I may have “hinted” I was not going to get an iPad quite yet —and here I am: writing a review of my experience with it in the last 30 hours or so since it came out on sale. (If you don’t want to read the story leading up to the acquisition of the iPad, scroll down to “After the Purchase”)

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BEFORE THE PURCHASE A bit of context around the last-minute decision: it all came to DJing applications like Mixr, Wireframing tools like iMockups, and quite frankly, the Origami option for slideshows in the Photos app in the iPad. This is all in addition to the many application in my iPhone I knew I could also use with the iPad (mostly sequencers and music-controllers).

Sometime after Stone Temple Pilot’s free concert in Indy, I decided to prepare myself with food provisions, laptop, and a good book (on my Kindle app for the iPhone) and departed towards an undisclosed and remote Best Buy location at nearly 3 am, following the various rumours that every Best Buy store with Apple Solution Consultants would be carrying a total of 15 iPad per store.

I must say I had never, ever, camped out or attempted to queue for dreadfully long hours before for a consumer product —until now. I thought I would want to do it at least once just for the experience and “to say I’ve done it”. Period.

I arrived at Best Buy… to an empty car park and not a soul to be seen anywhere around. I started to think perhaps I was at the “wrong” Best Buy location, but I couldn’t be bothered to go to another one. Clearly, I seem to have overestimated people’s enthusiasm for the new “magical & revolutionary” device in this part of the country (perhaps they didn’t know about Best Buy carrying in them?).

I managed to sleep for a great chunk of the time I was there. It wasn’t until 4 am that a couple of Best Buy employees arrived (to set up the iPads for display, I imagine). The first Apple fan-boy car arrived shortly after, followed by just another one by 7am. At least I knew I wasn’t the only one there early for the new iPads, but nevertheless, it was nothing like I expected it to be.

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By now, I’m convinced any pair of headphones cable manufactured by Apple is purposely design to break or fall apart after some determined amount of time. It’s a pity to have such good quality products with such poor quality accessories. 

Do you own an iPod? iPhone? Does your USB cable start peeling off from both ends? How about your earbuds?

On my way back from SXSW Interactive last week, I came to realize my iPhone headphones had stopped working —full stop. Not the most pleasant feeling to have mid-air when you just want to sit back and relax listening to M83.

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For lunch today, I decided to enjoy my recently-mastered Indian dish once more and finally give a closer look to the latest Interactions magazine instead of going out. Reading Interactions is one of those things that I wish I had more time to do: I want to dissect and take in almost every article, every time. I like to treat each issue like required reading for university.

Looking for an article to pick, I came across “User Research-Driven Mobile User Interface Innovation: A Success Story from Seoul” by Jay Chaeyong Yi. Clearly, the word “mobile” caught my attention immediately.

The article describes a study done in South Korea regarding the use of SMS and Instant Messaging in mobile phones between various groups of users. These include teens and young adults; those who are “born to talk” and “not to talk”. The author highlights the differences between text messages (SMS) and mobile instant mesagges (MIM) in terms of their nature and context of use.

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Sure, this game may be prone to potential injuries, but it was nonetheless great fun to experience it.

Produced by Ergonomidesign and developed for the Microsoft Surface, Sonicspree is a music quiz game in which players are presented with many upside-down album covers of various artists (rotating around the edges of the Surface). As a new song starts playing, players have to swipe the covers towards the middle of the table to reveal the cover-art of each album. Once the right cover is spotted (the one according to the song playing at that time) players must drag the album cover back to the “container” in front of them to collect that cover. Once someone manages to do that, a new song starts playing and the game continues.

I had the chance to play with this (as well as having my first encounter with the Microsoft Surface) at Interaction 10 in Savannah, Georgia (US).

Take a look at the actual gameplay to get a better idea:

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(To clarify, “Latest” is purposely within quotes. I’m sure is not quite the “latest”)

By now, many have seen the much anticipated “Apple Tablet”, in photos, videos, or have read about it in your favourite blog/news source. Maybe you are burned out with the topic from skimming your Twitter feed alone.

But the device everyone had been talking about for weeks/months has been shown, and despite the various rumours about the names it could have been given (and the names some people were “so sure” would never be considered) it’s called the iPad.

(even the “female hygiene product” jokes seem overdone already… and it’s been only 2 days since the announcement.)

It’s a thin, gorgeous-looking mobile device that looks and behave much like a current day iPod Touch, or an iPhone. Yet despite having 3G capabilities, Apple has built the iPad without the chance of making/receiving phone calls. The similarities with the previously mentioned devices saves you some paragraphs to read in this post.

Nice, isn’t it?

Well, I’m mostly disappointed for a number of reasons —purely personal and based on timing. Others not. But let’s begin with what I reckon are *WINNING* points about this device:

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Just in case there are people who still doubt that Google’s Chrome OS may just be all we need in an ultra-portable computer, here is yet one more example showing that more and more things that previously required a proper desktop application running on a conventional operating system, can now be done through the web browser.

My professor and thesis adviser Dr. Davide Bolchini sent me the link to this video today, and I have to say I was rather impressed. Not entirely by the transition of the slides or the choice of Bruce Springsteen as background music (as it was on the original video —The video above was “enhanced” with music by music mastermind William Orbit). I was really impressed with the fact that it was apparently done in less than 10 minutes using something called Stupeflix Editor: an online video tool.

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I’m proud to announce that the current topic of my Master’s thesis at IUPUI’s HCI programme, has been published as an article in the current issue of Interactions magazine.

The article was co-authored between my thesis adviser, Dr. Davide Bolchini and myself, under the supervision of Dr. Anthony Faiola, executive associate dean of the school of informatics at IUPUI.

The topic? It’s about mobile user experience. More specifically, it’s about how to anticipate it with the help of simple paper prototyping —a familiar concept to most practitioners in the fields of interaction design and usability.

“Paper-in-Screen” in itself is a prototyping technique that allows practitioners to anticipate the mobile user experience without the need to create high-fidelity, interactive prototypes (which are generally time/resource-consuming).

The origins of this prototyping technique were within one of my independent studies from the past Autumn semester at IUPUI. Dr. Bolchini gave me the freedom to work on any design-related project of my liking. With “mobile interaction design” being one of my most salient interests, I decided to design an application for the Apple iPhone. That application is called Vertsumption.

In the process of prototyping the application, we discovered (practically by accident) the ability to anticipate certain aspects of the mobile user experience that otherwise, would have required a couple of lines of code and some time with Adobe Fireworks.

I will go into more detail about the technique itself and the results from testing it with practitioners when I’m finished with my thesis project (the topic is the same as the article). I still need to do some more affinity diagramming with the obtained results for it all to come full circle.

If you are a subscriber of Interactions magazine, you shall see the July-August issue soon in your post box. The article is also available in PDF format at ACM’s Portal web site.

I’m really glad to see this article in a publication like Interactions. I consider it the “norm” for people in my professional field. It is an honour in itself to be featured in the same magazine where Don Norman has a regular column.

If you are a practitioner in UX/IxD, I hope you find it useful, but regardless of your field of expertise, I hope you find it interesting.

Here’s an article I came across thanks to my (sometimes neglected) daily email Google Alerts on “Interaction Design”. It’s an article on Design Thinking by CEO and president of IDEO, Tim Brown. It appeared on the June 2008 issue of the Harvard Business Review. I was lucky enough to come across a link to the article in PDF (Thanks, ideo.com).  

Harvard Business Review? Yes. That may be because design thinking seems to be just as valuable and applicable to business, marketing and product-development as it is to user experience an interaction design.

Tim Brown provides a couple of simple examples to illustrate what design thinking is:

[design thinking] - a methodology that imbues the full spectrum of innovation activities with a human-centered design ethos.

This speaks directly to the need to go beyond the salient issues of a design problem or product requirements. It’s about more directly observing people’s lives, their wishes, their needs, their likes and dislikes about whatever is being designed.

That sounds rather compelling. And it should be. After all, user experience and interaction design never stops at the end-cycle of that mobile phone, that controller or that alarm clock.

This next example seems more concrete, in relation to a “real-world” example:

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By looking at this trailer, you might understand why I’d be so interested in Gary Hustwit’s documentary:

From the Objectified’s web site:

Objectified is a feature-length documentary about our complex relationship with manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them. It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about the designers who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It’s about personal expression, identity, consumerism, and sustainability.

Clearly, this pertains almost any kind of designer: visual, industrial, web…

The sole thought of going deeper inside the mind of those who think about “what is going to happen” (quoting the trailer) and the reasoning behind the associations we make with the products we engage with are some of the key selling factors for me. They speak directly to my Psychology background.

I’m looking forward most particularly to the pieces featuring IDEO’s Bill Moggridge (responsible for making the term Interaction Design meaningful) and Apple’s Jonathan Ive (… —no explanation needed).

This movie should be coming out in DVD or online, after it’s select-cities tour around the world.

If you have had some sort of difficulty in the past trying to define what Interaction Design is (specially if you call yourself an Interaction Designer), this video shall help get you closer to that answer.

IxDA’s co-founder David Malouf leads the over 70-minutes long conversation, alongside fellow Interaction Designers Ted Booth and Jennifer Bove.

This video doesn’t only address where Interaction Design currently is, but mostly importantly, it attempts to provide a clear(er) idea of what is. I found this very helpful for various reasons. I think Jennifer Bove says it best during the video when she asks “Have you ever tried to explain to your mum what you do?”. My easy way out is to say “I design web sites”, but if you are reading this, you are likely to know that it’s not as easy to define your profession compared to Doctors and Lawyers.

The discussion touches on various topics that I’m glad to know I’m not the only one who had questions on. What is our clay? What is our tool? (Illustrator? OmniGraffle? Flash?); where do we land in the scheme of the product (or services) development? (Is interaction design more marketing? science? creative force? business analysis?) What exactly are we borrowing form Human-Computer Interaction? Ergonomics? Industrial Design? The discussion even brings in Agile Development into the mix —exploring how exactly interaction designers are placed within this new and widely implemented development process.

This video leaves you with many things to think about.