If you haven’t seen or experienced Chat Roulette yet, it’s catching a lot of buzz lately. Both intriguing and extremely disturbing is how I’d describe it. WARNING: You’ll likely encounter lots of random situations and likely things you wish you wouldn’t have seen (your eyes may burn and you might go cry to your mom). I also caution you to not pull it up at work. Anyway, I was on Vimeo and came across this great video that explains what Chat Roulette is all about. I highly recommend watching this video before clicking the link to Chat Roulette in that first sentence above. Highly. Oh, and if or when you click the link, I’d make sure you know who’s around your computer. You might get some pretty messed up stuff. Proceed with caution.

chat roulette from Casey Neistat on Vimeo.

What do you get when you mix Elvis’ 75^th birthday, 1,000s of tech geeks and gambling? (Cue John Favreau and Vince Vaughn) “Vegas baby, Vegas!” It’s an annual tradition for me – visit mom for her birthday, celebrate Elvis’, hit up Monster Cable’s concert and of course check out all the great new ‘toys’ at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). A little slice of heaven, really. This year was no exception, lots of new products and excitement. As part tech geek and part experience designer, here’s my take on this year’s CES…

My Faves from CES 2010

If you’ve never been to CES, love cutting edge technology, and enjoy some of the best people watching on the planet, then what the hell are you doing? Don’t miss CES. It’s your chance to see the widest range of computer and electronic gadgetry in the country, let alone the world. Some of my favorites this year included:

• 3D TVs – A huge hit. It was everywhere, as if one TV manufacturer leaked it to another and they all had it. After seeing a movie like Avatar in 3D, I’m psyched about the possibilities for my home theater. CNET has a great overview of the 3D TVs featured. Many of the prices still TBD, but expect them to be pricey and need to buy a variety of accessories (like glasses).
• iPhone Controlled Helicopter – What!? Yes, an iPhone app that uses many of the device’s features to control a toy helicopter. Probably one of the coolest toys I’ve seen in a long time and I’m not even into remote controlled cars/helicopters. Check out more of the Parrot AR.Drone.
• Power Over WiFi – Imagine a world where you never have to charge your cell phone or laptop again. It just recharges from existing wireless connections in the area, and you don’t even have to be connected to those wireless hot spots. Awesome, I know. Even non-geeks can appreciate this. Oh, and it’s coming this summer. Check out RCA’s Airnergy on Engadget.
• Intel’s Processing Power – We’ve all seen the Intel commercials. Personally, I’ve never found their marketing pitches and concept prototypes to be that engaging. Until now. This multi-touch wall with live data feed was INCREDIBLE. You have to see it to believe it.
• Celebrity Star Power Sells (or at least companies are betting on it) – From Lady Gaga being named a Creative Director of special projects and inventions at Polaroid to seemingly every artist now getting their own tweaked out headphones from Monster Cable, there were celebs everywhere. I’m not convinced that celeb power will ultimately sell more product over great quality and fair price, but cool nonetheless. If they’re smart, they’ll figure out a way to combine them.

The Impact of CES on an Experience Designer

For experience designers, the technology at this year’s CES provided signs as to the tremendous impact on what and how we design for devices and user interfaces in the next few years. The principles of information architecture, interaction design, usability and visual design will be stretched, pulled apart and put back together again. We’ll have to make strategic experience design decisions as to what user interfaces look like, or perhaps even how their defined and how they reveal information using things like user action/gesture and environment context. Add in content that’s streaming to more and more devices each day from the far reaching corners of the Internet, and we’re in for some awesome design challenges.

Well, there you have it, “… just a hunk, a hunk of…” good time this year at CES. Until next year!

If you’re not a Fast Company subscriber or reader, you should be. There’s always some good content. It’s not always the first to report, but it does provide a great breadth and depth of topics, particularly around design and technology.

As a designer and techno-geek, Fast Company recently published a couple articles on “killer” Microsoft Surface Table applications. Still very much a technology looking for a solution, the Microsoft Surface Table continues to gain traction in the business world as we figure out just what to do with this BAT (big ass table). Anyway, there are some interesting applications that are showcased.

• 11 Killer Apps for Microsoft Surface
• Five More Killer Apps for Microsoft Surface

Of course I would be remiss if I didn’t give some shout outs to my friends over at Phenomblue for their Genesis application built for South by Southwest (SXSW) this year; a 3-D application allowing users to create virtual galaxies. Sweet.

And… of course, even though not mentioned, Manifest’s very own conference table application, originally designed for the interaction ’09 conference, is pretty sweet in its own right.

Recently, a student of my Interaction Design course at DePaul University asked about “ribbon” design in user interfaces. For you Microsoft Office users, you know what I mean – the new navigational element of the 2007 version. Anyway, she’s working on a fairly complex Windows-based application that is “used to drive specialized medical equipment that automates the preparatoin of intravenous nutrition solutions for critically ill patients”.  Anyway, as part of our discussion, I came across some links that I haven’t seen for a while and given their great information, I thought I’d share here…

• Dan Harrelson, design technologist at Adaptive Path, interviews Jensen Harris, Group Program Manager of Microsoft’s Office User Experience team
• The Story of the Ribbon by Jensen Harris on an Official Microsoft User Interface Blog

If you are familar with other great summaries of the design of the Office ribbon, please do share.

I recently interviewed someone that used Wordle for the cover of their portfolio. Intrigued, I thought I would check it out for myself. (Excuse me if I’m behind the times on this one.)

From Wordle’s website…

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

When I look at this from a user experience/ information architect point of view, I automatically think of tag clouds. Ya know, the hodge-podge list of tags typically found on sites such as blogs, representing the prominence of various tags that someone has associated with the site’s content.

But, I also think about a whole variety of other requirements gathering sessions, usability tests, card sorting and visual/emotional design tests that I’ve done it the past. Why? Well, because I’m always looking for new and better ways to illustrate the findings from these type of activities; specifically, findings from these activities that require a sense of prioritization and weighting. A feature of Wordle allows you to simply input a list of words, say from a resume, a bio (like mine below) or perhaps even notes from a design research activity like the ones I mentioned.

To provide an example, I took results from a emotional design test that I conducted for a client. Basically, the participants were provided a screen’s visual design for 5 seconds, then the design was taken away and they selected descriptor words from a worksheet that they felt best described what they had seen. Based on the frequency of occurrence of the words selected by the participants, here’s the result that Wordle generated for me…

My takeaway – a tool like Wordle could be used as a means to communicate results from various types of design research activities, especially ones that use more structured data capture methods (e.g. when participants all select from a predetermined list of descriptor words). In the past, I would have to tally up the occurrance of each word selected overall and then increase/decrease font sizes based on the word’s number of occurances during the activity. Now, I can just use Wordle to create the visual pattern for me. I will definitely try this tool in some future efforts and report back on its viability.

By the way, here’s my bio through the eyes of Wordle…

If you’re like me, you probably have a whole bunch of instant messenger (IM) accounts through service providers like AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, etc. And, to make things a bit easier to manage, you’ve been using free tools like Adium or Trillian to aggregate them all into one place. So when I recently wanted to add a chat feature to this blog using Meebo, I went on a hunt to figure out how to integrate my Meebo account using one of these tools (particularly Adium).

After some Internet diggin’ I found this great set of instructions from WiseGuyDigital on how to add your Meebo account within Adium. I’m glad to report that after following the their instructions and some basic testing, this is working great!

Thanks WiseGuyDigital!

We had a company meeting in late December where Dan Thompson showed off Manifest’s brand new toy – a Microsoft Surface Table. As part of the discussion, Dan, one of our web developers, walked through various aspects of the table and answered some questions. I’ll be posting more as we’re sponsoring he interaction 09 conference in Vancouver and bringing the Surface table with us (plus building an application for the conference).

Without further ado, here’s Dan…

Manifest Digital was recently selected by Microsoft as one of four Chicago design agencies to participate in their PhizzPop Design Challenge competition. As part of the competition, three people from each agency work together to address a particular business problem through solution design. The teams are provided with some initial Microsoft training. Then, the teams are provided the design challenge and given about a week to devise a solution. The competition is judged by design industry experts on November 20th, with the winning team moving on to showcase and compete at the SXSW conference in March 2009.

The PhizzPop Design Challenge – Chicago 2016 Olympics Bid Awareness

An overview of the challenge taken from Microsoft’s UX Evangelist Chris Bernard’s blog:

You’ve been selected by the Chicago 2016 Committee to help provide digital strategies to help Chicago be selected at the site of the 2016 Olympics. Chicago 2016 has less than a year before the International Olympic Committee votes on which of the four competing cities wins the bid. The four competing cities are Chicago, Madrid, Rio, and Tokyo.

One of the key elements to winning the bid for Chicago is getting the city’s youth behind the bid. Teenagers between the ages of 13 and 18 will be in their late 20’s to early 30’s if/when the Olympic come to Chicago in 2016. This is the audience that in 2016 will be going to events, and taking their kids to cheer on the next Shawn Johnson or Michael Phelps.

The committee is looking for ways to actively engage and ultimately generate support with the city’s youth in a demonstrable way. It is very important to not just get the youth involved but somehow show their impact/support in a visual/meaningful way. It is also important to somehow find ways to activate those that influence youth, like teachers, coaches, and parents.

Introducing the Manifest PhizzPop Team

We’ve stacked the deck and have three great team members representing Manifest. Here’s a bit about them…

• Brian Henkel – One of Manifest’s wicked-hard-core User Experience Architects, Brian is leading the user experience design charge. Look for him to sketch, wireframe and incorporate plenty of multimedia ideas into the design. He’s a big thinker, so look for a solution with a true “WOW!” effect.
• Kevin Panke – An energetic and exciting interactive designer, Kevin is the team’s visual design magician. Kevin’s drive for creating fresh, bold and simple designs will help the team put the “pop” in their PhizzPop solution.
• Dan Thompson – As the team’s lead developer, Dan has the challenge of getting the solution to actually work (yes, this actually needs to happen). This will be challenge in itself, as Brian and Kevin will likely come up with large, kick-ass creative ideas. This isn’t anything new to Dan though – he’s constantly playing an integral role in developing many of the solutions for Manifest’s clients on a regular basis.

Look for the team to hit a homerun on the challenge. As I write, they’re cooped up in the design room across from me. I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with. Don’t miss out on cheering them on during the showcase and judging event.

Don’t forget to RSVP to attend the showcase and the judging!

Well, look at that… Manifest’s very own Carolyn Chandler talks about how we use Central Desktop to improve our company’s collaboration, knowledge sharing and document management.

Truth be told, we’ve been using Central Desktop for nearly two years now, both for internal projects and company assets and collaboration on client projects. Personally, the five best features of the Central Desktop tool are:

1. Workspaces – the ability to create individual workspaces, comprised of teams, topics or client projects to best manage the work at hand
2. Document Management and Version Tracking – goodbye file server, hello version control, history and comparison
3. Security and Configuration – super simple setup of users and access rights, including the ability to mix internal and external users all in one workspace
4. Discussions and Wikis – Simple, easy to implement and with core features for quickly generating discussion on a topic and documenting processes (even integrated with email!)
5. Quick and Simple Setup – It really wasn’t difficult to hit the ground running, and continuing to do so regularly when using it on client projects

Like most design professionals I’m signed up for way too many email newsletters and discussion lists. Thank goodness for the digest feature. Somewhere that feature’s inventor is sitting at the same table as the “Copy and Paste” guy, talking about the old days in which their features didn’t exist and how hard a time they had it, blah, blah, etc. Ya know, the kind of conversation your parents gave you as a kid – “In my day, we had to walk five miles to school, uphill, in the snow”. Anyway, many of the email newsletters and discussion lists contain a lot of fluff and philosophical discussions about how to use the back button or whatever, but sometimes I come across things that I think could radically change the way we go about our work as designers and the way people involve technology in their lives – a couple of which I’ll share with you here.

There’s some hidden, to the general masses at least, ideas and products happening being developed at Microsoft. I say hidden, simply because to the general public Microsoft typically comes out looking like a big bully at times, but if they knew about some of the other things that they’ve been working on, they might see them in a different light. For example, a technology that has been in the works for a while and is just nearing a release is Microsoft’s Surface technology. Another product, in its beta stage, is Microsoft’s Photosynth.

Microsoft Surface Technology

Microsoft Surface technology started as a vision created by a couple guys in their research group. From acceptance of the vision at a leadership level, the design iterated to where it is today – an interactive, table-like, product that understands context of its environment along with human touch and gestures. Yes, no mouse, keyboard, application file menu, etc., getting in the way of an individual’s ability to interact with the product. Awesome. Take, for example, a scenario in which you are out at dinner with two friends at a restaurant and what to split the bill three ways – simply touch the screen, place your card on the table and touch and slide your meal and drinks towards your credit card and you’re done. Now, as a designer, start to imagine how this might impact your design process for a product, the way you create the user interface, the interactions, patterns, etc. – quite possibly a whole new way to approach design solutions. There’s a lot here that could possibly even create new specialization within the design and development fields – e.g. gesture specialists, advanced recognition technology experts, etc.

Microsoft Photosynth

Since technology advances have made digital cameras very affordable over the last several years, it has created millions more hobbyist photographers. These hobbyist photographers are producing so many digital photos, they’re sure to need a tool to organize, view and enjoy their collections. Welcome, Photosynth, a software product that creates relationships among digital images, primarily photos, and reconstructs them into a three-dimensional space to show how each relates to the other. The best example that came to mind when I saw a video presentation of this was that of a 360 degree panoramic or a virtual tour of a room of a house. It looks to be truly a social network tool for digial photos. Unlike a tool such as Flickr, where you manually create metadata and group photos together based upon various attributes, this tool uses the metadata you provide, then analyzes the photos’ visual similarities to create the relationships. By doing so, it allows you to do things such as view photos from various angles, zoom-in, etc., using photos that you have taken and basically filling in the missing pieces with others’ photos. I’m imagining that we’re not too far off from a day where anyone can visit a destination virtually and walk away with some of the same breathtaking experiences as-if you visited in person. The way you interact with your digial photo collection will surely be changed.

Wow, Cool, Neato Don’t Really Do Justice Here

Truly these technologies are on the cutting-edge. They are examples of how we may think differently about not only a design approach, but how we interact with technology ourselves and other people through technology. It’s exciting to see examples such as these because they provide an example of the integration of technology into our daily lives without it being an impairment, but rather just something that happens, something we don’t even think about using or doing.