From the monthly archives:

August 2008

You are what you eat (And I’m about a B-)

by Anne McLaughlin

Like many people, I use heuristics when choosing between food products. My algorithm goes something like this:

What’s the lowest unit price? 25 cents per ounce vs. 40 cents per ounce?
Pick up the lowest
Look at the saturated fat RDI
If reasonable, look at ingredients
Is list too long to read in 3 seconds?
If yes, pick up next cheapest item for comparison.
If no, look [...]

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Electronic Books–A Human Factors perspective

by Richard Pak
Thumbnail image for Electronic Books–A Human Factors perspective

So I finally made the plunge and obtained an Amazon Kindle E-book reader.  This isn’t a gadget review site so don’t expect a full review but I just wanted to comment on some of the ergonomic/human factors considerations after using the device for the past few days.  The bottom line?  There are some critical “book behaviors” that the device does [...]

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Inner and Outer Outed

by Anne McLaughlin

Redesigned Beltline signs to drop ‘Inner’ and ‘Outer’
RALEIGH – No more “Inner” and “Outer” for Raleigh’s Beltline. Soon it will be Interstate 40 and Interstate 440, east and west.
The state Department of Transportation is about to make good on a long-standing promise to get rid of the Inner Beltline and Outer Beltline signs that get lots of motorists [...]

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Getting Ready for November – Ballot Designs

by Anne McLaughlin

I‘m impressed by Slate’s detailed look at ballot design. Check out the alternative designs!
The answer: not far. A study carried out by USA Today and seven other newspapers in 2001 concluded that faulty design, not punch-card machines, was responsible for voters’ confusion in Palm Beach County in 2000. Despite this finding, states have focused their election-reform energies on upgrading old [...]

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Hospital’s Design Keeps Fresh Air in Mind – NYTimes.com

by Richard Pak

In July, builders broke ground on a new hospital in Rwanda’s Burera district, near the Uganda border. The design relies on simple features to reduce the spread of airborne disease: outdoor walkways instead of enclosed halls, waiting rooms alfresco and large windows staggered at different levels on opposing walls to keep air circulating.
Global Update – Rwanda – Hospital’s Design Keeps [...]

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The Future of Web Browsing

by Richard Pak

Interesting scenario of the future web browser from Adaptive Path and Mozilla. I can see many potentially interesting human factors research questions. It seems overly complicated on first look but I guess that’s an empirical question!
Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.
Aurora (Part 2) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.

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With automated tagging, Web links can surprise

by Richard Pak

I‘ve previously posted on the topic of tagging. As more products attempt to automate the process of creating tags from content, more problems are bound to appear like below.  A pretty clear case of automation gone wrong!:
It wasn’t what anyone expected to see while perusing a news article. But there, in the final paragraph of an online story about [...]

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