Effective Product Thinking
Effectivus is focussed on helping you to bring the best possible products to market in the most effective way. We combine strong commercial, technical thinking with innovation to deliver concrete results which will help you deliver better products. We focus on technical products, especially software, delivered into business markets. We have over 20 years experience with products for the creative industries.
Sketching User Experiences
A review of Bill Buxton’s book
In the late ’80s when I first began contributing to commercial products at Spaceward I came across a book which opened my eyes to the issue of how we interact with products and particularly software products. It was “Readings in Human-Computer Interaction” edited by Baecker and Buxton and changed the way I thought about my products in a fundamental way. Bill Buxton’s latest book has had a similar effect.
Reading “Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design” feels like leafing through a designer’s sketchbook, a sketchbook of a lifetime of contributing to designing high tech products. Ideas come at you from all angles and then drill down into incredible detail before spinning off in another direction.
Bill Buxton has worked at both EuroPARC and Xerox PARC, Silicon Graphics, Alias Wavefront and most recently Microsoft Research. He has been lecturing and writing on the human computer interaction for 30 years.
Apple differentiates the iPad
You can take a feature too far.
Regular readers will know that I tend to rant until blue in the face about differentiating technology products, targeting user needs and not going overboard with your one key differentiating feature.
I’m also really keen on clear names and clear concepts about what a product does. In the film industry they talk about “high-concept pitches” for films. Legend has it that the high-concept pitch for Aliens was “Jaws in space”.
So I was gratified when I heard a high-concept pitch for the Apple iPad as “like and iPhone but bigger” – I got it (or at least some of it) immediately. Then I came across this picture and became a little worried that Steve may have over done it a tad and that he was destined to go the same was as the captain of the Vasa.
Behind you Steve!
The future of 3D TV
Will 3D TV take off like The Stewardesses?
I am a geek. Well, I was. But I’m starting to doubt it now. You see part of being a geek is adopting new technologies way ahead of the sensible majority of the population. Not only am I a geek, but I’m a geek who has spent 25 years in the film and television business creating and delivering the coolest new products to help put fantastic images on your screens, but now I feel like I’m losing my way. Why? 3D TV.
First out let’s just clear something up, because geekiness is also about pedantry. It’s not 3D. I’ve got to call it that because everyone else does and if I don’t you won’t know what I’m talking about. The point is that it is an optical illusion that gives us just two of the cues we use to perceive the 3D world in which we live to make us think that what we are looking at is (a bit) three dimensional.
Samsung Tic Toc
The first ‘most stupid’ product award of 2010 goes to…
What were they thinking about? What can possibly have got into the Samsung engineers’ minds, let alone the marketing guys, to make them think that the Tic Toc was a good idea?
Announced at CES, the Tic Toc is an incredibly small MP3 player which has but one button. You control it by turning this way or that, or shaking it quickly or slowly. As the power says: “Easily shift through a choice of four play modes with a simple shake of the wrist”…”through the force of gravity”.
You can just imagine the thought process:
- We could make an MP3 player much smaller if it did not have to have buttons or a screen on it (a bit like saying a car could be much more efficient if only it did not have to carry passengers).
- I know, we play the Wii by shaking the controller, we could do the same with our MP3 player.
- Oh, wow, now we’d need to watsit, a thingy and a 9v power supply…
Meanwhile in the marketing department… “an MP3 player with no buttons, no one has ever done that before, we’ve got to show it at CES”.
Make the tough stuff look simple
How technologies, like special effects and small children, should hide their light under a bushel.
On one of my regular visits to our customer Industrial Light and Magic in the early ‘90s I was talking to one of the matte painters I love to watch users (whether artists or technical whiz kids) as they work. You learn so much from them. Only that way do you get a real understanding for their pains and needs. Sandy was drawing around the blue stockings on an actor, frame by frame, with amazing care and precision. She explained that they were going to have to remove the lower legs so that it looked as if the actor had had them amputated. The first stage was to isolate them.
Now usually you can hope to draw one frame and then move forward several frames, draw another, and then have the software generate the in-between shapes. If the motion is relatively simple, they match, or nearly match, the image, leaving the artist to do some simple fine-tuning. This is called “in-betweening” and we had written that functionality into Matador for just this purpose. Sandy knew all about this as she had helped us specify the functionality, so I asked her why she was not using it. In answer, she zoomed out so that I could see that the actor was sitting on a swing, hung from a mast, on a boat rocking on the ocean, shot by a camera on another boat. Simple the motion was not. In fact it was so complex that no amount of clever in-betweening was going to help her. I shook my head in disbelief at the skill and dedication required even to consider attempting this shot, never mind to bring it off convincingly.
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