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Just want to share the results of the eReader and gestural interaction project I had my Basic Interaction class (undergraduate HCI double majors) do for their final project. This was a six-week project with the following focus:

• Synthesize needs and opportunities from both potential product users and other sources.
• Discover the intersection between the needs observed by researchers and the needs people perceive in themselves in otder to find rich areas for product development.
• Design product interactions that support the emotional connections between the person the reader
• Explore the personal and social roles that ebook readers facilitate
• Communicate the value of the ebook reader through the visual, auditory, and narrative channels provided by a video sketch

Though the time line was short, I was pleased with the results. During the final, a user research specialist from Daedalus Excel showed up and was very impressed with the presentations and solutions.

I was really impressed with the quality of the video sketches. I had them read John Zimmerman’s Video Sketches: Exploring Pervasive Computing Interaction Designs and showed them several examples. We talked about the advantages and disadvantages of different styles. But we did not go over tools, video techniques, or audio, which is typically done. Also, I told them that there was no right way to do this and that they should design their video sketch according to what they thought would be most effective given their skills and the time they had. The quality of the results were really impressive.

In particular, I enjoyed one group that used simple sketches and a child narrator to tell the story for an eReader for moms.

The students got to select an audience focus from a list of six options. Some of the groups overlapped. The documentation links are below, which contain links to their videos and final presentations.

Commuters
Starburst Reader
EasyNews

Moms
Kava
Oracle Reader

Family
Flip ‘N Share

Today marked the beginning of the third project in the Basic Interaction course I am teaching this semester. The goal of the project is to design an ebook reader taking into account gestural interaction for particular audiences and contexts. I thought this would be a good project because it combines a product with much opportunity for improvement and invention and an examination of the language and appropriateness of gestural interaction.

To begin the conversation on interactive gestures, we looked at Recognizing gestures: Interface design beyond point-and-click, the Interactive Gestures Pattern Library, and the recently released draft of the first chapter of the upcoming Interactive Gestures. Between the three, the basics of gestural interaction are well covered. The first chapter of Interactive Gestures, in particular, offers a lot in the way of examples for exploring the history and current state of gestural interaction. It was very convenient to have been released just a few weeks before the project began.

The students will have the remainder of the semester to conduct user research, synthesize, produce and test concepts, and then demonstrate their solution in the form of a video sketch. I have no preconceptions for the result of combining the ebook and gestures, but that’s what makes this exciting. In the words of Frank Gehry, “If I knew how a project was going to turn out, I wouldn’t do it.”