Tine Lavrysen from Human Interface Group presented "How the cloud will change your life (as a designer, but also as a human being)" at TU Delft

1. How the cloud will change your life
(as a designer, but also as a human being)
Tine Lavrysen

2. What is happening?

3. Introductory Movie

4. What is happening?
 More and more devices are connecting to each
other and to the cloud
 Services are offered across
devices/platforms, which asks for a cross-
platform service user-experience

5. So how will this change your life
as a designer?

6. Continuity
 When moving from one device to another within
the same system, users need:
 Task continuity: You are booking a holiday on your
PC, but your bus leaves in two minutes. What would
be nice at that moment is to migrate to your
smartphone, so after running for the bus you can
quickly book those two spots under the sun.
 Knowledge continuity: Users need analogies with
what they already know – they want understanding of
new device characteristics and their effect on the
user interface.
Photo: CARMENRUETER on Flickr

7. Main principles
 When moving from usability (referring to the
usability of only one device) to inter-usability
(referring to the usability across multiple
devices), two smart people called Denis &
Karsenty defined three main principles:
 Consistency
 Transparency
 Adaptability
* Denis, C. & Karsenty, L. Inter-Usability of Multi-Device Systems – A Conceptual Framework.
In: Seffah, A. & Javahery, H. Multiple User Interfaces: Cross-Platform Applications and Context-Aware Interfaces. John
Wiley & Sons (2004)

8. Consistency
 Consistency
 Perceptual: the look and feel of the service you are
offering on each device should be consistent
 Lexical: the terminology used across the service
should be consistent
 Syntactic: to perform a certain task or to achieve a
certain goal, the steps that should be taken should be
consistent on each device
 Semantic: the system as a whole
should also be consistent

9. Transparency
 But some inconsistencies are not
problematic, as long as they are solved by
transparency.
 Transparency in:
 Composition:
 What are the different roles of devices, how are
functionalities distributed across the system?
 What is identical and what is different?

10. Adaptability
 But too much transparency can cause a
cognitive overload
 So a user model is needed of what information
is needed in which situation (user knowledge)
 And the interactions should be adapted to this
user model
Photo: Cardboard people by Anton Tang

11. And how will this change your life
as a human being?

12. Case study
 Case within the Smarcos Project
 Attentive personal systems
 For recently diagnosed diabetes type 2
patients
 By being physically active and taking
their medication on time, they can
postpone the moment from which they
have to start injecting insulin
 We want to offer them insight into their
daily behavior and coach them towards a
healthy lifestyle

13. System Set-up

14. Adaptive feedback
 Depending on the user’s context, such as the
timing or urgency of the message, the feedback
can be adapted and displayed on different
devices or through different modalities

15. Adapted interfaces
 Interfaces can be adapted to specific devices

16. Consistency conflict
 But there is a tension between inter-service and
inter-platform consistency

17. Device affordances
 And different device capabilities afford
different types of interaction

18. Future plans
 So more research is still needed!
Photo: gadl on Flickr

19. Conclusion

20. Conclusions
 Lots of challenges for designers
 But also lots of opportunities for making this
world a better place
 And stay tuned for more guidelines from
Smarcos…

21. Want to know more?
tine.lavrysen@higroup.com
Or follow us through:
www.smarcos-project.eu Smarcos Smarcos project @smarcosproject
www.higroup.com Human Interface Group Human Interface Group @higroup