ERGOSIGN Blog

Introduction

When Steve Jobs announced the iPad, he emphasized Apple's embracement of a new third segment of devices, right between the smartphone and traditional computer/laptops. The target hereby - at least in the beginning - lies in the home context, in which content such as websites, photos, movies and books is primarily just consumed passively.

From a user interface designer's point of view the iPad as such is particularly interesting in three ways:

• With the iPad Apple sticks to the same interaction paradigm as on the iPhone: Except for the Home button the interface is completely touchbased. However now the size of the iPad's display provides enough screen estate to avoid the frequent collision of controls and artefact happening on iPhone, especially in games.
• The temptation to twist the current passive character of the iPad into more active content producing scenarios is immense. This at the same times raises quite interesting constraints and challenges for the touch-concept. Especially the correct estimation how soon touch-interaction with the device gets inefficient and un-ergonomic for example when entering text, will be crucial.
• In the medium term the iPad can integrate usage scenarios in the home context, that until now were distributed across several devices. This directly inclines tasks such as checking email (previously done e.g. on a Blackberry), surfing the web (previously done e.g. on a laptop), reading ebooks (previously done e.g. on a Kindle) and media consumption (previously done e.g. on a HD-recorder) etc...

Overall the iPad stands representatively for a huge exploitable potential, especially for us user experience designers whose brain cells never stopped buzzing since Steve's keynote.

In the following we sketch two usage scenarios, which highlight the advantages of such an (integrating) tablet in the home context, which might even be shared by multiple family members.

(Disclaimer: Of course we are aware that there were similar devices and concepts before the iPad. But judging from the current media feedback, it is safe to assume that - just like the iPod and the iPhone stand for a fundamental change in the music and smartphone businesses - the iPad will revolutionize the tablet-business.)

Scenario #1: Personalized Radio for Father Homer

Until now Homer turned on his radio every morning to start the day with good tunes mixed with news and the weather update. The only problem is that either the taste of the DJs is questionable or the frequency of news is too low.

With our new radio.app this service can be tailored much better: Countless semantic connections through custom artist-tags, neighbourhoods of shared musical taste, individual news-intervals are just a few benefits to mention.

Besides its light-weight portability the tablet bears a key advantage in this scenario by leveraging its touchbased interaction. The interface scales beautifully with the complexity of the usage context, starting from trivial (Start, Stop) to precise gesturebased navigation through the tag cloud by zoom & pinch. Furthermore different views can be switched through simple swiping in the upper half of the screen.

Scenario #2: Interactive Learning for Daughter Lisa

Lisa perceives the static representations in her physics schoolbooks way too abstract thus extremely boring, which reflects directly into her grades.

With our new learning.app she is now able to view all experiment setups from different perspectives, zoom in and most importantly replay them as movies at any speed.

The advantage of gesture based controls in this scenario is obvious: Besides directly tangible manipulation of the view angle, the level of represented information adapts naturally by zoom & pinch. Furthermore the setup itself can be re-arranged on the screen by dragging its parts just like in real life without any indirect interaction (mouse or keyboard).

Eventually this natural interaction makes the physical laws for Lisa transparent and conclusive. Any error in her setup gets highlighted instantenously both in the calculations (bottom screen half) and in the schema (upper half) via live simulation.

ERGOSIGN proudly supports UXcamp Europe 2010, which takes place on May 29th and 30th in Berlin.

Leveraging the advantages of the contemporary barcamp-principle, designers discuss, collaborate and present hot topics from all UX-related domains.

Tickets are free, all you have to do is register (early) on the barcamp's wiki ...

We look forward to great sessions!

Prof. Dr. Dieter Wallach is holding a presentation today on the topic "HCI: From Theory to Practice and back" at the Informatisches Kolloquium des Hamburger Informatik-Forum e.V.

• Montag, 1. Februar 2010
• 17 Uhr c.t.
• Vogt-Kölln-Str. 30
• Konrad-Zuse-Hörsaal
• Gebäude B

Right in time for the jesters' high season, we designed four carnival icons in 128px, 48px, 32px, 24px and 16px to download for free!

Jump over to our free icons in our icon shop...

ERGOSIGN contributes to this conference with two presentations:

A Best Practice Approach to the Design of Natural User Interfaces

by Prof. Dr. Dieter Wallach and Martin Radvak
Usability Fundamentals Track, Thursday , 27th of May at 1:30 PM

Natural user interfaces, especially multi-touch systems, are becoming increasingly established in productive scenarios in which "classical" GUIs turn out to be less appropriate. This presentation describes guiding solutions for the arising conceptual and user-centred design challenges focussing on the platform and posture of tabletop-based systems like Microsoft Surface.

Establishing Cross-Cultural Collaboration in the Field of User Centered Design

by Dr. Marcus Plach, Sebastian C. Scholz, Aurobinda Pradhan and Jayaram Srinivasan
Experienced Practitioners Track, Thursday, 27th of May at 4:15 PM

A process of establishing collaboration between a German and an Indian UCD service provider is presented, built on principles of modern communication theory: By following five phases gradually common ground was reached, allowing both partners to control the growth of trust and mutual understanding – eventually to deliver successful cross-cultural UCD projects.

We look forward to meet you at UPA2010 in Munich!

The ERGOSIGN Award 2010 for outstanding efforts in "Media Information Sciences and Digital Media" at the University of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern, Zweibrücken was presented on Friday, January 15th.

The prize comes with a 500.- Euro purse and is awarded for the 6th time. This year's recipient Stefan Kovachev finished his studies with an excellent 1.1 grade. In his brilliant diploma thesis he evaluated different implementations of the Java Persistence API (JPA) regarding performance, features, documentation and usability.

What’s the advantage of scalable vector-icons?

In the development of modern software a plethora of visuals and icons is used. The ideal solution would be that one icon library feeds all potential applications such as tool bars, splash screens, tree views, buttons etc.

How to design XAML icons

ERGOSIGN designs vector icons in Adobe Illustrator. Subsequently, they can be refined in Expression Blend Designer and transformed into XAML code.

This procedure enables us to keep using our familiar design tools of choice and thus to avoid any compromises regarding quality. Furthermore, the icons can also be exported as printable EPS-files without any problem.

How to integrate XAML icons into WPF

The integration of a XAML icon library into WPF is quite simple. All XAML icons are delivered as a single XAML resource file that can be imported into any existing WPF project.

If you need professionally designed vector-based icons in XAML, just contact us here.

It's the start of 2010, which by the way is the year of ERGOSIGN's tenth anniversary, and the redesign of our website is finally online.

Particularly noteworthy are the following changes: