2. MOBILE APPLICATIONS AND INTERFACES

3. CONTEXTUAL AND SOCIAL EXPERIENCE

4. THE INTERNET OF THINGS

5. APP STORES AND MARKETPLACES

6. NEXT GENERATION ANALYTICS

7. BIG DATA

8. IN-MEMORY COMPUTING

9. EXTREME LOW-ENERGY SERVERS

10. CLOUD COMPUTING

Scientists say the animals were also able use the arm to sense the texture of different virtual objects.

Writing in the journal Nature, the researchers say their work could speed up the development of wearable exoskeletons.

This technology could help quadriplegic patients not only regain movement but a sense of touch as well.

In the experiments, a pair of rhesus monkeys was trained to control a virtual arm on a screen solely by the electrical activity generated in their brains.

Thanks to feedback from the experimental setup, the monkeys were also able to feel texture differences of objects on the screen.

The researchers involved say that just like a normal functioning limb, the monkeys were able to do both actions at the same time, sending out signals to control the arm while simultaneously getting electrical feedback to understand the texture of the objects that were touched.

Wireless future

Prof Miguel Nicolelis from the Duke University Centre for Neuroengineering in North Carolina was the senior author of the study. He believes it is a significant step in this field.

“It provides us with the demonstration that we can establish a bi-directional link between the brain and an artificial device without any interference from the subject’s body,” he said.

The researchers trained the monkeys, Mango and Tangerine, to play a video game using a joystick to move the virtual arm and capture three identical targets. Each target was associated with a different vibration of the joystick.

Multiple electrodes were implanted in the brains of the monkeys and connected to the computer screen. The joystick was removed and motor signals from the monkey’s brains then controlled the arm.

At the same time, signals from the virtual fingers as they touched the targets were transmitted directly back into the brain.

The monkeys had to search for a target with a specific texture to gain a reward of fruit juice. It only took four attempts for one of the monkeys to figure out how to make the system work.

According to Prof Nicolelis, the system has now been developed so the monkeys can control the arm wirelessly.

“We have an interface for 600 channels of brain signal transmission, so we can transmit 600 channels of brain activity wirelessly as if you had 600 cell phones broadcasting this activity.

“For patients this will be very important because there will be no cables whatsoever connecting the patient to any equipment.”

The scientists say that this work represents a major step on the road to developing robotic exoskeletons – wearable technology would allow patients afflicted by paralysis to regain some movement.

Prof Nicolelis and his colleagues are already working with a team in Munich to develop a whole body exoskeleton, a device that can be controlled by the brain activity of the patient.

“When the patient commands this vest to move, it will not only carry their body it will provide the sensory feedback so that they know if they are stepping or walking or grabbing objects,” he explained.

“In terms of rehabilitation of patients that suffer from severe neurological disorders this is a major step forward, I think.”

The Duke University team is leading the Walk Again project, which hopes to carry out a public demonstration of a wearable exoskeleton at the opening game of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.

The system is capable of “rewiring” its connections as it encounters new information, similar to the way biological synapses work.

Researchers believe that that by replicating that feature, the technology could start to learn.

Cognitive computers may eventually be used for understanding human behaviour as well as environmental monitoring.

Dharmendra Modha, IBM’s project leader, explained that they were trying to recreate aspects of the mind such as emotion, perception, sensation and cognition by “reverse engineering the brain.”

The SyNAPSE system uses two prototype “neurosynaptic computing chips”. Both have 256 computational cores, which the scientists described as the electronic equivalent of neurons.

One chip has 262,144 programmable synapses, while the other contains 65,536 learning synapses.

Man machine

In humans and animals, synaptic connections between brain cells physically connect themselves depending on our experience of the world. The process of learning is essentially the forming and strengthening of connections.

A machine cannot solder and de-solder its electrical tracks. However, it can simulate such a system by “turning up the volume” on important input signals, and paying less attention to others.

IBM has not released exact details of how its SyNAPSE processor works, but Dr Richard Cooper, a reader in cognitive science at Birkbeck, University of London said that it likely replicated physical connections using a “virtual machine”.

Instead of stronger and weaker links, such a system would simply remember how much “attention” to pay to each signal and alter that depending on new experiences.

“Part of the trick is the learning algorithm – how should you turn those volumes up and down,” said Dr Cooper.

“There’s a a whole bunch of tasks that can be done just with a relatively simple system like that such as associative memory. When we see a cat we might think of a mouse.”

Some future-gazers in the cognitive computing world have speculated that the technology will reach a tipping point where machine consciousness is possible.

However, Dr Mark Bishop, professor of cognitive computing at Goldsmiths, was more cautious.

“[I] understand cognition to be something over and above a process simulated by the execution of mere computations, [and] see such claims as verging on the magical,” he said.

IBM’s work on the SyNAPSE project continues and the company, along with its academic partners, has just been awarded $21m (£12.7m) by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Today we communicate a bit differently. Our information is fragmented across various mass-media channels and delivered through ever-changing technology. It has become watered down, cloned, and is churned out quickly in 140-character blurbs. We’ve lost that personal touch where we find an emotional connection that makes us care.

Image credit: guldfisken

Using storytelling, however, we can pull these fragments together into a common thread. We can connect as real people, not just computers. In this article we’ll explore how user experience professionals and designers are using storytelling to create compelling experiences that build human connections.

It Begins with a Story

In 1977, a simple story set the film industry on its side. The special effects technology used to create this story had not been created or used in filmmaking at the time of its writing. The author disregarded what was popular and marketable at the time (apocalyptic and disaster movies) to create his own vision. The film starred unknown actors and the genre had mainly been seen in 1930s serial movies. It was turned down by many film studios and at one point was almost shelved.

Image credit: Wired (Courtesy of Ballantine Books)

The movie, if you haven’t guessed, was Star Wars. The author was George Lucas. Star Wars went on to become one of the most successful films of all time and turned into a pop culture phenomenon. It gave birth to the blockbuster and the trilogy, and completely changed the way movies with special effects were made. Many of today’s most influential film companies were spawned from the success of these movies: LucasFilm, THX, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), and Pixar.

Star Wars wasn’t a new story though. It drew from mythic archetypes of stories told over thousands of years.

Revealing the Design in Stories

The creation of a story is often viewed as an almost magical or random process. The author sits in front of their canvas, the blank word processor, and begins to type whatever inspires them at the moment. Great stories, though, don’t just happen randomly; they are designed. There is a pattern at work here. In order to be entertaining, have the right dramatic cues, and tap deep into our collective psyche, a specific method is used to build the story. A story that fails to pull the audience emotionally and keep their attention may not have used enough of these patterns as a guide, as shown in the typical story arc below.

The story arc is widely used in screenwriting and novels.

The structure of the story has been around since long before screenwriting was taught. There was a point that it remained simply an unnoticed rhythm in the background of every story. Some aspects of this structure — like the hero’s journey and comparative mythology — were first popularized by Joseph Campbell. He wrote about his discovery in the book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Campbell was a student of Swiss Psychiatrist Carl Jung, who believed that we are all born with a subconscious idea of what a “hero”, a “mentor”, and a “quest” should be.

Campbell studied the structure of religion and myths across many cultures. What he discovered is that, consciously or not, every story (or myth) told had been created with the same basic formula. This is why great stories transcend even language barriers. It was this conclusion made by Campbell through his research that created large ripples in the waters of myth and religion.

We find the blueprint for “The Hero’s Journey” in films like Star Wars and The Matrix (via Star Wars Origins, Unofficial Site)

The stories we have seen on the silver screen or read about in novels have been able to captivate us by continuing to use these patterns. We talk about dialogue and certain scenes at the water cooler as if they had happened to a mutual friend, rather than some fictional character. All because we became emotionally invested in the characters and the story.

This type of emotional investment is something that brands strive for every day. Starbucks doesn’t want to just sell us a cup of coffee; they want customers to become invested in their story — the ambience, the aromas, the community. The goal is to become the “third place” for people (work, home, and Starbucks). They say, for them, “It’s really about human connection.”

The Power of Emotion

When speaking about stories, we describe the experience in a certain way. It tends to be more of an emotional experience, sometimes affecting us more on a personal level in how we relate to the story. This is much different from the way we traditionally describe the experience with products like websites or applications. Those are seen as more utilitarian and task-oriented.

If we are able to accomplish what we came to do, say transfer some money in a banking application, then it has been a good user experience. In order to achieve our goals, the interface should be usable and function the way we expect. This view is preached by many usability experts including Donald Norman, a professor of cognitive science and usability consultant for the Nielsen Norman Group.

After hearing that if people followed his rules “everything would be ugly,” Norman decided to explore people’s relationship to design. The result was the book Emotional Design. Through his research, Norman found that design affects how people experience products, which happens at three different levels, and translates into three types of design:

• Visceral Design This design is from a subconscious and biologically pre-wired programmed level of thinking. We might automatically dislike certain things (spiders, rotten smells, etc.) and automatically like others (“attractive” people, symmetrical objects, etc). This is our initial reaction to the appearance.
• Behavioral Design This is how the product/application functions, the look and feel, the usability, our total experience with using the product/application.
• Reflective Design This is how it makes us feel after the initial impact and interacting with the product/application, where we associate products with our broader life experience and associate meaning and value to them.

Image credit: D. Alan Harris Photography

There is a lot more to emotion than can be covered here, but understanding those basic levels of processing gives us some insight into why storytelling is so powerful. Consider how the levels of thinking play off each other in an amusement park: People pay to be scared. At the Visceral Level we have a fear of heights and danger. At the Reflective Level we trust that it is safe to go on the ride, and we seek that emotionally charged rush and sense of accomplishment (overcoming that fear of heights) after the ride is finished. Knowing that emotion is so vital to how we think makes it more important to create not just a functional and usable experience, but to seek and make a meaningful connection.

The Basics of Storytelling for User Experience

At a basic level, storytelling and user experience have common elements — like planning, research, and content creation — that can be utilized for effectively developing an experience. Storytelling offers a way for the team to really understand what they are building and the audience that they are creating it for. Stories allow for the most complex of ideas to be effectively conveyed to a variety of people. This designed product/experience can then offer meaning and emotion for its users. The professionals that are currently using the power of narrative in their projects are doing it in vastly different ways. The following sections attempt to outline some of the current usage and benefits of modern storytelling.

Bring Teams Together

User experience professionals typically have to work with people from many different backgrounds. Depending on the type of experience, it might require the effort of everyone from an engineer to a user interface designer. Also, in many cases, the approach in creating websites or applications is to consider the technology, or limitations of that technology, first. Finally, to make matters more complex, larger teams tend be split with concerns regarding their domain. For example, the marketing person is going to focus on their directives and motivations based on their initiatives. This is not always in the end-user’s best interest and results in a diluted and poor experience.

The Disciplines of User Experience by Dan Saffer

The infographic above depicts the many different fields that make up the disciplines of user experience. The user experience team selected to create an iPhone application for the masses would be quite different from one that is developing a medical device used by doctors. As described earlier, the individuals that have been involved in crafting stories have been successful in tapping into a way of communicating that has been around for thousands of years. Utilizing storytelling, user experience teams can also inject emotion and value into the end product for users.

User-Centered Goal

In reading through the storytelling approach, it might seem that the story is just another way of saying “strategy.” With storytelling, though, tied to the story the interactions should communicate is a more user-centered goal. Companies like Apple have used similar methods in their design process to really define what they are building.

Cindy Chastain refers to it as an Experience Theme. She says this theme is “the core value of the experience” being created. Christian Saylor refers to it as finding the Lead Character. Without this user-centered goal, he states, we are just “designing for the sake of designing.”

By centering around a specific theme, or character, the uncoordinated elements of an experience all have a clear goal and purpose. With storytelling, a diverse team creating a website or application can collectively link together the tangible elements and create something that is a meaningful experience and is more than just bits and bytes.

Defining the User

There is a lot of discussion and articles about usability and functionality of websites and applications. Functionality, of course, is important. For example, what good is an airplane if the engine isn’t powerful enough to get it off the ground? If you take a step back though, the more important question should be: How far does the user need to go? If it’s only a few miles down the road, then it really doesn’t matter if the plane is functional, it’s the wrong solution altogether. So, discovering what we really need to build is a key in the initial phase of building the user experience.

Image source: Mishka

When research is finished, we typically move on to create personas as a way of understanding the user and can be looked at as part of creating the story. By building a fictional representation of the user that is based on real research and observation, we are able to empathize with them and really understand their needs. Using the created personas and then creating stories about them, we are able to cast a more meaningful vision of the project.

Persona Sample by Fuzzy Math

The storytelling approach allows us to transfer this research in an anecdotal way. This has shown to have a better recall rate of information. In addition, being able to empathize with users through stories allows for better understanding of the emotional side of the experience. Films and video games deliver successful experiences that impact people on an emotional level. This is something people will begin to expect more from websites and applications that they use everyday. We can evolve the focus of creating a simple task-driven and functional website/application into a valuable human connection. We are, after all, a “global campfire” as Curt Cloninger refers to it. He goes on to say, “But the web is not a global network of connected computers. The web is a global network of connected people. And story-telling is still the most effective way to emotionally impact people.”

The Benefits

Most projects have a lot of documentation outlining their goal and strategy. These come in a set of business requirements, functional documentation, and any other pieces of supporting research/information. Using storytelling can help improve the overall product/experience:

• Puts a human face on dry data
• Can simplify complex ideas for a team
• More efficient team collaboration and purpose
• Insight into the key users
• Setting a project direction faster
• Better communication within large agencies/organizations
• Experience delivers meaning and value to users

Storytelling can help teams focus their efforts on everything from the content on the website to understanding the business problem in a new way. For example, you can define the scope of a project quickly without designing or wireframing screens. Dorelle Rabinowitz shows how The UX team for Yahoo Personals created a story around how a fictional dating couple would go through some specific scenarios. Using this, the team was able to come to a better understanding of what the website should do and the type of experience the users go through. It opened it up from very task- and strategy-based steps to the more real and emotional experience of dating. It is a powerful way to really get the team talking directly to the experience rather than creating documentation that only talks around it.

Happily Ever After: The Reality

Image source: Fallen Princesses by Dina Goldstein

There are many different opinions on what the ideal user experience process should be. Many of them stem from the fundamental approaches developed by Alan Cooper, a pioneer in building software with user-driven experiences. But as technology evolves, so do the approaches and processes to create solutions that meet users’ needs. The variety of approaches in UX are akin to the number of frameworks available for developing software. Much of the time it comes down to what is best for the type of projects a team typically works on.

Your ability to adhere to a process is dependent on many things, like timeline, budget, and business goals. In reality, it’s not always possible to do everything as specifically outlined. Storytelling is a way to connect teams quickly, and gain insight and understanding. The experiences we create communicate with those elements through the design, content, and user interaction. Storytellers have successfully been communicating for much longer than websites have been around — which makes it a valuable tool from the business side of design.

To Be Continued…

In the next part of “Better User Experience Using Storytelling” we will hear from creative professionals leading the way in this relatively new world of combining the craft of storytelling with user experience. We’ll also look at how storytelling can be applied to more than just interactive experiences — we find it in everything from packaging to architecture.

Resources

• Star Wars Origins
• Emotional Design by Donald Norman
• A Practical Guide to The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell
• “Experience Themes” by Cindy Chastain
• “Storytelling – A Compelling Design Tool” by Dorelle Rabinowitz
• “The Art of Storytelling” by Christian Saylor
• “A Case for Web Storytelling” by Curt Cloninger
• Personas and How to Increase the Quality of Solutions

Source:

• By Francisco Inchauste
• January 29th, 2010

But I say firmly and with conviction: wrong. Every medium is a channel that can convey many types of content. Books, television, and charcoal sketches each have the capacity to entertain, educate, and make powerful statements. But the unique ability of video games to command a player’s attention may in fact make them an ideal way to persuade.

I’m not alone in thinking that there’s potential in persuasive gaming. In March 2010, the USDA and Michelle Obama‘s “Let’s Move” campaign announced a contest challenging designers to create games that would persuade kids age 9 through 12 to eat healthier. I worked with a brilliant team (Andrew Karetas, Bri Lance, Jim Chiponis, and Amanda Ferrara) that created an entry titled Fitter Critters

Below I explain how we attempted to combine principles of both UX and game design to demonstrate the persuasive potential of video games.

The Core Message

A persuasive game has to be built around a focused message. Vaguely defined messages lead to confusing game experiences, so it’s important to get specific before moving on to finer details of the design.

When our team was designing Fitter Critters we had a general sense that we wanted to create a virtual pet game, but we didn’t really know how it would work. So we took some time to write down what messages we wanted our game to impart, and came up with two core messages:

• Eating a varied diet rich in vegetables, fruit, and whole grains leads to a better quality of life.
• Eating junk food may have short-term advantages, but in the long run it’s not worth the negative health consequences.

Now that we had something to work with, the basic game mechanics snapped into place:

1. The players need to shop for food their critters and feed them on a daily basis.
2. A set of scales show the critter’s progress toward daily nutritional needs like vegetables and whole grains, as well as limits on fats and added sugar.
3. If the player consistently makes better nutritional choices, the critter will be healthier and lead a more prosperous life.

Players need to provide the critter with food to fill the bars at the bottom of the screen.

A clearly articulated core message also helps designers decide which proposed gameplay ideas to adopt. An effective message needs to be communicated clearly. Digressive game mechanics risk muddying the message and need to be dropped. For example, one of our early ideas was to have the game track when the critter gets full, after which it would reject any more food. But the concept had no meaningful punch. A critter’s fullness had nothing to do with whether you’d fed it healthy food or junk food—it was just full. This gameplay element also would have forced players to return to the game several times a day to feed their critters, interfering with the message. By leaving aside this feature, we gave our game a more focused design, and kept the project’s scope limited to building only those features we absolutely needed.

Designing Discovery

Players naturally tend to seek out the most efficient ways to meet the objectives of a game. Discovery is an especially effective way to teach through games because it gives players a feeling of ownership of new information. Rather than being directly instructed that the core message is true, players internalize the message as a working hypothesis and use the game to prove to themselves that it’s true. To succeed in the game, they need to buy into its point of view.

Exploiting this principle of gameplay design,Fitter Critters creates opportunities for discovery in multiple ways. First, players need to shop for their virtual pet’s food. The grocer offers over 600 food choices, each with a label listing its nutrition information. One of the key challenges in the game is sifting through the multitude of options to discover the food items that will fill the nutrition requirements as quickly as possible while keeping fat and sugar as low as possible. For example, players may discover that sorbets are among the best dessert choices available, since they’re free of fat and added sugar and actually provide valuable servings of fruit.

Players also discover the advantages of maintaining a garden and using it as a source of food. Harvesting free food from the garden allows players to use their resources more efficiently and save money for other things (as in real life). Creating such optional activities that offer real advantages to players who invest the extra effort is a great way to enable persuasion through discovery.

Players can shop for food or harvest for free from the garden.

Finally, Fitter Critters lets players get creative by combining foods into cooked meals, which can be sold for up to a 500% profit depending upon the healthfulness of its ingredients. Using tactics like this, game worlds can create a perception of tangible value for discoveries that might be harder to perceive in the real world.

All of these discovery opportunities were designed to persuade children to think differently about the foods they eat every day, while at the same time modeling the real-life skills needed to make thoughtfully discriminating choices about their diets. To be successful, players of persuasive games need to internalize the game’s core messages and get used to applying them in the real world.

Meaningful Choices

A game designer’s trap was hiding inside the game’s overall concept: if healthy food offered only benefits and junk food only drawbacks, then the game would present no real choice at all. Players would always pick the healthy food since there would be no reason to consider anything else.

Interesting games offer players meaningful choices. Imagine if a racing game offered players the choice of two cars, one fast and the other slow. Which would you pick? Not only would winning this game feel distinctly unfulfilling, but the player would also never need to weigh the real advantages and disadvantages of different types of cars. Games with simplistic choices create no opportunities for players to learn.

It sounds weird, but there has to be some advantage to making some wrong choices. It’s best if choices fall on a smooth continuum from right to wrong, with a competing set of advantages and disadvantages all along the way.

In Fitter Critters, there are two built-in advantages to consuming high-calorie foods. First, your critter needs to have a certain minimum level of energy to participate in the sports games. Calorie-rich foods fill up your critter’s energy bar quickly, giving it immediate energy to play more games. Second, a higher energy level also allows the critter to earn more money each day from work (although this caps at 2000 calories). That bacon double cheeseburger offers a fast track to higher energy levels.

Energy allows players to participate in sports.

Of course, unhealthy food choices also have important consequences. Exceeding daily limits on calories, fat, or sugar brings down the critter’s health over time. An unhealthy critter will lose the sports games more often and earn less money at work. It will be more likely to get sick and lose an entire day’s wages. The critter will also develop a taste for junk food and start to reject healthier choices, making it harder to get it back to a healthy lifestyle.

This gives players a meaningful choice. It also supports the second core message of the game: whatever short-term advantages there are to eating junk food, they’re outweighed by the damage done to health and quality of life. And by creating meaningful choices involving real trade-offs, this message is learned instead of simply taught.

Rewards

Games build engagement with players by offering structured rewards in exchange for actions—actions ranging from jumping over barrels to killing enemy soldiers. In Fitter Critters, all player rewards are based on nutrition choices. We arranged the rewards in the game in a laddered structure, so that one type of reward leads to another. This gives the game a dimensionality that unfolds over the course of play.

At the bottom rung, eating well increases health and reduces body fat. Players are offered simple praise as they meet their critter’s nutritional requirements, and get the satisfaction of watching its bars fill. All games offer these kinds of fleeting rewards, but they’re not enough to sustain interest for very long.

Moving up one step, healthier characters earn more money. Critters are paid a salary once a day, and the amount of the paycheck is determined by their health and energy (which also affect productivity in the real world). Staying healthy puts critters at lower risk of getting sick, and sick days cost an entire day’s wages. Healthier critters will also win sports games more often. When players win sports games, their critters are paid $50 in game cash. It can be fun to watch your purse grow, but game money is ultimately worthless without anything to spend it on.

Farther up the ladder, players can use money to decorate their critter’s home. The decorations range from inexpensive lamps to topiaries to an extra window. In the near future, players will also be able to build extensions to the house and upgrade home furnishings. Customization is a much more tangible reward, but what good is it if no one else can appreciate your creativity?

Earning money allows players to trick out their homes.

At the top rung, more decorations earn you a higher ranking on the game’s leaderboard. Starting in the fall of 2010, critters will also be able to visit one another’s houses to see how they’ve been tricked out. Social rewards like these are among the most powerful motivators that games can offer players.

But all of these rewards ultimately depend on the nutritional choices the player makes for his or her critter, making it the essential foundation of the critter’s lifestyle. In a persuasive game, effective rewards need to have a clear relationship to the design’s core message.

Games in the Real World

If we dismiss video games as nothing more than frivolous entertainment, we’re cheating ourselves out of a potent way to communicate with an audience. When players feel engaged with a game, they are highly focused on figuring out what it’ll take to win. This state of heightened attention creates an opportunity to bring about real change in people by building a message into the structure of the gameplay. Much attention is paid to whether games contribute to social problems, but not enough attention is given to their capacity to solve them.

Source: UX Mag: http://www.uxmag.com/design/designing-a-persuasive-video-game

Researchers at Cambridge University have developed a cool augmented reality app called Popcode. An update to the app recently made it available for iPhone 4 and Android, and the app is being featured at the University of Cambridge Science festival being held this week and next.

Before we say much about the app, take a look at a one-minute demonstration for yourself:

As an augmented reality application, Popcode’s central innovation is that it’s “markerless”; after unlocking the content by scanning the Popcode logo, additional content can be added onto just about anything. T-shirts seems to be a favorite of the team; here’s another one:

Popcode in brief

Popcode shows the camera picture on your phone’s screen just like when you go to take a photo. But view a picture or poster with augmented reality content and it comes to life on the screen – the app adds extra content as if it were actually there in the world around you.

Popcode is what is known in the trade as a Markerless Augmented Reality platform. That means you can add additional content onto any image (providing it has enough texture). You do not need to print large black-and-white markers to be able to add Augmented Reality (AR) content to the world using Popcode.

How do I use it?

Whenever you see a Popcode, like the one on the right, start-up Popcode on your phone and view the logo. The app will recognise the logo and download the augmented reality content that it points to. Turn the phone towards the picture that the Popcode is beside, then view and interact with the embedded content.

How do I get it?

• Visit m.popcode.info from your mobile phone’s browser to download the Popcode app.
• Visit our Demos section to view some augmented reality content that we’ve put together.

How do I create content for Popcode?

You can download the Popcode Developer Kit from the Developers page. The Kit contains the tools, examples and documentation to get you started.

What does it cost?

Both the Popcode mobile app and the Popcode Developer Kit are free to download and use.

Soon we will offer the ability to upload and deliver content through the Popcode platform; associating third-party content with a Popcode and serving it to users of the mobile app. This service will be free for non-commercial use (a fair use policy will apply). Charges for the hosting and delivery of commercial content will be based on traffic.

What can I use it for?

Some ideas for possible uses of Popcode are shown in the Demos section. We’re sure there’s lots more applications out there. If you’ve got a great idea, then why not try and make it happen with the free Popcode Developer Kit, and then tell us all about it in the Forums?

The first release (0.8) of Popcode does not allow distribution of any content you create. Additionally, content should be within the field of “Entertainment”. Both of these restrictions will be lifted before the release of the final 1.0 version of Popcode within the next couple of months.

Similarities Between Agile and UCD Methods

Let’s start by exploring the similarities between the two approaches.

I particularly like Alistair Cockburn’s comparison of an agile development process to a cooperative game: “Software development is a (resource-limited) cooperative game of invention and communication. The primary goal of the game is to deliver useful, working software. The secondary goal, the residue of the game, is to set up for the next game.” Thus, according to Cockburn, an agile development method, at its core, is about delivering useful software. According to Rassa Katz-Haas, user-centered design is about understanding people’s needs—so we can provide useful software. She writes: “[User-centered design] places the person (as opposed to the thing) at the center…. UCD seeks to answer questions about users and their tasks and goals, then use the findings to drive development and design.”

A human-centered design approach allows us to better understand the people who use our products, while agile development techniques let us build, test, deliver, and revise our products faster. This is what software design and development is all about: delivering meaningful products to people. So, if these two methods seem to complement each other so well, why is there so much friction and frustration when it comes time to integrate them? A surface examination of the issues can’t answer this question. We must dig into the details of these methods, where integration gets more complicated.

Differences Between Agile and UCD Methods

Defining a development process is a tricky thing. The most challenging aspect is that of defining how people are going to work together. People who have egos and opinions. People whose skills may be undervalued or who may not be fully committed to the process. Define a process too strictly and it becomes unbearable and unadaptable; define it too loosely and there is a risk of not including the right people at the right time.

Agile’s iterative development cycle is one of the method’s strengths, but it also makes for some tight deadlines. As the now infamous interview between Alan Cooper and Kent Beck [2] shows, the timeline is perhaps the most controversial aspect of agile methods. In such a high-speed development cycle, do we have time to fully understand users’ needs? The short answer is no. The long answer: If we’re defining users’ needs during development—even in an agile development process—something has gone horribly wrong.

Case in point: One of the engineering teams I’ve worked with used six-week cycles and two-week iterations. My original plan was to stay one iteration ahead of them, but that proved problematic—especially when I got to the second iteration. By that time, I was supporting revisions to iteration 1, supporting development on iteration 2, while designing for iteration 3. Needless to say, I drank a lot of coffee and burned the midnight oil for several weeks.

Redesigning a Development Process

What to do? I started out by taking a deep dive into agile development methods. I needed to better understand the theory behind these methods before I could even begin to resolve the friction between the two processes. In doing this study, the first thing that became apparent to me was that agile is a method of development. It’s certainly not a research process, and it’s only loosely a design process. Despite what many proponents of agile development methods would have you believe, they cannot replace the need for some up-front user research or design. Agile proponents may cringe at that statement, but I stand by it. That said, though, while agile methods can significantly reduce the amount of up-front design that’s required, it does not, in any way, reduce the time user research requires.

User Research

User research and agile do not play well together. The time to conduct field research is not during development. Research should occur before any design or development work begins. This may seem obvious, but is an extremely important point—especially when you consider that agile development is about writing code as early as possible and delivering working software as often as possible. Conducting user research slows things down. However—and I’m probably preaching to the choir here—user research provides insights into customers and their needs that will help a product team to identify useful new features and products as well as to prioritize those features and products for development.

The outcome of user research is documentation that describes users and their needs and goals—for example, personas that represent a product’s primary and secondary audiences. Many agile development methods employ user stories—which are somewhat similar to scenarios—and personas can become the main actors in these user stories. By creating behavior and goal-based personas, you can make your user stories much more effective. At this stage—before design has begun—user stories should be fairly high level and detail only how people will generally interact with your product.

I recommend involving a representative from engineering in your field research. By seeing users in the wild, engineers will develop some empathy toward them. Of course, doing this is helpful no matter what type of development method your team is using. Also, include this engineer in the process of developing personas and user stories. Getting buy-in from engineering is critical to the successful use of personas and user stories during the development cycle.

Feature Prioritization

Once user research is complete, and you’ve created your personas and high-level user stories, it’s time to define and prioritize product features.

Feature prioritization is important in agile, because it lets engineering focus first on the features that make up basic working software. There are many different prioritization techniques—some belonging to the different agile methods. Of all the techniques for ranking features I’ve encountered, I prefer Janice Fraser’s approach [3], because it’s simple, objective, and accounts for three important perspectives on product definition: the business, users, and technology. Using her prioritization technique, stakeholders rank the importance of each feature to the business, UX professionals rank the importance of each feature to the users, and technical analysts rank the feasibility of implementing the feature. Once they have all ranked the features, the product team combines the different rankings and compares them to identify the most important features.

Design

Once you’ve defined the feature priorities for your product, it’s time for design. Most agile development cycles comprise a time-boxed development period, or iteration, of 2–4 weeks, and the expectation is that a developer will have produced working software by the end of that cycle. As a designer, you should focus your efforts on designing the features in the next one or two iterations. If you get too far ahead of the engineers, you run the risk of requirements changing, necessitating a lot of rework. However, you need to stay far enough ahead so you have time to do usability testing and remedy any usability problems in the previous iteration, support development on the current iteration, and design for future iterations. If your development team’s iterations are brief, I recommend designing at least two iterations ahead. But with four-week iterations, designing one iteration ahead will probably be sufficient.

All design should start with the creation of detailed user stories. Be sure to involve the engineers who are developing related features in creating the user stories. You must have their buy-in for this technique to be effective. Once your user stories are complete, create your design documentation of choice. Keep in mind that there is a delicate balancing act you must manage. First, you must consider that you don’t have much time for producing a lot of design documentation, so the documentation you do create needs to be as concise, effective, and useful as possible. I’ve found wireframes and workflows to be most useful for engineers.

Second, in many agile development methods, documentation is nearly considered taboo. Some would say that the attitude “don’t document, do” is a core strength of agile, but where does that leave designers, whose main deliverables are information architecture diagrams, usability reports, wireframes, workflows, specifications, prototypes, and a myriad of other documents? This documentation helps designers model user interactions with a technology product, so it’s important—especially when you consider that it can actually reduce development time by identifying common patterns and eliminating unnecessary steps before any code has actually been written. The challenge, then, is to find a balance between providing too little documentation and too much documentation. Determining how much documentation is enough is not easy.

I have found that defining the 20 percent of a feature that includes its most important aspects gets it to a relatively good place. You can generally define and design the most important user interactions for a feature. Then, whiteboard sessions throughout an iteration let you define the remaining 80 percent.

Develop and Test

One of the core principles of agile development is its focus on delivering working software frequently. In some agile methods, a customer review of the working product even caps each biweekly or monthly iteration. In addition to or, sometimes, instead of these reviews, you can run iterative usability tests. According to Jakob Nielsen, if you do three rounds of usability testing, testing five people in each round, you can discover the majority of usability problems [4]. With agile development, you can test and revise a feature over three iterations, allowing you to discover and correct most usability problems before launching a product.

Conclusion: Integration of Agile and UCD Requires Collaboration

In this article, I’ve described some of my experiences and shared my thoughts on how to integrate agile software development and UCD. Of course, the goal for any process is to create something that will work for both the designers and the engineers working on a project, not to impose a canned process on a team. What’s actually pretty amazing about agile is that, at its core, it’s simply a manifesto that emphasizes the importance of collaboration to delivering useful, working software [5]—a manifesto that nearly anyone can get behind. Regardless of whether your development team adopts agile techniques, they hold plenty of valuable lessons that make it worthwhile for UCD practitioners to learn more about them.

Notes

1. There are many different agile development methods, including Scrum,Crystal, and XP. In this article, I focus on only the concept of agile software development, not any particular agile method.
2. In “Extreme Programming vs. Interaction Design,” Elden Nelson interviewed Alan Cooper and Kent Beck. By the end of their discussion, neither seemed to understand the value of the processes the other had defined.
3. In “Setting Priorities,” Janice Fraser outlines a simple and effective way of prioritizing features. The only thing I would consider adding is a column for weighting the feasibility of assigning a UCD resource to define a specific feature, which would be especially helpful on product teams where one designer is supporting several engineers across several features or products.
4. Jakob Nielsen makes a strong case for limiting testing to only five users in “Why You Only Need to Test With 5 Users.”
5. If you are interested in learning more about agile, you can read the full “Manifesto for Agile Software Development.”

Source: Richard F. Cecil, UXmatters

More than 24 percent of those who responded to the survey (full results in PDF form here) said they regularly play social games, a category that includes Facebook games such as Farmville, Mafia Wars and Happy Aquarium. According to survey company Info Solutions Group, that level of response suggests a total social gaming population of approximately 100 million. Social gamers were defined as those who said they play games on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace at least once a week. The market for social games has been growing so quickly that companies that make them, such as Zynga and Crowdstar, have become investment and acquisition targets.

Social gaming seems to appeal to a much older demographic than traditional video games, perhaps in part because social games are easier to play for short periods of time, are largely free, and don’t involve sophisticated equipment or gratuitous violence. According to a recent survey by Royal Pingdom, the average age of social networking site users in general is also older — the largest single group is between 35 and 44 years of age. More than 60 percent of Facebook users are over 35.

The PopCap study showed that 55 percent of all social gamers in the U.S. are women, as are almost 60 percent of those in the UK. The average age in the U.S. is 48, which is substantially older than the 38-year-old average in the UK, and 46 percent of American social gamers are 50 or older, compared with just 23 percent in the UK. Only 6 percent of all social gamers are age 21 or younger.

According to the survey, women make up the majority of avid social gamers, with 38 percent of female social gamers saying they play social games several times a day, vs. just 29 percent of males. Women are also more likely to play social games with their real-world friends than men are (68 percent vs. 56 percent) and are nearly twice as likely as men to play social games with relatives (46 percent vs. 29 percent). The vast majority (95 percent) of social gamers play multiple times per week, and nearly two-thirds play at least once a day.

The largest single group of social gamers — 41 per cent of those surveyed — work full time, while 13 percent are retired and 11 percent are homemakers. In terms of educational background, less than half of those who play social games in the U.S. are college graduates. One-third of those in the U.S. earn less than $35,000 a year while 17 percent earn between $35,000 and $49,000; 21 percent make between $50,000 and 75,000 and 21 percent earn more than $75,000 a year.

Other points of interest from the study include:

• More than 60 percent of social gamers say their average session lasts more than half an hour, and 10 percent say it lasts 3 hours or more. About a third (35 percent) say their consumption has increased over the past three months, compared to 10 percent who said it has decreased.
• Facebook is by far the most popular destination for social gamers, with 83 percent of those surveyed saying they play games there, compared with 24 percent who play on MySpace, 7 percent on Bebo and 5 percent on Friendster.
• Social gamers spend 39 percent of their time on social networking sites/services playing games, compared with chatting with/messaging friends (17 percent) and playing solo games (15 percent). Nearly half (49 percent) said that when they connect to social networks, they do so specifically to play social games.
• The most popular games are Farmville (69 percent of those who play it say they play once a week or more), Bejeweled (65 percent say once a week or more), Texas Hold’em Poker (63 percent) and Cafe World (61 percent).
• A little over half (53 percent) of social gamers say they’ve earned and/or spent virtual currency in a game, but only 28 percent have purchased virtual currency with real-world money and only 32 percent have purchased a virtual gift.

“This study establishes social games as a fast-growing and quickly maturing pastime for an enormous portion of the population,” Robin Boyar of Thinktank Research said in a statement. “With more than 80 percent of social gamers stating that playing social games strengthens their relationship with friends, family and colleagues, social gaming reinforces the core appeal of social networks.”

Source: gigaom.com

Miikka Terho, 46, from Finland, was fitted with an experimental chip behind his retina in Germany. Success was also reported in other patients.

The chip allows a patient to detect objects with their eyes, unlike a rival approach that uses an external camera.

Details of the work are in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Professor Eberhart Zrenner, of Germany’s University of Tuebingen, and colleagues at private company Retina Implant AG initially tested their sub-retinal chip on 11 people.

Some noticed no improvement as their condition was too advanced to benefit from the implant, but a majority were able to pick out bright objects, Prof Zrenner told the BBC.

However, it was only when the chip was placed further behind the retina, in the central macular area in three people, that they achieved the best results.

Two of these had lost their vision because of the inherited condition retinitis pigmentosa, or RP, the other because of a related inherited condition called choroideraemia.

RP leads to the progressive degeneration of cells in the eye’s retina, resulting in night blindness, tunnel vision and then usually permanent blindness. The symptoms can begin from early childhood.

The best results were achieved with Mr Terho, who was able to recognise cutlery and a mug on a table, a clock face and discern seven different shades of grey. He was also able to move around a room independently and approach people.

In further tests he read large letters set out before him, including his name, which had been deliberately misspelled. He soon noticed it had been spelt in the same way as the Finnish racing driver Mika Hakkinnen.

“Three or four days after the implantation, when everything was healed, I was like wow, there’s activity,” he told the BBC from his home in Finland.

“Right after that, if my eye hit the light, then I was able to see flashes, some activity which I hadn’t had.

“Then day after day when we started working with it, practising, then I started seeing better and better all the time.”

Soon Mr Terho was able to read letters by training his mind to bring the component lines that comprised the letters together.

The prototype implant has now been removed, but he has been promised an upgraded version soon. He says it can make a difference to his life.

“What I realised in those days was that it was such a great feeling to focus on something,” he says.

“Even having a limited ability to see with the chip, it will be good for orientation, either walking somewhere or being able to see that something is before you even if you don’t see all the tiny details of the object.”

Electrical impulses

The chip works by converting light that enters the eye into electrical impulses which are fed into the optic nerve behind the eye.

It is externally powered and in the initial study was connected to a cable which protruded from the skin behind the ear to connect with a battery.

The team are now testing an upgrade in which the device is all contained beneath the skin, with power delivered though the skin via an external device that clips behind the ear.

This is by no means the only approach being taken by scientists to try to restore some visual ability to people with retinal dysfunction – what’s called retinal dystrophy.

A rival chip by US-based Second Sight that sits on top of the retina has already been implanted in patients, but that technique requires the patient to be fitted with a camera fixed to a pair of glasses.

Charities gave the news of the latest work a cautious welcome.

David Head, of the British Retinitis Pigmentosa Society, said: “It’s really fascinating work, but it doesn’t restore vision. It rather gives people signals which help them to interpret.”

Source: by Neil Bowdler, BBC News