As Halloween approaches, and the veil between worlds grows wan, threadbare, and permeable, Cooper turns its collective attention to the spirit, spook, and creature population. Last year we sought to understand them from a Goal-Directed perspective. This year we take the next unholy step and design software, devices, and services around these personas. Today we revisit Emily.

Emily is in trouble. She narrowly escaped a horde of flesh eating zombies, but was bitten in the process. Now she's suffering under the gradual onset of zombification—cognitive decline, neurodegeneration, loss of motor control, and an increased apetite for delicious, raw, human flesh. She wants to stave off zombiism as long as she can, but she knows that once she's crossed a threshold, she will succumb and attempt to kill her friends and eat her family. What can she do? Enter iZombie?, an app made specifically for zombie-virus-infected humans, distributed by the military for free to all civilians at the first sign of the inevitable plague.

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Who do you trust for food advice? Review sites like Yelp are bloated and contain a cacophony of opinions. Others just aggregate shallow star ratings. Reviewers often have tastes and preferences that might not match your own. And even if you find a good restaurant, how do you know what is the best thing on the menu?

The idea behind Chefs Feed is that the best food advice comes from experts - professional chefs, and friends with discerning taste.

Currently available in nine US cities, the app doesn’t just tell you where to go, but also what to order, providing an insider’s look at each city’s eateries.

When Chefs Feed approached Cooper, the startup was about to make a big leap. Lots of people were downloading the app, but its functionality was limited to a few features like reading and bookmarking chefs’ reviews. With the user base expanding quickly, Chefs Feed needed a blueprint for making the app a platform for interaction between chefs and foodies. The app also needed features to help friends trade dish recommendations and share their passion for food. In short, the app was to get social.

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In our last Drawing Board, we explored the desire some travelers have to uncover and experience the authentic spirit of a place. For the Lyrical Travel Drawing Board, we meet Jeanette. She’s in a new town with a day on her hands. Without much to go on and wanting to avoid the same old guidebooks, she turns to Latourex for inspiration.

The Drawing Board Episode 10: Lyrical Travel from Cooper on Vimeo.

Credits: Chris Noessel, Christina Worsing, Greg Schuler

In the video we introduce the high points of the service. In this blog post we'll go deep in explaining some of our design thinking about how such an app might work to help Jeanette accomplish her goals.

Our Inspiration

This Drawing Board was inspired by “Experimental Travel”, aka Latourex. Latourex is short for LAboratoire de TOURisme EXperimental. Experimental Travel was developed by Rachael Antony and Joël Henry as a series of techniques to make travel more interesting. In this type of travel, people play “games” on the road, to get them off the beaten path. We love this idea where chance operations inspire and help support us in our search for unique and authentic travel experiences. In our Drawing Board, we explore how this approach might translate to a service design opportunity via a mobile experience.

The first thing we realized is that as in Latourex itself, no single game would suffice. So we envisioned a container app called Latourex Travel Games that has an open and extensible architecture. Some game modules would be available at launch, but over time more modules could be added, keeping the content fresh. Lyrical Travel would just be one module within this container app, and the sketch below shows that the Latourex app is what Jeanette would download.

Once downloaded and launched, the app would briefly introduce itself, and then get Jeanette to the action as quickly as possible by providing a default selection from the available modules. If she wasn’t interested in this first randomly selected module, she could “roll the dice” (or shake the phone) to get another one. While fun and in the spirit of Latourex, that mechanism could become tiresome if she was looking for a particular module, so we provided means to select a particular one from a list if she wanted. Since we knew that such an app would grow by word-of-mouth, we also let her replicate the module through which she learned about the app: Lyrical Travel.

In the world of Latourex, Lyrical Tourism is a game where travelers select a song for a given location, and let the lyrics suggest things to do and see. When we imagined what this could be in a mobile app, we recognized we could keep the spirit of the original game and improve upon it by providing:

• A huge database of songs that might fit given locations
• Easy access to lyrics
• Automated local suggestions based on those lyrics
• Simple ways to capture, curate, and share the experience

We saw that we could facilitate this experience in four steps: getting started, guided suggestions, capturing key moments, and curating/sharing the results.

A Four-Step Process

1. Getting Started

In preparation for her adventure, Jeanette first tells the app some things about her travel: where she wants to explore; what her transportation options are; and how much time she has. We suspect that most users would open the app just before wanting to explore, so the default screen uses her current location, allowing her to select another or even randomize. Rather than make these separate steps, we thought the map screen had enough real estate to let these be simple radio buttons or toggle buttons as overlays to the map. This way it would feel more like a single step even though it has three separate pieces of information.

We’re also big fans of the power of Lyrical Travel to encourage people to rediscover familiar places like their hometowns and suspect setting the current location as the default would encourage this idea when people open the app near home.

With a location set, a song is next needed. By default, Lyrical Travel makes a suggestion, selected at random and based on a search of the location Jeanette has chosen. She has a control that lets her listen to it to see if she likes it. That makes it simple to use. We understand that a default song wouldn’t always be to her liking, so the app enables her to either “re-roll the dice” or allow her to select from her own music. (You’ll notice the interaction is the same from the prior screen. You can read more on the pattern, below.)

These two options—randomization or direct selection—work, but we also wanted to provide her an “in-between” option that would keep the interaction simple and still ensure an ideal match. To accomplish this, we thought that she could permit the app to scan her music collection (on the phone, or possibly in the cloud). In this scan it could look at any ratings she provided, combined with the sheer volume of songs she has of particular categories. From this, Latourex could infer the categories of music she prefers, similar to how Pandora can infer preferences from a small set of choices.

2. Guided Suggestions

With a place and a song in hand, the app next begins to make suggestions on what to do by looking for key words in the lyrics. The algorithm would try to find more unusual words and unique phrases first, so the suggestions would be particular for each song, but gracefully degrade to more common words if those first ones don’t have any results. The app would then display the suggestions it found about local activities and place them alongside the lyrics, highlighting the connections if possible. Suggestions include an image, a title, and a small overview. With a tap Jeanette can get to more details, including directions from her current location and the ability to rate suggestions. She is able to delete any suggestion with a swipe, giving room to other suggestions of greater interest.

3. Capturing Key Moments

Using persistent tools below the suggestions, Jeanette is able to capture moments through text, photos, and video. She’s free, of course, to follow these to the letter or interpret as she pleases. As she collects memories of the day, they stack below the suggestions, next to the lyrics. If she wishes, she can delete or rearrange these with standard iOS gestures.

4. Curating and Sharing the Experience

Jeanette is able to save and share her experiences through curated “video postcards.” We wire-framed three different ways for her to edit: Edit by ratings (the simplest), simple editing, and power editing. Below you’ll see the sketch for the Edit by Ratings screen, which lets Jeanette rate individual elements. The Postcard Player chooses and dynamically displays the elements during the duration of the lyrics, ensuring a minimum time per element, and augmenting elements with “The Ken Burns Effect” slow panning and zooming effects. Though we did not have time to comp it up, we thought that to be in the slightly-random spirit of Latourex, the postcard wouldn’t be a fixed video, but a semi-random display, like slideshows from a photo album app, that plays with the selected song and overlaid lyrics.

To share the postcard, Jeanette has the option to share with others by posting the video to the Latourex site, or sending a link directly to whomever she likes. There are some complexities about getting the media from her phone to the site, but we did not detail these out in this wireframe pass.

Design Challenge 1: Keeping Jeanette in the world

To meet Jeanette’s goals, her experience should involve interacting with technology but not being consumed by it. She shouldn’t walk around the city all day with the phone in front of her face. How do we create interactions that integrate into the flow of a person’s day but not interrupt it? To solve this problem, we made the interface as modeless as possible, letting her drop in and out of it as she needs or wants to.

Design Challenge 2: Avoiding musical burnout

If a single song serves as a guide, how is it offered in a way where the person doesn’t burn out on it by the end of the game? To solve this problem, we chose not to play the song by default. It was tempting to have the song underscore the lyrics as she was interacting with the lyrics, but it felt like it would be too much. It’s always opt-in, and the app would work well with her music player app.

Design Challenge 3: Varying degrees of control

When it comes to planning and travel itself, people want varying degrees of control. From highly supported and structured to free-form and interpretive, Lyrical Travel enables people to make decisions from direct selections to self-guided interpretation. This pattern of enabling people to move from simple to more complex decision-making processes is experienced across the service. For example, in the process of choosing songs people can accept suggestions; choose from random; or make their own, personal selections. In using the lyrics as a guide, people can select and follow specific suggestions in the order in which they appear in the song; jump around and choose at random; or disregard suggestions completely and interpret lyrics using their own internal compass. And finally, when creating a video postcard, as mentioned earlier, people can turn the reins over to Lyrical Travel or take full control of curating their day using the tools provided by the app.

Design Pattern: Random default first & Roll the dice

In several places throughout the app, we noticed a pattern emerging, and once we found it, we opted to stick to it. The pattern is that for choices Jeanette needed to make, we would not present a menu of options. Instead, we would first present a good, default selection. If she was in a hurry or wanted to keep it simple, Jeanette could just press OK and be on her way. And of course we would offer an option to select directly through a full-featured menu, but that didn’t feel complete given the spirit of randomness that’s inherent in Latourex. To meet that spirit, there’s a “roll the dice” option that would select another option randomly. And in the music selection we even went one step further to take advantage of existing data to improve the likelihood of a roll Jeanette would really love.

Service implications

In order to deliver on the promise of the ideas in the video, we realize that there would be not just an app, but a complete service underneath it, to help connect travelers and house the marketplace of modules. Imagining this container service led us to aspects of the design such as hearing about it through an existing member, letting similar travelers’ selections influence suggestions, and giving Jeanette options to meet other Latourex travelers near her.

Wrapping Up

We had a lot of fun making this short video as we explored some fun topics like travel, inspiration, and chance operations. We hope you’ll enjoy the fruits of our labor. We even have a bit of an itch to have this app in hand ourselves when we do our own travel, and though we don’t ever want to design for ourselves, we think it’s a positive sign. What do you think? Would you use this app? Can you think of other ways Travel Experiments can be brought into such an app without losing their magic, and encourage a community of Latourists? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Contributors: Chris Noessel, Christina Worsing, and Suzy Thompson

Related reading

• The Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel on Amazon.com
• If you read French you should check out the Oulipo home page.
• There are lots of other Drawing Boards to whet your speculative design palette.

Here at Cooper, we find that looking at the world from the perspective of people and their goals causes us to notice a lot of bad interactions in our daily lives. We can’t help but pick up a whiteboard marker to scribble out a better idea. We put together "The Drawing Board", a series of narrated videos, to showcase some of this thinking. These aren’t meant to be slick, highly-produced demos—just some ideas we’ve thrown up on the board to stimulate thought and discussion. So enjoy. Discuss. Design.

This Drawing Board was inspired by Experimental Travel, also called Latourex, in which travelers play “games” that determine what they do and how they might do it while on the road. We are enamored of this idea, and wondered how it would translate to a service design with a mobile experience.

Nobody likes to feel like a tourist. When we look for guidance from typical sources, it can feel like we're all working off the same script and we're still not connecting to the real place. In this episode, we explore how people can use chance to find inspiration and authentic experiences when they travel.

The Drawing Board Episode 10: Lyrical Travel from Cooper on Vimeo.

Credits: Chris Noessel, Christina Worsing, Greg Schuler

Related Reading

• Some specific thoughts on Goal-Directed Service Design.
• Or check out any of our other Drawing Boards.
• Read more about Latourex in Lonely Planet's Guide to Experimental Travel, or the Wikipedia entry.

It is very rare indeed when designers eagerly anticipate a release from Microsoft. This October’s Windows 8 release will see a new Windows Phone, the second version of the Metro UI for mobile devices. But more significantly, Windows 8 will bring the Metro interface to the desktop.

Metro on mobile and on desktop.

Metro, which won over designers, developers, and users with its colorful, transit-inspired, and minimally geometric interface, was first bundled with the Windows Phone 7 package. It was a risky - but undeniably insightful - move. Rather than simply playing catch-up to Android and iOS, the gridded interface stakes a dramatic new claim on how an OS should function on a mobile device. Rather than presenting a “home screen” where a user launches applications - an idea borrowed directly from the desktop - Metro uses the blocky launch icons to directly display the latest information and updates from within the apps themselves.

In other words, rather than launching your news app to check for the latest headline, Metro would feature those headlines right on the home screen. You’ll click on an app once you already know something of interest lies beneath. But Metro’s most striking implication is that you might not even open those apps as often anymore.

However, Microsoft’s approach to the home screen was not the first attempt at a radical departure from established mobile home screen norms. In 2010, an Android app called SlideScreen was on a similar mission, and its untimely demise shows the complications of innovating on the home screen in an environment where the handset makers and the creators of operating systems make the rules.

The SlideScreen app on Android.

SlideScreen, developed by Larva Labs, cleverly replaced the Android home screen with snippets of content you depend on the most. Get the gist of your inbox, absorb the latest headlines in your feeds, and check in on the churn of tweets and Facebook updates every time you idly flash on your phone. It was space-efficient without looking cramped - austere, but with personality.

Many early Android users (this author included) grew dependent on the immediacy: there was no need to navigate to an app or pull down a pane. The phone stopped being another media channel and became a tool again.

But in August of 2011 it was over. An ill-timed security update prevented the app from reading data from Gmail. SlideScreen could no longer “hot-wire” you straight to your messages. Developer Matt Hall begrudgingly admitted: “As of right now there appears to be no workaround as this is an intentional change to restrict access to the data. [..] As of this morning we’ve removed the app from the market.” SlideScreen was dead.

It’s a shame. SlideScreen was an important counterpoint to the prevailing norm on phone operating systems: the home screen as a list of apps you can launch. It’s a limiting norm that makes phones less useful. The “app-launcher-approach” to home screens essentially traps information and functionality in digital “lockboxes” that can’t be accessed without starting an app.

SlideScreen’s story highlights how apps themselves can’t innovate without the alignment of vision with the creators of the operating systems, consumer services, and information providers. Apps also depend on digital lockboxes that are stable and supply open data. But these conditions weren’t present in 2011, and they are even less so today. And when software ecosystems become more closed, apps like SlideScreen can’t flourish. That is likely why the Apple iOS home screen paradigm has been remained largely unchallenged.

Five years ago, the launch of Apple’s first iPhone in 2007 popularized this paradigm of precious, “gemstone” app icons. Instrumental in the phone’s success, the icons simplified access to functionality and made it obvious to novice users what a smartphone could actually do. But simplicity comes at the cost of information density and efficiency. Apart from the occasional push notification, there are precious few hints at what relevant information might be behind each icon.

iOS home screen. Image via Scrappble.

Yet, despite these shortcomings, and in spite of the efforts of the Larva Labs and the Windows phone team, there’s a real possibility that the gemstone paradigm becomes this decade’s default mobile navigation system. Why is this worrisome? Interface paradigms tend to die slow deaths.

On stationary computers and laptops, the same antiquated metaphor has guided interface development since the early 1970s. The “desktop metaphor”, as it is called, treated the computer screen as an imaginary desk, where objects like “files” and “folders” could be put. Despite some valiant efforts (at Cooper we took our stab with the Litl netbook, and Google attempted to bring the beast down with their Chrome OS), this concept has displayed a frightening resistance to technological progress and user needs.

The same thing can happen on our phones. We are facing the risk that inarticulate gemstones could become the primary way you operate your phone, even when new technology begins allowing for far superior ways to interact with smartphones. A smartphone’s ability to predict and automate actions has massively improved alongside the evolution of its impressive stack of sensors, cameras, microphones, and touch screens. Based on this knowledge, there are many ways a phone can tailor a home screen to the needs of the situation or time of day. The phone can begin to guess what I might need to know. Wouldn’t that be nice - a home screen with information I care about, rather than a list of the apps I have downloaded?

As Metro seeks to demonstrate, the main purpose of smartphones should not be to launch apps. Smartphones have a lot of impressive functionality, but not all functions are equally important. Not all functions need an icon. Home screens should facilitate important functions, and hide trivial ones. It should make it easy to communicate, help me be aware of time and place, and anticipate common information needs. The standard home screen as we know it today is not up to the task, so let us look for better ways. Let us leave the familiar behind. A better home screen is out there.

At Cooper, we love to share what we learn in our consulting work. We've published and socialized techniques and tools for doing interaction design in our books, at conferences, and through Cooper U. Recently, Apple released the iBooks Author platform, and a few of us have been giving it a test run.

The platform itself has lots of potential. There is much to improve, but the possibilities are interesting and it's too early to critique it too strongly. There's been much talk already about the EULA and whether or not this will disrupt education. It's too early to make that call, though. Our initial impression? It's an accessible tool aimed at a user population that, up to this point, hasn't been equipped to produce engaging and usable interactive educational content.

In our trial run, we produced a look book with some of recent work, including slideshows, imagery and video. It's a little rough in some areas, but we'd love to see what you think. You can download it via the link below and share your thoughts in the comments section.

Download the Cooper iBook.

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TaskRabbit’s service connects people who want help with simple tasks—anything from walking the dog, standing in line at the DMV, or moving furniture—with “Rabbits,” a network of background-checked and pre-approved individuals who have the skills and time available to complete tasks.

With a design ideal for mobile task posting, the app provides a simple, seamless process for securing extra help.

Cooper designers collaborated closely with developers at Pivotal and the TaskRabbit team to design a user experience specifically optimized for busy, on-the-go people, offering timely help for folks with unfinished errands or other tasks. With just a spin of the wheel and a few taps, the app enables a task to be posted on the TaskRabbit service network in a matter of seconds with minimal, if any, typing.

Credits: Faith Bolliger, Jim Dibble, Glen Davis, Tim McCoy and Nick Myers.

TaskRabbit, has more than 1,500 runners in San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles, and Orange County fulfilling up to 3,000 tasks per month and they just opened the service in New York City.

Congratulations to the TaskRabbit team, as the new app release has been featured on Mashable, TechCrunch, and Forbes and has received great reviews.

Download TaskRabbit at the App Store and start getting stuff done! Read More

Here at Cooper, we find that looking at the world from the perspective of people and their goals causes us to notice a lot of bad interactions in our daily lives. We can’t help but pick up a whiteboard marker to scribble out a better idea. We put together "The Drawing Board", a series of narrated sideshows, to showcase some of this thinking.

Almost everyone enjoys a great meal out with friends, but splitting the bill can be unnecessarily complicated. In this Drawing Board, Cooper designers turn their attentions to the way groups of people pay the check while dining out.

Credits: Greg Schuler, Peter Duyan , Bo Ah Kwon , Suzy Thompson and Chris Noessel.

Related Reading

• Another design for social awkwardness The Drawing Board: Taking The Call
• More service design Economizer
• Another drawing board The Drawing Board: Feeding The Cats

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Recently the internet buzzed with the introduction of Word Lens, an application for the iPhone which uses the camera to perform on-the-fly translations of signs and menus printed in a foreign language. The video demo is super compelling because the translation is so fast, and the interface so non-existent, it is as if you can suddenly read Spanish.

Imagine the places you will go. The richness of your new experience, when the previously opaque meaning of foreign signs is now clear. You are no longer forced to wander the streets, wondering what kinds of shops you are passing. You can understand signs regarding public transportation, tourism and safety. You sit down at a restaurant and with the help of Word Lens you can read the menu. The waiter approaches and quickly utters something, and waits attentively for your response. You glance at your iPhone... nothing. You flash a pained smile back, mutely trying to communicate you don’t understand. Word Lens is lame because it’s only half of the solution. You’re dumb because you can’t speak and really communicate.

Don’t get me wrong, Word Lens is a great step forward. It will help with some of the anxieties of travel, in particular in using and navigating complex transportation systems. These kinds of tasks don’t really require two-way communication. Simply reading and understanding your options is a major win.

Trying to buy tickets for the Tokyo subway, would have been nice to have Word Lens.

But, you don’t need to read to understand what a particular storefront offers. You just look at what’s on the shelves.

Hong Kong street scene, no translation needed for understanding

You don’t really need translation help for safety related issues. These were solved a long time ago with universal picture language.

Where safety is concerned pictures have long sufficed, Parisian "walk" pictograph

The hardest part of travel isn’t understanding, it is being understood: Asking for directions, ordering food, asking for a receipt. It’s frustrating to struggle at expressing your needs.

Word Lens leaves you with a little more input, but a frustrating lack of output. Now you may understand, but you still can’t say a damn thing.

The speed and accuracy of the underlying technology is a breakthrough. The transparency and dead-simplicity of the interface is exactly how visual hand-held translator should work. As many people have commented Word Lens delivers on the promise of augmented reality. This technology shows great potential and will most certainly be adapted and built upon.

But, until we get a voice, a way to communicate back, Word Lens is little more than an amazing party trick.

Typing into Google translate lacks the elegance, speed and simplicity of the Word Lens interface, but it does get you to "speak up" for yourself. How could Word Lens improve upon this?

A couple of girls use Google Translate to order Indian food Read More

Supporting people's usage contexts has always been an important component to good interaction design. With mobile devices, the diversity of these contexts has gone up, and thankfully many applications have become more responsive to changes in context. It turns out though, that all of this responsiveness has created a big gaping need for better capabilities for easily returning to previous contexts. I think I've got an idea that would help.

Imagine Carl, an iPhone owner. As someone who is directionally challenged he relies on his phone for directions to almost anywhere. In the morning he accepts an invite to dinner across the bay and uses his phone to map the route and figure out how much travel time to plan. During lunch he opens the Map application to find a local electronics store. If he wants to use the route to dinner this evening has two options. Abandon the route, do his search and later reenter the addresses for directions, or save the origin and destination addresses as bookmarks to use later.

He has also figured out that for short trips he can just take a screen shot, so long as the directions fit on one page. This allows him to save many routes that he uses on a regular basis, though he hates that he can't zoom in or scroll around, and they don't show live traffic. He wishes that screenshots would actually be more like saved states of an application, that when he opened them would allow him to interact in the usual way.

He'd like to save states for more than just maps. He gets travel itineraries emails that he needs to reference repeatedly over a week long trip. He does the screenshot trick when he can, but sometimes they are long and he can't screencap-scroll. If he could save the email screen state he could just return to that important email without scrolling or searching though his inbox.

He gets mobile boarding passes as links that open in Safari. The page tries to refresh when he opens the link from his email. If he could just save the screen state in Safari it wouldn't need to refresh the page, and he could scroll down to locate his seat number.

With the recent introduction of multitasking on the iPhone, there is the possibility of saving an app in an open state. Why not extend this functionality to allow for saving multiple states of an open app? Apple could provide an application which works similar to how the photo app works with screenshots. But instead of static images of the screen the application would allow Carl to open the saved state of the application. Instead of a static screen, the information could be manipulated as usual (scrolling, zooming, turing on and off options).

Simple things like scrolling (which is not available on screen shots) would make it easy to save and retrieve mobile boarding passes. Saved states of the map application would maintain the route and allow for live traffic updates. It would be easy to retrive a specific email, or return to a web page without refreshing the data. For Carl the best part would be that he can save many different states, so he can save every route, and return to many different emails.

The application could replace the screenshot function. When Carl wanted to grab a screen state he would press the "Home" button at the same time as the "Sleep" button. Visual and auditory feedback would confirm the action was successful. To return to the saved state Carl would simply open the Saved States application. He is greeted with a simple interface; icons of the saved state of the screen are displayed in a time sorted matrix across the screen, he can scroll down, and view older state captures. Since he captured the states he has some visual memory of the screen and icon helps him distinguish between different captures. The sorting by time serves as a secondary way for him identify captured states. Once the desired state is located Carl touches the icon to relaunch the application into the saved state. Once open he can manipulate the application like normal.

With Saved States Carl can quickly capture a screen he will want to return to. When he revisits the saved screen state he has all the functionality he expects, but starts off with the application loaded with the data he wants, rather than starting out from the beginning every time. Read More