New Horizons in User Experience Design for the New Computing

Abstract

Computing is always going through some kind of revolution, with each generation being smaller, faster and more powerful than the last. We’ve finally reached a point where devices are small enough to be easily carried in a pocket, powerful enough to be truly useful, and connected enough to be relevant. The dominant question now becomes: “What can you do with it?”And “Can you make it work?” The design of the user experience involves getting all aspects of use to be just right. It’s not enough to just have a GUI that looks good and back end services that work properly... in order to succeed in new computing environments, we need to design the information architecture, the presentation methods, the interaction systems and how the part fits into the whole. This integrated approach to design has been the focus of our recent work. In this talk, I’ll present new research from IBM’s User Sciences and Experience Research (USER) lab in Silicon Valley, California, where we are advancing new interaction styles ranging from very small interaction devices (digital jewlery) to very large display/interaction spaces for e-meetings. Proceedings of the 27th EUROMICRO Conference 2001: A Net Odyssey (EUROMICRO’01) 1089-6503/01 $10.00 © 2001 IEEE