RECORD

How can dynamic interfaces enhance social media?

A few days ago I presented my paper Social Navimation: engaging interfaces in social media, at the NORDES design research conference Engaging Artifacts in Oslo. In the presentation I analysed a set of design experiments that show how specific features of navimation can be used in social media applications. I got a lot of positive feedback after the presentation, which was made using the online presentation tool Prezi. Read more about social navimation and see the presentation at Navimation Research.

Workshop: Designing dynamic interfaces for mobile devices

Are you compelled by the rapid development of mobile devices and their graphically sophisticated screens?

Have you noticed the increasing employment of visual motion in screen-based interfaces?

Are you interested in the possibilities and challenges for designing such interfaces?

Jørn Knutsen and Jon Olav Eikenes will arrange a full day workshop at the NORDES conference Engaging Artifacts in Oslo, August 30 – September 1, 2009. The participants will be introduced to theoretical concepts and design techniques for prototyping screen-based interfaces that make use of visual movement. Participants will work hands-on in groups, exploring techniques for developing simple prototypes. The workshop ends with a general discussion in which we address theoretical as well as practical issues.

Download workshop description (PDF).

Conference program. NB: early registration until August 1.

To be presented: Social Navimation

I will present a full peer-reviewed paper on the Nordic Design Research conference NORDES’09: Engaging Artefacts, which will take place in Oslo in the end of August this year. The paper is called ‘Social Navimation: Engaging Interfaces in Social Media’, and explores how visually dynamic interfaces can enhance social media applications. This potential is investigated through experimental design production, followed by a textual analysis of the resulting interface prototypes. The term ’social navimation’ is introduced and applied in the analysis, in which I investigate how semiotic resources from navimation are connected to features of social media. Hopefully, the paper will be of interest for both theory and practice of interface and interaction design, and new media studies in general.

UPDATE: The conference program and all papers are now available here. Download the full paper: Social Navimation: Engaging Interfaces in Social Media (PDF).

This blogpost is also posted on the Navimation Research blog.

Student Project: Musicpartners

In the autumn of 2008, students at AHO conducted a 5 week task looking into how to move from a transaction-based music store, to a store based more on richer experiences around music. See more student projects for RECORD here.

Fan-Fan, Kjetil Austvoll-Dahlgren and Kristin Tobiassen made a cross-platform music store based around a single piece of Norwegian legislation: You are allowed to share the music you buy with five of your closest peers. This laid the foundation for a rich service based on many small groups of five people. However, this also introduced many challenges regarding group dynamics such as maintenance, joining / quitting, leadership and internal communication.

Read more about the concept in their presentation.

Student Project: Telenor mutrack

In the autumn of 2008 students at AHO conducted a 5 week investigation into different solutions for a mobile music shopping experience. See more student projects.

mutrack is group effort by Ingrid A. Clausen, Stina Wessman, Eivind Bergstøl, Lars M. Vedeler and Kristian Sporsheim. The project looks into of how to share and explore music in a physical context. Here is what they write about their it:

mutrack is a concept that act as a link between people, their music and where they like (or hate) to be.
You create a trail or track of where you’ve been by dropping off small teasers of the music you listen to as you go.
The music links to the location and can be found by others after you.
If they want they can buy it when they find it, in order to pick it up, or they can stay in that place and just listen to your song.

If places are special to you, you can add text to and tell the world WHY that song is there. In a way, you create a musical territory or turf.

Learn more about it in their project presentation.

Student project: Urørt customised.

In the autumn of 2008 students at AHO conducted a 5 week investigation into NRK Urørt. See more student projects.

Kristin Tobiassen’s starting point was what many users of Urørt have been missing in the existing service: the ability to customise their profile pages. Kristin writes:

Today the users who wants to be more personal and perhaps more different from the other bands, don’t have that many possibilities. You can decide fonts and colors and upload a background picture. When users are trying to find new music they might like, they get almost the same impression from every band. So if the band could be more personal it wouldn’t just give the bands a tool to use, so they can show who they are and what the band represent, it would also be more fun for the listeners to search for new music and easier for the listeners to find bands and music they might like.

Her result was a design tool to lower the threshold and enable the users to be more creative about the profile page design. To communicate how this tool works, Kristin created an extensive slide-show-prototype with a step-by-step walkthrough of how this could work. Note how she also includes how this tool can be misused.

Student Project: Urørt Gadgets

In the autumn of 2008 students at AHO conducted a 5 week investigation into NRK Urørt. See more student projects.

Fan Fan investigated the possibilities for the listeners to playfully explore audio content through different small tools.

Fan Fan has designed an extendable modular interface where the user can add and remove different explorative tool according to their preferences. All the different tools integrate into a common framework, giving the tools a familiarity and a common set of interactional conventions.

For communicational purposes Fan Fan created a semi-clickable prototype, which explain how the different tools and the framework work.

Student Project: Urørt Player

In the autumn of 2008 students at AHO conducted a 5 week investigation into NRK Urørt. See more student projects.

Kjetil Austvoll-Dahlgren and Eivind Bergstøl worked on a stand-alone desktop player – based on the Adobe Air technology – for Urørt, and looked specifically into new ways of discovering new music through the desktop application.

Kjetil and Eivind also faced the problem of making visual representations of audio content. They write:

Little or next to no inherent information resides in recorded music. This limits searches for music to things such as length in time and amplitude, things which can easily be read by software and is totally uninteresting for most users.The usual practice is to add a title, artist name and a genre tag, as well as perhaps location based tags.

Though this helps a long way, we find that it is not nearly enough to make the act of searching for new music worthwhile. When looking for new music, the artist name and song title means nothing to you; and by leaning on genre descriptors you limit your findings in a far too narrow manner.

Their approach to this problem is to represent each song by a colored circle. The colors represent different sorting filters like favourites, most popular and recently uploaded. By hovering over the circle you get the name of the song and the band in addition to a sound sample. This allows for a more explorative way of navigating through the content.

Read more in their design report.

Student Project: Urørt Redesign

In the autumn of 2008 students at AHO conducted a 5 week investigation into NRK Urørt. See more student projects.

Ingrid Alice Clausen investigated a large re-design of Urørt, both on a visual and a more systemic level. She implemented more social features and looked at how to make the content more scanable and browsable.

Ingrid writes:

When searching or browsing for new music in the Urørt sites, the content comes across as all but glanceable and easy to keep on top of, much due to the sheer amount of it. In order to enhance the ability to take in and process the information given in the event calendar, the redesign made use of clear distinguishable colours to symbolize genres and increase the level of intuitiveness for the reader and identity for the content provider.

Particularly interesting is the use of color to annotate audio-content, making it instantly recognisable. Every tune is given a color based upon which genre the tune belongs to, opening a wealth of interesting possibilities.

See more in Ingrid’s presentation.

NRK Urørt: Design Research Report

AHO’s design report from the first case iteration for NRK Urørt is now printed and available online. In the report you can read more about our approach to the task, methods we used and reflections on the results. Download the PDF, or contact us for a paper version if you’d like one.

The case-work resulted in five videos that can be viewed here.