Luca Rosati
April 9 10:30AM
Information is bleeding out of computer screens and into the real world.
We have different names for this: ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence,
emergent systems, spimes. What these names mean though is that the convergence
of physical spaces and digital devices is shaping up a new scenario for the
practice and discipline of IA.
Many of the tasks we accomplish every day require us to move across different
media, devices, and platforms, and often from a digital to a physical
environment and back. A product in a tv commercial captures my attention, I
check the web site for more information, locate the nearest or most convenient
store, ask my social networks for comments, visit the shop, go back to the web
site for assistance or updates. Simple tasks become part of one single, broad
process, but they are rarely conceived, designed, and executed as such. Most of
the pieces of the puzzle are not designed to fit. At times they are not thought
to be pieces at all.
The Web is now largely become a commodity: the challenges to the practice and
discipline of IA lie elsewhere. While the current shift towards an Internet of
things and cross-mediality gains momentum, UX design has to look at the process
and not at the single artifacts. When multiple interactions are designed as
single, unstructured, unrelated experiences but are in fact one, structural and
behavioral inconsistencies are common, and this increases the cognitive load on
the user and hampers the final UX.
Interfaces are bound to touch-points and devices, the experience is not. Since
IA relies on principles largely independent from any specific medium or
practice, it provides a flexible but solid conceptual model for the design of
cross-context models spanning different media and environments and providing a
constant cognitive experience to users.
As every artifact, product, or service, is now part of a larger ecosystem
largely based on information, social patterns, people, and devices, IA has to
become the connector between these different environments and contexts, and
become pervasive.
Through the analysis of brief case studies detailing common activities like
shopping, travel, and health care, the presentation will illustrate a complete
set of design heuristics which can aid IA transition to this holistic approach,
and help IAs better grasp the design implications brought along by the change.
These heuristics are meant to assess key characteristics of a successful
bridge-experience:
resilience, the capability of a process to adapt itself to specific users,
needs, targets, and seeking strategies;
place-making, the capability to help users reduce disembodiment and
disorientation and increase legibility and way-finding in digital / physical
environments;
choice, the capability to reduce the stress associated with choosing from ever
growing sets of information sources, services, goods;
correlation, the capability to suggest relevant connections between pieces of
information, services, goods, to help users achieve explicit or latent goals.
The presentation will use narrative to illustrate the scenarios and the case
studies will provide sample deliverables and methodology for the task and
heuristics being discussed.