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The future with gestures
The highlight of Wednesday lineup of events at the UX Week conference was, for me, Dan Saffer's workshop on designing gestural interfaces. The overall approach to this session was incredibly tactical, and we focused primarily on on exploring gesture through touch, with fingertips as input device. After a quick, but comprehensive walkthrough of critical considerations for prototyping a touch-based interface, the room broke into about six groups who each worked through the task of prototyping an installation for a music store who's been losing customers to Amazon and iTunes. With services like iTunes and Last.fm being such an integral part of my hunt for new music, this exercise presented a unique challenge is considering what experiences belong solely to the physical act of flipping through racks of vinyl or CDs that aren't normally replicated in an online experience.
The one question that I'm left with after this workshop, though, is how gestural interfaces might change how we interface with technology on a daily basis in the future. Touch-based interfaces already exist in many public locations from airline check-in kiosks to self check-out at the grocery store. But, with an iPhone in so many people's pockets (and I've never seen such a high penetration of iPhones in a distinct population as at this conference), how will touch and other gestures continue to impact personal computing?
The overall track of Tuesday's other sessions focused on the experience of service design. While hearing about how Zipcar has approached their business model and embraced experience as being essential – and exploring how Comedy Central tackled building an extensive archive of tagged clips for The Daily Show – uncovered interesting approaches to process, this thread didn't produce any lasting "a ha" moments for me to draw from. However, I did manage to end the day with the most exquisite service experience at Masa's, a SOMA restaurant that serves up new French cuisine. I have a feeling, though, that I might encounter some issues passing off the $200 bill as being a "research expense."
written by ahaschke on August 14th, 2008 @ 10:27 AM