Progress update on kiosk UI design

[James William Yoon]

Hello all,

Over the past couple of months, we've been working on a number of different
UI ideas for the DIA kiosk. For those unfamiliar with the kiosk goals, you
can find an overview of them here:
http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Kiosk+design+overview -- in a
nutshell, the kiosk serves as an index of pre-authored tours, which cut
across different galleries, and may produce a printout for visitors to carry
with them.

You can check out the sort of ideas we've been playing with here:
http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Kiosk+design%2C+draft+5

Our latest UI idea introduces a fresh, new interaction behavior. It revolves
around displaying the cumulative path of a user's experience, and creating
visually salient relationships between content. Instead of going from
screen-to-screen (a la web experience), we're proposing flattening out the
hierarchy of screens onto a single plane. And because everything is
flattened out onto a single plane, more screen real estate is a necessity of
sorts for readability, and so we're thinking of this UI as fitting on a
largish display (say, 40").

You can see sketches of that particular UI idea here:
http://wiki.fluidproject.org/display/fluid/Draft+5+sketches+-+Flatland

The "flatland" (aka "bubble bobble land", aka Draft 5.C) UI has a number of
interesting advantages over conventional UIs:
* Disorientation of where one is in the scheme of things is minimized or
eliminated because the entire experience path is presented
* The interface complexity is built by the user as they progress along their
path of choices; it's not thrown at them all at once
* The interface is highly scalable (adding content poses little difficulty
because of the extra screen real estate) and flexible
* It's playful and encourages exploration
* The navigation is more intuitive, spatial, and tangible, and less
conceptual. For instance, there's no back button because the user can simply
tap on the previous screen in his/her path
* Because the entire path is presented and disorientation is minimized,
other users can pick up from where another user left off--there's no need to
start from "Home" all the time

We're now working towards digitizing and iterating on these ideas.

In addition to this overarching interaction behavior concept, we've been
working on compiling kiosk accessibility considerations and discussing how
to ensure our UIs are accessible. Notes on these are found here:
* Accessibility considerations:
http://wiki.fluidproject.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=12616031
* Tactile/haptic & audio navigation:
http://wiki.fluidproject.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=12911258

As always, any thoughts and feedback on the work we're up to is welcome.
Once we have some solid wireframes going, we'll have a walkthrough session
for everyone to take part in (developers especially).

Cheers,
James
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