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.

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!

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

At Interaction 11, Bruce Sterling gave an amazing closing keynote. Out of the hundreds of nugests of wisdom, one thing in particular stuck out to me. Bravery. I’m not sure entirely how Bruce spoke of it, but he reminded us to be more brave when we design. Something about this phrasing stuck with me as very inspirational. In fact, this phrasing helped change and re-shape my capstone project for the better. So, thanks Bruce!

However, the inspiration did not stop there. A couple of days after the conference, a new re-phrasing came to mind, “Design with Bravery”. To me, this spoke to the heart of Bruce’s phrasing while reminding me to continue to push myself and my designs into new directions. With this in mind, I created a poster to hang on my wall, where it now sits reminding me to be design with bravery.

The above image links to a full size screen quality graphic. Contact me for a print quality version.

Design with Bravery by John Wayne Hill is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at www.vectorportal.com.

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 this iteration, I’ve added some toggle buttons that allow for viewing the title, description, category, and exif information for a given photograph. This information appears as an overlay on the image directly, and is always ‘at-hand’ during a critique.

5th Design Iteration

Explanations

I’m looking for feedback from photographers and designers. For background information on this design, please see http://www.johnwaynehill.com/blog/category/capstone/, the first post has some good information.

What is Video Prototyping?

Video Prototyping is a tool Interaction Designers can use to tell a story about a design. It allows for the showing of an entire experience through a narrative. Video prototypes can be used to help better show a design in use in a way that many people connect with emotionally and aesthetically.

My Goals

Video Prototyping can be a very powerful tool to communicate a design. However, it can also be expensive and time consuming in order to produce. While some industry players are starting to use video prototyping more, many do not because of the costs involved. With this in mind, I decided to create a video prototype with very little cost in as little time as possible while still providing quality when narrating the experience of my design.

My Process

My overall process for creating a video prototype was to choose/create a design, ideate on how to tell the story of that design, create a storyboard, shoot the video, and then edit and upload that video.

I decided to use a design that I had worked on in the previous (spring 2010) semester entitled GroupView (research overview, design document). This design allowed multiple photographs to come together and learn from and teach each other. It connects their various cameras to an iPad application and allows for on-the-fly editing. As this design never previously made it to a full prototyping stage before, I had to iterate briefly on the design itself before bringing it into a video prototype.

Storyboard

After iterating on the design, I came up with some basic ideas on how to tell a story about the design. I quickly sketched out a basic narrative using 6 post-it notes and asked my colleagues for feedback. With this feedback I created a storyboard of my video prototype, using post-it notes on a sheet of foamcore so that I could rearrange and iterate quickly as needed.

Shooting and Editing

With the storyboard in tow, I gathered a couple of students and starting shooting the video. I had quickly scouted out a place to shoot and informed my ‘actors’ of their roles as we walked to the location. From there I directed my actors and shoot several takes of most of the scenes. I quickly learned here that having my shoot broken up into scenes greatly speed up the process of shooting. I was able to shoot the entire video in about 25 minutes.

In keeping with my goals I decided that the quickest way to edit this video was to use iMovie. iMovie provides a good quick interface for putting together a decently polished video. Spending just 4 hours total, including make a couple of graphics in Photoshop, I was able to create my video prototype from raw video footage.

Reflection

I’ve found through this project that video prototyping can be a very compelling way in which to show a design. It allows stakeholders, users, developers and others to quickly understand the experience of a design. Some major drawbacks are that it costs (time and resources) a bit more than other forms of prototyping. However, by being mindful of these costs I think a video prototype can be created fairly easily. In the future I would be more mindful of my lighting sources, as there are several annoying reflections within my video. Scouting multiple locations could also help to provide backup plans for when a primary location doesn’t work out (as in it’s too sunny outside to see a screen, etc). Furthermore, storyboarding should absolutely be done prior to shooting as it cuts down video production (shooting and editing) time by a large factor. Without having properly storyboarded my design I would have spent much more time shoot and editing the video. Overall, I am happy with my process and have proved to myself that compelling video prototypes can be made with little resources and time.

Final Video

Below is the video prototype for GroupView. I would love any comments and critique on the video itself, as well as my process.