iasdr07 [2/4]
This morning I was a bit disappointed when I was listening Surya Vanka from microsoft presenting his keynote “Seeing the World through Our Users’ Eyes” because he started to talk about “user experience” using the tiring examples of Starbucks and iPod… it sounded so “yesterday”. But he managed to keep me engaged when he said that when doing user research for the new MsOffice, they had more than 1.6 billion data… wow! He was talking about the new challenges of design research: pace, scale and diversity.
Later on, a paper called “Nine Sources of Product Emotion” presented by P Desmet from TuDelft made me worried about the health of design research….
When he was presenting the research outputs and the final design (a meal-set-tray for the KLM airlines) he quoted the “user experience connected to the emotion” of this design to be:
“this new design lets you explore how to eat your breakfast by yourself”
Yeah! that’s brilliant… </irony>
Dan Formosa, from SmartDesignWroldwide, presented a paper on “Design, Emotion and How People Think”.
The highlight (apart from his knowledge dissemination on applied user research done in the private sector) was a software called ThinkMap. A pretty cool tool (from the same guys behind the “Visual Thesaurus“) that anyone related to design research should know and use.
Keep in mind:
Design profession is converging while the world is diverging:
Professions are overlaping and user’s differences are increasing.
[by: P Chomowicz]
Embarrassing moment:
One presenter showed a graph and used nice bubbled 3D balls to illustrate his findings…
During the Q/A, a guy from the audience pointed out that designers should be specially careful about the “data accuracy” when visualizing and “beautifying” data, because when representing data in 3D all is multiplied exponentially.
[The presenter was showing something visually 54 times bigger than the data figures]
