Envision event - Prague
I am currently flying from Prague to Rome to catch my connection flight back home, to Athens. During the last couple of days I was in Prague attending the Envision event organized by Microsoft. Once I am in the plane trying to kill time I shall start typing in some thoughts about those two interesting days.
What is the Envision event?
The Envision event in Prague was the first out a series of events or should I say a series of workshops aiming to give the chance to people in the Internet industry to discuss about current and future Web design, Web interfaces, user interaction, user experience and what kind of feeling and emotion do all these generate to users.
Who was there?
The panel consisted of a set of very interesting people. People from world leading Internet agencies, people from Microsoft and the Microsoft Expression and Microsoft Silverlight team, people from the Microsoft Surface team and people from academic area.The people who actually made me an impression and influenced me are the following.
August De Los Reyes
The former creative director of the Windows Hardware Innovation Group, August de los Reyes is the Experience Architect for Surface Computing. He is a member of the Advanced Studies Program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design where his research area is in design and emotion. August applies his findings to his everyday work at Microsoft while continuing his research interests as a visiting associate at the University of Oxford and a doctoral candidate at the Technische Universiteit Delft.
Prof. Wolfgang Henseler
Prof. Wolfgang Henseler (born 1961) is Managing Creative Director at Syzygy Deutschland GmbH based in Bad Homburg and a Professor for visual communication, usability, user experience and electronic customer relationship management (eCRM) at the University of Pforzheim. Professor Henseler leads the design department, the usability lab and the trend and innovation division of Syzygy Deutschland GmbH. He is an expert for customer- and user-oriented e-Business solutions as well as a user and brand experience specialist.
Rob Lawrence
Rob invents new stuff that works. Previously European Creative Director of IBM, a founder of Proximity and a producer of the Big Breakfast, Rob has several patents, a Guinness record and is co-creator of the gameshow Survivor. He’s also an occasional lecturer at Central Saint Martins. Currently he is the Creative Director, Avenue A | Razorfish.
Giles Colborne
Giles has been making products more usable for over fifteen years. He was President of the UK Usability Professionals’ Association from 2003-2007 and speaks frequently on usability in the UK and overseas. He writes on usability for Revolution magazine and was one of the editors of the PAS 78 accessibility guide from the British Standards Institute.
What did we discuss about?
There was an enormous amount of information that went back and forward during these two days. What I will do is try to highlight a few of what I think were the hot spots of the event.
Me and August de los Reyes chatting
Silverlight and the Expression Suite
Microsoft has been keeping a distance from design software all these years. Designers have been using Adobe products which have become a standard for print and the web. Now Microsoft wants to play the game and is entering this area with the launch of Silverlight and the Microsoft Expression Suite. We talked about how Silverlight can be picked up by the market and how it will affect the current design and development process.
Microsoft claims that with XAML, an XML based language that describes design and motion, will eliminate the gap between the designer and the developer. Microsoft aims to help the designer and the developer to communicate by talking the same language, XAML. Design packages by Microsoft, the Expression Suite generates designs in XAML. Then the developer uses the same file, the XAML file, to work on the development of the design. This results to proper communication between the two roles.
Some people mentioned that the role of the designer and that of the developer are getting confused and that new roles might emerge through this process. August de los Reyes is talking about “Design-led engineering”.
My personal opinion to this is that, from an Internet agency point of view there are two ways to compare Silverlight to Adobe products. The first is when trying to sell a web site where the biggest rival of Silverlight seems to be Flash. The second is to compare it when designing and developing Web sites. In this case I get the feeling that it compares more to Flex and AIR rather than directly to FLASH. There is a lot more behind the scenes than just a frame based engine. There are pure programming environments such as Visual Studio, the Dot Net Framework along with SQL Server and all the rest back office products.
The Editor strikes back
We talked about the Web 2.0 trend and user generated content. Some mentioned that this was tried out and it failed. There is too much bad quality content being produced and that this has a negative impact to the Web experience. The Editors will strike back while the user generated content will be somehow limited. Or should we better say, more thoroughly moderated?
I totally agree to this point. There is so much junk wasting time, web space, bandwidth and therefore money.
Stay minimal
We talked about minimal and simple user interface design. Statistical measurements have shown that simple and minimal user interfaces have a better impact to users. Users seem to have long term emotion bonding with the simple and the minimal.
People argued that we have reached the years where applications can and should be accessible by different devices and different platforms. This leads to simpler user interface designs that are easier to port to different platforms and devices while keeping consistency through out the entire platform range. Hence simple seems to be good!
Go organic
Try to move from the strict structure of Web sites. Give an organic behavior to web sites by altering the user interface and structure according to user behavior and action. This is a known technique and is known as customization. Yes we have been doing it, or should we say, we have been trying to do it. No, we need to go big about this. Customize the experience according to:
- community behavior
- user behavior
- user history of actions
- assumptions about the user
From GUI to NUI and from WIMP to STaG
Prof. Wolfgang Henseler is a user interface specialist. He believes that the mouse is the worst control device ever invented. He said that the mouse is so indirect and unnatural compared to what we actually do with the use of it that it should be replaced with speech, touch and gestures.
He and August de los Reyes talked about the progression of Graphical User Interfaces (GUI) to Natural User Interfaces (NUI). This means WIMP (Window, Icon, Menu, Pointing device) will be replaced by STaG (Speech, Touch and Gesture).
Believe it or not there have been interfaces that are NUI-like these days. Even in mass production and this is no other than the iPhone. Apple also announced the MacBook Air which understands a number of gestures on the touch pad for zooming in and out and flipping backwards and forwards in navigation environments.
Microsoft is designing Microsoft Surface. No much need to be said, just watch the videos! This will launch in limited production August 2008.
Emotion
The activity of doing something on the web, directly affects the user. It creates an emotion, good, neutral or bad it creates one! This is what we need to harness. Create good emotion when user visit our web sites.
Objects have intelligence embedded into them hence can produce emotions to people who use them. Anything that is used for some action crates something. There is nothing created from nothing.
People should feel good about the whole experience on the Web - just like the way a great book is more than just words on a page.
Now what?
Overall the event was very interesting and inspiring. All discussions took place in a very friendly environment and the panel was there for us to ask any questions we had.
It all comes down to find projects and clients to apply these thoughts in a way that will help the users and our business. We all need to start talking the industry forward and try to apply new ideas and new methodologies to our projects. We make our industry, we drive it and therefore we have to put our thoughts onto the table and apply them!
The panel
The venue
The venue again
Nerdy quote:
Character develops itself in the stream of life
Goethe