What Were the Top UX Trends for 2013?

From “Bad UX Goes Mainstream” to “Pinterestization”…?

“A lot has happened over the last 12 months, so we turned to our contributors and other members of the UX community for their notable trends of 2013. We asked why these things mattered, if they were positive for users and practitioners, and what kind of future the trend has in 2014.”

Check out this insightful and fun retrospective from UX Magazine — “The Top UX Trends of 2013“!

“The UX Explorers at Ford: An Interview with Parrish Hanna and Chris Thibodeau”

From the latest article on UXMag.com.

Looking back, the early 21st century will be considered the age of UX Epiphany. For nearly fifty years, we languished with knobs and buttons where styling was only the consideration of plasticized curves.

The last decade, however, has seen an onslaught of new user interfaces and associated modalities bringing a paradigm shift about a company’s holistic product; sleekness is measured when it is electrically alive as well as mechanically alive. Dr. William Gribbons said it best in his article The Four Waves of User-Centered Design.”

“In the most demanding markets, user experience became part of a product’s brand and was carefully orchestrated across every touch point with the customer.”

In response to this recent explosion in UX, Ford Motor Company has hired folks like Parrish Hanna and Chris Thibodeau—Global Director of Human-Machine Interface and Executive Manager of Global Product Planning for User Interface, Connectivity, and Infotainment respectively—to react and reshape Ford’s user experience.
Continue reading ““The UX Explorers at Ford: An Interview with Parrish Hanna and Chris Thibodeau””

An Interview with Tesla: UX Definition, Strategy and the Model S

Steve Tengler recently sat down with Tesla Motors’ User Interface Manager, Brennan Boblett, to discuss the company’s automotive user experience philosophy.

HMI should be empowering, not typical. We take the small, little things you do all of the time and make them a bit more of a pleasure. It’s those little nuances and attention to details that we rally behind, which add value to the user experience and strengthens the core of usability.”

Boblett goes on to give five words to describe Telsa’s approach to user experience and discusses why the Model S has gotten so much attention. Finally, he talks about how the company is poised to adapt to the rapidly changing mobile consumer electronics market.

Read the interview in its entirety on UXMag.com.

 

 

Moneyball 2: How to Sweep the UX World Series

When I worked for a Japanese automotive original equipment manufacturer (OEM), they had a saying, which may or may not be a national cliché: “Free is oft the most expensive price.”

Huh? Let me translate. What they’re saying is something slightly beyond the American cliché: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” You must spend some money wisely to save money in the long run.

To illustrate that slightly further, let’s look at the movie Moneyball: the story of a financial underdog—the Oakland A’s—keeping pace with the big boys by reevaluating the value of statistics and applying their money efficiently.

I know what you’re thinking: What does that have to do with user experience?

Everything.

Rethinking the process based on goal-outcome-oriented data can help the A’s of the world beat the Yankees and win the UX World Series.

Read more at UXMag.com.

 

EE Times Article on Current Trends and the Future of HMI

Check out NXP’s perspective of the factors behind the current proliferation of embedded graphics — and likely future trends in HMIs.  The article touches on hardware capabilities, touch technologies, memory configurations and, of course, graphics code generators.

An interesting read from Ken Dwyer:  http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?section_id=36&doc_id=1319313

 

Here’s Why I Love Altia Design 11

Although Altia just released our new GUI editor, Altia Design 11, as a company insider I have been able to use the new release for quite a while. And I LOVE it.

Why you ask? Here’s just a few reasons.

  1. The dockable / movable panes (navigator, control code editor, etc.) enable me to customize my HMI development environment for maximum productivity.
  2. The new control code editor is a huge leap forward for creating control code, debugging it in place, troubleshooting issues for designs that I didn’t create, etc.
  3. The accessibility that the new code generation dialog brings with respect to target documentation is excellent. I can access an installed target’s release notes and overview documentation directly. This saves me time from having to wade through the start menu and finding docs buried 3-5 levels deep, especially when you have umpteen different targets installed. Woot!
  4. Speaking of code generation, I can now set the canvas size in the editor. What this allows me to do is to avoid having to manually select items or manually change the size of the editor window to match a desired target screen size. Double woot! Avoiding manual steps equals awesomeness because it means less room for human error and makes builds easily reproducible across different developer / designer / customer PCs.
  5. Overall, the controls and tools needed to create a new HMI from scratch are far more intuitive than previous versions of the editor. This new tool enables me to wade in to customer’s designs and not have to worry about accidentally screwing something up because the editor does something in an opaque or non-obvious way (like using the wrong deck object, etc.).

Ultimately, I am loving Altia Design 11 because it saves me time. Saving time means I can get more done, faster.

All these things make me a happy user!

 

 

 

Altia Releases New User Interface Editor – Altia Design 11

GUI Builder Gets Boost in Features and Functionality to Make Embedded Display Deployment Quicker and Easier  

Altia, Inc. announces the release of Altia Design 11, the latest version of Altia’s user interface development editor. Altia Design 11 includes new features and enhancements to simplify and accelerate graphical user interface development.

Continue reading “Altia Releases New User Interface Editor – Altia Design 11”

Altia Design and DeepScreen Now Support Green Hills Software INTERGRITY RTOS and Virtualization Platform

Check out the news from Green Hills Software at Telematics Update in Novi, Michigan this week!

Green Hills Software Expands GUI Builder Support for INTEGRITY RTOS with Altia Design and DeepScreen:  Combination Delivers Advanced HMI Design Capabilities for Industry’s Leading, Independently Certified Operating System

“Green Hills Software, the largest independent vendor of embedded software solutions, and Altia Incorporated, a leading provider of user interface design and development tools, today announced the availability of the latest release of Altia’s graphical user interface development suite — Altia Design and DeepScreen code generator — for the Green Hills safe and secure INTEGRITY® real-time operating system and the INTEGRITY Multivisor™ virtualization platform.

This combination allows customers to quickly and successfully implement and market products with sophisticated graphical user interfaces (GUIs) with the ability to execute on an operating system platform that delivers deployment-proven system reliability and availability. This solution  targets customers in the automotive, industrial, home automation, medical, consumer electronics and defense industries.”

To read the Green Hills Software press release in its entirety, click here. For more about Altia’s support of GHS INTEGRITY RTOS, email [email protected].

 

First Touchscreen Insulin Pump Up for Award

Tandem’s new t:slim insulin pump is the first touchscreen insulin pump to hit the market.  Easy to teach, learn and use, this very cool medical device is not only changing people’s lives but also breaking new, exciting ground in the personal medical device market.

Apparently, the Medical Design Excellence Award committee agrees:  http://www.tandemdiabetes.com/News/2013/t-slim-Insulin-Pump-Named-a-Finalist-in-the-2013-Medical-Design-Excellence-Awards/

Learn more about how Tandem used Altia to power the graphics in their award-winning medical device in this success story. For more information about Altia for medical device user interfaces, check out our website.

 

 

Even More UX Lessons from Hollywood – Jim Carrey!

What do Tom Cruise, Johnny Depp, Tom Hanks, Laura Dern and Jim Carrey have in common — aside from the fact that they’re all famous actors who live and/or work in Hollywood and walk the red carpet more often than we walk around the block?

Steve Tengler would tell you that they’re all noted teachers in User Experience lessons — not in a classroom but via their impressive collection of films.

Jim Carrey is the latest addition to the Tengler University’s UX staff — and here’s a list of his current classes.

  • Bruce Almighty:  Silent Analytics Can Help Tailor Your UX
  • Man on the Moon:  Know the Business Side of Your Business
  • Mr. Popper’s Penguins:  Watch Out for the X+1 Factor
  • Horton Hears a Who:  The Minority Might Be a Captured Market
  • Batman Forever:  Be Flexible for Emerging Modalities

Want to check out the class notes? Read Steve’s article on UXMag.com — and email us at [email protected] with your feedback!

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