Welcome back to HowToAV.tv we're over at ISE 2018 and people have been asking us this year
are we going to see Chuck Espinoza again? We are not allowed to have favourites on the
channel, but if we were Chuck you definitely would be one of them. Welcome back to HowToAV
it's really good to see you again and I know that you've got a whole list of presentations
coming this year. One of them is indeed really talking about UX. Now some of us are talking
UX all of the time, some of us don't know what it is yet. This is all about user experience.
Yes user experience is a big topic right now; it's evolving the design discipline.
Before if we got the boxes to work together, if we got one box to talk to the other box
and the software worked and the system functioned it was a good system. But now the system can't
just work it has to feel good. We have to feel good about using it and there's a lot
of things in that design discipline that people are realising how humans work with their systems.
So it's not just the look and the function but it's the feel. How does it make you feel
when you're using the system. Sometimes systems you can use them and you feel not like a good
user because you make mistakes on the system and they've been discovering that it's not
really a human mistake, that's a design flaw. So the whole design experience is centred
around function, look and feel to the person that's using the systems.
So who's responsible for this? Is it the manufacturers, the product designers or is it the system
designers or is it us end users just not doing it correctly?
Well it's a combination of a
lot of things. It's end users A the end users have to know a little bit and communicate
with the designers. The designers have to evolve their thinking beyond technology, they
have to think about ergonomics a lot they have to think about natural human behaviour
a lot. Manufacturers are keeping up pretty good with evolving technologies with the processors
need to be faster for the engagement. If you hit a button and it takes forever for the
action to happen, that's kind of a bad experience. If I hit the button and action happens it
gives me a feedback that's a good experience. So manufacturers have been really good about
making those processors faster, making things more streamlined, making the look of the product
sexy and really nice to have on the rack. Likewise designers have been keeping up with
the technology and what it needs to work now the evolving design discipline is going to
incorporate more of those human factors. So our technology designers are gonna have to
be a little bit more touchy-feely a little bit more into the emotional aspect of people
and how it makes people feel. And that's really going to be something that we have to go back
and fourth with our user, our end user and maybe a little bit of education with the customer
because they don't know they see the button and a couple seconds later it blinks and they
get used to it, but if they can have something better, if they can have something more friendly.
Before it was called user friendly and you know we had to consider the human factor they
now call it User Experience.
A better user experience is becoming a requirement out there
in the industry and in commercial systems because I think that end users expectations
have built so much. We're all used to using so much technology at home that just works,
that now we have an expectation that when we go out into a public building, into an
education building no matter where we are going we really expect things to work, rather
than us having to work at it.
We do, we expect things to work at our workspace and at retail
places and you know the gas pump like it works at home. I want to say to my speak and say
device whatever device that is hey Siri, Alexa, who ever you are, I need a weather report
and I get it. When I go to a retail place I want to look at what they have to offer
or a map. A lot of the times you'll go up to a display and you know, people will start
to pinch the display expecting it to have the same qualities as an I device or a Smartphone
or a tablet. So people in general are our cultures getting more used to technology and
the adaptation. And the consumer market has really been pushing personal technology for
a long time. If you look at some kids nowadays three and four years old that go to a magazine
and try to pinch the magazine because they think it's a oh, I have to actually flip a
page that's foreign to them because they're used to an I device or something else. So
that drive of I have it at home and it looks great it, it sounds great, it works well, why can't we have that
here? And at home my system does this, can we get it to do that here. Like I can say
Alexa turn on the TV and my entire AV system goes on. Why do I have to press so many levels.
So yeah that's a lot of what's driving it is comfort from the home, bringing that into
my workplace and just the technology being public.
And so let's talk about the design
process now for an integrator, for a system designer. How do we need to change? When we
were purely looking at hardware let's say you can start with plan drawings and a piece
of paper. Do we need to get within the environment? Do we need to meet the users before we start
to design a system do you think?
Oh I think 100%. We've been doing this, I know I've been
doing this with my site surveys and first meets and in my program analysis of systems.
Not only do I want to know the space of the room, how large the room is the dimensions.
The things that are going to be on the floor the ceiling - for reflections from my audio
and how bright it is going to be for my video to make sure I have the right contrast ratio
for my projector. And the room is the furthest viewer is here and I have to size my display
correctly, but I want to know not just what the task they're trying to accomplish. I want
to know other things like do you have automation in your offices? Do you have motion controlled
light switches? Are you a green building and how can we incorporate that into this room
or this environment? What are the colours that you're going to have on your chairs and
why do you have that colour? Why do you have that colour in your corporate
environment? How do you structure your meetings? Because I want to make sure that you know
if I know certain enterprises come in and before their meeting they have a five minute
quiet time, so everybody can review the agenda and they can have it blocked off so no ones
interrupting them. But it's very quiet and if you can imagine starting that AV system
if there's a projector making a lot of noise in there that disrupts their quiet. Well if
they do have that corporate type of culture, I want to know that so we do something to
either baffle that fan noise whilst they're trying to be quiet maybe meditate or just
go over an agenda or we do a flat panel. We can do a nice flat panel large now. So knowing
how they behave is going to help me design for their behaviour.
And I think relationships
with other partners is going to make a big difference. We talk a lot on the channel about as system
designers, as integrators what additional skills do we need to have? And there will
invariably always be technical in it. There will always be you know, you need to build
your IT skills. The AV guys need to learn more IT and the IT guys need to learn more
AV. Do we need to actually start talking to the architects, to the interior designers?
Is that becoming key to becoming a great user experience?
Not only the architects and interior
designers, I actually like to talk to behavioural specialists and people who are into analysing
habits. If you can think of any habit that you have and incorporate that. If we can incorporate
that habit into your design it feels good to you. Hey this feels familiar because I
do it like this all the time - that's a good experience. If you think about door design
a habit of a human is to reach up to a handle that is up and down and pull it. Natural act
there's a bar we push it, if you can think about that behaviour in designing a door and
you see the door that has it up and down and you have to push it most people will pull
it and think there's something wrong with me. I didn't do it the way the instruction
said. It's actually a bad design for my human. So if I can incorporate these into the system,
you start it, you like it, you play with it, you use it, you think that is a good experience.
You use it more, you get good with it and you develop this behaviour. Well you don't
really have to change your patterns, we've incorporated that into our design.
User experience is being talked about all over the industry more and more it's something that a lot of
us now need to start to consider. We know that some of the most successful designers,
system designers and integrators are making this a key part of the specification now.
There's a lot to learn from Chuck over here at ISE 2018, thanks Chuck for joining us again.
Plenty more to come from HowToAv.TV