Monthly Archives: January 2009

User Experience in Architecture: Walden 7

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Anna Bofill Levi is a Spanish architect that was part of the Taller de Arquitectura movement (together with his brother Ricard Bofill Levi). Recently, she was offering a lecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich (Akademie der Bildenden Künste München). My impression was that her work is very user centered and that’s why I decided to write about it here, specially about Walden 7.

Walden 7

This building was finished in 1974 when Barcelona was facing the need of sheltering thousands of workers coming from different places. The aim of this work was to avoid typical appartment blocks that look like huge gray boxes. There was a big need for social housing but also for interactions and a feeling of society for a new community.

 

 

Anna Bofill Levi explained that they were thinking in the user the whole time, talking with potential residents before the construction and getting feedback several years after construction. The result of such a user centered design was a place were people naturally interact and communicate.

 

 

 

Walden 7 has shops, bars, terraces, gardens, patios and swimming pools connected through bridges, balconies and trails. The configuration resembles the one of a medieval city.

 

 

 

The facade is also special, it looks like a huge red fortification wall connecting interior and exterior through big windows.

 

 

The Power of a User Centered Design

Thinking in the user experience from the beginning was clearly positive for the project. What started as cheap social housing ended up being a place where people don’t want to move out from, driving prices from very low to high. People living there are also organized in a community, the building has its own web page and they organize events for themselves, including annual donations for other communities. 

FromHere, an Application for Mobile Public Transport Information

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At Design vs Art we have been thinking for some time about how it would be to give users of public transportation the possibility of knowing in a fast way how to get from A to B in an extremly fast way. In this article I would like to give you some insights about the design of the fromhere application.

The Problem to Solve

Our agency is based in Munich, a city with a huge public transport network that takes people everywhere. The problem is that as the travelers get more options the network becomes more complex. Then, is very difficult for people to plan a journey without a computer with access to the online route planning system.

There are several services to check this information through a mobile phone but none takes advantage of the latest technology, like GPS.

The Solution

In the following video you can see a fast introduction to our design.


FromHere Application from Design vs Art on Vimeo.

 

We have been asking users of public transportation about the places they usually go. The answer was that most of them are regularly going to the same places, like work, gym and favorite cafeterias or bars.

So we decided to design an interface as simple as possible that makes the journey planning really fast, wherever the user is but going to those "standard" places. We decided to design our first solution for the iPhone as we realized that tapping on the destination would be the fastest way to do it. 

The Interface

The fromhere interface is clean, it loads fast and eliminates any distraction other applications could have. For us, designing an interface that is fast and easy to use was our main goal. 

The Technology

Thanks to GPS the telephone knows where the user is located. The application then connects to the server to translate coordinates to a real address, such as "Duesseldorfer Strasse 11, Munich".

In the next step the application requests the journey plan between departure and destination to the servers.

Contact Us

Please contact us if you need farther details about the application.

The official fromhere product information website is here: http://www.designvsart.com/fromhere 

Creative Commons

You can use the contents of this article and video under Creative Commons Attributions License 3.0. Just link to http://www.designvsart.com/fromhere

iPhone Apps: Designing a Better Experience for QR Codes

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Last weekend I was trying several applications to read QR Codes with the iPhone. They all do the same thing but the experience using them is very differnt. I would like to share with you my conclusions.

What are QR Codes?

They are two dimensional bar codes that store some information like URLs and addresses. In some countries they are widely use in the advertising industry to give links to additional information.

A QR Code:

QR Code Example

QR Code Reading iPhone Applications

I was trying four of the most popular QR Code reader applications for iPhone:

QR Code Reader iPhone Application Icons

 

Understanding the aim of QR Codes and QR Code Readers

In order to design a better user experience you have to think what the QR Codes are for and in which context they will be used:

- QR means Quick Response, so they should be decoded fast by the code reader. That is, not only decoding, but also the application should be ready to read the code as soon as the user starts it. 

- QR Codes are used in advertisement a lot, at the street and in magazines. They do a good job because they meant to save time as the user does not have to type, for example, a URL address while she is walking or not using a PC.

 

Three of the four applications I tried don’t care about the previous two points. For example, 2D Sense does a great job decoding QR Codes but it fails to provide a good experience. The user needs to read and decode the QR Code fast but the application bothers with a welcome message and tries to get access to the location information, both things totally unnecessary.

You don’t need to know my location to decode…

2D Sense Application Screenshot

Barcodes, BeeTagg Reader and 2D Sense do a great job decoding but they bother with welcoming messages and other unnecessary options. On the other side, UpCode allows the user to shoot at the QR code directly without loosing time, exactly what is needed to make the QR Code reading user experience good.

UpCode, start the application and shoot straight away.

UpCode Screenshot

I want to point out how a good design could make an application better than other similar ones. Always go for the simple design without features the user in that situation don’t need.