Press Button, Receive Bacon, Enjoy Bacon

This week has been, and will be a busy one. So far, I haven't been hit over the head by a surprise assignment, but I'd almost prefer that to looking forward and seeing several very large ones looming in the distance. Ah well...

In class on Monday our guest lecturer spoke about the her personal experiences in user interface design, and the steps and methods that she took. It was pretty interesting, as our projects this quarter are focused on user interface design, and helped to shed some light on the direction our projects and research was taking. What I found most interesting was her take on user interface and usability today, and how the expectations for UI have changed.

"Usability is a given, consumers and clients are both looking for a signature moment"
I thought that this was pretty poignant message. What is a signature moment? Where can we find it? How can we capture this?

"Dialogue happens in a variety of ways (people to: people, culture, environment, and things)"
Interaction is something that can seem so abstract and is difficult to grasp. However, viewing and treating as a dialogue between the user/person and something/one else is simple, yet can change the perspective of the designer entirely.

For instance, looking at the interaction between a hand dryer in a bathroom and the person whose hands need to be dried, the interaction has changed significantly through time. In the olden days, a butler would stand in the bathroom, and as I'm not really an expert on what he did, I can only spectulate. However here are three services I believe this butler served:

1. The butler would dry your hands
2. The butler would tell you gossip and other things that he heard from other bathroom guests
3. The butler would could give advice about the location where the bathroom is... located.

Inherently, these were people to people interactions, serving a job of drying ones hands, but also being a person to converse with in an otherwise very... functional and one use environment.

Nowadays we have a variety of hand drying options, as butlers became far too expensive, unionized, and discovered that being a human towel rack is rather boring. Thus, bring out the paper towel and air hand dryer. These modern day contraptions have the following interactions:

1. Do something, and paper/air is distributed to dry your hands

Seems pretty lame. I guess that is a poor people to thing interaction.

Where can we find room for improvement? Maybe we could try to imitate a person to person interaction (the automated dryer play snippets of conversation overheard in the bathroom, or have a LED face that smiles and say "have a good day" when you leave). Maybe a person to culture interface, where the hand dryer offers styling tips as to what you're wearing, complementing the well dressed, and offering suggestions at the less well. Or maybe a hand dryer with an RSS feed describing news related to the location of the rest room.. Options abound.

Perhaps user interaction is something where design research, or research through design, can play a tremendous role. Too often things are designed with the traditional usability being the only requirement, but today, with generation demanding (aka us), the desire and opportunity for a well designed, well thought out item, such as a new era of hand drying and personal stylist devices can help us become more hygenic, and better dressed.

Until that day comes though, I will look forward to the simple 'press button, receive bacon, enjoy bacon' icons that exist. I forget what kind of icons they are though...