December 2011

Redesigning a Mortgage Statement

December 27, 2011

Enjoy this video by Tristan Cooke and Thomas Nelson at Humans in Design. Some of the blame for our current financial crisis lies in the opacity of legal documents. In this post, a mortgage statement gets a facelift to become easily interpretable and allow the homeowner to predict and well as understand the payment schedule.   The Mortgage Statement Fix from [...]

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Learning to use a steering wheel with no vision or feedback

December 20, 2011
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Here is a link to an enjoyable radioshow called “99% invisible,” about the “design, architecture & the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world.”* 99% Invisible-37- The Steering Wheel This episode covers the difficulty people have in correctly miming use of a steering wheel (spoiler: they can’t!) and how they can learn to do so correctly with no visual feedback. [...]

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Paper isn’t so bad…

December 15, 2011

One thing that annoys me is the silly argument that paper is bad or paper kills. Such hollow arguments are used to encourage technology adoption in airplane cockpits, the class room, and hospitals. Usually they are associated with silly statistics about how much paper is saved or how much less weight is carried, or how much easier it will be [...]

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Virtual Assistants (automation) and Etiquette

December 6, 2011

This NYT article discusses the “new” scourge of rude people interacting with their phones in public via voice thanks in large part to Siri, Apple’s new virtual assistant. This article reminded me of something slightly different about human interaction with virtual assistants or automation. In a 2004 paper, researchers Parasuraman and Miller wondered if automation that possessed human-like qualities would [...]

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