You only have to see this YouTube video of a child attempting to look through a magazine by “swiping” the pictures to know that Apple’s iPhone and the advent of universally usable touch interaction has truly changed the world.

People just want to touch.

We’ve seen this done badly in quite a few applications, most notably ATMs and kiosks that provide a combination of hard and soft keys, where you need to push a hard button to do one thing, then switch to an on-screen soft button for another.

And of course we’ve seen the evolution of it being done very well from the first generation iPhone, to the iPad, and on to a plethora of competing tablets and smartphones. Then last year in an uncharacteristically bold move even Microsoft, the behemoth behind the most prevalent operating system in the world, reset the paradigm of personal computing  with Windows 8, an OS optimized entirely for touch.

Like it or loathe it, this was a monumental shift and one that signaled their unparalleled vote of confidence in touch and what they see as the desire of the world’s users to interact with software by physically touching it.

What has been played down by mainstream media is that, while the world  has been adopting and coming to grips with the world of touch-SCREEN interfaces, the true digital innovators have been developing alternative technology and inviting the world to touch everything around them.

What was once quite an aspirational, almost fantasy vision is now becoming reality. I can still remember my reaction when I first watched that futuristic Corning video on how screens and our interactions with them would no longer be confined to devices. I was at once amazed, then dismissive, then a little hungry but ultimately I came away excited.

Last night as I watched this demo of a new device from Fujitsu that takes this from dream to reality, I was once again gripped by that excitement as I started to think about the possible applications of this technology.

We’ve seen this type of technology used in some truly amazing ways but in the same way that astounding gesture-based interactions have become a reality in our own homes  the practical applications of touch and gesture interactions in our lives are set to revolutionise how we go about even the most mundane of tasks.

Tom Cruise’s shenanigans on Minority Report might have seemed far-fetched and laughable to many at the time (probably because it was in the context of Cruise attempting to act) but this is no longer a real possibility.

It’s today.

Now. Where’s my flying car??!

The post How Touching appeared first on Chrysalis - Digital Blog.

Article via Fastcocreate.com by Meg Carter

"I wish my son had cancer," declares a print ad that, as well as raising awareness for the organization behind it, has sparked debate about what is and what is not a suitable tone and sentiment in charity advertising in the days since it ran recently in London’s Evening Standard.

The ad is for Harrison’s Fund–a charity set up by the parents of Harrison, a 6-year-old boy with the degenerative condition Duchenne muscular dystrophy, which is incurable, barely known outside medical circles, and receives little research funding. Its aim is to raise money towards bringing Duchenne therapies to market.

With no marketing budget, creative agency AIS London agreed to work with the charity after Harrison’s Fund founder, Alex Smith, created an ad himself that ran in media space he secured and achieved only limited impact.

"Harrison is the nephew of our marketing and new business director, who sits on the charity’s board," says Geoff Gower, London creative partner at agency AIS. "For now he’s a chirpy 6-year-old. But Duchenne will soon slow his muscular development until, ultimately, his heart will stop–probably before he’s 20."

Initially, the agency’s thinking ran along more traditional lines.

"Because these kids live with the disease [and] they are very cognizant of when they will go, our first thoughts were along the lines of kids writing their own wills," Gower says.

"But this felt rather obvious. All of us felt that, as a parent, surely nothing can be worse? And when we plucked up courage to mention this to Alex, he said it’s just how he felt–and had said it, a number of times–as research into many other conditions is better funded, offering at least a percentage chance of success."

It was, though, a bold line to take.

So the creative team worked closely with Smith to present the sentiment within the ad as a personal perspective. Emphasis was also placed on downplaying the art direction to make the ad look and feel stripped back, not advertisey. The image finally chosen is a photograph taken of Alex and Harrison during a break in shooting.

So far, the finished ad has received considerable support among other parents of children with Duchenne. However, some online comment on the charity’s Facebook page has questioned the merit of, in effect, setting up different childhood illnesses in competition for donors’ support.

"This isn’t and never was about shock tactics or positioning the fund as the charity that rails against other organizations," Gower insists, stressing AIS’s track record working with other charities, including CoppaFeel!, a campaign aimed at promoting breast cancer awareness among young women.

Rather, it’s about presenting the anguish of the situation, in an honest and realistic way, that families like Harrison’s find themselves in. He adds: "The whole thing feels like a very personal quest, which is what it is."

In the week since the ad first ran, at least one other national newspaper–The Independent–has run it for free, prompting ITV and BBC news to carry the story, which, in turn, has helped raise thousands of pounds. Most surprising of all, however, was a piece about the fund produced by the BBC World Service which quickly secured more than £2,000 from . . . Brazil.

The next step is to build on the awareness now raised with a second ad in coming months. "The challenge now is to keep momentum going," Gower says. "And it’s really exciting, because what we have achieved so far is the biggest response we’ve ever had from a piece of advertising so small."

http://www.fastcocreate.com/1682960/is-i-wish-my-son-had-cancer-appropriate-ad-copy?utm_source=twitter

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When it comes to content on the internet, what’s the difference between loving and ‘liking’ something?

The rapid pace in which we consume, ‘like’ or ‘share’ a piece of content on the internet before moving onto the next thing, makes the act of returning to read or watch something twice, increasingly rare.

This is an awesome Tapestry slide by Robin Sloan.

Read it and let me know your thoughts in the comments – is there a piece of content on the internet you have consumed more than once or that you regularly return to?

http://tapestry.is/fish

(oh, and the analogy of the fishy will make sense after also…)

The post Loving On The Internet appeared first on Chrysalis - Digital Blog.

As a User Experience designer for Deepend, I create user journeys for people I don’t know and who I may never meet, every day. My goal is to enable these users to interact with an interface with ease and intuition. However, what I had overlooked was the reality that these interfaces were not always in the digital space.

I recently read a statistic that more than 1.5 billion people in the world have never even used a computer. It made me think, can UX extend beyond digital and into life? Can I help someone on their journey far from my traditional area of expertise?

Every day I come into a job I love and take for granted the ease of my bus ride in and my daily challenges. I started to think of ways I could help some of these people I will never meet and those whose journey in life is much more difficult than my own. What I decided to do was help by challenging myself beyond anything I ever imagined. I decided to climb a mountain. A really big one.

My sister, Lana, works as a communications assistant at the SAN hospital in Wahroonga. She works closely with Operation Open Heart Australia. A humanitarian organisation that provides heart surgery to children in south-eastern Asia who can’t afford, or don’t have trained surgeons, to execute such complex operations.

This aid struck a cord with me. I approached Lana and we decided to help raise funds for Operation Open Heart and to do it by reaching the summit of the biggest mountain in South East Asia. Borneo: Mount Kinabalu.

Deepend funded the cost of my hike as part of their new Positive Change Initiative. Once booked, Lana and I set up a page and used social media channels to help us raise over $1700 for Operation Open Heart. As rewarding as that was, the greatest reward was reaching the top.

On the 15^th April 2013, our journey began… and it was not easy. The stairs; in no way were they user friendly. I carefully calculated every step, felt every breath, every bead of sweat and every heart beat until I reached the top at 6:20am on the 16^th April, 4098m above sea level.

No one could ever prepare you for a view like this one. The sky was on fire and the giant rock beneath my feet was millions of years old. I was standing on top of the world. Being up that high and being so small in comparison certainly makes you question your existence and your journey in life.

My passion for user experience design, in turn saved a child’s life; whom I will never meet. My climb to the top started in the office and ended on a mountain. It has made me realise the opportunities and experiences you can create for yourself and others with an open mind, an open heart, a goal and a little creativity.

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Google Implemented a little easter egg as a way to celebrate Atari’s hit title. Just Google image Atari Breakout to inject a little old school fun in to your day.

Google

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This speech that was given to a graduating collage class in 2005 by author David Foster Wallace, 3 years before he took his own life, has been edited into a videogram by The Glossary . The video is very engaging and worth checking out, however whilst they quote the speech as now being within reach (or interest) to a wider audience via video, I actually think the speech on its own is highly engaging. You can find the full speech here: http://web.archive.org/web/20080213082423/http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html

Yes, it may seem at times to be a message of morality, with a couple of seemingly Hallmark moments, but I think it trancends this and remains something a bit special.

Via The Glossary

In 2005, author David Foster Wallace was asked to give the commencement address to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College. However, the resulting speech didn’t become widely known until 3 years later, after his tragic death.

It is, without a doubt, some of the best life advice we’ve ever come across, and perhaps the most simple and elegant explanation of the real value of education.

We [The Glossary] made this video, built around an abridged version of the original audio recording, with the hopes that the core message of the speech could reach a wider audience who might not have otherwise been interested.

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Sydney Theatre Company has teamed up with Suncorp in an effort to make the trip to the theatre more affordable for everyone.

For 20 bucks you could see Cate Blanchett in The Maids or Hugo Weaving in Waiting for Godot (one of my favourites!) and many more performances showing this year.

Pretty sweet deal I think!

Tickets go on sale Tuesdays and performances are the following Monday to Friday.

http://www.sydneytheatre.com.au/what’s-on/suncorp-twenties.aspx

The post Hey you! Want to see world-class theatre for $20? appeared first on Chrysalis - Digital Blog.

No Apple, not you too. Really, no. You were supposed to be the good ones, the ones we user experience folks turned to when all around was chaos and disarray. Arguably, you were the company where user experience as a practice was born (all hail Don Norman). And now this.

My recent experience with you, Apple, has lost me the last little bit of UX innocence I had left. I am disappointed in the way that only an 8 year old boy discovering that Santa is not real can understand.** I am heartbroken.

Such an easy thing to go wrong. Upgrade to the new Mountain Lion OSX. How do you do that? Well, through the App store on the Mac, obviously. Really? Why not a direct download, or automatic upgrade like every other computing platform? Or maybe even through the automatic software updates feature on the Mac? That would be too easy. Where’s the mystery in that? Where’s the excitement?

So I open the Mac App store (for the first time in my many years of Mac ownership, mind you) to upgrade my MacBook to the latest OSX. I know there’s a fee, so I have asked and been granted this as an office expense. Extensive paperwork has been filled out to purchase this upgrade. I am ready.

No Apple ID on this computer. Ok, no problem. I’ll create one.

First hurdle: security questions. I look at the list. I don’t know the answers to any of these things… certainly not with the kind of certainty one would need when something has gone wrong and I need to remember the answers correctly. I must be getting old, but I can’t remember the name of my first pet (it could have been one of at least four, but who knows which came first?), the first dish I learned how to cook (is “tea” a dish?), or where I flew the first time I was on an airplane (I can barely remember the last place I flew on an airplane, let alone the first).

I am a user experience guy, so I run a poll of my adjacent co-workers. None of them can answer any of these questions. There was a great Forrester Research report written while I was there, and the title was fabulous: “Menus should be clear, not cute.” The same should definitely apply to security questions.

So I get through the security questions, and make careful notes of my answers so that if I ever have to use them in the future, I will have something to refer to. I play fast and loose with the answers hoping that Apple won’t know that I’ve used the pet name that was my favourite as a teenager, not my first. Oh wait, just realised I gave the wrong answer and it should have been the cockatiel I had called Chuck. Damn.

I muddle through the rest of the Apple ID setup, and it goes smoothly enough – except that I spent so much time answering security questions, and doing random usability testing off the back of it, that my session timed out and I had to do it all over again. I take some responsibility for this as I may have gone and made myself a coffee and chatted with a colleague about the zombie apocalypse.

Next, okay, all done. Back to the App store to make the purchase. Hit the download button, agree to the price. The download starts, goes all the way from 0 to 142mb then stops. An error appears in small red letters. It reads, rather helpfully: “An error has occurred.”

Here’s the Forrester Research expert review criteria for giving a major failure to an error message: “There are several instances (or one major instance) where required fields are not clearly indicated or an error message is not integrated into the display, does not describe what happened and why, or does not suggest how to fix the problem.” Pow. Failure. FTW, Apple.

I click the download button again. Nothing. Same error. I do it again (not sure why), and I get the same result. As I hover near the download button with my cursor, an ‘X’ appears. I click it. It’s right beside the error message and I assume this will clear it. The whole download item disappears. I mean really disappears. It’s no longer in my purchases. No download link appears on the original description screen. It’s like it never happened.

And then an email arrives, saying my account has been billed $20.99 for the pleasure.

I download a free app from the app store just to make sure it’s not my computer or network. Works perfectly first time.

I write to Apple support after trying to find an answer in the support section. Nothing. I Google the problem. Many many other customers have the same problem. One clever customer has written a short description of how to make your aborted purchase reappear. It works. Score: “regalialilith” on discussions.apple.com = 1, Apple = 0.

I have another chance to get the download working, a fresh chance, a clean slate. It fails. Again.

I write to Apple support. They come back straight away saying they have reset the download and I should do it again. I try it again. Same result – all the way up to 142mb and then kablooie. I write back to Apple support saying (and I’m paraphrasing here) “Sort it out or give me my money back”. They issue a refund and don’t even bother to try to sort it out. Only problem is, I actually really wanted to upgrade my computer, and now I can’t.

Next day I get a follow-up email from Apple support.

They write (not paraphrasing – this is the real email text): “I wanted to send a quick note to see if you are still experiencing any difficulties with the iTunes Store. Resolving your issue is important to me, so please don’t hesitate to reply if you need any further assistance.” Forget that I wasn’t doing anything in the iTunes stores for a moment, but I have already been issued a refund because they couldn’t fix the problem (or couldn’t be bothered).

Me: “Thanks for following up. But I’m a little confused. Your last email you said you issued a refund, so I assumed that you were not able to actually fix the problem and I will just have to live without the mountain lion upgrade. If I try to purchase it again, will I have the same problem again? It doesn’t feel like any fix was put in place – lots and lots of comments on the web about this problem from other customers. If you can provide me a guarantee that I will be able to download the update either through the App store, or some other more reliable means, I’d be happy to re-purchase it.”

Apple support – directly quoted from their email: “Craig, we cannot promise that the issue won’t persists again also you’ll need to purchase OS X Mountain Lion using another Apple Id because once we refund an item purchased from Mac App Store, you cannot purchase again using same Apple Id.”

Me: I wonder if Don Norman has any opinions about the Zombie Apocalypse.

**Editor’s Note: the author is in no way making a comparison between Don Norman and Santa Claus. Though there definitely is a resemblance.

The post et tu Apple? appeared first on Chrysalis - Digital Blog.

Who can forget Barack Obama’s historic 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns, with their groundbreaking use of social media as a powerful political tool and its record-setting online fundraising successes. Barack Obama’s Chief Digital Strategist, Joe Rospars, and Stephen Muller, the Obama campaign’s Video Director, offer an overview of how the campaign managed to unite and mobilise 13 million online supporters toward a single goal of electing President Obama. Following the talk, they will speak to Michael Brissenden, who was the ABC’s Washington correspondent leading up to the 2012 election, and is the author of American Stories.

Supported by the City of Sydney.

http://www.swf.org.au/component/option,com_events/Itemid,124/agid,3558/task,view_detail/

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It’s great to see we are trying to make disabled people’s lives easier.. or more FUN!

Some great recent examples:

1. The touch sleeve “Access4Kids”

“Access4Kids is a wireless sleeve that uses a sensor system to translate movements into fine-motor controls. With a mere swipe or press on one of the patches, those lacking fine-motor skills gain a whole new level of control and access to touch-technology.”

2. The Hearing Impaired telephone

“The amplified captioned telephone displays a transcript of the talk in real-time on its large color touchscreen.”

3. 3D Printed Paintings “Midas Touch”

“A group of students from Harvard have come up with an innovative new way for the visually impaired to experience art along with everyone else. The project is called “Midas Touch” and uses 3D printing to make visual art more accessible.”

4. Railway station guided path for the blind

“Europe’s busiest interchange station – Clapham Junction – has become the first station in the UK to be equipped with a guided path for blind or partially sighted passengers. Braille signs have also been added.”

http://www.psfk.com/2012/12/touch-sleeve-tablet.html

http://www.psfk.com/2013/01/hearing-impaired-telephone.html

http://www.psfk.com/2013/04/3d-printed-paintings.html

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