Mike Kuniavsky, of ThingM and sketching in software, has a good post on Orange Cone on "Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design: "
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 second-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.
His recommendations for doing good user experience design for ubicomp:
- Make Tools, Not Platforms
- Define Services Before Designing Devices
- Don't Overload Affordances
- Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
- Respect the Society of Devices
- Create Physical Behaviors, Not Visual Representations
- Use Information Processing As a Material
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