Richard Pak

Designing Displays for Older Adults: Chapter 1 (excerpt)

August 18, 2010

Below is the preface and excerpt of Chapter 1 from our forthcoming book.  The book will be released September 2010 and will be available where fine books are sold or directly from our publisher CRC Press.  Until January 31, 2011, you can get 20% off the cover price when you purchase directly from CRC Press using this link and this code: 810DE. [...]

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Ergonomic Advice from Star Trek

August 5, 2010

From xadamx via Gizmodo.

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Human Factors and Ergonomics Madness

August 2, 2010

Are you going to the annual Human Factors and Ergonomics conference this fall?  If you are conference presenter or just browsing, make sure to stop by the Madness sessions.  The purpose is to get a fun 25-second preview of the talks happening that day.  It’s early in the morning but hopefully well worth it. We’ll host a concurrent website (web [...]

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Almost Here: Designing Displays for Older Adults

July 20, 2010
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After a long process and over a year of work, Anne’s and my book on user interface design for older adults is almost available!  The cover of our book has been finalized (shown below).  The book will be released September 21st, 2010 and will be available where fine books are sold or directly from our publisher CRC Press. We’ll give [...]

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The Human Factors of Weapons

July 16, 2010

James R. in California sends along a tragic story of police officer confusing his taser with his firearm.  The news story can be found here.  Here’s what James says: Here in CA there is a big to do over the shooting death of a young man (Oscar Grant) by a BART police officer Johannes Mehserle.  Apparently, Mr. Grant was being [...]

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Human Factors and Health care: Tackling Inefficiencies

July 12, 2010
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I came across two examples of human factors angles in health care. The first is from the NPR show Planet Money.  The show focuses on how much inefficiency and waste there is in medical billing. The whole podcast is worth listening to, but there is one bit that made me laugh out loud (fast-forward to 10:35). Codes (NDC number) are [...]

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Usability Potpourri

July 2, 2010

HF/Usability Potpourri returns with two recent items. iPhone Reception Display Reports from some sites suggest that at least some of the cellular reception issues of the new iPhone 4 are due to improper display of signal strength.  This is a neat HF issue because it involves user’s trust in automation (the display of reception bars is actually a computed value, [...]

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Update on an Academic’s Use of the iPad

June 29, 2010
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There seems to be a huge amount of interest in the use of iPads in academia as evidenced by the popularity of my last post on the iPad. This is just a follow-up post with some more app recommendations and more thoughts on how well it substitutes for my laptop after over a month of use. I recently went on [...]

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Don Norman’s 10 Rules for Successful Products

June 28, 2010

The embedded video below is a one-hour talk given by usability guru and cognitive psychologist Don Norman.  He discusses his 10 Rules for Successful Products.  Factoid: Did you know that his landmark book, “The Design of Everyday Things” was originally called, “The Psychology of Everyday Things“?  I guess psychology was a dirty word back then. [Link]

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Usability Potpourri

June 23, 2010

First, some thoughts on mobile usability from Google user experience designer Leland Rechis. Next, decisions, decisions, decisions…when did buying gas become so difficult? As Travis says, At this point, why not let me use a slider to create my own mix? That’s a keyboard, touchscreen and 5 grades of gasoline. From somewhere in Florida on I-75″ (Thanks Travis Bowles). Finally, [...]

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iPad is everything the Kindle isn’t (for my use cases)

May 25, 2010
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I acquired an Apple iPad a few weeks ago and am very impressed with it. Just as background, i’m a PC person (a desktop at work, home, and a Fujitsu P1620 ultramobile tablet, all running Windows 7).  My portable computer weighs about 2.5 lbs but the iPad is a full pound lighter and the battery lasts about 10 hours. Less [...]

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Facebook and Privacy: A Guest Post by Kelly Caine

May 8, 2010
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Many of my friends have threatened to leave Facebook because of their concerns over privacy, but for the first time, this week one of them actually made good on the threat. In his “Dear John” letter, my friend Yohann summarized the issue: I don’t feel that I am in control of the information I share on Facebook, and of the [...]

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Evil Interfaces

May 3, 2010

Excellent post at the EFF describing “evil interfaces“, or interfaces that may be deliberately designed to make you do things you did not intend to do: As Conti describes it, a good interface is meant to help users achieve their goals as easily as possible. But an “evil” interface is meant to trick users into doing things they don’t want [...]

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Situation Awareness Issue?

April 27, 2010
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Situation awareness fail?  No details but this happened in Dallas TX (via Fred Switzer, David Switzer):

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Facetted Navigation Primer

April 22, 2010

A List Apart recently posted an excerpt from Chapter 4 of Search Patterns by Peter Morville and Jeffery Callender that presents a great description of facetted navigation (FN), a type of search interface. FN is contrasted with just text searching (e.g., Google), taxonomies (e.g., Windows Explorer or Mac Finder), and tag-based interfaces (e.g., Flickr).  See illustrative figure below if you [...]

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Soft Keyboard: Smart Idea or Incredibly Frustrating?

March 22, 2010

ThickButtons is a replacement soft-keyboard for Android phones that works in a very unique way. It uses the predictive word functionality available in many soft keyboards (where it can predict what word you are likely to be typing based on what you’ve typed) but takes that one step further by enlarging the next letter on the keyboard. Take a look: [...]

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