When I started I chose Informatics. And I suppose the Apple Lisa played a significant role in my decision. Is it fate that I later wrote about Apple Lisa?

I’ve attended your presentation and public demo of the Lisa System at CHI ’98 in Los Angeles. Maybe a video still exists. I should look it up and publish it somewhere.* You had also booth duty for Sun Microsystems – presenting HotJava Views, a user interface for a network computer. And you were handing out VHS tapes (!) of Starfire. I still have mine – but no player anymore.

Then I joined Sun in 2002, and I guess I popped up in your office each time when I came to Santa Clara. The SEED mentoring program finally made it possible that we exchanged and discussed many ideas on the past and future of HCI. Dueling Interaction Models of Personal-Computing and Web-Computing at MEDICI 2007 is one of the results. But do you remember for instance also our jam session with Phil Clevenger on Hello World? Marvelous!

I will miss you at Oracle. Enjoy your life and let’s stay in touch.
Matthias

––

* Even better, transcript and video of CHI 98 are already online:

The Lisa User Interface as presented by Frank Ludolph and Rod Perkins at CHI '98, April 1998 – or click here to see a larger view in Google Video)