Challis Hodge’s UXblog

Small improvements in form factor and functionality can have a huge impact in the handheld mobile device market. Kevin Werbach in TheFeature.

Kevin writes, “Last month, I bought a Treo 600, the new PalmOS smartphone. I’m still marveling over one aspect: its size. When I took the Treo out of the box, it looked half as big as its predecessor, the Treo 300. The first comment of most people who see it is, “Wow, that’s tiny for a smartphone!” When I actually put the current and prior Treo models side-by-side, however, I was in for a shock. The Treo 600 is slightly narrower, but it’s also taller, thicker, and heavier. In other words, essentially the same size. The many small industrial design changes make a world of subjective difference.”

“I use this example not because I’m enthralled with my new toy (though I admit I am), but because of what it suggests for the mobile world. Subtle improvements can have huge consequences. The same is true when it comes to functionality. A torrent of incremental advances are now producing converged devices that are “good enough” at each of their primary functions. This will have significant consequences for both device manufacturers and operators.”

Getting packages to their destinations overnight is no simple matter. Efficient shipping and receiving is so complicated, in fact, that it has spawned the FedEx Institute of Technology, where researchers will tackle subjects as seemingly disparate as life sciences and transportation. Most of the lofty research taking place at the institute’s new 90,000-square-foot facility in Memphis, Tennessee, can somehow be traced back to shipping, regardless of how esoteric it might seem.

Check out the Design Observer. Writings about design and culture by Michael Bierut, William Drenttel, Jessica Helfand, Rick Poynor.

“Color communicates and it sells everything from products and services to ideas and environments. This helps explain why color forecasting has become such a vital process for so many organizations and industries. In normal times, color trends are evolutionary, changing gradually and subtly in step with cultural, social, economic and technological developments. But these are not normal times and, according to the color experts, the stresses that beset our society are having a rather direct influence on the direction of the color palette.”

“The executive dashboard is a hot technology product. The logical progeny of portal applications and technology, the executive dashboard is a single interface that serves as the point of entry into the masses of data and information within a company that might be relevant to a particular executive.”

Sun to Open a Wal-Mart Compliant RFID Test Center “Sun Microsystems today announced that it will be opening an RFID test center where Wal-Mart suppliers can test their RFID solutions to guarantee compliance with the Wal-Mart standard.”

Camera phones, easily concealed, can be used to take pictures the shooter has no business taking. This is a particular problem in South Korea, which now decrees that all new handsets emit a beep whenever a picture is taken. I’ve also noticed the use of cell phones being disallowed or restricted in a bunch of places these days. I’m assuming it’s for the same reason!

Molly Steenson at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, recently launched The Hub, a resource and discussion site on interaction design. I feel the Interaction Design Institute’s definition of Interaction Design is too broad, still there is room for much discussion in the vast continuum between the ground-level definition of interaction design and broader definition of general design. Labels aside, we need a forum for these are topics. I’m looking forward to the discussion and debate on The Hub and hope that it can compliment what we’re doing at the Interaction Design Exploratory Group.

Molly writes, “We’ve officially launched today, in conjunction with the Foundations of Interaction Design Symposium– and we’re discussing the symposium as it happens on the Hub blog. (My colleague Walter Aprile and I are blogging the symposium as it
happens, to accompany the live video stream.)”

“We would love your participation and feedback on the symposium - and on the field of interaction design. As we see it, interaction design takes place at the connection of technology and personal interaction with products, environments, spaces, platforms, services, social networks. Each of these areas has its own way of talking about interaction design, and too frequently, they don’t cross over. The purpose of this site is to find common language, to look at the intersections, and to energize collaboration across existing boundaries.”