One of the iPad apps that most people think is inevitable is some kind of remote control for home entertainment systems, but I think the conventional wisdom on this isn’t thinking big enough because we just can’t shake the idea of a “remote controller”.

The basic idea is that you’d throw away all your remote controls and have the most fabulous remote control of all time, with the ability to manipulate multiple hardware devices and systems, of all kinds and from different manufacturers, even some devices that enable viewing internet videos such as from YouTube or Netflix, all using a single awesome iPad graphical UI. You could preview what’s on other channels while watching a show on the big screen, scroll through TV schedules on the little screen without changing what’s on the big one, finger-tap on show titles to add them to your DVR queue, etc.

To do all this, there would need to be some additional device to translate the iPad’s output — which is basically WiFi — to what most set-top devices need for input — infrared light (IR). This “Universal Remote” iPad app would also need to be programmed to know the IR codes for most set-top devices, just like thousands of other so-called “universal remotes” do.

Here’s what this system might look like:

Of course, some more visionary people predict the death of these multiple devices and envision them all being replaced with a single multi-purpose device for streaming video from the internet, recording cable programming, playing discs, browsing a personal media collection, and more. Devices like Apple TV and Boxee. In fact, many Apple observers already suspect that the iPad will become the killer remote control for the next version of Apple TV.

This is obviously a much simpler configuration, and looks something like this:

But what if we take this just one step further, and take the expensive devices out of the loop completely? Imagine a system like this:

The iPad uses WiFi to pull content off the Internet (or from its own library), and then uses WiFi to push video to the big ass display, possibly with the help of a cheap WiFi video “receiver” unit (which, come to think of it would be trivial to build directly into monitors).

In this model, the iPad itself replaces all of the set-top devices. While the iPad cannot play Blu-ray disks, it can certainly do everything else in this list. Why should Apple bother making another version of Apple TV when they could build all of the functionality of Apple TV into the iPad itself? All the storage, all the video, audio, and picture playback, all the online video browsing, all of it built into the iPad.

All the games, too. So long Xbox, Playstation, and Wii.

In this model, your “home entertainment center” is all contained in software. The only hardware you need is that big screen. Or select from multiple screens around the house, using only software to determine which screen you want to “project” on to.

Obviously there are technology constraints here, but they are all the usual constraints that inevitably fall aside faster than we generally imagine: network speed, processing power, and memory. HD digital video is a lot of bits to go over a wireless connection. But if you imagine all of these technologies being even only a little better than they are now, we’re basically there.

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The search is over. Many have heroically tried. But a decisive winner has emerged.

Behold! the most elegant and usable conference badge design ever:

This badge is from The Web and Beyond 2010, held in Amsterdam two weeks ago, where I spoke and saw many excellent sessions.

Let me explain the mechanics of this great design:

Lanyard: The lanyard is nothing special — a branded ribbon with a simple clasp at the end. As far as I’m concerned, the lanyard is interchangeable. Irrelevant, in fact: you could use a metal chain, a hemp rope, whatever. That’s part of the awesomeness of this design.

Graphics: The first name is big so you can say “Hi Christopher”, and the last name and company/affiliation is a little smaller. The same information is printed on both sides. I imagine the text could be a little bigger all around for readability’s sake.

Booklet: Here’s where it gets really clever: The “name tag” is actually the cover of a little booklet. The booklet’s cover, as you can see in the picture, is printed upside-down from the contents of the booklet itself, so that the badge wearer can flip the book up to read the contents. The lanyard attaches to the booklet using “loop staples“, the same staples that hold the book together, thus requiring no additional hardware and, even better, no plastic sleeve. I’ve seen plenty of attempts to make badges with little pockets for holding a conference booklet, but this unified solution blows those ideas away.
It doesn’t hurt that the 35-page booklet contained great facilities maps, a full schedule, and biographies and photos of all the speakers. The covers were color-coded, too, with different colors for attendees, speakers, and staff.

Of course, not every conference can afford all of the bells and whistles on display with this badge design, but it’s easy to see how the basic principle — a book on a hook — can work for smaller budgets. For example, the custom-printed attendee-name covers could simply be blanks on which stickers are affixed. The booklets could be briefer, focusing on just the schedule, for example.

Conference organizers: Please steal this idea!

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I just finished reading Lolita; it was my first time reading it, but it was not my first Nabokov novel (having already enjoyed Pale Fire and Ada or Ardor). It was a 1955 American hardback edition, the first year Americans got their hands on the book. I don’t understand why anyone buys new classic books in any format — paperback, hardback, or ebook — when beautiful and historic hardback copies can be easily purchased online for a fraction of the cost of buying a new copy.

Nabokov is a staggeringly good writer, in both style and substance. Every sentence feels like a gift from the author to the reader. In the delivery of a gut-wrenching and thrilling plot, he draws you in, deeper and deeper, with his beautiful and astonishing use of language and dramatic structure. I flew through the final 100 pages of Lolita on a flight back from Amsterdam, and it must have been amusing, or perhaps disconcerting, to my fellow passengers to see my face, enrapt, my expressions shifting repeatedly from intense concentration, to a state of near-tears, to knowing giggles, repeat, repeat, in a determined sprint to the conclusion.

(It may strike you as crass for me to consider running a race a suitable metaphor for reading a great book, but please understand that for me, as an athlete, finishing a race is not the end of an ordeal but a supreme pleasure.)

And what delight as, finishing the third to last, right-side-facing page, I turned to the final spread, one-and-one-half pages of text, and unexpectedly found some of the most heartbreaking words of the whole novel, right at the top of the penultimate page, the finish line within sight: an experience that was both textual and physical in its manifestation. Was it the author, the typesetter, both, or neither, who constructed — designed — this neat, sublime, perfectly-timed emotional jolt?

Throughout the final terrifying third act of the book, Nabokov knew that the reader would be constantly, sometimes consciously, sometimes not, seeking (or deliberately avoiding seeking) a single word, a word whose distinctive typographical form would light up like a flare in the reader’s peripheral vision, paragraphs in advance, impossible to miss. Every time you turn a page, even if you avoid it, your eyes will, in an instant, claw through the one-thousand characters in every new two-page spread to find it, the word, the single characteristic letter. He plays with this visual expectation so thoroughly — torments the reader, in fact — that it’s inconceivable that he wasn’t always thinking about printed words, words on pages being turned in a reader’s hands.

Oh, how glad am I that I was unable to find Lolita in any sort of eBook format.

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After waiting six months on a pre-order waiting list, I finally got my Fitbit two months ago. I was really looking forward to it — as a big fan of the Nike+ running tracking system, I was excited about Fitbit’s promise to not only track my running and walking, but to track my sleep patterns as well. And the design was extremely seductive — small in size, elegantly combining form and function (it doesn’t have a clip, it is a clip), and with a magical blue led screen that is invisible when the device is off. How could I resist?

And I was right: I love the Fitbit!

But I don’t want to use it any more. How is that possible?

First, though, you may be asking “What is Fitbit?” Fitbit is a personal health tracking system consisting of a small electronic device that you clip to your body to track your movements and a web site that uses the data from those movements to give you detailed reports and analysis of your fitness and health. The Fitbit device contains an accelerometer to detect anything from a single running stride to tossing and turning in your sleep, and it wirelessly syncs to your computer via a small radio transmitter. The Fitbit has a small digital display indicating the number of steps you’ve taken, how far you’ve walked or run, and how many calories you’ve burned. MORE…

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A few weeks ago, I got an email from a young undergrad interested in SVA’s Interaction Design MFA program (where I teach a class in the fundamentals of interaction design).

The student, a talented web designer, was curious about the relationship between “web design” and “interaction design” and “user experience”, and what the future holds for UX and IxD. I thought it would be nice to share some of my response:

It’s hard for any IxD program to avoid the overwhelming presence of the web as the epicenter of most people’s (technological) interactive experiences. And the faculty of the program at SVA certainly draws deeply from the web design world. But the meaning of “the web” itself is blurring — when you use an app on your iPhone, or get a DVD from Netflix (or view a streaming NetFlix movie via your DVR), or read a book on a Kindle, are you not, to some degree, interacting with the web? My point is that “interactive systems” are bigger than just the web even if the web is a big part of them: that they involve so much more in terms of physical processes (Netflix had to invent a warehousing system), business models (should Kindle books cost the same, less, or more than physical books?), and that they’re always incorporating new technologies (touchscreen UIs fundamentally change how web design is done, and imagine how Apple’s tablet will shake up “web” design). Interaction design is influenced by entertainment, games… and global concerns like sustainability and digital accessibility.

In my class, we’ve worked on web sites, mobile apps, physical devices, and even just social system design (for example, how does a taxi driver “work” as a planned interactive system?). I think I am typical of SVA’s faculty in my attitude that great web design is just a flavor of great interaction design, which in turn is a flavor of experience design. So we don’t teach web design specifically, but students who want to focus on web design are absolutely free to do so, and we are happy to evaluate, guide, and teach ideas and concepts that advance web-based experiences. But I’d be lying if I told you that the web as we know it now is going to be the dominant interaction design paradigm of 2020. The fundamentals of interaction design aren’t about HTML and CSS, nor even about hard drives and keyboards. It’s about human beings, our relationships with each other (socially, business, culturally), with media, and with technology.

There is definitely a lot of demand for people who can bring this higher and broader thinking to projects. What I like about the SVA program is the dialogue students have access to — with each other and with the faculty. It’s something you can’t get in most workplaces, and especially not so rapidly and intensely. You are required to talk not just about what you did, but how and most importantly WHY. It’s one thing to design something, it’s another thing to justify why in the world the world needs what you designed. Hopefully, that’s what the program gets students to think about and know how to express.

Finally: I wouldn’t be in this field, or teaching in the program, if I didn’t think that UX was *the* most important factor in creating beauty and happiness in the coming decades. Making stuff that people like to use, well, I’ve wanted to do this since I was a kid making stuff out of paper and legos.

I hope that gives a little more insight into the program and perhaps even into my thoughts about IxD and UX overall. Good luck, and let me know if I can help any further.

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I’ve submitted two talks for the 2010 SXSW Interactive conference. As you might know, SXSW’s selection process includes a period of public review to gauge general interest in the panels submitted (they call them “panels” even though many of the submissions, including my own, are single-speaker sessions).

I would be deeply grateful if you, gentle Graphpaper reader, would put in a vote for my sessions. If you want to comment on my ideas — and I’d love it if you would — please do so at the SXSW site. (You have to register to vote, but it’s an easy and painless sign up.)

Here are my proposals (click the title to see the voting page):

• The Human Interface (or: Products are People, Too!)
  More and more, users are interacting with web sites and software on a conversational, physical, psychological, and emotional level — just like we’ve always interacted with other people. UX designers, then, must stop thinking about interfaces as dumb control panels and begin using technology to envision interfaces (literally!) as human beings.
  .

• Re-Invent the Wheel!: Redesigning your Design Process
  It’s the start of a new project. You’ve got requirements, guidelines, data, research. Now what? Like an artist staring at a blank canvas, designers of interactive products often don’t know where to start. Instead of following a rigid methodology or waiting for the perfect idea to appear out of the blue, designers must invent new tools and tricks to foster real UX innovation.

I’m particularly excited about the first one, as it ties together so much of what I love and/or things I know a lot about: interaction design, science fiction, culture and literature in design, artificial intelligence, human behavior and emotional design. It’s kind of like “The Graphpaper.com Experience, Live!”

Sharing the love

There are a few other talks I think you ought to consider voting for, as well, from people I like and think people should be listening to: MORE…

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Here’s an awesome idea for the camera industry. Like most of my seemingly awesome ideas, someone else has probably already thought of it (UPDATE: someone has already thought of it, sort of… skip to the bottom of this post). But just in case it’s at all novel, I offer it up for public review:

Yesterday I saw a little kid yawning, and I thought it would have made a really cute photo if only I had a camera in my hand, ready to shoot. Of course, I had a camera in my hand: my iPhone. The moment, however, went by just too fast: I noticed it, but could not photograph it.

Being able to take a photograph spontaneously, with as much ease as pointing your finger or blinking your eyes, would change the world of photography even more than the profound effect digital photography has already had. It would make available the ephemeral and fleeting moments of beauty and inspiration in a way that current photographic technology still cannot deliver.

Today’s cameras, however, still have too many obstacles to this goal. The camera has to be in your hand, with the lens cap removed, and if electronic it has to be powered up. And then you have to adjust the exposure and focus on your subject.

Most of these obstacles can be overcome: small, cheap, and fast cameras are already here. A camera mounted in a pair of glasses or on a fingertip is easy to imagine. And you can adjust exposure, to a limited extent, after the fact in Photoshop. It’s the focus part that seems the biggest barrier: Choosing the subject in the frame and then adjusting a mechanical lens array to focus on that object takes both time and human intelligence. Automating this would seem impossible.

But I think I’ve figured it out.

Multifocus: Fix it in post!

Instead of taking one photograph upon clicking the shutter, my camera would shoot 50 photos as fast as possible. Each photograph would have a slightly different focus setting, zooming on different points in space. Cameras are pretty damn fast these days, and getting faster, so it seems possible that taking 50 good photos in a fraction of a second is reasonable.

Some of the 50 photos will focus on nothing, and will be useless. But among the rest there would almost certainly be one image that is nicely focused on exactly what you wanted to shoot.

The idea is that we use brute force (that is, speed) to capture a variety of photos, then we pick the one we like best. Basically what photographers have been doing for years with motor drives, but ridiculously faster.

The key to this concept is the post-production software. You could just view 50 photos, but I picture it being more interesting than that. The interface for choosing the photo could feel like taking a photo, where you look upon a scene and move a slider to change your focus on the scene. I imagine an interface like the one Harrison Ford used in Blade Runner to investigate the space in a crime-scene photo, but instead of exploring a 3D space, it permits the viewer to explore the image-space by moving the point of focus.

Many years ago I made a Flash experiment showing how a focus effect might work. You can try it here. If you play with the demo, you can imagine the UI for my multifocus selector tool, choosing the best-focused image from the 50 images originally captured by the camera.

If the system was fast enough (say, fast enough to take 200 photos in a second) the lenses could also take each photo at several zoom levels or exposure settings, too. So you point, snap, and then do all of the zoom, focus, and exposure work later, almost as if you were freezing and capturing time itself.

This idea isn’t so far fetched. It’s influenced by a bunch of other ideas along similar lines:

• Bullet-time camera: Popularized in The Matrix, the “bullet-time” effect is achieved by a brute-force technique of taking dozens of photos at the same time from many different angles. Cool example here.
• Page scanner concept: The idea behind this concept is that instead of slowly photographing the pages of a book one page at a time from a fully-flat perspective, a machine could scan the book’s pages a hundred times faster by simply photographing them at an angle as they are quickly flipping by, adjusting the image later to appear flat.
• iPhone’s “always on” camera: Lonelysandwich’s Adam Lisagor recently speculated and tested that the iPhone is able to take photos really quickly because it doesn’t wait for you to click the shutter to record the image in memory. It just takes photos constantly and then keeps the one it already took at the time you click the shutter.
• Focus Stacking: In microscopic photography where the depth of field is miniscule and getting an image of an entire tiny object is difficult, a technique called focus stacking allows the photographer to take many photos of the same object at different focus lengths, then combining them all into a single composite image where everything is in focus. Check out this cool focus stacking animation.

Most of the conceptual and technological pieces are there. Another issue would seem to be the lenses themselves: how to move a physical lens array quickly, but given the size of cameras these days it seems that we’d only need to move the lens a few millimeters to get all 50 focal lengths.

Now, someone please tell me this already exists.

UPDATE: Okay, it already exists. The plenoptic camera, or light-field camera, which uses an array of tiny lenses to take multiple photos at different focus points. Different concept (mine relies on a single moving lens), same result. Either way, I hope someone figures out a way to build this kind of thing into cheap phone cameras.

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Someone recently pointed me to an interesting book, Some Place Like Home: Using Design Psychology to Create Ideal Places, by Toby Israel. The book’s thesis is that a designers’ childhood environment profoundly affects their professional and adult design choices. The environments and objects children see and touch in their formative years will, according to Israel, have a deep and lasting effect on how they perceive and how they create the designed environments around them later in life.

I haven’t read the book, but the basic premise as far as I understand it strikes me as very likely. Childhood experiences drove me to become a designer in the first place, why should it not also shape my day-to-day decisions as a designer?

And wouldn’t childhood experiences with interactive things be especially emotionally powerful, whether positive or negative?

I was really curious if this idea rang true for other people in the UX design world, too. So I asked the twitterverse:

chrisfahey: UX people: Which interactive experiences from your childhood shape your decisions as a designer of interactive experiences today? #uxorigins

I got a few dozen delightful responses (most of them using my suggested hashtag #uxorigins). It’s interesting how many of them share common themes: video games, science fiction, dashboards, doors and light switches.

chrisfahey: I remember 2 light switches that controlled the same light. Each switch also reversed the on/off orientation of the other (bad!).

peterme: Simon, Merlin, Mattel Electronic Football, Intellivsion, the cable box where you pressed a button for each channel

strottrot: I remember my mom’s thrill at the development of school desks & scissors designed for people who are left-handed.

soldierant: great idea . I learned narrative, flow balance & symmetry from the modeling diorama books of François Verlinden.

martinpolley: Auto-reverse Walkman — Which side is it playing? Which button do I press for FF and which for RW?

jarango: Videogames, Legos, Disney World, Chris Crawford’s “Art of Computer Game Design”.

gielow: Mine was: Being 1stborn = lots of early individual open-play. Growing up w/Apple II & living near Smithsonian

Braindonut: Acknowledging great game UIs help me to focus on the challenges I actually CARE about and seeing bad UIs obstruct fun

odannyboy: Making robots and spaceships out of cardboard boxes and figuring out the controls. Playing detective.

octothorpe: When I was young, I made siege weaponry (trebuchet, catapults, etc) out of common household items (hangars, mousetraps, etc)

ladylynnet: Pull-doors that look like they should be pushed, can openers, lots of SciFi, and growing up as the Internet grew up

mjbroadbent: @octothorpe Good fun! I’m curious: were your foes real or imaginary? Or perhaps the creative joy was simply in the making.

ConeTrees: reading Enid Blytons & watching cartoons where all things/ interfaces just work and everything is simplified

davin: . Speak & Spell, Merlin, text adventures on Vic-20, 20-sided dice, Lego/Star Wars mash-ups

mikeym: Hammond organs, analog Buchla synthesizers, backlit toggle switches (love!), tube amps, aircraft flight controls.

daveixd: I think it was the Odessy game console. I LOVED that game controller more than anything! The circular disc w/ the 12key punch.

mjbroadbent: Baking, cooking, and serving food were formative for me. Planning everything to yield a fabulous end result was (is) great fun!

nikkirmz: Light switches located on walls behind doors. You must walk in, partially close the door to turn on the light.

jeanphony: Helping my dad design and build a custom family camper from a former delivery van

rayraydel: It’s always been about sketching for me. Both figuring stuff out and communicating it with pencil & paper. The best.

strottrot: Another : My dad cursing through toys with “some assembly required”

noahmittman: As a kid, pirating software without any manuals or help, using only the software’s end design to learn its features.

cchastain: Putting on a carnival in the back yard.

jspahr: Devouring Isaac Azimov’s SciFi stories; building/re-building lego houses/cities; hypercard.

mjbroadbent: Oh yeah! My brother and I created spooky fun houses in our basement. RT @cchastain: Putting on a carnival in the back yard.

jeffpiazza: - Drawing dashboards of real (space shuttle) and futuristic aircraft.

austingovella: Magic: tell a story, misdirect their attention to what they want to see, and delight them.

It’s interesting that about half of these are about experiencing frustration and wanting to fix the experience, and the other half are about being inspired with wonder and delight — precisely the dichotomy that UX designers seem to perpetually wrestle with today

Do you have any childhood experiences that you are convinced still influence you as a designer today?

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Have you ever thought of design as an opportunity to be kind to someone?

User experience designer Jeff Howard wonders if service design (a way of thinking about design in which the user experience has many “touchpoints” across many channels and contexts) isn’t ultimately a frustrating and Sisyphean task, where customers and users are always going to be disappointed simply because no system or experience can ever be perfect. He observes that no matter what the designer does right, users will always remember when and how a system let them down, even if it only fails them in a small way.

He offers an interesting alternative way of thinking about the design of service experiences:

Maybe the answer itself is counterintuitive. Rather than offering reliably excellent service, what about unpredictability? What if the answer lies in random acts of kindness? The bits of business that add value to a service, but that aren’t part of its core offering. Something we can’t anticipate, something that captures our attention — randomly exceeding our expectations. A foil to the capriciousness of human perception.

I totally agree, and not just about service design. In all forms of design, practicing random acts of design kindness is a great way to improve a user experience without radically overhauling your design process or revisiting the core strategy of your product.

A fun approach I like to use (sometimes unconsciously, sometimes deliberately) is to have an unofficial objective of having three delightful details in a design — a humorous error message, a helpful hint at a difficult juncture, a way to skip a step in a process, etc. The important thing here, as Jeff suggests, is to do it at an unexpected time, almost as a kind of surprise, just so it has an extra emotional impact on the user.

Of course we all want to make everything perfect, but it’s amazing how one delightful detail will stick out in a user’s mind.

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When it comes to social media, it is easy to be dazzled by big numbers and strong opinions. But often what is really needed isn’t a comprehensive strategy with metrics and targets, but a charming and intelligent human personality.

The majority of people who today call themselves social media experts, even the legitimate ones who actually know what they are doing, were complete social media newbies only a couple of years ago. Some very likely took the plunge only a few months ago.

I’ve seen people who didn’t have a Facebook page, people who’d skeptically asked “What the hell is this Twitter crap?”, jump in head first and, within a few months, become absolute masters of social media with tens of thousands of connections and followers and influence over some of the biggest names in their field. I’ve seen people in their teens and in their 60s become social media virtuosos, at least within the fields they really know and love, some of them virtually overnight.

I also know hundreds of people who have lots of friends on Twitter, who regularly blog and speak about social media, and who know all about the different companies, people, and technologies in the social media space, but who would be absolute freaking disasters if they had to put those skills to the service of a brand or company. I know this because they have volatile personalities, crummy writing skills and sloppy grammar, glaring personal issues, or are just ignorant of important subject matter. But with thousands of friends and immense popularity across lots of social media.

In other words, jerks, blowhards, and idiots are perfectly capable of mastering the logistics and technologies of social media, but do you really want them managing your social media?

There is undoubtedly a kind of social media skill that has nothing whatsoever to do with expertise with social media tools and technologies, but which all great social media success stories have in spades. Social media tools and technologies can be learned in a matter of days or weeks by the right people as long as they have other important skills: A passion for the product or the field they are working for, for example, is essential. A great personality. Great interpersonal communication skills. A sense of dignity and balance, and political sensitivity. Empathy.

In fact, this traditional stuff is WAY more important than having any experience whatsoever with social media. A so-called social media expert with thousands of hours of experience managing and building social networks and products could easily ruin your social media strategy simply by being a bad cultural fit with your audience and customers. And a total newbie — a kid from the mailroom, a user interface designer, or maybe the CEO herself — might become your company’s social media rainmaker simply because they completely understand your audience and believe in your product.

Charm can be bought, and it can be taught. But usually it’s simply a matter of finding it and letting shine.

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