January 2009

History of Multi-touch Research (Bill Buxton)

January 27, 2009

BusinessWeek has an article on the veiled threat that Apple has made to competitors regarding multi-touch technology.  But the interesting part was a link to a whitepaper written by Bill Buxton.  It’s a great historical overview/crash course of touch and multi-touch research that preceeded Apple’s work back almost 30 years. Multi-touch technologies have a long history. To put it in [...]

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Game Players as Future Warriors

January 26, 2009

I heard an interview over the weekend on the use of robots in war. A fascinating bit from that story was that as modern warfare moves to soldiers manipulating robots from afar, the military leveraged the existing research and development of game companies in the design of hand held controllers (at 13:43 in the streaming interview). So the predator drone [...]

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Usability of Electronic Health Records

January 25, 2009
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Electronic health records are computerized versions of those old paper files you see at your doctor’s office.  In an effort to trim the cost of health care, President Obama has pledge to support EHR use among more doctors. In the course of other research, I had the opportunity to see the kinds of EHRs that are used in a major [...]

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Usability Affects Use: Police make fewer arrests due to struggling with software

January 23, 2009

Australian police in Queensland are asked to provide information to a national database, which should help communication between departments about offenders. Sounds great, right? Not if it’s poorly designed. From the News.au article: “There was an occasion where two people were arrested on multiple charges. It took six detectives more than six hours to enter the details into QPRIME,” he [...]

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Crowdsourced Usability II: Mozilla Test Pilot

January 21, 2009

Interesting distributed/crowdsourced usability effort from Mozilla, the makers of Firefox. Enter Test Pilot. It’s a still-in-concept platform for a new user-testing program for Mozilla that aims to build a 1% representative sample of the Firefox user base for soliciting wide participation and structured feedback for interface and product experiments. From Wired: Raskin notes that the project was initially intended to [...]

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Return of the Checklist!

January 21, 2009

Paper to the rescue again! From the January 14th New York Times: “Surgical complications are a considerable cause of death and disability around the world,” the researchers wrote in the online edition of The New England Journal of Medicine. “They are devastating to patients, costly to health care systems and often preventable.” But a year after surgical teams at eight [...]

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You can now follow us on Twitter

January 20, 2009

In addition to being notified of new posts by RSS and E-mail, we are now on the Twitter bandwagon!  If you are an existing Twitter user, you can now “follow” our Twitter feed and get notified of new posts.  What is Twitter?  Well, here is what Wikipedia has to say: Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that [...]

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Milk Jug Usability

January 19, 2009

A square milk jug has lots of benefits; because of its square shape, they stack more efficiently compared to existing milk jugs.  The shape makes it so that cartons of milk won’t require milk crates.  The net result is reduced transportation costs. However, it seems they are not so easy to pour. According to the NYT article, training was required [...]

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Rethinking the Hotel Closet

January 16, 2009

Great picture from reader Kim Wolfinbarger, University of Oklahoma: “Thought you might enjoy this example of an affordance gone wrong. I had never considered this use for a sprinkler head, but obviously some other hotel guests had.”

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User Perception of Automobile Brands

January 14, 2009

I often hear people in HF say their users “don’t always know what they want” or that users want something that isn’t good for them. (One example might be a touch screen when a touch screen is not appropriate.) Consumer Reports lists the top automobile models by perception of a brand in certain categories. The categories they used were: safety [...]

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1960′s Human Factors : The Titan II Missiles

January 12, 2009
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I went on a trip to Tucson over the holidays and toured the last Titan II missile silo. A brief history: from 1963-1982 these missiles were part of the cold war “peace through deterrance” and “assured mutual destruction.” In essence, they provided one reason not to attack the US: even were we destroyed, these missiles would still launch to destroy [...]

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Terrifying Telephones

January 9, 2009

I purchased a new phone and wanted to understand how to do 3-way calling on it (you can’t). But that’s not the point of today’s post. This is the first page of the manual. Probably only an HF professional interested in warnings would actually turn to page 38, and I went there straight away. Click the image for the actual [...]

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How does one get into Human Factors?

January 8, 2009

We got a great question from reader Matt: I’m still unsure whether I want to make the leap into lots of school…and I was wondering if I could ask you about your human factors stories…How did you get into HF/E?…How do corporate and academia differ? In addition to teaching and research, do you or have you done any other HF/E [...]

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Objectified: A Documentary Film by Gary Hustwit

January 5, 2009

A trailer for an upcoming documentary; looks very interesting!  Human factors probably does not make an explicit appearance in the documentary but I’m sure it will be interesting nonetheless. Objectified is a feature-length independent documentary about industrial design. It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about the people who re-examine, re-evaluate and [...]

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