From the monthly archives:

July 2009

A Blind Person’s Interactions With Technology

by Richard Pak

The latest issue of Communications of the ACM has an interesting story on the unique issues in interface design and usability when the user is blind.  The author/researchers Kristen Shinohara and Josh Tenenberg conducted interviews to examine limitations in current accessibility technologies for the blind.
Showing off her BrailleNote, she said she prefers [...]

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Politics and Research: Driver Distraction

by Anne McLaughlin

A hot item in the news is that research on multi-tasking while driving was suppressed back in 2002 because the NTSA was afraid of “antagonizing” Congress. An excerpt from the NYT article:
But such an ambitious study never happened. And the researchers’ agency, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, decided not to make public hundreds of pages of research and warnings [...]

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Ford’s Use of Personas in Design

by Richard Pak
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This NYT article delves into the use of personas at Ford Motor Company.  The article is written to imply that the use of personas (or archetypes as they call it) is novel.  It also delves uncomfortably and unnecessarily into Jungian psychology (psychological archetypes, eh?).
But many designers and user experience people have been using personas for quite a while.  The article [...]

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When Users Complain: Blackboard

by Anne McLaughlin
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There is a great article over at Inside Higher Ed. describing what happens when a company without evidence of a usability process finally asks its users for feedback.
At an open “listening session” with top executives of Blackboard here Wednesday at the company’s annual conference, college officials expressed frustration with many of the system’s fundamental characteristics. At times, the meeting seemed [...]

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Augmented Reality for Everyone

by Richard Pak

There have been many recent examples of consumer friendly augmented reality applications for smart phone users.  I remember reading about augmented reality research over a decade ago (in an HCI class) and remembering how bulky, expensive, experimental, and out-of-reach it seemed back then.  The systems back then required head-mounted displays and were physically attached to cameras and large computers.  Now [...]

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Population Trends: Age

by Anne McLaughlin

Perhaps you are like me, and always looking for great images to put in your presentations about why it’s important to consider aging in human factors work. Or perhaps you just like a good, creative visualization. Well, here you go on both counts.
This comes courtesy of Mark Thoma of the Economist’s View blog, created from census data. It shows the [...]

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Time.com article on Anne’s research with Games & Aging

by Richard Pak
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Our own Anne McLaughlin was featured in a recent article in Time.com.  Anne and her colleagues Jason Allaire (NCSU) and Maribeth Gandy (Georgia Tech) were recently awarded a $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to study using games to moderate cognitive decline in older adults.
Their plan is to study what parts of games might help cognitive performance and [...]

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Is Older Adult Interest in the Wii Interface Just Hype?: or “I want to try bowling”

by Anne McLaughlin

I’d like to share a conversation with my mother that occurred today. She is in her 60s, and although she uses a computer for communication, has never even played solitaire or shown any interest in a video game.
Nikki says:
The wee? Is a game that lets you think you are doing a sport?
Anne says:
Yes, you use the controller, that looks like [...]

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New Interface for Online Banking

by Anne McLaughlin

There are many iPhone applications that integrate the phone camera with software in novel ways.  I came across this video demonstrating how it can be used to deposit checks electronically.
The interface demonstration starts at the 1 minute mark if you would like to skip the advertisement.*

*I’m not sure if it counts as an advertisement when most people aren’t allowed to [...]

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The Tactile Thinkpad: More Laptop Redesign from Lenovo

by Anne McLaughlin
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I posted earlier on the innovative data collection Lenovo did for a keyboard redesign. A new post on DesignMatters details the design and user testing of a new touch pad using tactile feedback.
Designers must often work within constraints induced by other portions of their product. In this case, the touchpad had to be flush with the hand rest of the [...]

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Behind the scenes look at “Playtesting” games

by Richard Pak
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Our friend Tim Nichols (of Microsoft Game Studio) was recently featured in a video explaining how games get tested for usability.  See the embedded video for a look behind the scenes:
Have you ever been playing a game and thought to yourself, “I just wish I could speak with the developers and let them know that this part of the game could be [...]

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