Have you ever found yourself wanting to prototype a simple, realtime interaction between an iPhone and another piece of hardware, but don’t have time to learn iPhone programming? TouchOSC provides a simple solution to this challenge. An iPhone app that communicates over wifi using Open Sound Control, TouchOSC allows you to control any kind of application that accepts OSC messages.

TouchOSC also includes a companion layout editor. This free desktop application allows you to define custom screen layouts of UI elements and then upload them to your iPhone. Unfortunately there are only a limited number of UI widgets, and because the software was designed to control realtime sound apps, they naturally tend toward realtime control- knobs, faders and toggles as opposed to forms, dropdowns and checkboxes of more rich interfaces. Still, if all you need is a few buttons and a slider to control an interactive system and you aren’t able to develop a native iPhone app, TouchOSC offers some enticing potential. See below the jump for some examples of unexpected uses.
Continue reading “Code-free iPhone interaction prototype

Aaron Travis explores the motivation and payoff for developing low-fidelity wireframes for user interfaces during the design process. While I have my own reasons for loving all things lo-fi, this (web-specific) article really nails it. Their rationales are clearly thought out and expressed in a way that make them relevant to a wide variety of disciplines.

Read More for excerpts
Continue reading “Why Wiggly Wireframes?

An excellent article appears today on Boxes and Arrows. It gives an overview of the benefits of using a narrative technique to communicate complex interactions. In this case study, User Experience Designers developed comic strips to communicate broad goals to a larger and diverse audience.

Comics are effective not only because they are essentially narrative, but also because they are unpretentious, easy to follow, and accessible. Whereas a functional specification document uses words and often “tech speak” to communicate functionality, comics use pictures and interactions to get ideas across.

Can’t draw? Don’t have time to draw? Check out the comments at the bottom of the article for a link to designcomics.org, where the folks at Sun Microsystems’ web team have built a repository of free stock scenes and characters that you can use to build storyboards with little effort. The ‘examples’ section, which has tips for how to use narrative techniques to describe design choices, reads like an introduction to Aristotle’s Poetics:

Another common format is a three-act play: (1) A hero… (2) has a problem… (3) and solves it (or not)

The act of designing a user experience can be compared to developing choreography for a user to enact. Writing like this in sometimes-dry forums like Boxes and Arrows validates my belief that telling a story is a valuable way to describe interaction to a broad audience.

SEE ALSO – ComicLife : A Story Machine

Google has announced the purchase of @Last Software, makers of SketchUp, a 3D modelling and rendering application. SketchUp, whose tagline is ‘3D for everyone,’ is designed to be an intuitive tool for creating 3D mockups and sketches.

@Last Software had created a plugin for Google Earth that allows SketchUp users to add their own models to a Google Earth application. Like the models shown above, this means that anyone could place their 3D design into the Google Earth application and users who subscribed to that ‘layer’ of data could see your building on their desktop.

This could be for architects and designers what Google’s purchase of Blogger was to writers. Google continues to expand the average person’s ability to create and share content. Of course, it could also mean endless 3D blogging of peoples’ doghouses, office buildings and summer homes, but some good may come of it regardless.

@Last Software

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Update: This guy has a catalogue of notable real, imagined or proposed buildings that have been modelled and placed in Google Earth. A good indication of things to come.