Gestural User Interface and Experience Design Considerations

The International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2013 wrapped up last week, and apart from 4K TVs (3D was so last year), there were many gesture-based products and services being showcased – including Leap Motion, a gesture add-on for iOS devices, and Intel’s perceptual computing.

The gesture-based products caught my attention more than the fancy TVs, since I had just bought a Kinect over the holidays. Not the Xbox gaming system, but only the Kinect sensor. I bought it along with a couple of books on hacking the Kinect, to get hands-on experience with non-gaming gestural user interfaces.

Five User Experience Takeaways from Online Holiday Shopping

Yesterday was Free Shipping Day in the US – the last one-day, online-shopping event marketed by thousands of merchants offering free shipping with delivery by Christmas Eve. As the informal end of the online shopping push by retailers to drum up online business leading to Christmas, it comes in last after Green Monday, Cyber Monday and the start of it all – Black Friday. From the looks of it, retailers had a great online shopping season with E-Commerce spending on Black Friday topping  $1B for the first time.

Conveying Trust Through The Online User Experience

I jumped out of a plane earlier this year. A tandem skydive from 14,000 feet may not sound as spectacular as Felix Baumgartner’s space jump, but it was an exhilarating experience! While the actual skydive took less than 10 minutes, the process of finding a trustworthy skydiving facility took over 10 hours.

Since no one I knew had gone skydiving themselves, I started with a Google search. It wasn’t very consoling that Google’s top search suggestions had to do with skydiving death and accidents, but I pressed on anyway. With most skydiving facilities being equally far away from civilization, and prices being similar, the selection process came down to how trustworthy they seemed. This was an extreme example, where I was literally putting my life in the hands of a business based on their online presence. Even with lower stakes, trust is a basic user expectation and online businesses need to convey trustworthiness.

User Experience on projects: how late is too late?

A common complaint from UX professionals is that they are involved too late in the project lifecycle. The stage when UX resources are involved will determine what they can do for the project, and in turn, the impact they can have. While it is best to involve UX from the beginning, in reality that does not always happen. How early is early enough, and how late is too late? Looking back, I have typically seen our team involved in one of five stages: