A new magazine is starting up in March 2009, devoted to design of services. The magazine is named Touchpoint, it is run by Service Design Network, organization I mentioned in one of my previous posts. Touchpoint is a 50 pages, four-monthly edition, annual subscription costs € 33 plus delivery from Germany.
I am glad Service Design Network is growing and getting more followers
If you were working in Computer Human Interaction for a while, you probably thought, why this area is being developed and getting supporters all over computer industry, while other areas of human interaction do not get so much fuzz? I was also curious about it, but lazy enough to discover this area.
And now here come news from Service Design Conference, gathered in Amsterdam this November. Since 2004 Service Design Network joins experts working on Business Human Interaction. I definitely believe this field has great future. People often pay much more for service than for any goods, so why would services be designed as a matter of art, not as precise science?
Videos and presentations are available for download:
Just read a nice article titled Ambient Signifiers by Ross Howard
The author’s idea is to display status or state information in “ambient signifiers” such as background color, subtle texture etc. that will be recognized subconciously and make user “feel” where they are.
One scenario we used a similar concept for was different areas of the site marked with different background color and pallette for visual elements. This worked well, but we could achieve much more.
Interesting results can be achieved when we have stateful user interface, when the same controls perform different actions dependent on state. If we cannot avoid “modes” in UI, we should make user “feel” what mode they are in (much like finger feeling Shift key pressed, as opposite to Caps Lock, which is just an unnoticeable light somewhere on the keyboard).
Imagine an interface for viewing and editing a document which look the same (WYSIWYG editor). In viewing mode mouse click on an element (like a web link) causes execution, in editor mode it causes selection of an element. Making them visually different is a must, and doing it a “regular” way (like an exclamation mark in the corner or differrent menu bar or so) may be too explicit and draws too much attention from the main job you are doing. So a good idea would be changing background to lighter hue in editor?
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