Learnings from Day 1 of the interaction 09 Conference

The experience designer in me can’t help but observe how people are interacting with our interaction 09 Surface Table application. Some quick insights…

• When designed appropriately, a Surface Table application can be extremely engaging. Not sure if it’s the technology that’s creating the “wow” factor of the application. It seems to really be both. The experience conference attendees are having is somewhat magical as they interact with something they’ve never physically seen before (outside of the typical YouTube videos).
• Conference attendees love seeing their information show up on the table – Twitter, Flickr and Crowdvine content they’ve created
• Simple interactions are key to the experience. You could quickly overdo it with detailed features, but when you’re looking to simply inspire and engage, stay with the KISS principle (Keep It Surface Simple). By the way, I’m claiming that acronym now.
• Having remote or network access to the table is important in order to administer such things as a data layer. We can’t access the database over the network here at the hotel, so we have to sneakily pull up our web form while no one is interacting with the table in order to synch Crowdvine profiles with new Identity Tags.
• Consistent animations to illustrate task completion. For example, having the same animation on the Find People area when you drag your connect petal to a person as we have between two conference badges. Given the short time we built the application in, there are some basic improvements that can be made; but that’s expected anytime you do something you’ve never done before.

Many, many thanks goes to our Manifest team who worked on the application with me – Kevin Malone (Developer), Chris Miltzow (Developer), Nolan Seaton (Designer) and Dan Thompson (Developer). What we’ve produced is creating a tremendous buzz and energy at the conference.