Anne McLaughlin

Lack of human factors = more of your tax dollars at “work”

April 22, 2012

I live in Raleigh, NC. Our area code has always been a little problematic for the nationwide 911 emergency system – it is 919. But at least until now, dialing the 919 for a local call was optional. Looks like we’re finally big enough for ten digit dialing and we can expect to pay the price in our public safety [...]

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Mechanical exerciser interface from 1938

February 20, 2012
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File the above under funny, if inaccurate, information visualization.  The Bread-o-Meter shows how many slices of bread would be needed to fuel your mad bicycle ride! Click here for the original post and other neat antique exercise articles.  

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A collection of beautiful and creative information visualizations

February 14, 2012
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Click here for a gallery of wonderful visualizations. My favorite is the Histomap (pictured above) from 1931. Someone update it, please!   Photo credit feeb @ Flickr

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Looking down the barrel of a gun

February 10, 2012
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Here is a design that requires disobedience of the fundamental rule in a sport: don’t point your gun at someone you don’t plan to shoot. Blogger Mark Shead posits it might be due to a lack of domain knowlege by the designer and extends the analogy to software design. Mistakes in software design aren’t always as easy to spot, but often it [...]

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Development of the ground proximity warning system for aviation

February 8, 2012

This article tells the story of inspiration for and creation of a ”ground proximity warning” system for pilots, as well as multiple other types of cockpit warnings. Don’t miss the video embedded as a picture in the article! It has the best details! Some choice excerpts: About 3.5 miles out from the snow-covered rock face, a red light flashed on the instrument [...]

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New automation will warn drivers of lane changes

February 7, 2012
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Ford is introducing a system that first warns of a lane change, then actually changes the direction of the car if the warning is ignored. From the USA Today article: When the system detects the car is approaching the edge of the lane without a turn signal activated, the lane marker in the icon turns yellow and the steering wheel [...]

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Fun with confusing medication names!

February 2, 2012
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Check out this post from The Consumerist about how unhappy the FDA is with Durezol and Durasal. A hint: It’s ok if you accidentally use Durezol when you wanted Durasal, but the penalty is high for using Durasal instead of Durezol!* This link contains an explanation of the names: When drugs are submitted to the FDA for approval, the Agency carefully screens [...]

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Excerpts from the NASA ASRS

January 28, 2012
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One of my students last semester (thanks, Ronney!) turned me on the “Callback” publication from the NASA Aviation Safety Reporting System. These are almost all first person stories written as case studies of errors and accidents or near accidents. There aren’t so many that it falls under my list of neat databases, but it certainly is interesting reading. I’ve collected [...]

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What values are pilots allowed to enter for the weight of the plane?

January 22, 2012
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I’d assume when pilots enter a weight estimate for the plane prior to takeoff that there would be a decision aid to prevents gross miscalculation. It certainly seems like an undue load (no pun intended) on the pilot to require entering multiple components for weight correctly. From the article linked below I am no longer sure how much automation is [...]

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Neat SciAm Blog Post on InfoVis

January 18, 2012

This story was passed to me today by Matt Shipman, who writes about research on The Abstract. An excerpt: [Right - Comparison of two road signs, Highway Gothic on the left, Clearview on the right, 2007. Credit: Wikimedia Commons - click on link to see large] The previous road sign font, Highway Gothic, was hard to read because of very small [...]

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Intuitive Interfaces for Software Developers

January 9, 2012
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Here is a link to some neat new research being done by my colleagues at NCSU.  It’s about the development of a tool that instantly changes the look of software code as it’s being developed, allowing for different ways to investigate bugs and features, but without changing the code in any way that might introduce errors. Dr. Emerson Murphy-Hill developed the interface [...]

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“I wasn’t trying to make a computer interface, I was just trying to make a drum” – NPR interviews Bill Buxton

January 7, 2012
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NPR interviews Bill Buxton on the technology side and Sherry Turkle on the social impacts side. The Touchy-Feely Future Of Technology Excerpts: “I wasn’t trying to make a computer interface, I was just trying to make a drum,” Buxton tells NPR’s Robert Siegel. “Did I envision what was going to happen today, that it would be in everybody’s pocket — in their smartphone? [...]

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ATM Accessibility (not)

January 3, 2012

I’m catching up on some older topics I never blogged about. This is one of my favorites. The Consumerist posted a video of a blind user interacting with an ATM. As they said, “Overall, it seems like whoever designed the ATM didn’t ask a blind person to try it out first.” Quotes from the video: (Re: finding the headphone jack) [...]

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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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Beyond Touch: the future of interaction

November 9, 2011
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Follow the link to read “A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design” by Bret Victor. The briefest of summaries would be that we over-use simple touch in our visions of the future, when we could be including many other cues, such as weight and balance. From the post: If you’re with me so far, maybe I can nudge [...]

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