Webvideo: The Road to Suleman Shahid's PhD

As one of the final assignments for the course Business Information Technology we had to make a webvideo including one of our teachers. We immediately knew we wanted to interview Suleman Shahid, our teacher for User Interface Design, since he really inspired us. Moreover, we were very curious about his past education and his almost finished PhD about emotions in games. Here you can see the video we made. Hope you like it.

We want to thank Suleman for his cooperation with the interview.

Stufficient App: making a students' life efficient

In one of my first blogposts I told about the lack of usability on Blackboard. Many students experience problems while using Blackboard: where to find deadlines, homework and activities? Besides students use Blackboard, they mainly have an agenda for the planning of other activities. To integrate a person’s school and social life, we designed the iPhone application Stufficient for the course User Interface Design. This application enables students to manage their courses, homework and deadlines in an agenda, make a to-do list, register for exams and check their results. But above all, this application can be personalized to meet the needs of any student.

Here are some previews of the different phases and our final design, however the real app will be kept secret until after the User Interface Design Symposium on may 18.

After a lot of brainstorm session we finally made a so-called low-fi design with the main functions of our app. First we pretested the app on paper. We wrote a few scenarios and let some respondents test these functions by clicking on them. After that a new screen was showed. Above you can see a preview of this phase.

Thanks to the low-fi evaluation we made some little changes to improve the application. Then we made our final design in photoshop. Finally, we had to program the whole application. Some screenshots are shown below.

If you want to see the real working application, please visit my website after may 18 or come to the User Interface Design Symposium to see our application and the projects of our classmates.

Saturday, April 23, 2011 // Labels: User Interface Design // 0 comments //

The Future Part 1: 'The future will be made of glass'

From now on I will regularly discuss some interesting predictions that are made about the future. Today I will show you a video from Corning, a company that states the future will be made of glass.

Can you imagine organizing your daily schedule with a few touches on your bathroom mirror? Chatting with far-away relatives through interactive video on your kitchen counter? Reading a classic novel on a whisper-thin piece of flexible glass?

Even though this video might look like an imaginary fantasy, the company Corning is currently engaging in research that could bring this alive in the near future. During my lectures of User Interface Design I have seen some other interesting movies about real working applications like this. Therefore, I think this could definitely be made in the future. Moreover, this video shows some fun and useful functions we could definitely use in everyday life or at work.

However, I doubt if within ten years people will seriously live in houses and environments like this. First of all, their whole house needs to be renovated to live a life like this. This will be way too expensive for a normal household. Nevertheless, a house made of glass is not the best place to live with kids or animals, since glass can be broken or scratched easily. Although I do not believe houses like this will be the standard within ten years, I do believe some of the applications you have seen will become reality sooner than you might think.

Reliability: 6/10

Source and more information at: www.corning.com