Iñigo Gascón's Interaction Design for UPM

For those of you that have never heard about it, Amazon Go is the lastest invention of the tech giant based in Seattle, an "smart" supermarket in which the client just enters using its smartphone, takes whatever he/she wants, and then leaves, without checking out. And how does this whole revolutionary idea works? Well, the answer has just two words: ubiquitous computing. Yes, the shop is, mainly, a ubicom system itself. There are cameras everywhere in the place that tracks the clients, so they know what everyone is taking or leaving; there are also other kind of sensor everywhere, specially in the shelves, also to track what everyone is taking to buy. And everything is, in the end, connected to your smartphone, in which you will be charged for everything you buy. Since this is, as we've said, an ubicom system, we can check that the 3 main properties proposed by Weiser are being satisfied: Is the system networked, distributed and transparently accessib...

Who hasn't been in this situation when you are using a smartphone app or a webapp on the PC and you make something completely wrong, sometimes even with no option of going back? If someone says that he or she doesn't, either he/she is lying or he/she has never used an app. But, who's responsible for this error? The easiest answer (specially for developers) it's always "the user". But nevertheless, if the user is doing something wrong, it's because there's something wrong or that can be improved in the app. There exists two different so called "user errors": slips and mistakes. Slips Specially nowadays that everyone has one or more smarphones, and that we even use them more that a PC, slips tend to appear in everyone's daily routine. For example, you have an appointment next week and you don't want to forget about it, so you program a notificaion on the smarphone's calendar; but when you are going to save the appointment...