Dan Saffer is an experienced design director for Adaptive Path in San Francisco who has designed and built websites, applications and devices since 1995. Dan leads projects for a wide variety of clients from large organizations like Green Peace, Time Warner, as well as some start-ups like Ninch and Foxmarx. Dan is a well-traveled man as he has taught workshops on interactive design on three different continents. He received his Masters of Design in Interaction Design from Carnegie Mellon University.
The beginning of the lecture brought in my focus immediately, as he mentioned the Wii console and the iPhone. He made it very clear that Videoplace and Simon were the first sensory interaction game consoles and touch screen phones, respectively. Sensors are becoming very common and very cheap, which are two reasons we experience them so often. The Wii remote, taken apart, is “really accelerated gestural systems” that use multiple sensors.
Dan says designers need to start paying more attention to designing digital objects with more consideration to the physical body, specifically our hands. Designers are creating things that are used by our hands. Touch targets, as Dan described, is the spot on a touch-screen that a user can actually touch. The tip of the adult finger is about 8-10mm, which is the part of the finger that tells the electronic what to do. Fingernails could be a potential problem, seeing that designers can’t take into consideration how long the average length people keep their nails.
Another interactive gesture that designers use to document is animation and movies. Timing is always a key factor when you are doing interactive gestures and cannot easily be captured on paper. Dan says the easiest and simplest way to understand timing is to animate stills and to show how long it takes to do certain things. A really good rule of thumb, according to Dan Saffer, is the more complicated the gesture, the fewer people who will be able to perform it.
