From the monthly archives:

December 2007

“Why Nobody Likes a Smart Machine”

by Richard Pak

He was playing with one of this year’s hot Christmas gifts, a digital photo frame from Kodak. It had a wondrous list of features — it could display your pictures, send them to a printer, put on a slide show, play your music — and there was probably no consumer on earth better prepared to put it through its paces.

Dr. [...]

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“Domestic products bad designs are out of control”

by Richard Pak

A very nice main-stream article on the problem of bad human factors in consumer products. In retrospect, I am often suprised how tolerant *I* am of bad design/usability.
If the cockpit of a Boeing 747 were as badly designed as some kitchen appliances, most of us would never make it to Denver alive. Imagine a jet pilot having to [...]

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Google and the Mind

by Richard Pak

A recent article in Psychological Science on using Google’s PageRank algorithim to explore fluency effects in memory.
Abstract:
Human memory and Internet search engines face a shared computational problem, needing to retrieve stored pieces of information in response to a query. We explored whether they employ similar solutions, testing whether we could predict human performance on a fluency task using PageRank, a [...]

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Military training via video games

by Richard Pak

The U.S. military has been using games for decades to train its troops.  Now, for the first time, the Army has set up a project office, just for building and deploying games.
No, the Army isn’t about to start handing out copies of Halo 3 to troops, TSJOnline.com notes. “I haven’t seen a game built for the entertainment industry that fills [...]

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Wacky Warning Label Winners

by Richard Pak

DETROIT (AP) – A warning on a small tractor that reads «Danger: Avoid Death» was named Wednesday as the United States’ wackiest warning label by an anti-lawsuit group.

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NPR covers a good bit of the HF field in one conversation with two doctors

by Anne McLaughlin

All Things Considered interviewed Dr. Peter Pronovost this weekend about the checklist he developed for doctors and nurses in busy hospitals. On a topical level, this illuminated the working memory demands of hospital work and statistics on how easy it is to err.
As an example, a task analysis revealed almost two hundred steps medical professionals do per day to [...]

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Design out, Guard, then Warn

by Anne McLaughlin

Check out this fascinating solution to protecting users from the blade of a table saw.

The way it works is that the saw blade registers electrical contact with human skin and immediately stops. I can’t imagine not having this safety system in place, now that it is available. However, I still have some questions that commenters might want to weigh [...]

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Intuition vs Experience with Roundabouts

by Anne McLaughlin

Some people might say a traffic circle is obvious. There is only one way to go.. who yields might be more difficult, but at least we are all driving in the same direction.
Not so.
The following two articles come down on the side of experience for the usability of roundabouts.
New Traffic Circle Causes Confusion
Death-crash car launches off the road and [...]

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First Responders Charity

by Richard Pak

Not really human factors related (other than the fact that the Clemson Usability Group has been working on the website). Dan Fisk and friends are climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro to raise money for first-responders with PTSD.
You can find more information and donate at: http://www.climb4first.org

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