Tag: Design

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Windows 8 is for the Right Handed?

As I have played with Windows 8 (both the Developer Preview and the Consumer Preview), I have gotten the distinct feeling that it has been developed assuming a right-handed user. For example, access the system charms works much more consistently with my right thumb as opposed to reaching across with my left hand.

Tonight, while reading through some of the developer documentation for the consumer preview, I came across the following statement:

Untitled

Apparently it is ok to ignore 10% of the population when designing your user experience.

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Some challenges with MS Surface Development

So I have been playing with the MS Surface for a couple of weeks, and have a pretty good handle on the basics of the development model. As I said previsouly, the nice thing (for me, anyway) is that it is pretty standard .NET stuff. You can do pretty much anything you need to using Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). That being said, it is not without its challenges, and I would like to share some of what I have seen so far. 

1) The SDK only installs on 32-bit Windows Vista. This is a challenge for me, since my T4G laptop is running XP, and all of my other computers are running 64-bit Windows 7. The big value of the SDK is that it contains a “Surface Simulator” which allows you to experiment with Surface development without actually having a Surface. I tried setting up a 32-bit Vista VM to use for the SDK, but the simulator does not work in the VM. Now the good news, after a couple of weeks of messing around, I managed to hack the .msi file for the SDK, which then allowed me to install on 64-bit Win7. All seems to work great now.  

2) WPF experience is hard to come by. I can program in WPF, and understand how it works, but when it comes to the fancy styling and more creative aspects of what you can do with XAML, I am definitely no expert. Apparently, neither is anyone else I know!

3) Changing the way you think about the user interface. This is the biggy. The UI model for the Surface is different than anything else with which I have worked. yes, it is a multi-touch platform, which is cool, but hardly unique. If all you want to do is develope multi-touch apps, you can do it much more cheaply on a multi-touch PC (both WPF and Silverlight now support multi-touch development on Windows 7). The unique aspects of the Surface are that it is social, immersive, 360-degree, and supports interaction with physical objects. In order to make full use of the Surface platform, you have to think about all of these things. You also have to break old habits regarding how the user interacts with the platform. We are used to menus, text boxes, check boxes, drop downs and all the usual UI components we have lived with for so long in desktop applications. Or the content and navigation models we are used to on the web. The Surface requires us to forget all of that, and think of interaction in a new way. In this sense, it is more like iPhone development. However, even iPhone development gives you a fairly strict environment which defines how your app ahould look. The Surface on the other hand, is wide open. You can create almost any interaction model you can imagine, supporting multiple user working either independantly or collaboratively, working from any or all sides of the screen, with or without physical objects. This requires a whole new way of thinking, at least for me.

4) Ideas. This is another big challenge. I have lots of ideas for applications for the Surface. Some of them I am pretty sure are good. Some of those are even useful. Some of my other ideas are probably downright stupid. I would like to hear your ideas. I have always believed that, the more people you have coming up with ideas, and the more ideas you come up with, the better your chances of finding great ideas. So shoot me email with any or all ideas you might have – and don’t worry, they cannot be any more silly than some of mine!

Finally, I have added a little video showing just how far you can go with the Surface UI. Hopefully in the next couple of days, I will have a video of some of what I am working on to show.

DaVinci (Microsoft Surface Physics Illustrator) from Razorfish – Emerging Experiences on Vimeo.

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First Thoughts on Microsoft Surface Development

A brand new Microsoft Surface development unit arrived this week in the Moncton T4G office. As I start to develop some prototypes, I will be doing some related posts, but I wanted to start by talking about the platform a little, and the development environment.

For anyone who has no idea what the surface is, it is a multi-user, multi-touch platform released by Microsoft a couple of years ago. Have a look at this video to see what it can do.

Other the last few weeks, before the unit arrived, I have learned quite a bit about the Surface. The first interesting thing I learned was the the surface is not a touch screen in the sense that your iPhone or multi-touch laptop are. The surface of the Surface is just glass – it is not a capacitative or pressure sensitive material at all. All of the touch behaviours and interactions are based instead on a computer vision system. Inside the box there is a fairly standard PC running Windows Vista, with an DLP projector pushing the image up to the table top. There are also 5 cameras inside the box which perform the actual "vision". These feed into a custom DSP board which analyses the camera feeds into something a little more manageable for the PC. The fact that it is a vision-based system leads to some interesting capabilities, as well as some idiosyncrasies.

When the Surface is running in user mode, the Windows Vista UI is completely suppressed. There are no menus, no windows, and no UAC dialogs – nothing that would indicate it is even running Windows. There is also an Administrator mode which shows a standard Vista UI for administrative functions or for development.   

As far as development goes, the good news is that it is all pretty standard stuff. There are two approaches to programming for the Surface. The first is to use the Microsoft XNA Studio platform, the other is to use Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Using XNA gives you a little bit more power, as well as access to more of the "lower level" information like raw images from the video feed. Using WPF is a higher-level programming model, and comes with a set of controls specific to the Surface UI model. The nice thing is that all you know about .NET and WPF programming applies to the surface. And from a larger architectural perspective, Surface can tie into any infrastructure accessible to any other .NET-based model. It is just a different .NET UI layer.

The bigger challenge in developing for the Surface is changing the way we think about the UI, and selecting the right solutions. First and foremost, Surface applications are not just a port of a standard Windows UI. Stop thinking about Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointers (WIMP). The surface calls for a completely different models, one that I am just learning. One of the interesting statement I have read describing the Surface model is "the content is the application."
The Surface is more than just a multi-touch platform. Sure, you could implement a multi-touch solution on the Surface exactly the same as a Windows 7 multi-touch solution, but that is only using a subset of the Surface capabilities. The key characteristics of Surface interaction are:

  • multi-user, multi-touch (up to 52 simultaneous touch points)

  • social interaction – multiple simultaneous users, collaborating or working independently

  • 360 degree user interface – users on all sides of Surface at the same time, with UI oriented to support all of them

  • Natural and immersive – like the physical world, only better

  • Support for physical objects integrated into the experience (tokens, cards, game pieces, merchandise)

When it comes to selecting a solution to deploy on the Surface, the two most important keywords are "social" and "immersive". Social, because the best Surface applications are those in which the computer is not replacing human interaction, it is enhancing it. Immersive, because you want the user(s) to forget that they are using a computer, and to only be thinking about what they want to accomplish. The how should be transparent.

Over the coming days and weeks, I will post more about the Surface and what we are doing with it. Hopefully next week I will be able to post a short video. If you have any thoughts or suggestions, I would love to hear them.

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SketchFlow – Sketching and Prototyping in Expression Blend

I have just been reading SketchFlow – Sketching and Prototyping in Expression Blend. This looks really cool, and I can hardly wait to get a copy. It has been a long time since I saw a new tool that looks like it is made to use on my Tablet PC. There is also a good writeup on SketchFlow by Loren Heiny here.

Right now, I do design in OneNote – but of course there is no connection to any other tools used in the implementation of the design.

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