Interactions - September/October 2008

and a large touch screen would afford us the desired perception of simplicity that was so critical to product adoption. The single button would be used to start and stop collecting data in the field; this button, then, needed to be usable by either hand. The large screen implied that the device would become sizable enough that two hands could be used to hold it.

By deciding to restrict ourselves to only one button, we certainly faced challenging interaction design moments later in the process. Since every touchable element needed to be approximately a centimeter square, we had to scale back functionality in order to fit necessary controls onto the screen. Yet our single-button decision also helped us to manage feature creep, as it’s difficult to add features arbitrarily when there is no physical room to afford this feature growth.

so we quickly moved into explorations about how the visual design could support a message of simplicity and power.

These explorations were done before the user interface had been fully designed to help us understand how color and scale affected the overall product. These exercises gave us a sense of how many touchable targets could really be supported, and to provide a sense of how dense information could get.

September + October 2008

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is a lot like designing on-screen interactions, but it involves working with a different cast of team members who have different skills; additionally, this team frequently has a very different orientation to the design problem. To be effective, a convergent designer can focus their role in the process by helping to:

• Build interdisciplinary communication—balance the desires and motivations of industrial designers, mechanical and electrical engineers, software developers, and interaction designers.

• Be a facilitator and bridge builder—remind the team of user needs, market forces, competitive landscape, and technical constraints.

• Work smarter, not harder— avoid the “try everything” approach. Guide the team to a shortlist of plausible and compelling alternatives that can be meaningfully explored.

• Be realistic—don’t ignore real constraints like size or cost, but don’t let them make a decision for you. Help the team manage the implications of the choice on the design.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gretchen Anderson is the
director of interaction
design at LUNAR in San
Francisco. She has worked
for firms that do both
industrial and interaction design on a wide
variety of products— from medical prod-
ucts and consumer electronics, to enter-
prise software applications and consumer
websites. Gretchen was educated at
Harvard and has worked in the design
industry for more than a decade with clients
that include Starbucks, Virgin Records, HP,
Microsoft, Intel, and Johnson & Johnson.

interactions

Exploring the “Facial Features”

In many ways, physical controls on a product are like the facial features on a person. Just as it is important to consider the functional demands on the product, the industrial design team should look at the impact that different controls and layouts have on the overall product expression.

The handle features on the Spark turned out to be an important signifier of “durability and ruggedness” for the product. They also helped to distinguish the product from competitors and from more generic ultra-mobile PC products.

A large screen also meant that the on-screen UI would be a big part of the overall expression,

Matching Form and Function Even more than on-screen affordances, physical controls provide clues to the user about what they are supposed to do in a given situation. It can be especially tempting for product managers to try to leverage recognizable controls, yet following existing paradigms without rhyme or reason can lead to problems.

The Sansa C100 MP3 player featured a circular “wheel” that strongly emulated the iPod, but the actual component doesn’t turn or spin. Instead, it functions as a typical four-way navigation pad. When LUNAR worked on the C200, we advocated for a square component that both distinguished the product and more closely followed how the UI worked.

This might seem obvious to interaction designers who are conditioned to think about how form and function match, but these kinds of decisions can get lost in the larger design shuffle if interaction designers aren’t working closely with the development team to review assumptions about controls.