Some updates on what is happening on the mobile front with GateIn. We now have user agent (ie browser) detection and can configure site redirections based on that. Woot!
If you are using GateIn 3.4.0, you may already notice some changes:
- If you access the site using a mobile browser, you will be automatically directed from the default classic page to the new "mobile" page. Ok, the ‘mobile’ site isn’t really mobilized yet in terms of mobile optimized html, javascript and css, this will be coming in a future update. But the device detection and redirection part is up and running. Try accesing the default portal using different devices and see for yourself.
- You may also notice a new site preference portlet at the bottom of the portal page. This allows users to select which site preference they want. So if a user decides they don’t want to be redirected to the mobile page, thats cool, they can just click on the site preference portlet and be taken to their site of preference. And since their preference is stored in a cookie, their choice is remember on each subsequent visit to the site. No redirects? Thats fine, the portlet will remain invisible on the page if there isn't any.
A few caveats through:
- Its currently only configurable through the portal.xml configuration file, and there is no gui (yet) for the configuration. So its not going to be the easiest things to configure right now.
- As already mentioned, mobile optimized html, js and css is not there yet and will be coming in a future update. Yeah, this sucks and takes a away a lot of the functionality of a mobile iniative, but GateIn's skinning engine is powerful enough and should allow people to create their own awesome mobile enabled portal skins until we get a default mobile skin up and running. The skinning engine should also be updated in a newer release to handle some of the unique requirements of mobile development (like skin specific javascript and meta tags).
Stay tuned for future updates.
So lets focus on what is working and available today:
User Agent Detection
We can detect the user agent (ie browser) the current is currently using to access the site using the contents of the user agent string passed in from the browser itself or redirect to a special page to check the capabilities of the browser (for things like pixel density and touch event support). Can both be used together or separately, and uses things like regular expressions to give it some power.
Site Redirection
Ok, so we now know how to detect a user agent, now what? Well, the next steps is configuring the portal to redirect between the normal site and an 'alternative’' site (I guess we could call it the 'mobile' site here, but since we don't have a mobile ui done yet, its a bit getting ahead of ourselves). We support mapping specific nodes between the different sites as well as various strategies on how to handle nodes which don’t exactly match up.
And how do you configure all of this? Check out the docs available here: Gatein Device Detection and Site Redirection Configuration
Thats it for the mobile updates for now, stay tuned for future updates!
Before I begin, I would like to introduce myself. My name is Gabriel Cardoso and I am the new GateIn's User Experience Designer. My role is to improve usability and user experience of the product. To encourage discussions on user experience, this will be the first of a series of posts about the theme.
If you are involved with the development of digital interactive products I am sure that you have already heard something about the term user experience. But what is this about anyway? Let’s forget a bit what we usually see over the internet and dig into the origins and evolution of the concept.
Introduction
User Experience has become a buzzword in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Interaction Design over the last decade [1]. The term was first published for the industry and academy in an article written by Norman, Miller and Henderson [2] at CHI’95 -- Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. The article described the main aspects of research on human-interfaces made by Apple at that time, what the authors preferred to name user experience.
After more than 15 years from the first publication and despite the growing interest in user experience, it’s been hard to achieve a common understanding about it [3]. It's inventor assessed that this and other design terms “[...] just sort of entered the vocabulary and no longer have any special meaning. People use them often without having any idea why, what the word means, its origin, history, or what it’s about” [4]. Considering its broad utilization and its lack of understanding, let’s check out what has being said about user experience since its origin.
From its origin to the present
Since the first publication of the concept, many approaches have been described. They vary from subjective perspectives to project-centered ones, as well as an umbrella that put many disciplines together. In a research made for my Masters that covered 17 publications about the subject, it was possible to observe that the initial speeches tried to explain that user experience was more than usability and GUI (graphical user interface). Even Norman said: “I invented the term because I thought human interface and usability were too narrow. I wanted to cover all aspects of the person’s experience with the system including industrial design graphics, the interface, the physical interaction and the manual” [4].
Seven years later, Preece, Rogers and Sharp [5] brought a approach more focused on the user by declaring that with user experience they mean “[...] what the interaction with the system feels like to the users. This involves explicating the nature of the user experience in subjective terms”. Marc Hassenzahl -- the author I know who more publishes on the subject -- also believes in an user’s perspective and have defined user experience as “a momentary, primarily evaluative feeling (good-bad) while interacting with a product or service” [6].
Maybe one of the most famous authors on the subject, Jesse James Garrett [7] became very popular with its diagram and book "The Elements of User Experience", that describes the design process to deliver a good user experience (figure 1). His elements are so popular that many people think of user experience as Garrett's elements. The diagram also reinforces the idea of user experience as an umbrella composed of many related disciplines -- in this case information architecture, interaction design, information design, interface design and visual design.
Figure 1: The elements of user experience [7]
From the creator of personas, Cooper, Reimann and Cronin [8] also talks about the concept of user experience from the process perspective and as an umbrella too. To them, user experience design is an effort concerned with form, behavior, and content (figure 2). In their model, interaction design is more focused on the design of behavior, information architecture is more focused on the structure of content and industrial design and graphic design are concerned with the form of products and services.
Figure 2: The three overlapping concerns of user experience design [8].
An important variable are the mediators. To Garrett, user experience is related to all kind of products and services, even a book or a ketchup bottle [9]. On the other hand, Law and colleagues [3] propose a more reduced scope that includes only products, services, systems, services and objects that people interact via user interface (figure 3).
Figure 3: User experience in relation to other experiences [3].
On top of the concept and the mediators, authors seem to disagree about the temporal aspects of the user experience. Some defend that it happens only during the interaction while some others believe that it is related to before, during and after the interaction.
Making things clearer
Attempted to clarify things, a selected group of 50 researchers and practitioners in user experience brought their different perspectives during the three-day seminar “Demarcating User Experience” that happened in Germany in September 2010. In the document the resulted from the seminar [10], they declared that user experience is not only related to during usage but also to before usage, after usage and over time (figure 4).
Figure 4: User experience phases and the terms that describe the related kind of user experience [10].
They also assessed that user experience is related to the user and influenced by three variables:
- context: social context (e.g. working with people) + physical context (e.g. interacting with a device in a bus in movement) + task context (how focused on the task) + technical context (e.g. internet connection).
- user: the motivation to use the product, they humor, physical and mental resources and expectations.
- system: system character (e.g. functionality, aesthetics) + modified system properties (e.g. a background image) + brand.
Conclusion
Despite the broad utilization of the term user experience, its concept is interpreted in different ways and often misunderstood. While authors tried to explain that user experience was more than usability and GUI in the beginning, now it’s possible to see a more mature speech more concerned on the scope, mediators, temporal aspects and goals of user experience itself. Considering their different perspectives and many related elements and variables, it is still difficult to imagine an homogeneous discourse that addresses to the complexity of the concept completely.
Although there are divergences, it is possible to notice a predominance of an understanding that user experience is a subjective quality related to feelings and perceptions of the user in relation to products or services, the most cited mediators. From the scientific viewpoint, reduction of scope proposed by Law and colleagues (figure 3) seems to be more interesting in order to allow a deeper understanding of the concept.
About the temporal aspects, Roto and colleagues [10] presents a more complete model that covers the relation with the product even before usage (e.g. advertisement) and adds the idea of a cumulative user experience (related to the user’s idea about a multiple periods of use). This separation is very powerful in terms of design and evaluation. The before usage phase is related to the user's mental model about the product based on what he has read or heard about it. By evaluating this, it's possible to understand what the audience is thinking and change the speech if necessary.The during usage phase is related to the visceral reaction of the first impression (milliseconds) -- when is possible to see if the visual design is pleasant or not -- and to the first interaction -- when is possible to evaluate how intuitive is the design. After an interaction episode, the user has an idea about how was the interaction, what allows to evaluate if the experience was positive or negative (the first or following ones). Finally, the over time phase is when the user has already used the product during a reasonable period. An evaluation at this phase allow us to understand his behavior, needs, motivations and frustrations. That's what we are trying to do on the admin UI redesign, where we discussed some ideas [11] and will interview actual customers to understand better what they really need -- what allow us to take the design to a higher level.
In my opinion, the understanding of the concept of user experience is essential for designers and developers to be able to work on digital products that aim to deliver meaningful experiences to their users. It is important to understand that user experience goes beyond usability and shifts the attention from the product perspective to an user perspective, where the project is guided by the understanding of who are the users and by user-centered evaluations, in an iterative process of understanding, designing and evaluating to refine until it's good enough.
To conclude, it’s not possible to design the user experience. Garrett's process and the related disciplines only contributes to the design process. Thus, it's only possible to design for the user experience. User experience is not about the product, its aesthetics or how fancy the interfaces are. It's about delivering a valuable experience with technology. And to achieve this, you need to stand out from the computer and talk to people.
References
[1] HASSENZAHL, Marc; TRACKTINSKY, Noam. User experience – a research agenda. Behaviour and Information Technology, London, v. 25, n. 2, p. 91-97, 2006. Available at: <http://www.informaworld.com/openurl?genre=article&doi=10.1080/01449290500330331&magic=crossref>. Accessed 8 October 2011.
[2] NORMAN, Donald; MILLER, Jim; HENDERSON, Austin. What You See, Some of What's in the Future, And How We Go About Doing It. In: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 13., 1995, Denver. Proceedings… New York: ACM Digital Library, p. 155.
[3] LAW, Effie et al. Understanding, Scoping and Defining User Experience: A Survey Approach. In: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 27., 2009, Boston. Proceedings... New York: ACM Digital Library, 2009, p. 719-728.
[4] MERHOLTZ, Peter. Peter in Conversation with Don Norman About UX & Innovation. 2007. Available at: <http://www.adaptivepath.com/ideas/e000862>. Accessed 3 November 2011.
[5] PREECE, Jennifer; ROGERS, Yvonne; SHARP, Helen. Interaction Design: Beyond human-computer interaction. 2nd ed. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons, 2002.
[6] HASSENZAHL, Marc. User Experience (UX): Towards an experiential perspective on product quality. 2008. Available at: <http://www.marc-hassenzahl.de/pdfs/hassenzahl-ihm08.pdf>. Accessed 10 May 2011.
[7] GARRETT, Jesse J. The Elements of User Experience: User-centered Design for the Web. New York: New Riders, 2002.
[8] COOPER, Alan; REIMAN, Robert; CRONIN, David. About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design. Indianapolis: Wiley Publishing, 2007.
[9] GARRETT, Jesse J. The Elements of User Experience: User-centered Design for the Web and Beyond. New York: New Riders, 2011.
[10] ROTO, Virpi; KETOLA, Pekka; HUOTARI, Susan. User Experience Evaluation in Nokia. Now Let's Do It in Practice In: User Experience Evaluation Methods in Product Development workshop in CHI'08. Florence, Italy, 2008.
[11] Administration UI. Thread at GateIn Forum. Available at: https://community.jboss.org/thread/198872
3.2.0 Final released here!
It took us a while to get there but I’m happy to announce that GateIn Portal 3.2.0.Final has been released. I would like to especially thank Julien Viet with whom we are co leading this project, Thomas Heute from whom I took over this role and our great community for all the hard work.
If you are eager to try - ready to use project bundles are published on our project page in downloads section. And here you can find the full change log from JIRA.
We already blogged about new features that came along with Beta and Milestone releases. Let me just highlight again 2 recent features that we are very proud of.
GateIn Management
To just quote from our documentation: “The management component of the portal allows portal resources to be managed over commons interfaces like REST, CLI, and Portlets/Gadgets.” I think the best way to learn more about great opportunities it gives portal administrators is to watch recent awesome screencast from Nick and read his insightful blog entry. It is truly great to notice that our community is already actively using those features.
Improved URLs
URL management has improved since GateIn 3.1 and now GateIn provides better URLs. Now each URL uniquely identifies a page, which means that a URL always show the same page. The URLs are not hardcoded anymore and one can freely change the URL mapping in the controller.xml file:
You can read how to configurate it in the documentation.
Navigation internationalization
Now is easier than before thanks to the inline label provided in the navigation XML files:
Better import configuration
The import of data from configuration has been improved with several flexible strategies for importing data during startup, XML configuration fragment import is configured by a mode (conserve, merge, insert, overwrite).
More server support
Now GateIn has been upgraded to support Jetty which was not previously support and of course Tomcat 7 in addition of Tomcat 6.
Becoming Java EE 6 Portal
We are proud to announce that as part of this release we provide ready to use GateIn JBoss Application Server 7.1 bundle. This has the preview status as currently WSRP is not supported with this environment yet still we are quite excited to provide this integration. We are also actively working to bring GateIn to OpenShift.
Designing the future...
We are proud to announce that we will strenghten our commitment to open source software and our community in the forthcoming months. Our main idea is to release more often with a key feature for each major release, we want to involve more the community in the design of GateIn.
Technical Specifications
From now on every new project feature will need to have associated technical specification developed in the open. It has been this way but was not very open until now, and we have decided to fully open it in the GateIn community wiki. We kick started dedicated space in our wiki to serve this purpose:
https://community.jboss.org/wiki/GateInSpecifications
This is still quite fresh page that we are slowly feeding with new content. However you can already check our early vision around mobile aspects of GateIn Portal, improving Javascript serving and using JQuery, etc... More to be blogged really soon regarding this topic...
We want to use it to communicate and collaborate with our community around technical aspects of new project features. Additionally our new roadmap is shaping in there as we try to prioritize and scope each new feature. Your comments will be really valuable and helpful for us.
Git - here we come...
We aim to migrate GateIn Portal svn trunk into our github space within next month. Other components will follow shortly. More precise plan will be announced soon. Obviously - we’ll have a technical specification created for the task so you can track the progress and comment
On the horizon... 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 4.0...
We want to introduce shorter release cycle for the project. With new releases happening ideally within 3 months. Instead of going through several alpha, beta, milestone and candidate releases while polishing 10 new features, we would like to have clean focus on just few that we can deliver in desired time frame. You can check and comment how we are trying to shape the plan in the already mentioned GateIn Specifications wiki page.
Seriously - we want to give GateIn Portal 3.3.0.Final in your hands within next 2-3 months!
So what is next?
This is worth another separate blog entry - and in fact you can also expect such soon. However like you probably saw already on our specification page we are really serious about providing complete set of public APIs for most of interactions with portal services - both Java and REST ones, improving web serving with better CSS and Javascript. Another hot topic is certainly mobile but we are not only thinking about those... There are several improvements being prepared around the UI (Accessibility, JQuery) or authentication (SAML). Still we need to save some excitement for more blog entries so stay tuned!