Category: Zebra Technologies

IxDA London – Implicit Interactions

Last night I guest hosted and organized an IxDA London event on Implicit Interactions at IDEO. Below is the event description.

Talk on Implicit Interactions at IxDA London by Karey Helms, photo by Jill Lin

As the Internet of Things infiltrates the mundane moments of our daily lives, ubiquitously embedding intelligence into objects and environments – our relationships with technology become increasingly dynamic, contextual, and intangible. Therefore as interaction designers, how do we design what could and should be the resulting invisible dialogues between people, places, and things?

This month we will shift our attention away from classic, explicit interaction paradigms – those that demand our attention for direct engagement and manipulation – to implicit interactions that seamlessly behave in the background. Join us for product, prototyping, and research perspectives as we hear from Hongbin Zhuang, CEO and Co-founder of Olly robot; Karey Helms, a Senior Interaction Designer at Zebra Technologies; and Alex Taylor from Microsoft Research.

Innovation through Action

Part of my role within the Innovation & Design Team at Zebra Technologies involves synthesizing emerging technology trends into actionable insights. Much like many innovation teams, this yearly process involves concurrent stages of research, collection, and synthesis into pervasive and strategic themes. But as we internally transition external insights into internal action, I’ve been reflecting on our innovation process.

The top diagram represents an existing process, that from my knowledge is perhaps also representative of many other organizations. External inspiration enters an internal cycle of prescriptive stages – ex: collection, synthesis, ideation, business buy in – then, external publication, collaboration, or outreach.

But perhaps the approach should be inverted – and external publication, collaboration, and outreach come sooner and throughout. For example, involving academic collaboration, professional hackathons, and innovation challenges

Innovation from internal inspiration to external action at Zebra Technologies UX

UX Process Checklist

At the beginning of 2016, inspired by a fellow colleague who posted this great UX Process Checklist, as a side project I worked with colleagues to put together our own UX process proposal as part of an ongoing effort for team process development and sharing.

UX Process Checklist (PDF)

UX process checklist by Karey Helms for Zebra Technologies user experience team