Altia Announces Graphical User Interface Development Support for Freescale’s New i.MX 6 Series Processors

DeepScreen Code Generator to Support a New Family of Products from Freescale Semiconductor

Early this year, Altia, Incorporated announced support of Freescale® Semiconductor’s new Vybrid™ controller solution devices. The winning combination of Freescale’s powerful silicon for multi-screen graphics and Altia’s Design and DeepScreen user interface engineering tools enable Vybrid controller solution customers to quickly and successfully implement and market products with sophisticated graphical user interfaces (GUIs).

Today, Altia announces development of a new product to support a new family of products from Freescale Semiconductor – the i.MX 6 series processors.

Freescale’s i.MX 6 series portfolio addresses a wide range of market needs for both automotive and smart devices. In automotive applications, the i.MX 6 series is able to meet scalable demands of connectivity, real time data delivery, digital instrumentation, audio and multi-stream video. The i.MX 6 series enables smart device developers to deliver a seamless natural user interface (NUI) experience that is rich in sound, touch, video and graphics, plus save time and costs by leveraging one design across a portfolio of devices. Altia’s suite of user interface development tools will give both groups the capability to create cool and custom user experiences for their products that are optimized to take full advantage of the features of their i.MX 6 series processor.

“Freescale is excited to continue our fruitful partnership with Altia. From lower-end parts like Qorrivva microcontrollers all the way up to Vybrid controller solutions and i.MX, we’ve had a long history together. Now, with the plan for DeepScreen support of the i.MX 6 series, we broaden that offering in an important way. The i.MX 6 series is a scalable playground that will naturally draw many UI developers — and the Altia DeepScreen target for the series will help engineers and artists get their vision down onto the hardware,” says Ken Obuszewski, Director of Marketing for Freescale’s i.MX products.

Jason Williamson, Altia’s Director of Marketing, adds, “Altia’s generated graphics code running on Freescale hardware is a proven production pairing. Together, Altia and Freescale technologies are driving some of the most exciting GUIs on the market. We are excited about the opportunity to serve automotive and smart device customers with the new Freescale i.MX 6 series of processors.”

Altia has a long-standing heritage in graphical user interface development, helping customers in the automotive, home appliance, home automation, medical, consumer electronics and defense industries get state-of-the-art GUIs into production. Altia’s DeepScreen code generator supports a variety of Freescale hardware targets – including its Vybrid devices, i.MX 6 series, i.MX5 series, Qorivva MPC5645S  and MPC5606S MCUs.

About Altia

Altia, Inc. is a software company that provides user interface design and development tools that can be used from concept to final product code. The company was founded in 1991. Its customers include United Technologies, Ford, Chrysler, NordicTrack, Guidant, Star Trac, Hollister, Lockheed Martin and hundreds of other leading manufacturers. For more information about Altia’s products and services, visit www.altia.com or contact Altia’s corporate headquarters at +1 719-598-4299.

Tom Hanks Teaches UX Lessons? Indeed.

In his new article on Uxmag.com, Steve Tengler shares still another batch of user experience lessons from Hollywood. First he called out usability gems via the works of Tom Cruise. Then he connected fundamental Human Factors Engineering principals to the colorful characters played by Johnny Depp.

Today, Steve invites Oscar-winning actor, Tom Hanks, to User Experience 101 with his article, “Five User Experience Lessons from Tom Hanks“.

Here’s a preview…

  1. Lesson #1 from The Green Mile:  Task Completion Doesn’t Automatically Equate Success
  2. Lesson #2 from Cast Away:  Fictional Personas Can Bring Sanity to a Project
  3. Lesson #3 from Bosom Buddies:  Re-skinning Can Allow Financially-Adventageous Reuse
  4. Lesson #4 from The Da Vinci Code:  Complicated Interfaces Have Purposes, Too
  5. Lesson #5 from Forrest Gump:  Exceeding User Goals Makes You Memorable

Ready to read more? Read the full article here – and enjoy!

 

 

 

What can Johnny Depp teach us about UX?

What can Johnny Depp teach us about UX? Plenty! Just ask Steve Tengler, Altia’s own UX Director.

In Steve’s most recent article on UXMag.com, Steve draws on the works of another Hollywood great – Johnny Depp as Captain Jack Sparrow, Edward Scissorhands, the Mad Hatter, Gilbert Grape and Willy Wonka — to teach us some important lessons in User Experience.

Questions nearly always abound about what Human Factors Engineering (HFE) or User Experience (UX) departments do within an organization. The combination of art and science within these teams baffles the traditional engineers working in disciplines that have predictable algorithms that solidified decades ago. Having a frame of reference that provides simple analogies to pop culture builds an understanding of the basics without overwhelming.

With that, let us navigate the deep waters of Johnny Depp for five more user experience lessons from one of Hollywood’s elite.

 

 

 

Tom Cruise’s Lessons in User Experience

What can Tom Cruise teach us about UX? According to Altia’s UX Director, Steve Tengler, that couch-jumping film star and his many film characters can teach us PLENTY.

  • Lesson #1:  Rainman teaches us about the importance of social media ratings of UX.
  • Lesson #2:  Urgent tasks in Mission: Impossible? You bet! What do we learn about user interface design?
  • Lesson #3:  Why are multiple modalities important for UX? Steve calls upon Minority Report to make his point.
  • Lesson #4:  Designing for human error up front is important. Just ask “Maverick” in Top Gun.
  • Lesson #5:  Style gets you noticed. Look no further than Tom’s famous Risky Business shades for proof.

Check out “Five User Experience Lessons from Tom Cruise” on UXMag.com to read the article in its entirety.

Comments? Questions? Email us at [email protected]. We would love your feedback!

 

 

Good Job, Dr. W!

I had the good fortune to meet Dr. Susan Weinschenk when speaking at the same conference in 2011. If you haven’t seen some of the material flowing from her desk recently, I’d urge you to check out an article on the psychology of UX Design and a cool little video about the ROI of UX. There are a few things I’d like to emphasize and a few things that I’d respectfully append.

 EMPHASIZE:

  1. Calculate the ROI:  Yes, at times it seems like motherhood and apple pie that well-conceived Usability/Human Factors plans and resources are money well-spent, but executives think in dollars and yen. To approve the next project, they must clearly see the bottom line of this project and then whallah! They’ll see the penny-wise-ness of your User Experience (UX) project and how “pleasing the customer” equals big bucks in the end. A Change Request at my last job cost $225,000, and it didn’t get approved until we provided proof that the corporation should see $2.5M in addition revenue by avoiding novice task incompetion.
  2. Cluster Just Enough Info:  Amongst the top three reasons customers come to us for redesigns is something I call “information spray fire”. Marketeers want to show everything their competitors have plus the added bonus of the kitchen sink, but haven’t stopped to consider what THEIR customers’ goal(s) are and how to organize it into simple groupings. Keep It Simple [Sir] !
  3. Humans Make Errors: Nearly every UX to-do list includes “Undo”, Back”, “Home”, etc. If you give the user a parachute, there will always be a safe landing. If you don’t, the flight might go OK but eventually they’ll crash and burn.

 APPEND

  1. Understand the Elephant: Although her introductory analogy of feeling the same elephant is fantastic, I’d go one further: intentionally approach the elephant from other directions with the other people. If the selected processor is only capable of presses and not swipes or animations, the visual designer needs to know that. If the persona’s goal is sleek simplicity, the coder needs to know the desired philosophy for when the designer didn’t fully specify the interface. All team members must communicate, and that starts with approaching the solution from all perspectives together. An interesting read along those lines: The relationship between Design and User Experience
  2. Not All Users Have The Same Goal: I suspect Susan would agree with that simple premise. Users have different goals. But her article and others that I have read (e.g. http://www.cmswire.com/cms/customer-experience/top-5-rules-for-creating-user-friendly-mobile-apps-015841.php) assume the user wants “responsiveness” and a quick, intuitive design. Yes, that’s true for the vast majority of the population, but there are demographics and cultures globally that WANT a technological challenge so they may feel at the end that they’ve surmounted the Mount Everest of UX’s. I’m not saying that should typically be your goal; I’m only saying not to presume. Discovering and designing your persona is the first step after cleaning the white board.
  3. People Like Info & Flashiness: I whole-heartedly agree, and I haven’t found a good 30,000 foot description of that for the team other than nebulous adjectives. I recently saw an article accurately describe UX as the “… a [product’s] user experience is a holistic exchange of a hard to measure intellectual currency that drives satisfaction levels within a relationship.” Dr. W’s article does a good job of breaking down related elements, but I’d add this over-arching definition to clearly communicate that the boundaries are, unfortunately, undefined and constantly changing.

All in all, great content Dr. W. Keep up the good work!

Altia Announced as the Automotive User Interface Development Tool Select Partner for New Freescale Vybrid™ Automotive Solution

New Freescale Vybrid™ Automotive Solution announced at 2012 Freescale Technology Forum

Altia, Incorporated, award-winning provider of user interface development tools for embedded displays, was announced yesterday as Freescale Semiconductor’s Select Partner for HMI development tools for their new Vybrid automotive devices. This winning combination of powerful silicon for multi-screen graphics from Freescale with Altia’s Design and DeepScreen user interface engineering tools will enable Vybrid automotive solutions customers to quickly and successfully implement and market products with sophisticated graphical user interfaces (GUIs).

Freescale’s Vybrid portfolio addresses a wide range of automotive market needs. Its silicon-enabled software is designed to bring connected radios, entry-level infotainment systems and reconfigurable instrument clusters to mainstream automobiles. Altia’s Vybrid tools solution adds a powerful means of quickly exploiting Vybrid’s two ACE LCD controllers and OpenVG pipeline to this silicon-enabled software suite — getting the most out of a raster image based GUI with powerful and easily-integrated rendered vector images. This solution enables developers to create an impressive graphical interface with a compact embedded resource footprint.

“Freescale is going beyond silicon to provide a comprehensive HMI development platform for the Vybrid family of products,” said Ray Cornyn, Vice President of Freescale’s Automotive MCU business. “This facilitates R&D efficiency by accelerating the time to market cycle and reducing engineering development costs. By leveraging the powerful combination of our Vybrid products with Altia’s Design and DeepScreen tools for user interface development, companies can achieve a great end user experience.” “Altia has supported Freescale products for many years; our customers have produced hundreds of thousands of vehicles globally with combined Freescale and Altia solutions.  We are excited to continue this relationship for the new Vybrid automotive devices,” adds Jason Williamson, Altia’s Director of Marketing.

Altia has a long-standing heritage in graphical user interface development, helping customers not only in automotive, but also in the home appliance, home automation, medical, consumer electronics and defense industries get state-of-the-art GUIs into production. Altia’s DeepScreen code generator supports a variety of Freescale hardware targets in addition to Vybrid, including MPC5645S (Rainbow), MPC5606S (Spectrum) and i.MX application processors.

About Altia

Altia, Inc. is a software company that provides user interface design and development tools that can be used from concept to final product code. Altia also provides engineering services to support customer projects. The company was founded in 1991 and its customers include United Technologies, Ford, Chrysler, NordicTrack, Guidant, Star Trac, Hollister, Lockheed Martin and hundreds of other leading manufacturers. For more information about Altia’s products and services, visit www.altia.com or contact Altia’s corporate headquarters at 719-598-4299.

Is Apple Falling Behind? The Future of Multiple Input Modalities

A recent article in EE times asks the question “Is ‘vision’ the next-gen must-have user interface?”  Sure, you can control your device via touch, but what about other inputs such as voice, vision or “mental telepathy”? The article argues that Apple has made great strides for touch, but isn’t bringing new technologies to market that feature other innovative inputs.

The fact is, Apple may or may not be working on integrating vision or other alternate modalities into their products. They keep their cards very close to their chest. “Should” they be working on this type of technology — or embracing it (as IMS Research suggests in the article)? This is an interesting question especially since, though the macro vs. micro gesture and environmental challenges still exist, they are much more solvable now than ten years ago.

The automotive industry has had to be much more open to alternative modalities as these technologies have become key to current and future safety features.  However, the article is a bit unclear about how the $300 million in camera technology is being used in automotive applications. Most, if not all, of that technology is being utilized for environmental data acquisition — not Human-Machine Interfacing.  Back-up cameras or 360 degree image processing for obstacle and pedestrian detection as well as lane detection make up the majority of that “vision” technology.   Automotive companies have employed ultra-sound, Laser, LIDAR and RADAR technologies for allowing the driver to “see” obstacles or other vehicles for nearly a decade.

Turning that same technology toward the interior of the car – where the occupants can actually interface with it – has been tried and tested for quite a while, too.  Where previously “blob” detection and simple geometric analysis was effective for gathering human hand information, cheaper and faster camera devices with higher resolution have improved micro level detection, providing more details and finer resolution to distinguish finger gestures and much more.

Further improvements have addressed adverse lighting conditions which exist when aiming a camera at a driver lit from behind (by the large rear window), as well as excessive sunlight inside a vehicle – which typically rendered IR cameras useless.  Altia has previously done work with customers and Georgia Tech to test gesture as an in-vehicle input modality and it showed some promise. This may certainly be the time to bring this modality into the mainstream.

The bottom line is that there is no single perfect input modality. A product’s success will be the result of successful implementation of a set of interface modalities that provide a complete and fulfilling user experience.

The Personified UI

–Tristan Plank is a guest contributor and the Lead Human Factors Researcher and UI Designer at HF Designworks in Boulder, CO.–

Products with Personality

One of the most significant factors affecting satisfaction with an interface is the personality we assign to it. Every user brings personal experiences with them when they use a system.  It is these experiences that blend with the designed aspects of the UI to form a characterization. We then project a persona onto the systems we use…and an identity emerges. Sometimes we like these identities: they can be helpful, slick, and beautiful. They can become our friends and confidants as they possess our valuable information. Sometimes we even miss them when their “new personalities” are released, whether it’s a simple update for our phone interface, or an overhauled OS design.

At other times, UIs feel more like a bully pushing us around, or the snooty know-it-all correcting our every move. Paul Miller of The Verge recently demonstrated this curious personification process in his rant about condescending interfaces, an opinion piece that provides an entertaining case study on UI design.

Priorities: Usability or Visual Design?

READ MORE >>

Translate »