Research BLOG

This blog is dedicated to Creative/Art Direction, Brand Management, Interaction Design, UX, Usability, Industrial Design, Interface Design, Storytelling ...and related areas of interest.

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Form Follows Function (FFF) – An unclear design principle?

Frank Lloyd Wright introduced the word ‘organic’ into his philosophy of architecture as early as 1908. It was an extension of the teachings of his mentor Louis Sullivan whose slogan “form follows function” became the mantra of modern architecture. Wright changed this phrase to “form and function are one,” using nature as the best example of this integration. If Frank Lloyd Wright was alive today, he might agree with Andreas Burghart that FFF is an unclear design principle.

In a blog post for Centigrade UI Architectures, Andreas Burghart explains why FFF is an unclear design principle. The conclusion is that form and function must be balanced. It also means that form must always communicate main function correctly.

For the field of interface design, this means that aesthetics and usability are equivalent and mutually influence each other: a beautiful interface improves its perceived and actual usability. Visual poorly communicated functions have a significant negative impact on usability. Good usability increases tolerance for suboptimal aesthetics.

Ideally, however, for the development process usability and aesthetics has been treated with the same importance, so that the best result can be achieved for the user. This is also the basis and philosophy for our daily work as professional user interface designers and usability engineers.

Reasons for misunderstandings

The origin of FFF is very old and oftentimes leads to some misunderstandings. In addition, FFF originally referred to architecture, which is why mistakes are made when you transfer it to the field of digital media.

The simplicity of FFF is Blessing and Curse at the same time. On the one hand, it is a catchy alliteration. On the other hand, it is a complex issue that cannot be communicated entirely through the simplified statement...

Read Andreas Burgharts article

Start with why

Simon Sinek's simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership all starting with a golden circle and the question "Why?" His examples include Apple, Martin Luther King, and the Wright brothers. See the video from TED.com below.

Specialmoves shows gesture-based interactive design experiments

Neil Bennet speaks to the London-based agency Specialmoves about what its building for itself and clients that push the boundaries of how users interact with projects.

"The whole idea of gestural interfaces is still in its early stages, with technologies like the Kinect, Leap Motion and the Intel Camera which are all great concepts to help create and control interfaces with our human body without the use of a controller or remote.

One rather creepy project used the Intel Gesture Camera's facial tracking system to create a portrait who's eyes followed you around the room.

"Each device has its different uses. The Kinect can detect the human skeleton and use the whole body to interact with applications, but the Leap gives us the power to engage apps with our hands and fingers. The thing to remember is that there are always flaws and limitations to the devices.

"The limitations we found with the Leap concern the boundaries and distance of hand position before the device can pick up your hand and fingers. The size of different peoples' hands can cause issues, so we had to find a balance with maximums and minimums. The rotation of the hand can also confuse the device, as fingers start disappearing. Also in testing, we found that device itself is pretty unstable in different lighting environments.

"Knowing these limitations with the Leap, we do have to work around and adapt to these issues in our designs, but we will be creative and create any application in the best way to show off the best bits about the device."

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The best interface is no interface

by Golden Krishna for Cooper

How do you make a better car? Slap an interface in it.

Creative minds in technology should focus on solving problems. Not just make interfaces.

As Donald Norman said in 1990, “The real problem with the interface is that it is an interface. Interfaces get in the way. I don’t want to focus my energies on an interface. I want to focus on the job…I don’t want to think of myself as using a computer, I want to think of myself as doing my job.”

It’s time for us to move beyond screen-based thinking. Because when we think in screens, we design based upon a model that is inherently unnatural, inhumane, and has diminishing returns. It requires a great deal of talent, money and time to make these systems somewhat usable, and after all that effort, the software can sadly, only truly improve with a major overhaul...

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Xbox Kinect One takes it to a new level

"The Kinect sensors will revolutionize computing experiences. The precision and intuitive responsiveness that the new platform provides will accelerate the development of voice and gesture experiences on computers," said Bob Heddle, director of Kinect for Windows.

"The new Kinect has really taken it to the next level and may have taken a step out of just games. With the ability to know about your muscles, emotions and heart rate, it really has the opportunity to also jump into other industries – like medical and sports. The new Kinect is really exciting and I personally cannot wait to get my hands on one, so I can start my experiments and research on people.", says Stephen Chan, senior developer at Special Moves.

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Volvo Air – MotionLA Auto Show Design Challenge

Volvo Car Corporation: Monitoring and Concept Center VMCC -- Minimizing weight and complexity, while maximizing driving enjoyment, is the philosophy behind the Volvo Air Motion Concept. Thousands fewer components are employed than in a traditional car thanks to the powerful, yet simple, compressed air motors.

Google’s 3 Big Future Changes – And How to Adjust Your Internet Marketing Strategy

Google is no stranger to algorithm tweaks and Adwords changes, but the recent Hummingbird update and full-on move towards semantic search represent the company’s biggest search shifts since the early 2000s. Even much-feared updates like Panda and Penguin pale in comparison to these changes. In this post, we’ll talk about three recent Google changes and touch on what they mean for your Internet marketing efforts. Don’t worry: As always, we’ll leave you with some useful takeaways to help you position your business for an uncertain but exciting future.

Hummingbird: Googling the Future

Hummingbird has gotten the lion’s share of the public’s attention, so we’ll start here. Previous updates like Penguin and Panda had certainly made substantive changes to the ways in which Google’s search engine indexed and ranked sites. For instance, Penguin identified new black-hat techniques and increased the “penalties” for such tactics. By contrast, Hummingbird uses an entirely new algorithm to translate search queries into relevant results. If Penguin and Panda were the virtual equivalent of oil changes, Hummingbird is analogous to a wholesale engine rebuild.

In a nutshell, Hummingbird represents the most advanced iteration of an evolving system known as “semantic search.” Unlike the keyword-driven algorithms that Google once used – and that search engines like Bing and Yahoo will continue to use until they release Hummingbird-like updates of their own – semantic search aims to uncover the actual intent or meaning behind everyday search queries. In some circles, this is known as “natural language search.”

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If you know how a cow feels, will you eat less meat?

By Anne C. Mulkern and ClimeWire

STANFORD, Calif. — Inside a lab on the Stanford University campus here, students experienced what it might feel like to be a cow. They donned a virtual reality helmet and walked on hands and feet while in a virtual mirror they saw themselves as bovine. As the animal was jabbed with an electrical prod, a lab worker poked a volunteer’s side with a sticklike device. The ground shook to simulate the prod’s vibrations. The cow at the end was led toward a slaughterhouse.

Sculpture "Hold me close to your heart" by Patricia Piccinini. — Sculpture "Hold me close to your heart" by Patricia Piccinini.

Participants then recorded what they ate for the next week. The study sought to uncover whether temporarily “becoming” a cow prompted reduced meat consumption.

The motivation wasn’t to make people vegetarians, said Jeremy Bailenson, director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab. But the project hoped to uncover whether virtual reality could alter behaviors that tax the environment and contribute to climate change. “If somebody becomes an animal, do they gain empathy for that animal and think about its plight?” Bailenson asked. “In this case, empathy toward the animal also coincides with an environmental benefit, which is that [not eating] animals consumes less energy.”

It’s one of several environment-related experiments Bailenson is conducting in the lab, all tailored toward revealing whether there are new ways to encourage environmental preservation. Volunteers also have virtually chopped down a tree, a study aimed at examining attitudes toward paper use. Others took a virtual reality shower while eating lumps of coal — literally consuming it — to gain insight into how much was needed to heat the water.

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When Flat Design Falls Flat

Rick Debus writes for Six Revisions about IOS7 graphics as an example of inconsistent flat design, and the possible solution of an "Almost-Flat Design".

“What’s wrong with iOS 7? It’s inconsistent.”

Read the full article at Six Revisions

Lovemarks – The Future Beyond Brands

Brands have run out of juice. More and more people in the world have grown to expect great performance from products, services and experiences. And most often, we get it. Cars start first time, fries are always crisp, dishes shine. Saatchi & Saatchi looked closely at the question: What makes some brands inspirational, while others struggle?

Kevin Roberts is the CEO Global of Saatchi and Saatchi, and best selling author of Lovemarks. During his talks he explains the importance of infusing any business with Love. TEDx In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience.

Designing the new Volvo FH

The new Volvo FH from Volvo Trucks beat thousands of international products and wowed a panel of design experts to win a red dot product design award -- an internationally recognized quality label for outstanding design achievement and one of the world's most sought-after seals of design quality.

Moneyball: Video Essay – The Seventh Art: Issue 2

A video essay on the motif of seeing (things differently) in the 2011 film Moneyball by Bennett Miller. Essay written and edited by Christopher Heron and narrated by John Boylan. The Seventh Art is an independently produced video magazine about cinema with profiles on interesting aspects of the film industry, video essays and in-depth interviews with filmmakers set in casual environments.

A rare peek at the Google graphic guidelines

In April 2011, Larry Page took the reins as Google’s CEO. He didn’t waste any time getting down to business. On his very first day on the job, Page launched an incredibly ambitious effort to redesign the company’s main products, including search, maps, and mail. He wanted them to be beautiful--Google had never been known for its visual polish--but he also wanted them to be cohesive, more like a true software suite than a jumble of disparate digital tools. In the years since, Google’s products have improved leaps and bounds, aesthetically speaking, largely while working within the same shared design language. Here’s how they’re doing it...

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Why Things Fail: From Tires to Helicopter Blades, Everything Breaks Eventually

Robert Crapps article for Wyred:

"In the corner of building 4, a massive complex at Ford headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, the ghostly skeleton of a pickup truck endures a constant torment. The truck has no wheels, no bed, no seats, and no steering column—it’s just a vacant shell and a set of pedals. Inside, a pneumatic piston is positioned to press on the gas pedal over and over again, night and day. It’s a test of the whole accelerator assembly, but engineers are focused on one simple part—the hinge that connects the gas pedal to the frame..."

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Deep inside Taco Bell's Doritos Locos Taco

In early 2009, three years prior to Taco Bell's 50th anniversary, CEO Greg Creed was already experiencing something of a midlife crisis. "Our target audience is [customers] in their 20s. Turning 50 makes us sound old, and I didn't want to sound old," Creed explains. "I said, 'When we have our birthday, I don't want a cake or a celebration.'" So he issued a bold directive to his team instead: "I said, '[let's] reinvent the crunchy taco,'" Creed recalls.

The team soon assembled for an all-day ideation session at Taco Bell headquarters, where 30 different product concepts were considered, Perdue says, including new forms of burritos, nachos, and taquitos. But one idea, from Doritos-maker Frito-Lay, stuck out: a Doritos-based taco shell pocketed with Taco Bell ingredients.

"It was basically an image [of this taco] on a piece of paper, with a written description. I don't know what technology they use. We didn't even taste it; it was just more of, 'Hey, this is what it could look like,'" Perdue says. "It was like, 'Holy crap!' Nobody had ever done this before: turning a Dorito into a taco shell.

It was just mind-blowing at the idea stage." Steve Gomez, Taco Bell's food innovation expert, recalls seeing the first mock-up. "Every day I see a lot of concepts--sketches on paper, written words about products--and my job is to turn those products into reality," he says. "But in all my years as a product developer, I've never seen a concept like this. The product didn't even exist yet, and already people knew this idea was going to be huge."

Read Austin Carr's full article here

The other half of Henry Dreyfuss

Henry Dreyfuss, the most important figure in the innovation of anthropometrics in the industrial design process. Dr. Flinchum introduces Dreyfuss’s firm and illuminate the complexities of its working processes.

Beyond the HUD

User Interfaces for Increased Player Immersion in FPS Games

Master of Science Thesis

ERIK FAGERHOLT
MAGNUS LORENTZON

Department of Computer Science and Engineering
Division of Interaction Design
CHALMERS UNIVERSITY OF TECHNOLOGY
Göteborg, Sweden, 2009

The concept of immersion has been adapted by game developers and game critics to describe a deep and positive game experience. While the definition of this concept varies, the user interface of the game is often said to affect the degree to which players can immerse themselves in a game experience. In cooperation with game developer DICE, this master thesis aims to investigate how the notion of immersion affects, and is affected by, the user interface UI of first-person shooter games, with the ultimate purpose of delivering user interface guidelines for increased immersion.

By conducting a study of contemporary first-person shooter FPS games, the current state of user interfaces in FPS games is documented. With the addition of a subjective study of FPS games as well as games of other genres, a design space for UI designers is mapped out in order to provide a structure upon which the guidelines can be built. A literature study of various resources within the fields of ludology, cognitive science and media studies is conducted in order to gain increased understanding of what immersion is and its relation to the game experience. The knowledge acquired is used to formulate various hypotheses of how player immersion is connected to the user interfaces of FPS games.

These hypotheses are evaluated by user studies and user tests. Looking at the results of the user tests and the literature study, a final definition of immersion is proposed, upon which the guidelines are based. The first guideline, Know Your Design Space, explains the user interface design space of FPS games and encourages UI designers to look at it as a set of tools. Know Your Game discusses how the competitive focus of the game and the game fiction affects the user interface from an immersion point of view. The guideline Establish Player Agency focuses on how the player can be transferred into the game world by acting within it as an agent rather than simply a player of the game. Finally, Strengthen the Player-Avatar Perceptual Link suggests how the user interface can link the player closer to his in-game character on a perceptual level...

Download Master Thesis as Pdf

Life360 Branding the new family circle

Moving Brands worked with LIfe360 to reposition their brand as an intuitive family management service - re-designing their app with an identity system that resonates with parents and millennials alike. After a slow start, launching in 2008 with an andriod only app, the months following the launch of the new brand has seen them grow exponentially, now with more than 40 million users.

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A collaborative remote whiteboard

Moving Brands worked with Hitachi's product and engineering teams as user experience experts, designing an advanced collaboration tool – a touch-based whiteboard that would aid in the creation, exchange and collection of ideas.

Through integrating a custom user interface with existing backend technologies, the Advanced Collaboration System has been developed to allow businesses to increase meeting efficiency and collaborate both locally and remotely. This System will serve as the centre of every meeting, while allowing input from multiple devices.

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