uiGarden.net - Weaving Usability and Cultures

2009 Mobile Trends - (Part One)

Fjord — Thu, 21 May 2009 22:32:58 GMT

Nowhere in the industry can the future of mobility be seen as clearly as in Apple’s App Store. 2009 will be a year of wonderful digital bazaars full of innovative apps and services from developers around the world. Homebrew computing will be reborn.

Transforming Taiwan Aboriginal Cultural Features into Modern Product Design: A Case Study of a Cross-cultural Product Design Model

Rung-Tai Lin — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 13:47:11 GMT

With their beautiful and primitive visual arts and crafts, Taiwan’s aboriginal cultures offer great potential for enhancing design value and becoming recognized in the global market. Evidence shows very high prospects for Taiwan’s local cultures to become crucial cultural elements in future design applications. The purpose of this paper is to explore the meaning of cultural objects from Taiwan’s aboriginal cultures and to extract their cultural features. The paper attempts to illustrate how, by enhancing the original meaning and images of these cultural features and by taking advantage of new production technologies, they can be transformed into modern products that meet the needs of the contemporary consumer market.

Driver Segmentation, New Technology and Safety

Pat Jordan — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:38:51 GMT

This paper reports a study in which drivers were segmented according to attitudes and behaviours. The approach was based on a technique known as the Delphi method (Linstone and Turoff 1975) This involves interviewing experts in a particular field – in this case driving and driver behaviour – and coming to a conclusion based on the common ground between them.

Immersion in videogames

Paul Cairns — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:57:46 GMT

User experience is a term that is widely used these days to refer to all sorts of
interactions between people and technologies. But when it comes to videogames, experience is the only sensible word to use. Games are pure experience. And the range of experiences they offer is huge from what it is like to land a 747 at Heathrow Airport to slaying space dragons with a team of like-minded warriors. Thus, when it comes to really understanding user experience in games, it can be hard to say anything that would apply in general. However, one expression that does seem to crop up regularly, and that gamers relate to, is that games are immersive: when people are having a good experience, they get lost or immersed in the game and the world outside the game fades into the background. So what is this notion of immersion? What causes it? And is it the heart of what makes a good game? These are the questions that I have been trying to answer, together with my colleagues and students, over the last few years.

The Role of Ethnography in the Organizational Implementation of IT

Jesper Simonsen and Morten Hertzum — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 17:42:23 GMT

Ethnographic research in design often focus on the initial analysis of existing work practices in order to inform the subsequent design and implementation of new information technologies (IT). However, ethnography may also prove efficient in identifying, analyzing, and evaluating changes to work practices that emerge from using an IT system. In this article we investigate how nurses’ work was affected by the introduction of a large, shared Electronic Health Record (EHR) display in two highly collaborative work situations: the nursing handover, and the interdisciplinary team conference at which all clinicians on shift are present. The use of a display led to unanticipated and interesting new ways of collaborating among the nurses and between nurses and physicians. Evaluations of the initial use of new IT can establish a potentially important role for ethnography within iterative approaches to design as well as within the organizational implementation of IT.