User Experience Design
for Ubiquitous Computing
Mike Kuniavsky
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.
Make Tools, Not Platforms
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.
Define Services Before
Designing Devices
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-
