ThingM | mikek@thingm.com
I think 2005 was the year we began living in the world of commonplace ubiquitous computing devices. That year Apple put out the screenless iPod Shuffle, Adidas launched the adidas_ 1 shoe, and iRobot launched the Discovery—its sec-ond-generation vacuum robot.
Sadly, even though we live in that world, the user experience design of most everyday ubiquitous computing devices—things you see in gadget blogs—is typically terrible. That’s because we do not address ubicomp user experience design as a distinct branch of interaction design, much as we did not treat interaction design as separate from visual design in the early days of the Web.
In the last couple of years, I have conducted research for and designed a number of ubicomp user experiences. In the process, I’ve seen some of the seams between industrial design, interaction design, architecture, and ubiquitous computing user experience design. In this article, I have tried to pull together some approaches that seem particularly valuable in the ubiquitous computing user experience world. None is unique to it: They’re all general design guidelines, but they seem to apply particularly well to the particular design challenges of this field.
Like the fashion aphorism that just because you can wear two things together, it doesn’t mean you should, the ability to do arbitrary information processing does not imply the need to design yet another general-purpose device. We have laptops and phones for that.
It is because CPU power is so cheap that ubicomp UX design should concentrate all design and processing on a narrowly focused set of functionalities. Yes, a single device can be a dictionary, a calendar, a notebook, an alarm clock, a TV, an audio recorder, play every media format, and work as an 8-bit game machine, but doesn’t that just sound like an underpowered laptop?
oped WineM, our prototype smart wine rack, as an avatar of a service. The rack uses RFIDs on each bottle to track where every bottle is and then displays information using glowing LEDs behind the bottles. When we designed it, we treated the rack as one way to provide access to a service that associated a specific bottle with corresponding metadata, which was in turn part of a system that linked wine producers, distributors, retailers, and consumers together in such a way that everyone in the chain benefited from adopting the technology. The rack is a particularly visual manifestation of the service, but the service would be available through an API that could be accessed through many avenues.
Service design gives to ubicomp UX the notion that every object is more than just a stand-alone tool; it’s now the representative of a service. A physical, networked object is an avatar of a service that can be accessed in many other ways. This requires that affordances for the immediate task be included in the design of the product experience, and that the relationship between various pieces be taken into consideration.
ThingM, my company, devel-
Don’t Overload Affordances Ubicomp UX inverts several basic assumptions of traditional screen-based interaction design. While Web and software design aim to represent physical-world tasks on a monitor, the goal of ubicomp devices is to skip representation and directly enable activities in the world. Likewise, while many of the challenges of screen interaction design involve using rich general-purpose input and output methods in a novel way, many ubicomp products use narrow-focus, spe-
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