During the last flight I had on Virgin America a passenger turned around to the person behind them and politely but firmly pointed out…

“Whatever you are doing is bouncing my seat!”

The women behind him replied…

“I am just trying to turn the volume down, sorry!”

I nerdily chortled to myself.

This is a pattern I see over and over again. The touch-screens on Virgin America’s entertainment system, “RED”, require a certain finesse that when not mastered result in a huge nuisance for the person sitting in front of you. Good luck if you get a kid behind you punching away at the touchscreen or a channel surfer changing channels the whole flight. In all Virgin America’s orchestrated experiential glory this design problem haunts nearly every flight I am on.

I can see the mental models and personas of the experience designers for the airline staring at passenger goals like…

• peace&quiet
• focus
• comfort
• relaxation
• sleep

But what they didn’t catch is that their choice of user interface is essentially teaching people to push incessantly at their fellow passenger’s seats. A seat mounted In-flight touch-screen is the new kid kicking your seat. All of this was an interesting reminder of how these emerging natural user interfaces and touch user interfaces leave marks and make ripples in the physical world. So how do they fix it? Higher quality touch screens? Too expensive. I would wager mounting the touchscreen in a similar fashion to the tray table could work?

I had a blast in Vancouver for a quick 4 day vacation. Spent a lot of time outside walking around and checkin out the city. Verdict is its absolutely beautiful and kind of a combination of Portland and San Francisco. The people were really nice as well.

Some highlights as follows…

1) Paying a visit to the local fixed gear / track bike shop ( Super Champion ) only to find a lovely orange apollo conversion that just about fit me. The lads at Super Champion, Nick and Chunks, were kind enough to lend me the bike for a deposit and a mere case of beer. Of course I brought back 2 cases of bud to show em some good ol hulk hogan american hospitality.

2) Next highlight was taking the “rented” bike through the city and into Stanley park . Stanley park has a one way bike path around the perimeter of the park right next to the water. It was absolutely beautiful.

3) Going on a shopping bender. Vancouver had a bunch of great spots for clothes. Topping the list was Roden Gray , Jonothan and Olivia , Dutil , One of a Few , and Illustrated Example . Heres a map of the shops I checked out.

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4) Eating at Chambar . A great belgian restaurant that was so good we had to go twice. Reminded me of a lot of the restaurants in SF. The food was ridiculously good and the atmosphere / interior was really cool.

5) Checking out Inform – a huge 2 building 4 floor modern furniture store. I bummed around in here for a long time sitting on stuff until they told me to stop taking pictures. Heres a shot of their design library.