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Posts Tagged ‘ Interactive User Experience ’

Unity 3D: An alternative to Flash for highly interactive content?

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010 at 4:05 pm   - Posted by Pravin Kulange

Most of us are closely following the standoff between Apple and Adobe over Flash. It is now clear that Flash won’t be available on Apple devices anytime soon. Folks like me hoping to use Flash as a cross-platform tool for different mobile devices and web browsers have to look for alternatives. There are clear signs that mobile industry is going to be a fragmented one. So, writing code for each individual platform is not really optimal. What we need to achieve very quickly are the following:

  • Cut down development costs of highly interactive iPhone content and apps
  • Publish for multiple platforms (mobile, web, desktop) with minimal or no additional efforts
  • Provide immersive experience with rich interface and high interactivity

Although Unity is known as a game development tool, it can provide a good alternative to satisfy the above needs. A close look at Unity’s features reveals that Unity can go beyond games. It offers excellent features for 2D and 3D graphics, audio, video, animation, networking and deployment. It has an embedded game engine, a fully integrated IDE and uses JavaScript and C# as programming languages. It supports importing assets from all popular graphics tools. In short, everything a highly interactive application or content will need, and that a developer looks for, is available.

Unity also doesn’t seem to be harmed by the Apple OS 4.0 license change (clause 3.3.1) that closed the doors on Flash. Unity’s CEO David Helgason anticipates no problems so far. Even if it impacts, the fact that Unity compiles into an XCode project may help them realign quickly. Same may not be true with Flash, as the reasons there go beyond just technology (remember, Flash bypasses the native platform unlike Unity).

Unity has a proven track record on iPhone and iPod Touch (it now also supports iPad). It supports Mac, PC, Wii, XBox 360 and all popular browsers (check out this sample). The upcoming version, Unity 3, will also add support for Android and PlayStation 3. Looking at the growth of Unity both in terms of the number of registered users (130k+ so far) and the addition of platforms supported, Unity surely seems promising for the development of highly interactive content to face the proliferation of devices out there. It will be very interesting to see how well it works out in the interest of developers and end users!

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Apple’s Secret Sauce: Interactive User Experience

Monday, April 5th, 2010 at 5:34 am   - Posted by Shivesh Vishwanathan

An interesting study conducted recently could shed some light on why some of the new-age companies like Google and Apple are scoring so well compared to the erstwhile leaders like Microsoft and Yahoo!. The study from Cornell, published in , shows that experiences are better than possessions. The study essentially says:

The satisfaction we get from buying vacations, bikes for exercise and other experiences starts high and keeps growing. The initial high we feel from acquiring a flashy car or megascreen TV, on the other hand, trails off rather quickly.

I will not be exaggerating at all if I attribute the recent successes of Apple, from the launch of iPod to iPad (read Apple sold 300,000 iPads on its first day), to the creation of great user experiences. Experiences stick with users for a long time and are hard to compare very objectively. What Apple creates is what we call Interactive User Experience. If you are thinking IUX is just some nice UI, think again! IUX goes beyond the mere user interface and puts you firmly inside the context of your interaction. It is rooted in three principles that are coming of age in 2010 – Touch, Sensor and Location. It’s the difference between driving a car and racing it on a PlayStation. IUX is the thing of the future, just like GUI was the thing of the future back in the late 70s. And with the iPads and iPods of the world just coming out, it is safe to say that we are just getting started!

Our white paper Interactive User Experience: Going Beyond Interfaces, describes how IUX is different from UI, and illustrates it with some examples.

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Enterprise 2.0 software adoption: A tipping point in sight?

Sunday, February 28th, 2010 at 3:49 am   - Posted by Shivesh Vishwanathan

Over three years ago, Andrew McAfee wrote an insightful post on The 9X Email Problem. In the post backed by research of a colleague from Harvard, Andrew makes a case for Enterprise 2.0 software to be nine times better than Email to be accepted by businesses and their decision makers.

The number nine, he and his colleague say, comes from the multiplier effect of two pieces of irrational behavior displayed by consumers.

“…research suggests that the average person will underweight the prospective benefits of a replacement technology for it by about a factor of three, and overweight by the same factor, everything they’re being asked to give up…”

The bottom line is that if one has to oust email from its dominant position and be heard in the enterprise collaboration software market, he or she has to either

  1. increase the perceived benefits of his or her software or
  2. lower the perceived costs of switching for the customer.

The post recommends some strategies to achieve the former. The most effective one according to Andrew is an “extremely effective user interface and layout“.

We have come a long way from the way internet looked in 2006. Web 2.0 is so pervasive now that one cannot imagine the web without its myriad UI and collaborative features anymore. We, at Harbinger Systems have been building enterprise software systems with Web 2.0 features for companies that are trying hard to crack the Enterprise 2.0 puzzle. Back in April 2009, we presented a topic on Enterprise 2.0 at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. An abridged version of the presentation has since been posted on our website, and we also created The Enterprise Software Makeover Guide – a white paper that enumerates ten of the best UI elements that came out of Web 2.0, and that have performed well in the enterprise environment over a sustained period of time.

If Enterprise 2.0 has to become as pervasive as Web 2.0, some of the Web 2.0 concepts have to make their way into enterprise products – and make it so well as to break the 9X hurdle in the minds of enterprise customers. How far do you think are we from the tipping point? Are we standing bang in the middle of it all with SaaS, Cloud Computing and Google Apps + Buzz? What other signs of Enterprise 2.0 are you seeing at your workplace?

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Interactive User Experience (IUX): Going beyond interfaces

Monday, February 22nd, 2010 at 2:06 am   - Posted by Webmaster

We have a new white paper that identifies Interactive User Experience, or IUX as the next frontier in human-computer interaction. IUX combines three types of interactivity, which in turn exploit unique platform capabilities such as direction, touch, orientation, location, movement and proximity. The transition from user interface (UI) to IUX is as revolutionary as the transition from command-line console to GUI three decades ago. The paper explains IUX, the three types of interactivity that enable IUX, and presents examples based on Apple’s iPhone, the pioneer and by far the most successful IUX device.

Request Interactive User Experience: Going Beyond Interfaces white paper today from our website.

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iPad rings in the Interactive User Experience

Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 3:46 am   - Posted by Shivesh Vishwanathan

The Apple iPad is bringing in a new kind of user experience to our lives in front of computers. Just like computers reinvented themselves from a command-line-based console interface to a window-based graphical user interface (GUI) three decades ago, they will now have to reinvent themselves from graphical user interface to what I call, the Interactive User Experience (IUX) or First-person User Experience.

My earlier post introduced the concept as a user experience that puts the user firmly in control of the context of interaction in addition to the object of interaction. It is rooted in three principles that are coming of age in 2010:

  1. Touch, which throws keyboard and mouse out of the window (pun intended!)
  2. Orientation, which makes the “being” of the device itself a medium of input and
  3. Location, which introduces a new dimension to interaction.

The IUX will come in the form of wearable devices (or close-to-wearable devices like the iPad/iPhone) that will provide the user with a very immersive experience. The video below from TED might be a bit old now, but it is worth revisiting as a good demonstration of what it will all eventually look like.

You could visualize this as progressively reducing distance between computers and humans, and the coming decade will bring the computer even closer to us. For now, let’s see what the app developers have in store for this new device.

Update: Our new white paper Interactive User Experience: Going Beyond Interfaces, describes how IUX is different from UI, and illustrates it with some examples.

The sixth-sense video from TED.

 

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A very simple lesson in user experience

Sunday, January 24th, 2010 at 10:28 pm   - Posted by Shivesh Vishwanathan

First-Person Tetris is a truly unique take on the old game of Tetris, and exemplifies out-of-the-box thinking in interactivity design (quite literally).

User Interactivity from First-Person Tetris

What makes First-Person Tetris really interesting is that it turns the concept of the game on its head. In Tetris, you interact with the objects through your keyboard to place them properly in the box. First-Person Tetris makes you, the user, manipulate the context, which is the box, to ensure that objects fall into place properly.

When I came across this, I shared it with a few friends. One of them replied with a simple, “Love the idea!”. Most people I have shown this to have had similar reactions. For some inexplicable reason, the idea of rotating and moving the graphic computer shown in the game appeals to us, and so I think there is a very fundamental lesson here for all of us. And here is the lesson: Tetris is a game of user interface, where you manipulate objects that you see on the screen. FPT is a game of user interactivity. It goes beyond the mere user interface and puts you firmly inside the context. It’s the difference between driving a car and racing it on a PlayStation.

Touch-screen interface, accelerometer and GPS are examples of interactivities that create a first person user experience. Touch-screen breaks down the barrier between the user and the object and provides an experience in user immersion. Accelerometer helps with experience in object’s orientation, and GPS does so with the location of the object (where am I?).

Similar out-of-the-box thinking in building games and application clients for new, portable devices like iPhone, Droid, Kindle, iPad / iSlate has the potential to turn user interface on its head and create a new world of user interactivity. As you think of building apps for these devices, think of leveraging touch-screen, accelerometer and GPS to create a first person user experience.

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iSlate, interactivity and the era of intimate interfaces

Wednesday, December 30th, 2009 at 10:36 pm   - Posted by Shivesh Vishwanathan

Bonnier R&D came up with the following great concept for an e-Magazine Reader that offers great colors, animations, user interface and reading experience.

Mag+ from Bonnier on Vimeo.

We at Harbinger are passionate about interactivity and user experience, and have built great user experiences like flip-book on desktop, web and iPhone. The advent of a new breed of devices with touch-screen, accelerometer, GPS etc. opens up great opportunities for software product vendors to create wonderful user experiences. After all, we humans have a fascination with intimate interfaces on flat surfaces to do our work on – think of the amount of time we spend on papers, boards, desks and pads. The computer just had it coming!

So, 2010 is touted to be the year of what is variously named as tablets, slates or pads, and Apple is rumored to be announcing an ‘iSlate‘ this January. Do you think 2010 will be the year when the computer finally starts going flat?

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What are the trends that are defining the technology world? What is impacting the user interface, design, development and delivery of software? This blog explores the state of technology and the goings on at Harbinger Systems.

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