Justin Baum's Barbarian Blog

Welcome to the Social (media) revolt

Justin Baum — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 04:02:12 -0400

“Welcome to the social” ... Everyone remember that doozy? The social frame of the web seems to be close to running its course. The pour well intentioned social-media movement has become the butt end of jokes… How to Know if…

Broken filters

Justin Baum — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 04:02:12 -0400

Sifting through Google Reader on a lazy sunday afternoon I came across two very interesting items. One was a post on PSFK about a small device called fitbit that tracks your fitness and sleep as well as displays information via…

Margarita recipe

Justin Baum — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 04:02:23 -0400

I perfected my margarita recipe this weekend. I really cant cook or make anything in the kitchen beyond pasta and frozen pizza so its kind of a big deal for me :-p 1oz fresh lime/lemon juice – I usually squeeze…

UX Should not be a silo

Justin Baum — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 04:02:12 -0400

Should we be “Creating Products, not Experiences” or should We “Stop designing products”? Apparently Dan Saffer, author of Designing for Interaction, has left Adaptive Path to start his own firm called Kicker. One of Kicker’s first posts to it’s blog…

The Virgin Touch

Justin Baum — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 04:02:10 -0400

During the last flight I had on Virgin America a passenger turned around to the person behind them and politely but firmly pointed out…

“Whatever you are doing is bouncing my seat!”

The women behind him replied…

“I am just trying to turn the volume down, sorry!”

I nerdily chortled to myself.

This is a pattern I see over and over again. The touch-screens on Virgin America’s entertainment system, “RED”, require a certain finesse that when not mastered result in a huge nuisance for the person sitting in front of you. Good luck if you get a kid behind you punching away at the touchscreen or a channel surfer changing channels the whole flight. In all Virgin America’s orchestrated experiential glory this design problem haunts nearly every flight I am on.

I can see the mental models and personas of the experience designers for the airline staring at passenger goals like…

peace&quiet
focus
comfort
relaxation
sleep

But what they didn’t catch is that their choice of user interface is essentially teaching people to push incessantly at their fellow passenger’s seats. A seat mounted In-flight touch-screen is the new kid kicking your seat. All of this was an interesting reminder of how these emerging natural user interfaces and touch user interfaces leave marks and make ripples in the physical world. So how do they fix it? Higher quality touch screens? Too expensive. I would wager mounting the touchscreen in a similar fashion to the tray table could work?