Launch!

The service has been in the making for quite a long now. It’s good to finally see it go online and start to pickup users. In fact, due to the unique nature of this service it has a potential to grab huge number of users from the general populace. This project has seen many people since it’s beginning, but mainly the final design is done by Sami and myself. Talented people from the client and a 3rd party agile tech house have also had months long endurance, fighting all sorts of technical challenges, and working a lot with us on the design, too. Sadly we can’t say which service this is.Thanks from our behalf as well, it’s been a long ride.

And it’s not over yet. Now we are planning the next half a year’s worth of development on this one and other sibling services in this service ecosystem.

Concept!

In the multitouch tablet TV concept for our dear client SuomiTV, Mikael the client and some of our people talk about the place of tablets at home, our research on the topic and some new fantastic interactions we came up with. Panu, Sami, Ilkka, Sauli, Tia and Samuel were the main team in this project, but the final concepts include ideas from probably all of us.

The video comes (so far) with two blog posts that further iterate the concept. Have a look at them if you’re interested in multitouch interactions.

PART 1: TAP THE TV – The Concept

PART 2: TAP THE TV — New Interactions

In the end this is all about how watching television is changing. And naturally anything that is (or could be) in the middle of change, is something that we at Nordkapp are interested in. Nice, quick, fun, inspiring project. Let’s have more of these.

See you in one or two summer weeks. Maybe.

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.

++
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

As you’ve probably seen from the Youtube videos, the iPad/iPhone direct interaction is as close to natural interface as one gets. The absense of a pointing device removes an extra step from between the user and the interface, and multitouch naturally adds to this in a very exciting way. In this article I’ll go through a few pointers about our tablet concept, and of course how and why we arrived into our design decisions.

Form equals function

Conceptually iPad has two orientations—vertical and horizontal. We came to the conclusion that in a context of TV use the form should be respected to some extent: the portrait form is perfect for browsing and reading content, whereas the landscape facilitates more old fashioned, TV use. One major factor supporting this is the broadcast industry heritage especially with aspect ratios of TV content. This is actually quite significant because SuomiTV has 100%  HD production pipeline, and hence all the content is very high quality 16:9.

Pointing fingers

From the start one of the main ideas for this concept was to have as little interface as possible and let people interact directly with the content itself. With iPad this comes quite naturally, and we felt we should take the whole notion of a seamless interface one step futher.

Despite being a young platform, thanks to other, earlier iProducts, the iPad comes with clear interaction language already familiar to users. There are three kind of controls in this concept; direct, gestural and physical interaction. The primary way of interaction is tapping the screen and receiving an immediate response. In addition to this, there are simple physical gestures such as swipe. In fact, these two(!) things are all you need to learn in order to use an iPad. And since we’re talking about direct manipulation, the learning curve is almost nonexistent.

Not just one, but two

What we did is build a gestural system on top of this. Single finger tap + swipes are reserved for navigation and straightforward tasks. Placing two fingers on the screen means either more prominent tasks such as swapping playlists and saving videos locally for later use. In our initial concept we also toyed around familiar gestures such as pinch, but ended up leaving it out from the final concept for later development. Instead, the landscape use gives you access to joystick-like contextual video controls, which enable an enjoyable flow without having to concentrate pointing accurately on a timeline.

The third way to interact with the content is physical interaction with the device itself. We believe that by physical interaction with digital content makes it more real and tangible. There’s some great potential here, and we included in the concept playful little things such as shaking the device to shuffle a playlist, and tapping the side of the device to fast forward / scrub a video.

Selected screens (click for larger)

++
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 1: TAP THE TV – the concept
• Our concept video on Vimeo
• Our concept video on Youtube

People are still excited about the iPad project. You can see one of the many project group sessions going on in the above picture. The project is coming together and a cool video concept looms in the future.

Design-wise iPad also brings challenges, as there’s so many ways interaction could be done on it. One could select a more traditional route or go completely crazy with it. The perfect solution is probably often somewhere in between. It’s inspiring to see so much effort from the tech and design communities being put into developing platforms and best practices for these devices. This sort of innovation was probably happening when computers were being invented, and has always been going on, but nowadays it seems to be happening at shorter and shorter time intervals. Sharing is a great thing.

In fact, the iPad and the communities around it remind me of the often quoted words here at Nordkapp:

The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.
—William Gibson

Whatever we design can implemented and used immediately by people, which is extremely refreshing for future-looking designers like us.

In The Feed

If you haven’t noticed yet, our blog also features a section called “In The Feed“, which includes a flow of interesting items from the internets our people have deemed noteworthy enough to be added to Tumblr. In The Feed is present in the blog homepage and also now on its own URL.

This section will give you a good and near constant flow of hot topics in Interaction Design, Data Visualization, Cities, Design, AR, Management, UI innovations and what not. Anything even distantly related to the interesting world of digital communication and interaction. Check it out if you want to be entertained or inspired.

Weeknote break coming up?

I’m thinking I need a summer break from writing weeknotes soon. I’m currently extra busy on my freetime and work hours are pretty much minute-to-minute all client work. Therefore weeknotes are sadly getting a bit long in the tooth. (As you can see from the title, I’ve already taken a shortcut of grouping two weeks in to one weeknote.)

Besides, the Finnish summer is finally starting. During summer companies and projects go in to slow-mode. This slowing down normally starts after Mid Summer, which is next week’s weekend. You know, Mid Summer is a huge thing in Finland as we’ve suffered a long winter before that. Often that’s when peoples’ holidays also start. Some of Nordkappers escape to the nature then, too. There might not be too much to write about and I might want to be on a beach.

In effect, don’t expect too much from the weeknotes from the weeks to come. But I might stick around for some more weeks, before chillin’ over summer. Let’s see.

Take it easy in the meantime, dudes and dudettes.

Media house project’s first phase will be ready this Friday. During next few days we’ll finalize our presentation materials and specification document while design team finalizes the look & feel.

The client is very interested in deepening cooperation with us. This development looks very promising going forward. It seems that Nordkapp’s honest, open and user centered approach on concept and service design is much needed “breath of fresh air” for big organizations as well. Making development based only on technical decisions or hand-waving just won’t do it anymore.

Elsewhere, the service ecosystem thing is nearing its first launches. The IxD+GFX team pulled together some interesting UX-solutions; ideas that only happens through open, laid-back work processes; basically through sketches on the wall in the project rooms and random co-working sessions next to a display. Furthermore; the challenge of production tracking regarding exact uniform pixel outcome, is once again ahead. Times many.

On the TV front, our brief is “online strategy for a television channel” but it should be “strategy for television channel” – Matti thinks our big challenge is to make stakeholders understand that there is no online versus offline. Anyway, this week we’ll basically write our own brief and after that start workshopping and evolve things further with the client. Interesting stuff!

Agile moves quickly: after last week’s rant on Agile the situation in some on-going projects has improved significantly. Coders seem willing to evolve the Agile process, too! This same insight is also being put into use in projects starting during summer and fall. Agile is looking good again.

First iPad UI case is also coming up. We’ve been fooling around with an iPad for quite long now, and we are all impressed by the potentials of this new groundbreaking platform. Fabian gave a small presentation to the customer about readability and navigation on the iPad together with Sauli. Fabian’s personal conclusion: “goodbye dear old print media”. Pretty much everybody have been given a chance to participate in iPad ideation and now the process continues in a smaller team, where all extra is being ripped away and design is being concentrated on most important features and their usability.

Quickies

• » If in doubt, ask users. If client is in doubt, tell what users said.
• » Forcing yourself  to think how to explain the basics of your craft opens your mind up for different angles. This is the very reason Sami likes lecturing as a “side hobby”.
• » Apple announced iPhone 4. Some people are now counting weeks/months towards the end of their iPhone 3GS subscriptions — when can they upgrade?
• » We helped our old colleague Ville with his tippingeurope.com and villevesterinen.com sites. He seems happy about that.

Until next week, peeps.

Last week, like any other week, we worked quite a lot on projects done in Agile. Nowadays there always seems to be a few of these going on, and new ones being planned.

Our relationship with agile is interesting, as we are neither big or small agile house ourselves. We are an Interactive Design consultancy which means that we get to work with both big and small companies, experienced and not-so-experienced product owners and see different scrum management software used by coders who all seem to see sprint & iteration work a bit differently from each other.

The amount of design we do in and for Agile Scrum projects is therefore quite high and we see several interpretations of “how it should be done”. Being in this position gives us quite a good understanding of the potential problems that can happen in a project when certain criteria is met.

Some of this know-how was already shared a little while ago by our Sami in the UX Lx conference. Several important points are described in his presentation. One main idea is that design tasks should be known 2 sprints ahead. This gives enough time for necessary design tasks: user research, design iterations, prototyping etc., and makes sure that when coding starts in 1-2 sprints, the basics design problems are already solved and everybody knows what needs to be done.

Typically this pre-planning works initially very well for sprints 0-2 maybe, but then starts to fall apart when the original task order is changed in the Scrum. Suddenly it seems more difficult to see 2 sprints ahead. Also the sprint starting right now might end up having different tasks than originally planned 2 sprints ago. This is what forces the design into playing catch-up with the coding.

How all of this can be solved is will be our task for the rest of the year. I think we need to add to Sami’s manifesto and create a Nordkapp Agile Manifesto which includes clear action points for all stakeholders and what they need to do and when for an agile project to succeed.

Work

Sami will be lecturing in Aalto University Business School next week about User Experience Design. Program includes paper prototyping, layouts and sketching and what not. See more here.

Generally people are super excited about new iPhone & iPad projects they are working on. Foamcores are filled with hand drawn and computerized UI drafts and there seems to be workshops related to these every week. What’s extra fun to see is that our newer people are heavily involved in these as well. Apparently they’re also feeling happy about this kind of work.

Until next week, people.

Photo cred: Defensive Scrum (Rugby term) by P D

This Saturday we held a workshop as a part of the ideation for the forthcoming World Design Capital Helsinki 2012. The theme was “Touchscapes: Toward the next urban ecology” as coined by our friend Adam Greenfield. He also gave a talk about Taking Networks Seriously and Petri Kola from Aalto Medialab talked about open data in Finland, and also about “method Mastomäki” developed on using data for your own benefit.

A few clear main themes rose up from the discussion and concepts: Personal interaction and play in urban environment, way-showing and enabling communities through urban media. Personally I was attending some other business, but I’m told is was a very nice and rich afternoon indeed.

The ideas will be at WDC Helsinki website, and all material will be made public during the following days. The first batch of photos are out on Sami’s Flickr already.

Boing Boing’d

This is a tough one. Our intention to soften and transform an industry is going as planned, but it ain’t easy to teach an old dog new tricks. The outside reactions have been strong, and as expected most people use the topic to vent their frustrations from the last 10-15 years. A good thing is a few people seem to get the point, too. Sami’s a bit worried about the speed of progress here— due the amount of stakeholders the decision making is slow, even to the point where the original pitch will be 2 years old next month.

But in any case the ball is rolling now and we’ve done all we can. Our partners in crime, Henrik W & Kennel Helsinki, have done a stellar job here, and the result is first piece of work we’ve done that got Boing Boing’d. Looking forward to some more media attention in the following weeks, and the final get-go for the second, very different part of the story.

Other news

During the week we found out some idea we had some time ago are on their way to being patented worldwide. It always feels nice, even though we think in general patents are a bit evil.

And one more UX LX thing: Panu’s UX LX Twitter engine and talk made it to Johnnyholland.org’s UX LX wrapup. Go check it out to see what was the UX LX conference all about, and to read main points of Panu’s presentation. His ideas resonate so well with designer’s reality that perhaps everyone should learn them by heart.

That’s it for now, until next week it is.

50% of Nordkapp were in the UX Lx conference in Lisbon, Portugal. Bruno and his friends really outdid themselves with this very well organized, world class conference with big name speakers, room trashing workshops and lots of afterski events. Thank you organizers and fellow conference goers! UX Lx is definitely now on the map as a major conference.

However, there is simply no time to write a longer weeknote about it, as we came back in the early hours of Monday morning, barely dodging the ash cloud’s second coming. After that it’s been quite a busy week so far, as at least I’ve been re-immersing myself with the family and work again. And it’s already late Tuesday. Need sleep, will upload photos soon (one day) and share notes with fellow Nordkappers.

BTW: Sami’s and Panu’s presentations in UX Lx went well. Especially fun was Panu’s “by magic of technology” system that tweeted his slides to Twitter with the #uxlx hashtag, while he was still speaking! That generated quite a lot of interest. Sami’s ideas also generated discussion about agile and designing for it. His crowd seemed to be half designers, half developers.

One more thing: You should get ready for next Saturday’s WDC 2012 Idea forum: Touchscapes at our office. Lot’s of ideation and dreaming up the future.

The theme of WDC Helsinki 2012 is Open City, and in similar vain the workshops on May 22nd are voluntary, free-for-all events. Their aim is to join the organizers to brainstorm, discuss and plan what the year 2012 as World Design Capital can mean and be for everybody. For us at Nordkapp this notion of openness and transparency hits close to home—we believe the initial ideas are merely the starting point for innovation, and they should be shared for everyone willing to interpret them their way. Also by sharing our ideas them we enable richer and more meaningful dialogue for everyone around us, including the local design community and of course the city itself.

This is why we were excited to have an opportunity to organize a workshop as part of the official open ideas -day, on none the less than our recent favorite subject: urban screens and information design for urban context. The city is becoming filled with touchscreens, navigation aids and sensors of all kind, and we’d like to have a think on what this really could means for the city of Helsinki. The possibilities are endless, and we think this has a huge potential of being awesome in many ways. Here’s the synopsis our friend, collaborator and workshop participant Adam Greenfield wrote for us;

“In the last few years, we’ve become surrounded by screens as we move through the city: personal devices, shared interactive surfaces, and now even building-sized displays. Thinking about how to design for each of these things individually was hard enough, and virtually nobody has given much thought to how they function together, as a coherent informational ecosystem.

Until now. Join us for a day of activity dedicated to understanding these challenges and the new urban information design. We’ll move back and forth between conceptual thinking and practical doing, developing solid ideas about making the most meaningful use of the emerging resources culturally, commercially, personally and socially.”

In the workshop we are hoping to have thinkers, doers and deciders interested in the topic. The event will be loosely organized and will include a few talks/presentations such as Adam on urbanism and networked mobility, our research on urban screens in Helsinki, possibly open data and then some. Welcome to join in, but since our space is limited please let us know about your participation, either by emailing sami at nordkapp dot fi or by posting a comment below.

So where does the magic happen?

The place is our new office at Köydenpunojankatu 2, Helsinki and the time Saturday May 22nd, 11am – 3 pm (-ish). Welcome!

Update: The Facebook event page is now live as well.

This week we were mostly hard at work with current projects. Several things in finishing phases. Nothing too new there.

Meeting and team room name competition winner was selected. Matti won and the names will be Valhalla, Asgard, Ragnarok, Odin and Thor. Quite Norwegian. Congrats to him! I’m not bitter even though I became second and third. Special thanks to people in Twitter who gave me good ideas for the names. We didn’t win, sorry.

About half of the company is finally heading to the UX Lx conference in Lisbon, Portugal. The damn ash cloud from Iceland has just made a comeback and how we get to Portugal on Tuesday morning is still uncertain. Currently the airspace seems quite clear over Germany but who knows what the cloud will do. Anyway if conference goers actually get there Twitter will probably be quite busy with #UXLX tagged tweets this week. In fact, it already is.

An important announcement: we are organizing a workshop as part of the World Design Capital Helsinki 2012 Ideas Forum -day. The workshop deals with our recent favorite subject: Urban screens and information design for urban context. Read Sami’s more thorough blog post about the topic.

That’s it for now. See you in Portugal!