If I could choose someone from all of history to have a beer with, Richard Feynman would be on my short list. Books and audio recordings of his physics lectures have sold like crazy, even more among enthusiasts than as textbooks. He makes physics concepts approachable and even fun in singular, inimitable way. His memorable personality and antics are almost as well known. Bill Gates feels the same way; it’s what led him to acquire some of Feynman’s lectures.
So, when Microsoft Research asked us to create an innovative experience centered on a previously unreleased video-recorded lecture series, we jumped at the chance to work on it. Now, Project Tuva is available to the world.
As we watched these lectures for the first time we knew it was important to think of the kind of tasks unique to content so rich with ideas. We worked with an enthusiastic Microsoft Research team to develop an understanding of who could benefit from the site. After brainstorming and narrowing to an innovative feature set, we developed an information architecture and then a working Silverlight prototype illustrating what it would be like. We’re happy to see that the folks at Stimulant refined these ideas and built a great-looking experience that also performs well.
The content of Feynman’s seven Messenger Lectures lent itself to many outside learning resources we called Extras, like the one shown above. They’re cued by the content of the lecture. Some of them even update his slides of astronomical objects with interactive imagery and tours in WorldWide Telescope (another of our Microsoft Research projects that recently won an award). Focusing on teachers, students, and enthusiasts led to several other cool features:
Quickly find what you need:
Search over multiple video transcripts
Chaptered playhead navigation
Unique visual timeline
Time-synched video for search results, extras, and your own notes
Don’t just watch, understand:
Transcript synchronized to video playback
Interactive Extras expand on concepts from the video
Time-stamped note taking
Go fullscreen to watch without distraction
We also designed a cool set of community authoring tools and sharing capabilities.
Take a look! His teaching style is captivating and it’s fascinating how well the lectures still capture modern physics after all these years.
P.S. In case you’re wondering, Tuva is an area in central Asia, then part of the USSR, that Feynman aspired to visit for years. He died of cancer before the visa arrived.
“Also superb is that whenever Feynman mentions a constellation or spatial anomaly a link will take you to Microsoft’s Worldwide Telescope so you can go and take a look for yourself. It’s so brilliantly designed and wonderfully implemented it’s quite obviously a labour of love. It’s also precisely how I want to see historical information presented and updated.”
I love the web for many reasons, and one of those reasons is themashup. Darren Solomon from Science of Girls has created a simple site that hosts a grid of YouTube videos containing melodies, beats, spoken word and more that can be played however the user (you) desires.
It’s a kind of collaboration that let’s you control what the final output can be. Variables that can be controlled include volume, order and layering. It’s a pretty unique experience that has already costed me more than my lunch period. Woops.
If you haven’t already been checkin’ up on us, then you might have missed a couple of updates on how things are doing with our internal project focusing on retail shopping experiences. We’ve wrapped up our research and concepting and are now making plans to take it a step further. Maybe a prototype? Maybe just a movie? We’ll keep you post. Until then, you can read up on our last few entries. If you have any comments or feedback, let us know. There’s been a lot of lessons learned from the project and we’re anxious to hear your thoughts too.
We have written previously on the topic of Innovating In A Time Of Recession. As corporate earnings continue to plunge and the economic recovery is still but a speck of light in a long, dark tunnel, many of our business partners are looking for cost-effective methods to get the right strategy into action.
A couple of us, Christopher Konrad, and myself recently contributed to a Forrester Research study titled Low-Cost User Research And Usability Testing Techniques. This is a popular topic for companies that are looking to weather the recession without pausing on innovation. Konrad, our head of User Research, reminds me that we are a design firm at heart. We recognize that research is immensely valuable as a way of informing and inspiring product design. Regardless of economic conditions, we often see a desire by our clients to build highly desirable and relevant products, and to do so rapidly. At no surprise, clients want to move into the design of their product or service as quickly as possible. I’ll be going over 3 main approaches that allows us to bring the voice of the customer into product design quickly and without undue costs.
Internalizing user experiences by conducting rapid ethnography, “scavenger hunts” (a method for deep immersion in the usage of an existing product), or participatory design, designers can support the research studies to empathize with users early on. This isn’t anything new, but it’s an important idea to continually practice both internally and with the client’s team. In one of our previous projects, we worked on a mobile mapping application and thought to ourselves, “how well does each device truly help people get around?” We could look at spec sheets and also ask people about what they thought was troubling them, but in reality we can’t always rely on just what they say. Instead, we devised a game that involved both our client’s design team and us. Each team was given a mobile device to complete a set of tasks that a majority of individuals would face on a daily basis. In essence, we had ourselves a scavenger hunt. Exciting, right? We thought so. Plus it was a gorgeous day in Seattle. But I digress. The game turned out very successful with everyone feeling very much in tune with how the different approaches to each device translated into pain points or pleasures. For extra credit, we turned the activity into a comic book that we shared with our client as a means to communicate not only the process, but the outcome as well.
Continually evolving a product design through rapid concept value testing, RITE (Rapid Iterative Testing and Evaluation) and inexpensive remote testing methods. These approaches have big implications for cost savings (not to mention headaches). In a previous project, one of our researchers conducted 8 remote interviews with individuals around the globe including Chile, Denmark and Texas using Microsoft’s Live Meeting application. While UserVue is another application we have found great successful using, Live Meeting enabled us to communicate remotely internationally. Here’s how this saves money if you haven’t already guessed: airfare, hotel stay, food, transportation, transit time and of course, entertainment. Now take that value and multiply is by the number of people you need to run a study. Then on top of that include the cost of having your client send a representative as well. And, if the produce team could not attend the live session, the digital recording of the session facilitates viewing later. Video montages can be done simply with free tools such as Windows Movie Maker or iMovie. Combine that with a Creative Commons licensed track from Jamendo and you have a beautiful voice-of-the-customer video.
Finally, the great thing about remote studies is that they’re part of a greener practice in our field. One less person driving, flying and more driving. Instead it’s going about business as usual and getting things done quickly, effectively and properly.
Defining product strategy. In addition to understanding user needs quickly and efficiently, we apply the same thinking into our research and analysis methods to understand business models and product strategy issues. In the past, I have primarily focused on tying our strategy and research services to design projects. The recession, however, is increasing demand for these services as standalone offerings.
We have found we can go a long way by conducting a thorough inventory of existing market research and free (and often wonderful) Internet resources, followed by market opportunity analysis and strategy workshops.
We are constantly thinking about ways we can adapt our methods based on the climates changes, both economically, and also technologically. It’s not only saving our business partner’s money, but also our own operational expenses. It pays off for both parties to find leaner and more effective means of getting to the right design strategy so that energy can be focused on making the implementation of the design perfect. Leave your comments below on examples you have to share on adapting research techniques in ways that keep the research agile and the design moving forward.
If you’ve ever been curious about what the future may hold, check out the video Microsoft Office Labs released titled “2019.” You’ll find a technological utopia using some of today’s technology being applied in everyday settings. The production value of the video rivals that of many Hollywood films, and it certainly makes the point clear that this stuff can be a reality. Stephen Elop presented the montage at the Wharton Business Technology Conference highlighting key technologies including: advanced home networking, surface computing, modal devices and real time interactive classrooms to name a few.
How will emerging technology improve our productivity in the years ahead? What opportunities will arise from evolving trends and global change? Microsoft has collaborated with customers, partners, and thought leaders across multiple disciplines to develop scenarios that explore how long-term trends, customer challenges, and emerging technologies might converge to improve our lives, both at work and home.
Video montages are always exciting to watch and helps fuel the thinking on better experiences. What do you think? 10 years? Will we see this? or will we experience something more along the lines of Blade Runner?
We just updated the Labs blog with an entry on John Logic, one of our participants for our snowboard commerce study. We’ve captured a lot of great quotes and insights from our 60 minutes him. Jump over to watch the video and the observations we made.
Posted an update on our progress with the Frontier project we’re working on dubbed “Snowbird.” It’s an outline of the research we are conducting and we will be posting some of the data/findings in the next couple of days. Stay tuned!
by Dave McColgin, posted July 15th, 2009
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