What is the Jawbone UP

Jawbone UP is a wearable technology powered by an mobile application which tracks your steps, distance, calories burned, inactive and active workouts, as well as tracking your sleep patterns. The system consists of a sleek wristband device, and an iPhone application. The wristband itself is small with one button and an audio port. The iPhone application shows total number of steps and sleep, team information, a feed of your friend’s activity, challenges, and basic profile information. Plugging the wristband device into the headphone port of your iPhone allows you to sync your logged activity and view it in a couple of ways. It could be argued that the overall goal of Jawbone UP is to help make people more aware of their daily activities, concerning physical activity as well as sleep, so that habits might be exposed and changed over time.

Why Did I Buy One?

I am very interested in wearable and fitness technology. Jawbone UP is the first device that is fashion forward enough to wear every single day, which constantly tracks my movement and sleep patterns. I purchased the device in order to track my daily habits and see where improvements could be made. Tracking my sleep patterns and visualizing the information was also very appealing as I have always been curious about how I sleep (as I’m a very “deep” sleeper).

Summary

Overall, the UP is quite delightful and good at it’s stated goals. Switching from wearing no forms of jewelry (rarely even a watch) to consistently wearing the device every single day was easy. The device is fashionable without bringing too much attention to itself, and it easily fits in to my overall style and aesthetics. The iPhone application however has many problems. Over the course of 10 days I’ve encountered a number of design and software flaws with the application.

Interaction Design

Jawbone UP Home Screen

The overall design of the iPhone application could be said to be simple and fairly easy to use. First time use or Out Of Box experience was pleasant and gave me a clear sense of what to do within the application. While I’m usually a fan of design which does not require tutorials, designs which sync hardware and software are still a bit new, so some basic tutorials could be useful to a myriad of users. I also find syncing the device to work quite well, thought the tappable buttons seem to be too small and I find myself missing them on the first try. Syncing can also be an issue if the device isn’t fully plugged in and pushed completely into the audio port. To be fair the Square Card Reader has some similar problems.

While most of the application is straightforward and easy to use, I’ve come across a number of problems with the design. While some of these issues are easily fixed usability issues, others are frustrating to use on a daily basis.

Jawbone UP Sleep Activity

• No understanding that you need to rotate the phone back into portrait view
• No way to dive deeper into details of the timeline
• Feed isn’t intuitive and doesn’t mean much to anyone
• Why would anyone add to their feed manually when this device is all about the automatic?
• Why is my profile and feed only showing my sleeping activity? Why not all activity?
• Poor quality scrolling
• Tapping on Sleep doesn’t bring up the sleep timeline, but rather takes me to the last synced timeline.
• A 24 hour day in the timeline does not fit with my understandings of a day, if you know when I sleep and wake, you know when my ‘day’ starts and ends.
• Activity Indicator and vibration alert can not seem to tell when I’m standing and working but not moving beyond shifting weight a bit.

Industrial Design

Jawbone UP with lost cap

The UP device looks fantastic, and I’ve actually been complemented on the fashion of the device. It fits into my overall wardrobe and style seamlessly. Wearing the device is comfortable and I’ve gotten to a point where it feels natural. While the material of the device feels nice, it often get’s caught in cuffs of jackets and shirts. Further, the audio port cap comes off too easily resulting in a lost cap after just 8 days of use.

Missed Opportunities

While the Jawbone UP device is very new to the market, and the overall market of wearable computing is in it’s infancy, I think Jawbone missed several compelling opportunities with the UP device.

• Telling me how to actually improve my sleep.
• Vibrating the bracelet until I actually get up and move around (or at least more than once)
• Automatic snooze of sleep timer.
• No social graph to recommend people to be in my team.
• Nap mode, especially given that it knows my sleeping patterns.
• Not able to add notes about particular sleep or activity patterns to help me see the bigger overall picture of my health. This could work much like the meals option and notes.
• Should the device be smart enough to go into Sleep mode by itself?

Overall Thoughts

In summary, I love my Jawbone UP. It provides great data on my overall activity, especially sleep patterns. The UP is comfortable and fashionable enough to wear everyday. The only time I take mine off is to shower, but with the device being water and sweat resistance, that isn’t even necessary. I find myself syncing the device 3-4 times per day to see how I’m doing. While the device has some issues, it’s missed two nights of sleep data, and the application has quite a few design problems, I think Jawbone has put forth a great piece of useful and fashionable wearable technology.

Give-A-Crit allows photographers to upload images and get serious critique from professional photographers. Through video recordings and on-the-fly editing tools, photographers can engage in honest feedback and critique with each other.

Sign up to be notified when it launches in 2012.

Problem

Artists and creatives need critique to thrive and produce their best work. As digital photography has exploded in the last decade, hundreds of thousands of people have taken up photography. These new photographers turned to flickr and other sites for feedback and critique. However, text based comments don’t provide for a serious and honest critique. They lack context, technical information, and natural conversation.

Solution

Give-A-Crit seeks to address this problem through 4 major design principles; Show and Tell, Respond, Choose, and Quality.

Show and Tell
Video critiques coupled with on-the- fly edits enable professionals to give quality, honest critiques.

Respond
Photographers can watch any critique and can respond to critiques of their own photographs.

Choose
Photographers can request specific critics for each photograph they submit for critique.

Quality
Critics are of the highest quality to ensure professional, honest, and serious critique

Thesis Poster

Below you will find my thesis (or capstone) poster from my master’s program. You can find more information about the project via my blog.

I’m looking to mentor two graduate level students in the Experience Design field (UX, UXD, UCD, IxD, ED, HCI, etc). As a recent graduate myself I know that having a good mentor while going through a graduate program can mean quite a lot.

I’m offering the following:

• 6-9 months of mentorship
• Review and critique of design work
• Help understanding field
• Help understanding graduate school
• Advice of any kind
• Review, critique, and help with portfolio and resume

I’m looking to mentor any student currently enrolled in a graduate program in the fields listed above who posses the following qualities.

• 1st or 2nd year student
• English speaking
• Ability to listen to blunt, upfront critique
• Desire to work in the field (not looking to get into a phd program)
• Enjoys design beyond research (I love research as well, but I want you to love design also)
• Sense of humor
• Wants to be active in the design field
• a ‘go getter’

I’m based in San Francisco, but you can be based anywhere. I will mostly be able to mentor through email, IM, phone calls, and video calls. If you are interested, please send me an email directly explaining why you want to be mentored (can be brief).

Here is a desktop wallpaper I created quite a while ago. The background image is from Fergal Claddagh, under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial-sharealike license. Please feel free to share and remix. This wallpaper is under the same license as above.

For our final capstone/thesis project in my masters program, we must create a poster, a presentation, and write a long-ass paper. I present my capstone in just three weeks, and last night I finished my capstone poster. I will blog about my entire capstone, as well as add it to my portfolio, once it’s submitted, for now it’s back to work!

Recently I held a Wine and Interviews event at my house. I invited second year Interaction Design masters students over to talk about interviewing and share some wine. We each told stories about our interviewing experiences and learned quite a lot from each other. Following are some basic tips we talked about through our stories and experiences. These tips are not meant to be exhaustive, comprehensive, or applicable to every interview experience; rather they are meant to share the knowledge and experiences between fellow students. You likely already know many of these, but it’s good to be reminded and keep them in mind.

Spread the love, if you have tips to share leave them in the comments.

Projects, Stories, and Examples

Have a good story about failure.

Have a project to talk about in detail.

Prepare your capstone elevator pitch.

It’s ok to talk about the thermostat project.

Have an elevator pitch for your capstone.

Have an example of some design documentation.

You might be asked to show a task flow or wireframe flow, be prepared.

You might be asked to show some usability test results.

Know Yourself

Know your process.

Know your design philosophy.

• 7 themes of design
• user centered design
• how do your position yourself within the field?
• might be a good idea to weave project examples into your answers

Understand what you want from your future.

Before the Interview

Talk to Jeremy Podany!

• he can be a private outside party
• he can help you negotiate salaries and benefits
• he will help!

Understand that a UI Designer is not the same as a UX Designer.

It really helps to research your interviewer when possible.

It’s ok to ask about the dress code for your interview.

It can help to know some basic visual design principles.

Get your resume critiqued by many people.

During the Interview

Build rapport with your interviewer.

• change your perspective
• remember that you will be peers and colleagues
• try to find some common interests
• ask questions
• it’s ok to throw out some jokes
• try not to be nervous
• think of an interview more as a conversation

Take notes!

You will be exhausted.

It’s ok to ask for water during the interview.

Show that you are willing to learn.

Future : (verb)

to design a product, service, or artifact which is intended for use two or more years from the present.

Example 1
My main project for the summer was to future Firefox Home Tab.

Example 2
We would like to hire you to future the iTunes service.

Context

As Interaction Designers, we are often charged with envisioning the future of a product, service, or artifact. At IU’s HCID program, we are trained to design for the present and for the future. It’s easy to talk about the present, as most people can think about 6 months to a year out. However, talking about the future of a design is more of a challenge. Sometimes you would be designing for 2-3 years in the future, sometimes even further. Talking about the future in this way becomes wordy and lengthy. So, we all just started using a ‘new’ verb tense of the word future. This has enabled us to talk more vaguely about design possibilities and prompted us to be more creative. We use this tense so much that it has become quite common place.

I’m hoping that bringing this tense into industry, we, as designers, can more easily talk about the future of things. Although I’m not promoting everyday use of the word, as I’m considering it industry specific jargon, I do think that by using it more in this tense, we can help drive our creative imaginations.

Thoughts, reactions?

What Show and Tell Taught Me About Being an Experience Designer

In kindergarten, in the US at least, we had show and tell, at least my school did. Well, maybe it was first or second grade, I can’t remember. Each day we would have a student bring in something. This artifact was usually from around the house, and parents usually helped out, again from what I remember. Students would bring this artifact to the front of the class and “show” it. They would tell the class what the artifact was, it’s purpose, perhaps it’s personal history, etc. From there, other students might ask questions about the artifact, or discuss what the artifact means to them. At times the teacher would interject with learning opportunities. Wikipedia refers to this activity as a chance for students to learn public speaking. However, I think it’s also about being aware of the world around you and connectin to that world. Further, it provides opportunity for other children to see new artifacts, and (just as important) to discuss those artifacts and their relationship to them.

Show and Tell in Interviews

As I’ve been interviewing this past week for a full time job, I’ve been reflecting quite a lot. One thing that has hit me is how much, despite all that I know, I keep trying to tell when I really need to show. Instead of showing some images of my process and walking through a project, I tended to ‘tell’ about my process and just show the final outcome. While the final outcome is important, it’s more important to show how you got there. What methods were used, what assumptions made, what research was conducted, what processes were in place, and where did things fail and succeed. Show, show, show, and then tell as you show.

Show and Tell in Documentation

As practioners of user experience, I think we also fall into the ‘tell’ instead of ‘show’ trap. One of the top artifacts we seem to produce (going on some assumptions here) is documentation. We produce design specs that are 60 or more pages in length. They likely have some pretty pretty pictures in them, but are very wordy and lenghty. And this makes sense, considering our higher education system. Wireframes and mockups fail at showing an experience. User flows and diagrams might start to get at this, but still fall short. These artifacts still ‘tell’ the experience, as they are accompanied by explanatory text, instead of ‘showing’ the experience.

As a field, I think we need to take lessons from our kindergarten classes. We need to show more and tell less. One way in which we can start showing more and telling less is through prototypes. Prototypes allow us to show an experience to clients and users rather than telling and explaining. Our world is complex, and our designs are often complex as well, by showing instead of telling perhaps we can push our field further and focus more on human beings.

Image: Kindergarten class by chesirekat
Image: Wireframe Walkthrough by carriejeberhardt

After Bruce Sterling‘s ending keynote for Interaction 11, I knew my capstone could not continue has it had before. Tonight I decided to go back and sketch more designs, while trying to be ‘braver’. I also attempted to take to heart two other Interaction 11 speaker notes by looking at how I handled complexity within the interface, and how I might use the information itself as the interface.

My desk as I was sketching

Overall, I’m very happy with these new sketches and I’ll continue to explore new designs for critique.

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Have thoughts, comments, or feedback? I would love to hear it.

In an upcoming paper, I will argue that Deviant Art provides for a better quality critical discourse. I argue that certain formal characteristics along with use qualities create a particular style. This style is then affected and made sense of through social structures such as photography culture. This style leads to better quality critiques, even though it has weaknesses.

What makes for a quality critical discourse?

According to Carey [1] a quality photography critique talks about both objective elements, such as exposure and composition, as well as subjective elements such as artist intention and expression. Whittington [2] says that effective critiques talk about some formal elements of the photograph, unity, rhythm, balance, and communication. Abrahmov [3] talks about common criteria for a quality critique saying that quality critiques should talk about the focal points, the quality and direction of light, composition, depth of field, as well as the relationship between the foreground and background. So, according to these authors a good photography critique should talk about both formal elements of a photograph (those intrinsic to the photograph itself), as well as subject elements of a photograph. By providing both objective and subject elements in a critique, a criticizer can talk about the technical elements of a good photograph while still discussing the viewers aesthetic and emotional response to particular elements within the photograph.

What makes for a weak critical discourse?

When quality critiques talk about formal and subjective elements of a photograph, they quite usually discuss elements in a fashion of good elements, elements that need improvement, and usually conclude in talking about the overall affect of the photograph. So then, weak critiques would talk about either just formal elements, just subjective elements, or neither. I’m leaving out ‘critiques’ that simply demean or put down a photograph without talking about good elements within that photograph or with mean spirited comments about what needs improvement within that photograph. In fact, I’m not counting this type of commentary as a critique at all, as they provide no real discourse to the subject.

When a critique focuses on only formal elements within the photography, they fail to address the interpretation and intentions of that photograph and photographer. As photography is used for many different purposes, it’s important to speak to the artist’s intention to understand how a particular photograph will be used. Similarly, focusing only on subjective elements leaves no real basis for objective comparison between photographs. This style of critique tends to be an “anything goes” critique and normally fails to add to the discourse of photography. Furthermore, this style of critique normally fails to provide elements of improvement for the photographer. In simply saying “This photograph is beautiful” or “This stinks”, a criticizer isn’t saying much about the photograph at all, but rather speaking of their own personal opinions. When adding discussion about particular elements, such as “the exposure, light, and shadow of this photograph work well to create a beautiful composition” a criticizer is speaking to what creates, helps, or hinders their aesthetic experience.

Content Analysis

In determining what makes a quality critique, I looked at two large photography websites that allow for some sort of critique; Deviant Art and Flickr. I conducted a content analysis of both sites using 70 photographs from each respective website. Each photograph was picked at random. Comments and critiques were read and then coded. These coded results were then grouped according to the type of element being discussed or the type of discussion happening. For each site I grouped my analysis according to artist expression, color, composition, detail, emotion, exposure and lighting, and focus. While Deviant Art allows for 4 ratings to be given to a photograph, I also looked at how criticizers referred to or used those given terms within their textual critique. Within Flickr, comments are used for critique but also for leaving praise and awards to artists from the community (which is a form of critique itself).

What kind of critique is given on Deviant Art?

In looking at Deviant Art, I found that over half of all critiques talked about compositional elements (perspective, background, foreground, framing, etc) as well as exposure elements (lighting, contrast, tones, shadows, highlights, etc). Furthermore about half of these critiques also referred to the artists intention and the emotional affect of the photograph. About twenty-one percent of critiques also talked about Deviant Art specific keywords (Vision, Originality, Technique, and Impact) giving meaning and discussing how they interpreted these keywords within the photograph and critique.

What kind of critique is given on Flickr?

In looking at Flickr, I found some very interesting results. Overall, ninety-seven percent of photographs I studied contained comments simply offering praise or praise in the form of ‘awards’ (graphic icons stating greatness). Within these Flickr comments as critiques, only 30 references to formal elements were made, compared to 145 references on Deviant Art. Furthermore, only 4 references to subjective elements such as artist intention or emotional affect were made, while 32 such references were made on Deviant Art. It’s clear then that most of these comments were praise only not talking about any formal or subjective elements of the photograph. So, what did these praise only comments talk contain if not talking about formal or subject elements of the photograph? Most of these were contained of small three to five word phrases like “I love it”, “gorgeous”, or “this is the best!!!”. Exalting comments like may help the photographer feel better, but they do not provide a quality critique.

Why does this matter?

In all arts, critique is important in that it provides discourse and learning opportunities. Photography critique brings forth a discussion of what makes for quality photography in a non-arbitrary fashion. This provides knowledge and learning opportunities for other photographers.

Above I have discussed what makes for a quality critique, and what makes for a weak critique. I have shown how that Deviant Art has quality critical discourse, while Flickr offers a mostly praise only environment. In coming posts (and in my paper), I will show that the interaction style of Deviant Art is what allows for these quality critiques. By teasing out the details of the interaction style of Deviant Art, I will bring forth principles for designing for critique.

• 1. Cary, Rick. 1985. A Structure for the Critique of Student Photographs. In Annual Meeting of the National Art Education Association.
• 2. Whittington, J. 2004. The process of effective critiques. Computers & Graphics 28, no. 3 (June): 401-407. doi:10.1016/j.cag.2004.03.007. http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0097849304000330.
• 3. Abrahmov, Shlomo Lee, and Miky Ronen. 2008. Double blending: online theory with on-campus practice in photography instruction. Innovations in Education and Teaching International 45, no. 1 (February): 3-14. doi:10.1080/14703290701757385. http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&doi=10.1080/14703290701757385&magic=crossref||D404A21C5BB053405B1A640AFFD44AE3.