For November's Birmingham Interaction Design Association meeting we'd decided to do a design challenge - a little exercise to collaboratively stretch our design muscles. We weren't expecting a big turnout and we hadn't been able to book our usual room at the Institute of Art and Design so it had to be something fairly self-contained that didn't require a lot of resources and could be comfortably accomplished around a pub table.
As I gazed into space hoping for inspiration up popped a tweet from @IxDA with the intriguing subject line 'Can you redesign a chocolate bar?' A few clicks later I'd arrived at David Sherwin's ChangeOrder blog and the extracts from his Creative Workshop book that had prompted the tweet. A quick look through the exercises yielded 'Do the Undo' which seemed perfect for our little meeting
... [W]ith a wide range of new devices at our disposal, knowing how to undo is growing more difficult. On my phone, I have to shake it back and forth—risking dropping it on the ground and shattering the screen. And on even larger touch screens, exactly where does Command-Z exist?
In this challenge, you'll consider how to solve for this problem. Everywhere.
Within 30 minutes, create a gesture that would tell a selected device in your home to undo its most recent action. How would the device receive your command? What peripherals, if any, would be required to send the command? In your last five minutes, document your gesture idea with a brief video.
Here's what we came up with.
Our first idea was a big 'Z'. This preserved the link with Ctrl/Cmd Z, could be used across devices and provided a nice gestural flourish with which to roll back a step. Problem solved ... until we came to look at Undo's opposite, Redo. The obvious step of reversing the Z was confusing and unnatural.
Thinking a bit more about what Undo represents gave us our next idea - an anticlockwise circle.
Undo is really moving back in time. Visualising turning back time led us to sitting astride the guns on a battlesh ... I mean to moving the hands of a clock back.
Circling also linked in nicely to multiple Undo applications like Photoshop's History Palette. To keep moving back through the earlier states of your work you just carry on circling your finger. The opposite - circling clockwise - worked nicely for Redo. This was also a gesture that would easily translate across devices like the Wiimote. We were happy with that and broadened out David's original brief to look at gestures for other actions.
Tab If Undo/Redo is moving through time, Tab is moving through (screen) space. For this reason we chose to use the same gestures, but to differentiate them by using two fingers rather than one.
Delete Scrubbing the screen, akin to rubbing something out, was our first thought, which led on to drawing the fingers and thumb together to replicate scrunching up a bit of paper.
Cut It had to be scissoring the fingers
but Copy and Paste were much harder. We finally settled on moving from the palm of the hand to the side for Copy and then back from side to palm again for Paste.
Save Our first attempt was a twist of the hand, emulating turning the dial on a safe. Following on from that we came up with mimicking a goalkeeper making a save by moving the fingers of both hands together at a diagonal.
Search We referenced standard iconography with this one by tracing the simplified outline of a magnifying glass with a finger
Starting social applications requires a friend to place their hands on the screen at the same time as yours
We thought that there must be a use for the walking fingers - some sort of first person adventure game, displaying your phone directory perhaps, or calling up a Michael Jackson playlist
followed immediately by the Gesture of the Night, @jezturner's two-handed Abbey Road tribute
which would, of course, immediately purchase the recently discovered back catalogue of hot new band The Beatles.
We got carried away with the designing gestures part of the brief rather than thinking about the system that would support it, and opted for paper notes rather than chance mobile phone video in a busy subterranean bar, but it was good fun and definitely took us out of our comfort zones.
If these design challenges sound like your cup of tea or if you work in interaction design, new media, customer experience, web design or any related field we’d love to have you along. Our next meeting will be a Christmas Social at Birmingham’s German Markets on Thursday 18th December. See you there.
