The Human Element

This is the first of the many blog posts I would be putting up as a prequel to my talk at the DroidCon.in Conference to be held on 18-19 November in Bangalore (droidcon.in). 

I will be speaking about a topic quite close to my heart since a long time. The talk is titled as  "Humanize the Android" and will include insights on how do we as engineers use the findings from brain science, cognitive psychology and the emerging field of applying game mechanics, to create great experiences for android mobile users. 

Its ironic that we as engineers do not learn as much about the "user" as we do about the machine. We spent zillions of money of learning new programming paradigms, machine complexities, new software architectures but very little on the actual "endpoint" of the software that we intend to build. I am pointing about the study of how humans think, decide and behave. I believe it should be mandatory for engineers to learn about cognitive psychology, HCI (human computer interaction) and user experience - in order to create software of the highest order. The order for the next decade demands understanding of the human element in the experience that we impart from the software we develop. The rise of iPads, iPhones, Kinects, Siri re-inforces the point quite well. 

In the next few posts over the week, I will attempt to provide my views on what we need to know about the field of Cognitive Psychology and  Game mechanics, and how do we apply that to the software that we develop. There are tons of stuff available on the web, and my posts would anchor these links for all you readers. 

If you are interested to know more about this,  meet me at DroidCon.in (http://droidcon.in/2011/) next week.