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The theme of Tuesday was ‘Media & Service Design’, and it followed the same format as the day before, morning lectures and afternoon workshops.

Highlights from Tuesday were :

• ‘Our Mission is User Experience: The Design of Zipcar’s Service’ the keynote by Zipcar’s CEO, Scott Griffith

As a Zipcar member, I enjoyed the reminder that their product is not the car, but the service. Griffith noted ‘Zipcar is really an IT and Marketing company that happens to have a lot of cars.’ Great stuff! I can’t wait to see how the Zipcar service improves with their new site debut soon!

• ‘The DailyShow.com, FakeNews, 24/7′

Audrey Chen, a Sr. IA for ComedyCentral.com, spoke about her team’s tricky tasks of designing for massive amounts of content. She spoke about having to hire 2 full time screening teams (for day/night shifts) to screen hundreds of thousands of hours of the Daily Show. The screeners were hired to continually watch the show and constantly tag the Daily Show jokes. These tags were necessary for back-end taxonomies, but also for front-end users’ findability. Needless to say, I now have a very high respect for UX professionals working with a ton of media like Chen.

• ‘TV With an API!’

My friend Rod Naber and his coworker Dan Levine, both who work for Current, spoke about how TV is struggling and how they’re experimenting across their tv network as well as their social news website. I wish I had taken more notes during their talk. I was involved (and impressed) in how quickly they were responding to audience member’s questions via real-time tweets. Nice job!

Workshop: Designing Gestural Interfaces by Dan Saffer

My coworker Sabih and I both signed up for this workshop and were in the same group for the hands-on portion. We were tasked with concepting and prototyping a touchscreen installation. The installation would be in music stores and allow users to sample and purchase music.

Our group decided on a circular table top installation that would serve many different users simultaneously (similar to Microsoft Surface). We didn’t have much trouble with concepting the physical architecture of the installation. The trouble came later when we all had different thoughts on what gestures would trigger interface results. It was frustrating to see many of our ideas were directly copied from common iPhone gestures. We couldn’t seem to find any unique gesture that seemed ‘right’ for an action. This may have been because, in general, we all are somewhat inexperienced with gestural interfaces. It also may be due to the iPhone being the first mainstream device of its kind. We’ve adapted the gestures so quickly that we tend to only focus on what we access, instead of how we access.

While I was working on my masters thesis last yr, I concepted, designed, and prototyped a touchscreen device that used gestural interfaces. I took a lot of guesses (especially since the design was done pre-iphone). This workshop was a great intro, and would have been very helpful for me to take prior to completing my thesis.
Anyway, I’ll check out Saffer’s upcoming book, and hopefully be able to do more gestural interface designing soon.

Last 2 days of UX Week in the next post…