BUG+IDEO – Reinventing the BUG UI with your help
Today, we’re excited to announce a new project we’re kicking off with IDEO, a well known international design and innovation firm. Taking cues from everything we’ve seen in the community, our own experiences with new and emerging interface technologies and your direct input, we hope to gather several new ideas on how we can re-envision user interaction with the BUGbase. Essentially, we are going to build on the great work done to-date by our original design partner ECCO Design and explore an area of our product that we think has a ton of potential – the BUGbase user interface.
So, we want *your* feedback! IDEO has agreed to do this project in the open, which is a new approach for them, and we’re hoping it leads to superior results for Bug Labs and the BUGcommunity. We don’t have a fancy name (yet) for this process, and we’re still working on the specifics for collecting your input. But since everything we do is based on community participation, we are big fans of the idea, and naturally open to all your suggestions.
Over the next two weeks both companies will be posting their ideas and reporting on progress, via this blog and BUGcommunity.com. At every point in this cycle we would love to get your thoughts on the work-to-date, and at the end we will publish our findings, which again we welcome your thoughts on.
The whole point of this exercise is to continue to push the boundaries of how we innovate, not just on the BUGbase UI, but on all things related to BUG. We take pride in thinking our designs are good, but we also know they are exponentially better when the community gets involved.
Thanks in advance for your participation in this fun new project, and stay tuned for updates!
Tags: ideo bugui
January 17th, 2009 at 2:59 pm
[...] has just announced that they will be working with IDEO to redesign the user interaction of the product out in the open. This is more than an open source software project – it’s actually a public hardware UI [...]
January 17th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
Open Source interaction design sounds like a great idea and I am looking forward to participating in the process. One suggestion — a blog and comments seem ill-suited for the stated goal. Have you considered setting up a Wiki for the exercise?
January 17th, 2009 at 4:55 pm
[...] Wilson brags about his portfolio company, Buglabs, opening its redesign process with Ideo to the public — as well he should. Opening up makes sense [...]
January 18th, 2009 at 3:16 pm
Nik – thanks for the comment. We went back and forth on that point. Wiki’s are not that user friendly but blog comments have their issues too. We thought of maybe using something like Ideascale as well. We’ve been using that successfully for getting user feedback on our base features and new module suggestions. Would that make more sense here?
January 18th, 2009 at 11:27 pm
Wonderful stuff. Could you create code that closes the gap between blogs and wikis by allowing content to flow easily between the two?
And has the UI project been pretty tightly sketched out or is there openness to unanticipated outcomes (and outside people with ideas) that present unanticipated opportunities?
Regarding UI, there’s no shortage of high daily impact UI that’s terribly designed and costing the nation millions of dollars a year.
Some is amusing, some leads to dangerous situations. Some makes smart kids believe they’re stupid and puts them on the slippery slope to prison (Ogletree’s Institute at Harvard Law tackles this issue extremely thoughtfully and well).
Other bad UI simply sucks time out of people’s lives. What are you hoping to focus on in one year and in five years? Will you use UI improvement to decrease inefficiencies in the world around us as well as create new products and new efficiencies?
January 19th, 2009 at 8:42 am
[...] new BUGbase interface will be design in collaboration between Bug Labs and IDEO. What excites me most about this [...]
January 20th, 2009 at 3:42 am
Product UI Design Process Will Be Public…
The modular DIY gadget platform, BUG, has teamed with IDEO to redesign the BUG user interface. IDEO has agreed to BUG’s request to do the project in the open, soliciting feedback from the user community along the way. I’m not aware of a d…
April 15th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
[...] our users don’t have to. We need to continue to refine our design (see picture above from our work with IDEO). The other thing I’ve learned is that companies, organizations and even individuals are [...]