Multipurpose Room: August 2007

Petrol Station

Jan Chipchase's presentation at UXWeek 2007 still has me thinking. So I wrote this comment on his blog about one of the images he discussed.

Your image of a petrol bottle atop a brick in Vietnam and your comments have stuck with me. You asked the audience about what it was and you stated a gasoline station. You pondered if the brick could have been removed.

My perspective is that the brick was essential to making it commerce. The brick removed it from just being someone's jar on the street to a purposeful display of petrol for sale.

And the more I thought about this image, the larger the metaphor grew for me. The brick is marketing stripped to its simplest form. The user experiences the marketing and the product as one.

Labels: simplicity, uxweek2007

UXWeek2007: One Laptop Per Child

Upon reflection and conversation, two concerns about One Laptop Per Child. First, Sugar - the operating/network system - is an interface. I believe that "interface is content" and therefore it requires critical review. Sugar will "teach" as much as the content. And because the MIT Media Lab, home of One Laptop Per Child, has a dogmatic approach to teaching, I'm concerned about the flexibility of teaching styles that Sugar offers.

Second, the product is aimed at the poor in developing countries. What about the poor in this country? The primary group that does not graduate from high school. Sure the product is new, the design is new, the concept is new. More work needs to be done.

Labels: uxweek2007

Charmr

An Adaptive Path team just showed their research and design for a Diabetic Management device called Charmr. Their research was good and there may be more problems that it could solve. For example, the problem of getting people onto the pump. Not a gripe, but an unintended consequence.

Labels: uxweek2007