ExperienceLab

If voice interfaces are the future, why aren’t we all using them?

In the last few years speech recognition technology has broken out of specialist software and into mainstream operating systems and, in particular, onto smartphones. It feels like a no-brainer, but the revolution in technology hasn’t been quickly followed by a revolution in use. Why would we persist in typing, touching or doing anything else (in particular on smartphones) when we can just speak and the machine obeys?

Acting up a storm in early concept testing

Shailesh Manga kicking back on an Air New Zealand Sky Couch – See www.futuretakingflight.com for more details

I recently came back from the latest six-monthly UXalliance meeting in New Zealand. We use these to catch up with international partners to ensure we’re working together as effectively as possible and we also run user experience masterclasses. As part of this I interviewed Shailesh Manga of our New Zealand partner, Optimal Usability about their use of actors to test innovative seat designs in mock up aircraft cabins for Air New Zealand.

They found that actors were great for testing low-fidelity seat designs as they could get into the roles of personas and get beyond the inherent artificiality of foam and polystyrene mock ups and understand what worked well and not so well about possible designs. It would have been easy to do this wrong, but their careful approach to using actors really helped to make it a winner.

Advice on international user experience testing during travel disruption

Northern European airspace has only just opened after nearly a week of closure due to volcanic eruptions in Iceland. It's likely to be May before things return to normal and the possibility of future disruption cannot be entirely ruled out.

While not wishing to court doom, those of us involved in global research need to be ready for this. So what do we do? Here are 10 things to think about.

National digital retune causes problems

September 30^th was National Freeview Retune Day. This was a reshuffle of channels proceeding the introduction of High Definition on Freeview. Despite it being widely trailed beforehand, the confused of the nation still caused the website explaining the changes to crash and were calling the Freeview helpline at a rate of 200 calls per minute seeking advice.