An Insightful Video about IxD Big Picture

I came across this great video commissioned by Bassett & Partners, talking about the future connecting world and how interaction design can contribute to it. Many mind-provoking throughts.

My take-aways from it are two points: (1) Embrace “natural” interactions – removing constrains and artificials; (2) Connections among things through sensors and cloud will lead to environment- and context-dependent future interactions. What is yours? Enjoy.

Connecting from Bassett & Partners on Vimeo.

Four Reasons Why I Love airbnb

As a big fan of traveling, I was thrilled to find airbnb.com. I am attached to it and visit it frequently even when I am not planning for any trip. It is not only usable but also enjoyable.

This website gives me great experience mainly because of the following 4 reasons:

• Clean navigation and prominent searching area. As a platform offering choices of accommodations for travelers who have destinations in their mind, searching function should be significant and easy to find. Airbnb does a great job of placing the core function at the very center of the home page, which will also take the central place of on a commonly sized laptop screen. A “search” button colored with bright pink will ensure that you don’t miss the search box embedded in colorful cover photos.   

           In case you are new to the website and just want to wonder around and check it out, the fixed   search bar at the very top of the page will stay what ever page you are going to visit and quickly help you get back to track when you are ready to search for specific destination.

      This simple but thoughtful navigation design can always remind and facilitate users to complete the key task without hassle.

• Pleasing visual enjoyment. For all online shopping sites, visual attraction is a key to attack and retain visitors. Airbnb is also a form of online shopping sites, where people make purchase decisions without seeing and touching real products. What the difference between airbnb and other online shopping store (e.g., Amazon, Nordstrom, and eBay) is that airbnb is not only selling the product itself, it is also selling the living experience and life styles. These hidden selling points are in no way negligible. Thus, I appreciate the attention and value airbnb has put on the quality of the images and delightful color schemes of the website. I have no doubt that users will be attracted by most of the photos posted and feeling hard to make a decision not because the options are undesirable but because they are all too fancy to just choose one. Furthermore, the whitespace among images is reasonable, rendering great visual effect.

• Integration of social functions and wish list. This newly-added feature showed a salute to the good idea and experience on Pinterest. I viewed it as a tipping-point that airbnb evolved its focus on exploration rather than just search. Much like a soymilk-maker company in China spent great efforts to advocate and advertise the benefits of drinking soymilk in order to sell its products, airbnb offers contexts and atmosphere of different places around the world to arouse the pleasant yearn for traveling, and indicating living with airbnb is the best way to really immerse oneself in the local culture. I love the wish list function because I can “pin” interior designs that I love, save places for future trips, broadcast on Facebook about my taste, and plan trips with my friend collaboratively. Airbnb introduces the wish list function in the home page, right below the prominent search function. Users can easily browse popular wish lists. What adds to enhance this joyful experience is the great coding – it brings almost infinite scrolling, smoothy and robust. 

      In each individual space page, saving to wish list or sharing function (to Twitter and Pinterest) is handy. It is convenient at any stage to bookmark favorite choices. Overall, airbnb enables different pathways for users do discover fun places and ignite their unconscious desires.

• Trust system and adequate product information. Another formula of successful online shopping site is to build the sense of trust and ease the process of making purchase decisions. Airbnb succeeds in setting up a trust by using traditional user reviews system and approachable profile information of house-renters. Below shows randomly pulled two renter’s profile bar on the property’s page: 

      The font used to spell their names is handwriting style, creating a sense of friendliness. Other performance matrices reflect their working style. They helps users to make good matches with the renter they are going to deal with and be aware of what to expect. By clicking the name of the renter, users could check more detailed information and business record of her. All the means very much secured users trust towards the website.

      To help users make informed decisions, useful information is also ready available and easy to navigate through. For example, information regarding a renting property could be viewed in photo’s form, geography form, street-view form, and availability form, using tabs to toggle among. Detailed description, amenity list and house rules (e.g., no smoking, and no pets) are also specified right below the photo gallery. 

Above are the major 4 reasons why I have great experience on airbnb. As I browse it, I discover more lovely features that reflect those fine considerations from the website designer. A lesson learned.

EXCELLENT UX BLOGS: UX booth

UX booth is one of my favorite blogs about user experience study. This blog is run by a group of people named UX community. Its online presence delivers informative articles and resources on usability, interaction design, and user experience. The blog is updated regularly and has a readership mainly composed of beginning-to-intermediate user experience and interaction designers (just people like us).

If you take a look at this blog, it itself is a pretty nice, and user-friendly website (of cause, it has to be!). The map of the blog is easy to grasp (very good visibility!). As the blog consists mainly with articles discussing and sharing different aspects of user experience, it provides a clear achieve of related topics, which you could find either on the top of the page, or the bottom of the page. Other forms of information, such as video records, podcasts, tools and books that they recommend, or even some get together they organized, are achieved in “resources”.

Overall, I think this blog is pretty cool. It has something you might already know about, some more you might haven’t heard of. This is good for us as learners — you could have some reflections on your experience, and you could also learn new things as well. You could also join the community and contribute as a guest writer. As I subscribed this blog to google reader, it told me that there are already 13,693 readers has subscribed it (don’t leave yourself out!), and the update frequency is 1.4 posts per week. Check out the latest blog — “Personas: putting the focus back on the user” — isn’t it appealing to you?