Evening Events: Usability Week 2012 Conference

After a day of intense learning, unwind with us at this stimulating event aimed at broadening your view of user experience and your networking opportunities.

Dr. Norman’s plenary talk is free for all London conference attendees, no matter which days you’re registered for. Just show your conference badge at the door.

The evening keynote will run from 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. There will be a networking reception during the time between the end of the full-day courses and the start of the keynote.

The Future Is Here

We are once more in the midst of rapid technological change. Change always means great challenges coupled with great opportunities. As the technology industry matures, new needs arise, new devices and new forms of interaction emerge. Our applications now must be pleasurable and engaging. Our devices must delight. We want instant communication and engagement with friends and colleagues. We want all the powers of technology without its pains, no matter where we are, no matter what time it is.

The human body is part of the physical world. It savors touch and feeling, movement and action. How else to explain the popularity of physical devices, of games that require gestures, and full-body movement? The human is a social being: we want to share our experiences with our friends, hence the rise of social networks.

Devices and services proliferate. New chips, display technologies, communication capabilities, and sensors are completely changing the rules. Today, instead of mouse and keyboard, we gesture and manipulate. Touch and feel, haptics, will become greatly important. Location awareness provides opportunities to enhance our experiences and interactions always providing the information we want, just when we want it. At the same time, these new technologies offer increased difficulties, potentially violating social and legal norms about privacy, security, and trust. Designing for interacting groups of people is far more difficult than designing for the individual.

Want to develop for this new world? There are new rules for interacting with the world, new rules for the developers of systems. But the new rules still follow the old principles. As Jakob Nielsen and I have pointed out, let’s not throw away the old lessons of interaction. In fact, these become even more important than ever before. And yes, there are some new things to learn as well, new technologies to master, new words to learn.

Today the need is for complex, rich, emotionally satisfying things. It is no longer just about function and service. Those are still important, but they are taken for granted. Today we must add convenience and comfort, fun and excitement, pleasure. We need to develop applications and services that deliver real value but also that are high in emotional value, experience, and engagement.

Don Norman is the Norman of the Nielsen Norman group, but he has never been content to do just a single thing. So he is also a university professor, author of multiple books, an IDEO fellow, a Trustee of IIT’s Institute of Design in Chicago, and a member of numerous advisory boards and boards of directors of companies, small and large. He is professor emeritus at Northwestern University and the University of California, San Diego and a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Korea’s Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). He has been Vice President of Apple, in charge of advanced technology, where, among other things, his group invented the term “User Experience.” He was awarded the Benjamin Franklin medal in Computer and Cognitive Science, has honorary degrees from the University of Padua (Italy) and the Delft University of Technology (the Netherlands), is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is one of the founders of CHI and received their Lifetime Achievement award. He is the author of numerous books, including “The Design of Everyday Things,” “Emotional Design,” and “Living with Complexity.” He can be found at www.jnd.org.