The future of TV

Television is changing. Internet is increasingly used for distributing TV content. People can watch TV stations live over the internet, and they can view vast amounts of video clips on the web sites of TV channels and, of course, on all the social media sites. Television is becoming interactive.

Still, people watch the good old TV – nowadays often on wide screen home theatres – as much or more as they did earlier. There’s still something very compelling to just sit back, relax, and enjoy high quality programs together with family and friends.

Lately, we have seen launches of new tablet computers, the iPad by Apple being the most prominent. The evolution of laptop computers have been taking computers to this direction for some time now: lighter, thinner, better batteries, touch input, fluent connectivity, etc.

We at Nordkapp and at SuomiTV have identified these two trends, and we wanted to explore what this convergence will mean for the business of a broadcast television channel.

If you haven’t yet seen our concept video yet, you can see it on Vimeo.

From insight to implementation

We approached this by utilizing Nordkapp’s design process, which takes its main inspiration from the people – consumers or potential users of the projected solution. The process starts with the Insight phase, where we analyze users, trends, business, and technology. Then we move on to Synthesis phase to create the concept, and lastly to the Implementation phase, where the concept is refined, specified and taken through to the final carefully detailed, fully working solution.

Do people need tablets?

Computers in a form of a tablet haven’t been yet widely available yet – at least for larger consumer groups. People haven’t yet formed habits of how, where and for what tablet computers would be used. Therefore, we first wanted to do small user research studies, in order to find opportunities how tablets would naturally fit people’s everyday lives.

We visited people in their homes and observed and interviewed them about their use of TV, laptops and other media. It is always so refreshing, eye-opening and insightful to meet and talk with people and discuss their habits, usage patterns, expectations, fears, and attitudes towards technology.

Disappearing computer

One of the primary patterns we identified was that laptops were fluently used around the house. In particular, people had the habit of bringing the laptops to living rooms and using them while watching TV. Seeing this pattern repeatedly gave us the insight that laptops are currently used to fulfill the needs for internet, interactive content, and social use (Facebook etc) also while being together. People found this much more social than staying in different rooms at their computers.

As laptops are still somewhat cumbersome to move around, we found that this is a perfect opportunity for the tablet computer: to complement the relaxed TV-watching, typically in the living room. Tablets are less intrusive than laptops: they don’t have the display that protrudes between people. The relaxed use with swipes and gestures with the tablet casually on the lap is perfect for living room use. The computer disappears.

Complementing the TV

A straightforward design of a TV application to a tablet computer would probably contain a large window to display the TV stream. But how silly that would be! If you are sitting down in your living room, in front of the large-screen TV, why would you watch the same on the tablet? After the first interviews we soon understood that our application on a tablet must not just copy the TV. Instead, it must complement it.

The tablets are optimal devices for providing complementing information to the live TV programs. You can have an additional screen for the program guide, further information about the programs, links to IMDB database or Wikipedia for detailed information about movies, and more information available about the advertisements that you simultaneously see on the TV. If you would browse through any of this on the same large screen on your living room wall, this would drive your family and friends mad. Intensive interaction is best to be done alone.

With our design we support people being social while they are together. But of course, nowadays “social” has another meaning too. With tablets, it will be possible to be social over the distance and discuss, share, rate, poke, throw a sheep, and whatnot with your friends. As a complement to the TV, the tablet is the natural UI for social media while enjoying TV.

Naturally, you will have moments when you’re not in front of your home theatre and yet want to watch a program on the TV. This requires that the tablet has a second mode that provides a lean-back user interface with no or little interruptions, preferably in landscape orientation.

And radio, too?

We found also other fascinating ideas for tablets. When they are easy to carry around the house, they will be brought to places like bedside tables or to the bathroom, where they are used for entertainment and news, for example while applying make-up or taking a shower. In these use cases, tablets will assume the role of the radio: perfect for background information and entertainment.

Design drivers

We concluded the insights phase with workshops, where we defined the design drivers for our concept. Design drivers describe the design intent in a short, crystallized sentences that are easy for the designers to keep in mind.

Our design drivers were:

Cherish touch
Tablets have touch UI, so it should be used to its full potential. It’s always good to interact directly with the content rather than with artificial controls and levers.

Complement large-screen TV
Don’t just do what the TV does, but complement with additional interaction, features, social use, etc.

Respect full screen viewing
When user is enjoying the full screen TV, provide a laid back UI. Use subtle notifications and avoid interruptions.

High quality and relevant content
SuomiTV ensures that the TV content is of high quality. Filter it further according to recommendations by friends to make it more relevant.

Good for people, good for advertiser
The tablet enables new advertising models, especially when used together with the live TV. At best, ads provide real value to the user.

Next up: Designing the concept – read more in Nordkapp blog.

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The concept is a result of compact three weeks of intensive work. We produced quite a bit of ideas and material of which about 25% made it to the final concept. Naturally our intention is to share as much as we can, so look out for more posts delving into related material.

Remember to check out the other parts as well;

• PART 2: TAP THE TV – New Interactions
• Our concept video on Vimeo
• Our concept video on Youtube

UX leadership insight #1: Clear design drivers
UX leadership insight #2: Vague or specific?
UX leadership insight #3: Pick your battles
UX leadership insight #4: Appropriately radical
UX leadership insight #5: Split it
UX leadership insight #6: Milestones are good for you
UX leadership insight #7: Difficulty of UX design reviews
UX leadership insight #8: UX and agile
UX leadership insight #9: Demos are not only for demos
UX leadership insight #10: Tools of trade
UX leadership insight #11: Skill is everything
UX leadership insight #12: The space between
UX leadership insight #13: Bell curve
UX leadership insight #14: Tacit knowledge
UX leadership insight #15: You

I hope you enjoyed! And now something completely different…

In a large project, there will always be some churn in the design team. Some designers will eventually leave, and there will be some new members that join the team during the process. Sometimes, when there are schedule pressure in the project, you can try to catch up by adding a couple of extra designers to the project. New hires, freelancers, agencies – there are always people available (if you have deep pockets).

In a large design project you will have vast amount of tacit knowledge that is never written down. You may have documents describing the original design drivers or goals of the project. However, the interpretation of those drivers take place during the design process. People who enter the project later haven’t been part of that process of creating the shared understanding. They don’t get it.

The soul of the design cannot be documented. Designers must grow into it.

As design lead, you have a key role in transferring the tacit knowledge hidden in the existing design team to the new team members. It will take time – they need to “get it” by copying others work, and through trial and error. You must spend quality time with them, walking through their design proposals and discussing if those are aligned with the rest of the designs. You can try to delegate this to a senior designer in the team, too, by pairing them up.

There are no quick fixes to resource gaps in design projects. Sometimes you have to get new designers to fill in, but be prepared that this will require that you invest a significant share of your time to it.

As with many other natural phenomena, the skills of designers follow a bell curve. There are always a few super productive ones, lots of in-between, and then some at the tail of the curve. Factors that determine the productivity and quality of design work include training, experience, or simply – if I dare to say aloud – talent.

In a large design project you certainly will have designers from all over the bell curve. Naturally, you probably try to optimize that you can be working with the best people all the time. But the same bell curve will still be there with the group of the best… So my question is this: how to assign different design tasks for different kinds of designers?

The obvious answer would be that you put the strongest in the most challenging and most relevant tasks, and the less experienced in the least significant parts of the design. However, if you do this, you will have one surprising effect. You probably need to spend more time with the inexperienced designers than the strong ones. They need more support, they have more questions, they need your design input and supervision more frequently, their designs will have more comments in reviews, etc. As a result, you will be spending most of your time in the design tasks that you just had decided to be less central to the success of the project.

I think that the key to solving such issues lies in careful teaming: the designers will be split in working teams or pairs where less experienced always work with more experienced colleagues. In this way, the responsibility of tutoring is distributed more evenly. The same challenges will still be there in the small teams, but they will still be more manageable that way.

PS. I have been considering for a long time if I should write about this delicate topic. I sincerely hope that nobody that I’ve ever worked with will take offense.

Presentation schedule

Helsinki Design Capital 2012 – Palvelumuotoilu kaupunkimediassa

9.00 Welcome, Esa Blomberg & Helena Hyvärinen

9.10 4 things to remember when designing service interactions Anton Schubert, 358

9.30 Miten palvelumuotoilu luo mahdollisuuksia kaupunkiympäristössä Mikko Koivisto, Yatta

9.50 Palvelumuotoilussa oli avaimet voittoon: Forum Virium Helsinki ja WDC (world design capital 2012)

10.10 case I, Mikko Jäppinen, Palmu inc

10.20 case II, Teppo Kotirinta, Nordkapp

Mikko Franck, a respected Finnish conductor, was asked to help out and rehearse with an amateur orchestra for a full weekend. He arrived at the site, and just for a trial started to conduct the first composition. The musicians in the orchestra didn’t play particularly well. In fact, they struggled to keep in their tunes. After a few bars he put his baton down and said: “I’m sorry, but I can’t help you”, and walked out.

I’m not 100% sure that this is a true story. Nevertheless, if it weren’t, it wouldn’t make the point of the story any less clear. Just like the orchestra conductor, you as a design lead you should concentrate in the big picture and the nuances of the details that make designs perfect. If the basic skills of the designers that you work with are not there, it will take a lot from your time to simply teach people how to design.

As discussed earlier in this series, you will need a lot of raw material from the designers, based on which you can steer the project. In addition to being able to create solid designs and creative solutions (preferably better than you ever could), the designers must master the basic tools and able to express themselves verbally and visually, and be great communicators. Only then they will be efficiently provide the raw material for you that you need so that you can orchestrate the design.

Naturally, there will be different designers that you will have the chance to work with. Some will be less, some more experienced. You must coach new designers to be part of the team. But don’t let that take all your time.

PS. Sorry for the long gap between #10 and #11. Been busy with fascinating projects – and also the series is now starting to discuss issues with people so maybe I’m subconsciously postponing these as it’s difficult to stay politically correct.

The new old media

One of the most obvious uses for this is naturally the “old” media and the publishing industry. I am not probably very much off if I propose that the iPad, along the whole interaction paradigm, will breathe a new kind of life to the industry at a brink of being left behind. It will change the way how we see both form and content and the papers themselves. It will not happen overnight but  I feel that we’re approaching the tipping point on this quite soon. After more than a few not-so-successful attempts to bring the magazine experience to a digital medium (Flash newspapers anyone?) we’re finally on the verge of reaching the sufficient levels in technology, business ecosystem and last, but not least —interactions.

For a taste of what I’m talking about, here’s two examples: First, the GQ iPhone app which delivers a somewhat familiar magazine format spiced with video content for your iPhone. Buying an issue €2.99 a pop hasn’t ever been this easy. And once done with that, the Mag+ concept for Bonnier R&D by BERG London will most likely blow your mind.  What’s cool about it, the concept is very much implementable for iPad right away. And believe me, these both are only a taste of things to come.

The iPad as a prototyping platform

Which takes me to this: From our point of view, the greatest thing about iPad isn’t that it’s the business ecosystem, eBooks or even the possibility for quite slick and carefree couch surfing. What’s really cool about is that having roughly a 10″ multitouch tablet-like device with a proper, modern web browser. This means an easy access to a super capable platform for prototyping *anything* portable, with or without touch interaction. A clean slate if you will.

To illustrate the possibilities, a few uses from the top of my head would be concept, prototyping and development of a store cash register replacement, musical instrument or a sampler, a medical assistant or even a multi purpose communicator/support device for the elderly people. The natural interactions and ease of use are all there, while the technical capabilities are far beyond what’s needed. Very much of this of course is possible on iPhone + iPod Touch as well, but  the physical size is a major factor here.

What the iPad will *not* do is replace laptops and work machines at the office anytime soon. As Casey Reas pointed out— it is mostly about consuming media instead of producing, at least on a large scale.

Elsewhere;

— Pentagram’s Luke Hayman has posted a fairly good analysis on the publishing industry: Five ways the iPad will change magazine design.

— Gizmodo makes a very good point on Apple iPad just tried to assasinate laptops.

— New York Times’ David Pogue’s first impressions on the iPad.

— POPSCI Hands on, including video. Especially the browser behaviour looks super smooth.

— It’s all about the context according to Brendan Dawes.

— And of course, there’s always the nerdgasm/aftermath on Twitter

1. Design as a process

In 2006, the UK’s Design Council published their seminal paper on Transformation Design. Somehow things kept bubbling under the radar for a few years, but slowly design started to catch up. Meanwhile  service design and UX had brought the holistic, human centered thinking into into the collective design consciousness, and year 2009 saw Design Thinking in the limelight.  2010 will be quite interesting as design-led thinking keeps on penetrating in both business and technical development, and sometimes even shaping whole organizations, institutions and governments in a new, design-centered form. If you’re in marketing, you should be aware of the impact of transmedia storytelling will have on your work. If not, get busy with it.

More:
Transformation Design @ Wikipedia
Some Design Thinking principles

2. Rise of design generalists

Architect Eero Saarinen noted that designer should always resonate with the next larger context. As one could’ve read between the lines on previous theme, designers today tackle problems far beyond mere artifacts or even services, the larger context becomes more challenging to grasp. Keeping this in mind, design matures to seniority in the sense that it keeps on addressing the several different interaction within a system and hence, its boundaries as a whole. Design tools such as service journeys and experience maps address this level already, but in order to fully grasp the potential, design teams themselves need to involve different types on people.  These people should possess great design skills but also understanding of lateral thinking, even to a degree where they see themselves as generalists. Of course there will always be specialists, but design as a process needs both narrow but deep experts and wide-reaching empathic polymaths. Intelligent, curious and open minded people who are three-week experts on most pre-narrowed topics.

For example, when reaching into humanist sciences such as sociology beyond the surface requires training and experience. At the same time, when sociology is brought to the context of design practice, sociologists themselves need to understand design as well. They don’t have possess design skills, but understanding how design works is essential.  In design itself, interaction designers are already the de facto design generalists, and like all other designers, need to understand the human needs as well, and act as a filter for various kinds of inputs from research to vision to business. As design practice in particular is reaching towards more important strategic role, the role of a individual designer as a catalyst will become even more important.

More;
Systems Thinking @ Wikipedia

3. End of control

It should be pretty obvious by now that the internet has changed everything. And the change will only get faster and more vicious to the industries left behind. On a personal level, this is not that significant as most people are more than well of with a Facebook account, and possibly LinkedIn for the internet-savies. But if you’re in the business of running a company, things get very different. Now the people are in charge, and make no mistake, your brand is what they think it is. Not what you claim it to be.

Regarding content industries things will get interesting. For example, while in Finland the local media companies are busy suing TV-Kaista, Swedish service Voddler is about to launch a Spotify-like streaming video service in Finland as well. The industry is changing, and it will be exciting to see who are the ones prepared to embrace the change and who will get left behind.

More:
After Branding

4. Post-point and click interactions

At this stage it’s not really a question whether the rumored Apple device gets released or not, but the storm that has been built around. Last year saw the release of different kind of netbooks such as Litl, Nokia Booklet 3G, light operating systems such as Jolicloud and Google Chrome OS and 2010 will see many more. Squeezable mobile devices? You got it. Magic wand as a remote control for your tv? Oh yeah. Neural interfaces? Just $299, my friend.

It’s pretty clear interaction and especially web browser is far off from being tied into a form factor of something called “a computer”. Multitouch and gestural interaction guarantees also that the “computers” are just not for geeks anymore— for further evidence, just hand out your iPhone to a 6-year old kid or your grand dad. Oh and did I mention that Amazon’s most gifted item *ever* was Kindle on this christmas? And what comes to Apple, they most probably are onto something big again.

5. Ubiquitous computing

So this is where the things will get super exciting. The year 2009 saw Russell Davies coining the term Post Digital where internet turns around and penetrates physical objects. This co-incided this with the rise of sensors (almost) to mainstream, and Arduino, Pachube et al will keep on providing designers and technologists alike tools to prototype, hack, and visualize the ambient data in ways we’re just about to realize the potential of.

As our friend Adam writes, everything will have an IP address and it will happen sooner than you think. In-eye bionic interfaces? Almost there. Large scale touchscreens? Yes. And when we start pulling all these together, it’ will be magic. Besides, Google is laying the groundwork already.

More:
Mashable: Location. location, location

6. Play and social gaming

While location was all the craze in 2009 already, last year saw the also rise of services such Loopt, Gowal.la and Foursquare into the mainstream. For you not familiar with these, they are websites and mobile applications that build a reputation system around real world places. For example, in Foursquare you can become the Mayor of your favorite coffee shop until someone else checks in at the same place more than you. This encourages play and digital meritocracy on real world locations. Other examples include for example geo-caching.

More:
http://www.avantgame.com/
http://www.greyarealabs.com/

7. Design for people, not just users

Forget users, forget useless focus groups and fluffy market studies. The real innovation lies in combining technical advances with real latent needs of real people. Of course, the future will be mostly unpredictable, there will always be black swans, but at least part of it will be made by the pioneers. And the beauty of it all is that design-led innovation doesn’t always need to be revolutionary. A lot of times, evolution is more than enough. For Bank of America, their Keep the Change-program made more than $1.8b in customer savings while finding an untapped behavior in the existing system.

More:
IDEO’s Human Centred Design -toolkit

8. Aggregation, aggregation, aggregation

In 2010, having just “feeds” or even “real time web” is just not enough. Information on the internet is growing exponentially, and while major services such as Facebook are taking first step on curating the social graph, there’s a huge need for simplicity in terms of content. One of the biggest reasons this hasn’t done yet is because it’s not easy. At all. There are several companies providing services or APIs on mapping the social graph itself, and a few attempts on social curation in general. While the notion of aggregation is not exactly new by itself, my bet(and hope) is 2010 will be the year we see the first major services in the mainstream.

More:
Techcrunch: The dawning of ambient streams
AdAge on 2010: Brands start taking advantage of social graphs.
RWW: Social Graph: Concepts and Issues (in 2007)

Somewhat related

—Bruce Sterling: State of the World 2010
—Landor’s 2010 Trends Forecast
—Millennial Predictions for the next decade
—Adweek’s Top Digital Trends for 2010
—Sitra: Suomen tietoyhteiskunta 2020

Original photo cc by Oberazzi on Flickr

Watercolor paintings and oil paintings look no doubt quite different. The artist had a vision about the desired end result and then selected the painting technique that is best suited to reach it. In any form of art or craft, the tool is always visible in the end result. The same applies to interaction design.

The most typical process for interaction design is to draw wireframes of screens. After that, a visual designer will start working on the wireframes and designs the visuals. This process and selection of tools will be visible in the end result. Let’s say, if you design with Visio/Omnigraffle/Powerpoint, and then fill in the boxes with graphics, you will get … boxes with graphics: screens after screens, dialog boxes, windows, discrete states, z-hierarchy.

However, discrete (yet pretty) boxes is not my ideal of an optimal UI. What is your view as a design lead, what kind of result would you like to see? In my view, the UIs should be much more dynamic and fluid: canvases that transform to other canvases, objects that flex and transform, use of different shapes, fluent transitions. Interaction, that is genuinely utilizing the continuity of time. UIs that never stand completely still. Interaction that smoothly leads viewer’s eyes, hands and mind.
I’m not sure if there are proper design tools available for this. What would be the next generation of Harel’s state charts to describe and specify fluid interaction? Anyone?

Demos are great for many purposes. The most obvious ones are to communicate the design to someone else, and test the UI with end users. However, in a large design project, the less obvious purposes may be the most important ones.

A demo or a simulation is the best tool for telling about the ongoing designs for people outside the project. You can try to explain the design intent and use cases with bullet points on paper, but when people see and feel the designs, they will finally understand. In my work when presenting designs, I usually have simply skipped all slideware and presented the design only through an interactive demo. While using the demo it is quite easy to verbally point out different elements in the design, and at the same time tell the background story; the design rationale. It’s also a good test if you really know your story.

You can’t get a feeling of an interactive UI on paper. The first audience for a demo is the designer herself, or you as a design lead. By trying the designs out you can be confident that they really do work (for the user). With experience you can predict quite accurately if a design will perform well in user testing. Naturally, surprises still do happen.

One important aspect of building demos is process related. Without a demo, you perhaps can keep on working with different parts of the designs separately. Designing like that for long you run a risk that at the end, the bits and pieces will not fit together. Here where building demos help. The prototype engineer (or whoever does this for you) needs to get all the designs, well documented, with all the graphic files, and then make them all work together in the demo. Usually you will find that there are quite a few gaps, missing designs etc. A demo will force you to put together a complete system, not just parts of it.

A demo is a shared effort of the whole design team. Everyone’s contribution is needed. Demos help you feel that you are building one system together. If you can include good looking, although not necessarily final, graphics into the demos, you can also give the team a good morale boost. They start to see their efforts materialize and set further expectations for the final delivery.

PS. Fascinating discussion initiated by Jon Kolko here. I wonder if I should change the name of the series to “Interaction design leadership”…