A BHAG (big, hairy, audacious goal) is a clear, compelling long term goal that seems unreasonable and slightly out of reach but you believe you can eventually achieve it. First created by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in the book ‘Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies’ these goals are strong, focused and designed to excite and energise people.
Things that can help you achieve your goal is having a role model who has already achieved your goal and learning about their process to achieve it. We can also look at beating common enemies, creating smaller targets to achieve the bigger goal.
Some well known examples of BHAGs are John F Kennedy’s 1961 declaration, “This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing man on the moon and returning him safely.” This was a big goal to not only land on the moon but also wanting to beat Russia, the common enemy for who will reach the moon first. This BHAG This BHAG famously resulted in the historic landing on the moon in 1969.
<aside> 💭 Before todays lecture, I had never heard of a BHAG before but I now know and understand what a crucial role they play in inspiring, aligning and driving organisations towards long term success by providing a strategic direction and promoting continuous improvement and resilience. While this is not something I may use in my project, it is good to be aware of going forward into placement and the industry.
</aside>
When trying to create solutions, it is sometimes to look beyond apps and websites when creating user experiences. Users interact with products or services across various touchpoints, not just through apps or websites. By looking beyond the screen, we can take the entire user journey including physical interactions and offline interactions into consideration which helps helps create a more seamless and user centric UX design. As well as this we can take into consideration the accessibility across different on screen platforms and providing a consistent design across all which suits each users preferences and usability context. By allowing your content to be accessible across a number of platforms allows us to gather a more comprehensive understanding of user behaviour and preferences as well allowing us to personalise their experiences and provide more relevant content and services. It also allows our content to be more adaptable beyond the traditional apps and websites and used for new platforms and technologies such as augmented reality, virtual reality and other innovative interfaces.
Using HUDS & GUIS (https://www.hudsandguis.com/) I was able to look further at some inspirational ideas for user interfaces of the future, focusing on the ways in which people interact with technology, particularly the way something functions, looks, moves or sounds.
Sony Xperia Touch
The Sony Xperia Touch is one of the first projects that stood out to me due to it being an interactive smart home projection device which would be so useful in homes as it is a ****portable projector that transforms your wall or table into an interactive touch-screen. I liked this idea as it maximises screen size turning any surface into a 23" high definition touchscreen whether that is for watching a movie, playing a game on the table or projecting the steps to a recipe on the kitchen wall.
Although it looks quite fun an useful, from further research they talked about retailing for $1700 so it would be very unaffordable for the average person to use as well as potentially lacking functionality as it does very similar things to other devices and the annoyance of your arm casting a shadow over the image, restricting what apps you can actually use.
However I think if all the problems and issues were solved, this could become quite popular if it was directed to the correct market of target users.
Motorola Bendable Concept Phone
The Motorola Bendable Concept Phone was another idea that stood out to me as it is combining a watch and your smartphone into one. It is so interesting to see the features you could use and how you could design for a flexible display, a concept which is becoming more feasible and affordable. I think this is a great idea as it is combining the two uses of a smartphone and smartwatch into one by attaching to your wrist as well as having the ability to stand up alone. My only one concern is the thickness and width of it as mock up images show it to be quite big and bulky so perhaps the investigation of making more flexible or to have thin slap-band version which would be much more practical. It is definitely something I could see becoming a reality on the future
Mojo Lens
Finally I took the look at the Mojo Lens an idea developed by Mojo vision who work on ****High Performance Micro-LED Displays for devices such as TVs. The Mojo lens is a special type of contact lens which uses augmented reality which supplements a users vision using a contextual heads up display, a concept quite similar to google glass but instead it is confined to a contact lens. This is currently under development however this idea has been explored in the past in science fiction such as Sight Extended or Canadian series Continuum.
I think it would be quite remarkable to be able to view all this content through a contact lens and couldn’t start to imagine how much peoples lives could be enhanced with AR assisting their day to day life although I can see how this could also be scary for people too. This is definitely a product that caught my attention and something I’m interested to see how it develops as I think it could be very interesting.
<aside> 💭 Through reading about this futuristic product ideas, I feel very inspired for the things I could design and create and how I can help improve the way we interact with technology now and moving into the future with new technologies which are yet to exist and how we will adapt to design for those
</aside>