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Designing Across Senses - A Multimodal Approach to Product Design

of the screen, which also takes in the cognitive

engagement of language processing.

While “designing for engagement or ‘stickiness’”

was once a key part of app development, as daily

computer interactions move to the kitchen (“Alexa,

add crunchy peanut butter to the shopping list”), and

the car, it can be more necessary to not remove focus.

Sometimes we want to work with the user’s flow

state, sometimes to interrupt it (an alarm or alert).

Park and Alderman assess every sort of interaction,

and user state, to give a complete examination of

multimodal interfaces, looking first at the human

senses (not just the five that spring to mind, but your

vestibular sense – which tells you when you’re upright

• and many more). How to bring these multimodal
  interactions to the design process, and to engage
  users in ways (and with senses) most appropriate
  to the experience, is the work of the second half of
  the book.
  Modalities – the working together of sense,
  cognitive functions, and motor skills – “are inextricably
  tied to perceiving quality and experiencing delight,” so
  design your devices and software as rich multisensory
  experiences for a more involved, emotional response
  from the user. Novelty and play also engages users,
  and new sensors have come from the games
  console and found uses in other fields, such as
  health. The Internet of Things is compared here to
  a Cambrian explosion, bringing a diversification of
  devices and designs in all shapes and sizes to suit
  every environment.
  This first section throws a lot of concepts at you
  (and new words, unless earcon and hapticon were
  already in your vocabulary), and the second will help
  you design your next device or app for multimodal
  innovation. A densely packed and thoughtful look at an
  area that every maker needs to consider.

e may see traditional desktop

environments as purely visual,

but they are as multimodal as

many of our daily interactions

• from the haptic (moving the
  mouse), and audio (nothing
  beats the clatter of a good mechanical keyboard
  with Cherry Blue key switches, while 8-bit
  computer programmers pioneered music that rose
  in pitch and tempo to imbue a sense of urgency as
  game levels became more difficult), to the visual

Designing Across Senses

A Multimodal Approach to Product Design

Multimodal

design is

already here,

and everyone

making devices

and products

needs to ingest

these ideas.

VERDICT

Christine Park, John Alderman $35.99 shop.oreilly.com

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By Richard Smedley @RichardSmedley

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