Tech4Africa 2011 – Our hightlights

The highlight of last week for us at Origin Interative was the Tech4Africa 2011 conference! What an exciting and well organisied affair! Thanks Gareth Knight

Amidst the high caliber of technology-thought leaders speaking at the conference this year, two stood up for their commitment to the technological advancement of the African continent; Professor Ndubuisi Ekekwe, an inventor with two doctoral and four master’s degrees including a PhD in electrical and computer engineering, reminded delegates that technological innovation must not be reduced to the scope of Information and Communication Technology on a continent facing problems that cannot be solved by ICT alone. Ekekwe echoed a recurring theme of the conference – Africa must look within its own borders for solutions to our unique challenge and the time for it is now! By fostering intellectual ownership of these solution, we can capitalise on them more sustainably than imported solutions. Even though much of what Ekekwe said went way over our heads, his passion for driving truly African innovation needed no translation.

Herman Chinery-Hesse, the only African recipient of the “Distinguished Alumnus Award” is the co-founder of SOFTtribe, one of the leading software houses in West Africa and described by the BBC as Africa’s Bill Gates. Herman quickly captured a packed auditorium with his charisma and the way he ‘gangstered’ his way through the emerging African technology market over the last 19 years. He believes that “If Africa misses the current global IT boat, there may never again be an opportunity for rapid wealth creation on the continent.”

We were also truly inspired once again by the great work that the Praekelt Foundation is doing in harnessing the power of mobile technology to address one of the world’s gravest health crises. Their Project Masiluleke leverages the wide usage of mobile devices in South Africa to help fight the country’s clipping HIV/AIDS and TB epidemics through providing a free service to HIV and TB infected people prompting and educating them on better managing their illness.

Their Young Africa Live initiative is a mobile platform aimed at educating and empowering young people to be more proactive in their fight against HIV/AIDS that is entertainment-oriented, fun, interactive, and provocative. The Young Africa Live platform does not simply state the facts and “lecture” young people about the dos and don’ts, but rather create a space where young South Africans could talk about hot topics that affect their daily lives: love, sex, relationships, gender and cultural issues, as well as HIV/AIDS.

On a slightly more geeky note, Robert Nyman’s talk on keeping a pragmatic focus on HTML5 and its relation to the open web showcased some of the new opportunities and rich experiences allowed by the development of a standardised web architecture. The Star Wars references didn’t hurt either

Other speakers who made a lasting impression for their role in the advancement of User Experience Design were Rian van der Merwe (kalahari.com) and our friends at Clear Left(UK) James Box and Cennydd (pronounced Kenneth!) Bowles.

And so it was two days greatly spent at the T4A 2011 conference! It was a privilege to partner with Gareth and the rest of the T4A team and we look forward to next year already!

What is User Experience and User Experience Design?

experience design is about making emotional connections with people

In today’s information society, we’re spoilt for choice and bombarded with information. There is nothing we can’t find, buy or diagnose online. The world is literally at our fingertips.

Websites, applications and other interactive digital mediums have become progressively complex as our industry’s technologies and methodologies advance. What used to be a one-way static medium has evolved quite rapidly into a very rich and interactive digital experience.

Although production and development methods continue to advance, the success of a solution still hinges on a few emotionally driven triggers; How is it perceived, Is it easy to use, Does it meet needs and expectations and Is it an enjoyable experience. Subconsciously users will base their evaluation on these factors and decide whether to become regular users or not.

User Experience (abbreviated as UX) can be explained as the feeling or impression created when interacting with a company, its brand or service and how this is communicated and perceived by users within the digital realm. Whether this impression is emotional, like loving a brand and consequently loving everything it does, or one of approval when something works the way it should, it’s all about how it meets users’ needs.

So what makes people wait inline for 25 minutes for that cup of coffee? Sure, the coffee is probably good, but no cup of coffee is that good…

User experience embodies not only the product itself, but also the user and the context in which the product is used. And as User Experience is a subjective feeling, it cannot actually be ‘designed’. Instead, we design for the experience a user has, reinforcing and enabling a positive brand experience.

User Experience Design (abbreviated as UXD or UXDesign) can be explained as affecting all aspects of the user’s interaction with a product: how it is perceived, learned, and used. User Experience Design is how the elusive and invisible concept of User Experience is made tangible.

User Experience Design is a broad discipline, starting at inception and affecting the whole lifecycle of a project or a business. It is not just a step in the process, but is intrinsic and parallel to every other process and underpins all aspects of the project delivery.

User Experience Design promotes outstanding experiences, rather than simply preventing usability problems. We, the shareholders in our own everyday experiences, want User Experience to contribute to a higher quality of life by designing for pleasure rather than the absence of pain.

It’s about understanding your users, solving their problems and crafting amazing digital experiences. Done well, it’s the difference between good digital solutions and great ones .

So how do companies differentiate themselves in the competitive arena they operate in when everyone is promising the same thing? How do you keep your customers from dumping you for the next thing?

The answers is simple; User Experience Design.
Good User Experience Design = Happy Users

Happy users become your brand advocates and are more likely to recommend your services. They’ll be less likely to desert you when things occasionally go wrong. And if you really do a good job, they’ll even dedicate time to help you grow and improve your services by contributing ideas and valuable feedback.

In summary, happy users generate return on investment. Unquestionably, spending the time and effort crafting an amazing User Experience is definitely worth it.

The User Interface Revolution Underway

I found this Blog extremely relevant to the future of our industry and the world wide technology phenomenon. This Blog makes me super excited about what the future has to offer the end user/customer when interacting with brands and improving their experiences with brands within the digital world.

So it looks like Origin will be around for a long time!!!

2016: The User Interface Revolution Underway

Looking at the next five years, the role of interface design will only increase in importance as companies compete to win market share worldwide. Ease of use is essential to winning hearts, minds, and customers. With consumer product companies in heated competition, I anticipate a surge of redesign and new design in the near term. These designs will focus on usability, which means we are likely to see breakthrough products over the next several years.

Yet these new interfaces are not going to be uniform; devices and applications will not possess common protocols. For users, each interaction will have to be learned, so despite the improved usability of products, individuals will find themselves learning the quirks and standards of more and more technologies just to get the functionality they seek.

Converging Technologies, Diverging Experiences and Standards

For global companies, the next five years is a time to put their best solutions forward and integrate the UIs and capabilities of their own product suites. As companies work to independently to improve their products within the context of new technical and usability advances, we will see more diversity and incongruence in design overall. In the next several years, differentiation and unique ease of use will matter more than a common standard.

Technologies continue to combine and converge, but much of this convergence happens only within companies. Technologies and products developed by different companies will not truly interact across platforms any better than they do so today, or at least not in the near term. For every new process and device, there continues to be a lack of common standards, which requires that people learn device- and product-specific commands and functions. This problem is still acceptable to most people because that lack of integration and the individuality of interfaces has long been the norm.

Caught up in the daily flow of our lives, we hardly recognize we are in the midst of a rapid evolution in how we leverage technology. We barely acknowledge that we are slowly replacing ordinary and extraordinary functions alike with technology, including purchasing goods via phones, receiving on-demand GPS-based directions, and eliminating hard-wired phones altogether. And it is certain more innovation is just around the corner.

Today and in the next five years, those UIs will remain separate and disconnected from each other. But many decades in the future, we can expect to see shared protocols and standards that enable users to transition seamlessly between devices and appliances, which transmit information to one another to a far greater extent than we see today.

In the meantime, all of our incremental progress toward more usable applications is exciting for the UX industry as a whole. UI designers can rest assured that over the next five years they will not be out of work. In fact, as someone working in the field for nearly 20 years, my concern is there are not enough experts in UI design to meet the avalanche of design and redesign that needs to be completed. The process for designing UIs will continue to come from research related to behavior, and from evaluation of how information hierarchies and protocols can be more intuitively accessed.

Worldwide Vision

All this opportunity to design better experiences is not exclusive to the U.S. and Western Europe. In fact, much work over the next five years needs to be done to create UIs that are more in tune with the rising middle classes of China and India, each surging with unique demographics of potential technology users.

Companies will increasingly look to market consumer technologies to pockets of fast-growing populations that have so far had little exposure to technology as part of their daily lives. For these people, it will be critical that the solutions be highly intuitive to ease the abruptness of the transition.

In making these new technology products, leading consumer technology companies will be delving into new areas of UI design and need to think through language, cultural, and ethnographic particularities to create effective solutions. It will also be important to recognize how specific cultures truly interact with their social environment and technologies within the context of those environments.

Racing to market with products with long feature lists is not the only answer; in some cases, it may prove to be the wrong answer. The technologies must offer users an intuitive and tailored UI to give users full enjoyment of and access to product features within the context of their cultural experience. This is a new challenge that is rapidly unfolding as more solutions are offered to emerging populations.

A Seamless Future

New, improved UIs are part of a transformation that is happening worldwide in technology. As we have seen with Apple and others, the new measuring stick of quality and key to critical acclaim is not just about whiz-bang features, but also about the presentation of the technology and accessibility of features through sound design.

Over the next five years, UX designers will be increasingly called upon to create solutions that join the power of new technology with good usability. Their skills and vision will be put to good use as companies awaken to the new stakes related to intuitive design and strive to roll out a host of products that will be more engaging than ever before.

Conclusion

Consumer and business users alike will experience remarkable forward steps in the evolution of UI design, but they will also grapple with the lack of convergence and common protocols. It will likely be many more years before any common standards begin to emerge.

For emerging populations around the world, leading consumer companies will seek to capture market share. We advise these companies to go beyond the language barrier and truly evaluate the culture they are targeting as they have the opportunity to serve these customers through powerful design.

It is an exciting prospect to think of the millions or billions of more people who will be able to access technology, communicate globally and garner more information than they have before—all through intuitive, intelligently designed interfaces.

Reference: http://uxmag.com/design/2016-the-user-interface-revolution-underway

A users’ requirements defines the experience they have with a device

What is User Experience, how do you define it? I’ve been thinking about this for some time now. For years I’ve been trying to fully understand it so that I can confidently tell our clients what it is in a nutshell.

Just to set the scene, this discovery is mainly around mobile phones devices, but could be applied to all digital devices. Debatable…

I was having a debate with one of my colleague about why the iPhone 3 is a better device than the BlackBerry Curve. Just to lay things straight, I have the iPhone and my colleague has a BlackBerry.

The debate started off with ‘can your phone do this’ and ‘can your phone do that’ and persistently continued with both of us pointing at our phone or shoving it in each others face. For some time we both adamantly argued that our choice of device was a better choice than the others. The constant ‘mine is better than yours’ bickering went on for some time till I stopped her. And asked, “So tell me, why did you get a BlackBerry instead of an iPhone?” Her answer was simple and to the point. “It costs me R100 per month and the network provider gave me a free phone” (BlackBerry Curve) she said.

Now for her, this was a decrease in monthly payments, and an upgrade in device. I stopped and thought about her answer for a sec. “So let me get this right, you’re now paying less and you also got a new phone”, I asked her. “Yes” she answered. “How?” was my immediate reaction. She continued to explain to me that she was looking to get a new phone, saw the BlackBerry and thought it was an upgrade to her current phone. Now that she’s been using it for some time she’s fully sold on the device, what it can do, the services it offers blah blah blah.

My reasoning behind getting the iPhone was also simple. I wanted a phone/device that enabled me to; check my mail, listen to music, watch movies, take pictures, play games, take notes, browse the internet, store passwords, download apps, keep up to date with my social networks…

So, if you compare my requirements to her requirements, they are TOTALLY different. I wanted a ‘it can do everything’ device, and she was looking to spend less on her monthly contract and upgrade her phone.

So where does that leave us? I love my device and equally, so does my colleague.

Is the iPhone better than the BlackBerry? My answer would be, for who?

User Experience Design

At the heart of our approach is the recognition that a good user experience is the key goal to a successful digital solution. This can be measured by how quickly and easily a user achieves their goals and objectives. We determine the common tasks or scenarios users have in mind when visiting a product. In a market, which is quickly moving towards parity of products, the most powerful driver of loyalty amongst existing customers is their experiences with a brand.

As user experience is a subjective feeling, it cannot actually be “designed”. Instead, we design for the experience a user has with a product, enabling the desired brand experience of the full solution. The scope of user experience design is directed at affecting “all aspects of the user’s interaction with a product: how it is perceived, learned, and used.”

We achieve this through a technique called UCD (User-Centred Design)

Origin Interactive @ Tech4africa conference

TECH4AFRICA is a South African conference bringing together some of the most respected people in technology to share, teach and interact with Africans, in Africa. The Web and emerging technology conference, is breaking the convention by placing special emphasis on networking and direct access to some of the industry’s most internationally-recognised names that make up the events speaker line-up.

Origin Interactive’s founder Mike lewis will be on the panel for one of the sessions being held at the concurrence (How we redesigned PayFine.co.za, and why you need to know). Origin will also be there in full spirit with an exhibition stand to showcase our work and methodologies, so come say hi.

Tech4Africa runs from 12-13 August 2010 at The Forum in Bryanston. The event is targeted at business professionals and technologists from businesses of all sizes, from entrepreneurs and start-up owners through to professionals working at large organisations.

Come along and get inspired! http://www.technovated.com/

WPF Multi-touch Application; a Blend of design and development

We were approached by Microsoft SA (Kath Roderick) to produce the UX design and interaction development for an interactive WPF application for Softline Pastel (accounting software provider).

One of the central objectives of the project was to showcase the advantages of working in blend, using Microsoft Surface and WPF SDK toolkits to create an intuitive and engaging Multi-touch application.

The application itself is a high level account reporting system which allows a company/user to view the history of their financial data on a highly interactive chart. The user can control the type of data and level of detail viewed as well as the time period across which the data will appear.

In my role as the designer/integrator/UX developer responsible for the interactions, I encountered various challenges and considerations undoubtedly different to those presented by “traditional” graphical user interfaces. My experience on similar projects has taught me that this role does not exclusively belong to a designer or a developer but rather someone who can bridge the gap between the two worlds.

Within our team of 2 backend devs (with minimal/no WPF experience), UX designer, Technical advisor (Microsoft), PM and myself (title still somewhat undefined) we set out to create a truly delightful multi-touch experience.

The visual design of the UI focused on interaction principles which would determine how comfortably and intuitively users would interact with the application. Touch interactions have to be executed in a way which anticipates user responses, without detracting from the user’s own sense of control.

One of the challenges when designing for a multi-touch experience was to give the UI a sense of depth, and of a tangible impression. This influenced how the intended touch gestures would work differently to traditional system interactions. How would the controls visually suggest their touch-functionality? Would the interaction with the graph involve gestures that are intuitive? How would compartmentalizing a group of controls in a module or placing them in a separate control influence the touch experience? Some of these considerations had to be revised during the integration of the design into Blend, and the implementation of XAML into the application.

Extending the Pastel brand to the application would itself pose challenges to the conceptual design of the UI, since the experience itself had to exemplify the brand essence, convenience and sophistication of the Pastel ‘My Business Online’ service had to be associated with the ease-of-use and overall experience of the application. An integral objective to this project was to demonstrate how the WPF touch technology could enhance the experience and encourage an overall positive brand impression.

 

 

With the design approved, it was time to start setting up resource dictionaries for the colours, brushes, controls and the chart itself in Blend. These assets would then be implemented into the main project file.  Here the controls and their associated states would be assigned their functions. Why do we do it this way you may ask? Having dealt with many of the design and interaction issues mentioned previously, my involvement in the design phase lent an awareness of how to treat the assets appropriately. This proved to be invaluable process and starting block throughout the duration of the project.

As far as my work process is concerned, I found creating a WPF project in Blend that serves as a planning and “tidying-up” project which simplifies things as the project progresses. The Illustrator designs are imported into this “tidy-up” project, where I can then go through a refinement process where individual controls and components are consecutively grouped together, then placed in a main working project. Within the main project, colours of components are used to set up a colour dictionary, associated brush resources are created, and then component parts are converted to the relevant control templates (also referenced by a common control library). Much of the visual state behaviours of the controls are implemented in this project, as well as the parent-child relationships and structures of the controls.

Styling for the chart presented a new challenge – using the WPF Toolkit, a collection of WPF features and components made available outside of the standard .NET Framework development cycle. The purpose of the Toolkit (as with the Software Development Kits) is to allow for users to get interface functionality more conveniently. Relevant to our application, the Data Visualization control functions of the Toolkit provide a powerful means of easily creating flexible style-able charts. Not having had any experience in using the Toolkit before, I spent some time first getting acquainted with its Silverlight counterpart. Pete Brown’s Styling Charts with the Silverlight Toolkit  provided a good introduction to going about styling charts. Although Brown’s focus is on the Pie Chart type, the fundamental concepts behind the styling is extendable to the other chart-types within both the Silverlight and WPF frameworks. Therefore applying these treatments to the WPF Chart went quite smoothly, at least initially…

The styling process so far had been done without visibility of the development work stream up to that point. Until then I had been styling the controls as standard WPF controls.  Once we had sent the XAML over to the dev team, it was pointed out that for a multi-touch app the controls should belong to the Surface Toolkit to as great an extent as possible.

The solution to this quite simply was to create Surface templates of the relevant controls, copying the XAML from the existing styles into the new templates and changing the TargetTypes to the appropriate Surface control where needed. The “XAML” project was also structured to match that of the development teams. Whereas the Login window and Main window had each been assigned to a user control and subdivided to reference the ChartView (chart area with associated controls) and HeaderView. The layout of the controls was also defined in accordance with the designs using column and row definitions and grid controls.

Trying to get the chart to the point of being implementable now provided yet another challenge. After testing  and updating their Toolkit, the dev team had started using the compatible:Series, rather than the default Toolkit, Column type, meaning that either the style I had done up to that point was no longer relevant to the new chart type, or more likely I simply couldn’t figure out how  to apply my existing style to the new chart.

Furthermore, the new Toolkit seemed to require changes to the project namespaces. Admittedly, my understanding of how XAML namespaces actually work falls quite short of the mark. This is something I am yet to fully come to terms with. However, the dev team supplied me with a scratch project in which I could start styling the graph. This was more complicated than anticipated, and I think a fault on my part was instead of focusing more on the written XAML, I relied on the WYSIWYG offerings in Blend.

By trying to figure out the relationship between the Chart parent, it’s children and associated templates using the Objects & Properties panels instead of investigating the XAML more thoroughly, I suspect I may not have grasped things completely. For instance, instead of trying to set up and implement a style palette for the column series data points, I should have noted that such a palette already exists in the Data Visualization Toolkit, and I could have focused only on how the palette is referenced by the data points.

Ultimately, a substantial part of styling the graph was done by changing and adding to the existing XAML. Even though the solutions were often very simple, the XAML had to be specific. Obviously experience will help in being able to produce the appropriate XAML efficiently, but this does require a much deeper understanding of the WPF and .NET frameworks than I think Microsoft tend to acknowledge in promoting Blend as a design tool.

Supporting the dev team was one of the most central aspects of the project as a whole, and some of the greatest challenges revolved around this. Even though they were responsible for the implementation of the XAML, it was crucial to be communicating with them throughout this phase of the project. This ensured that the XAML we delivered was indeed implementable, done in accordance to the designs and resolved any issues which may have interfered with these objectives.

This is probably where my role as an integrator rather than designer became most obvious (at least in the case of this project). It was important to be able to communicate the needs of the design team to the development team, and in turn communicate back the limitations and constraints the developers may face. Even though the dev team were new to WPF themselves, I’m sure that as someone in the position of the integrator gains experience, he or she would be able to take more responsibility for the flow and efficiency of projects. I also think that one of the responsibilities of the integrator is to ask the right questions, in order to be able to establish the needs and responsibilities of the respective teams and members involved as soon as possible.

We have definitely learned a lot on this project and therefore fell confident in taking on more challenging project that influencess and improve users lives.

Please feel free to contact us regarding any questions you may have, I hope I’ve helped shed some light on an altogether new and undefined topic.

Wynand Kok

Yip we’ve got a blog

People have been going on about having a blog for years now and to be honest it just seems like a pain in the a$$. Anyways, we’ve eventually taken a step towards and have decided to start blogging about all the cool and exciting things happening in the world of Origin Interactive.

Watch this space…