affordances

“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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Influence of Environment on Behavior

January 4, 2012

Two articles came up that both touched upon the topic of how behavior is shaped and influenced by the environment and how we shape our immediate environment to suit particular behaviors.  The topic of how behavior is constrained by the physical environment is a long discussed topic in psychology and human factors (e.g., affordances, ecological psychology, situated cognition, “cognition in [...]

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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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Don Norman Chimes in on Scrolling Direction

September 5, 2011

Touch Usability points to a nice Don Norman post about new gesture scrolling differences primarily instigated by Apple.  As a side note, i’ve fully converted to the “content moves” model (at home, work, laptop) and did not find the transition unusual at all.  As Norman notes, it just required a subtle mental shift in my model: Both models are correct in [...]

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Bill Buxton Likes Input Devices

May 13, 2011
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And now you can browse his collection with him — all 28 minutes and 48 seconds worth! Channel 9 has the whole story and you can browse the collection one by one on the Microsoft Research site for Buxton. (Buxton obviously has his own site as well.) Photo credit andreakirkby @ Flickr

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When poor usability costs you your job?

March 30, 2011

You may have heard that an employee who managed “social media” for Chrysler accidentally posted on Chrysler’s twitter account about *ahem* poor driving in Chrysler’s home city of Detroit. Click here for the original story. The guy who sent the tweet blames the program he used for multiple twitter accounts. The article calls it a “glitch,” which would not necessarily [...]

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Honesty Hurts (especially when design is poor)

February 15, 2011
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I enjoy the mix of economics and psychology, which is why I am a faithful reader of the Freakanomics blog. Their recent podcast on “pain” started off with a good human-factors-related tale of the problematic design of a subway alarm system. I have included a link below to the podcast, but the quick overview is that there is an ear [...]

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Trashcan Affordances

February 8, 2011
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The picture above shows the front and back of a trashcan designed to be lifted by machinery. This past weekend I helped my parents start to clear their home for an upcoming move and filled this trashcan to capacity. I didn’t want my mother to have to haul it to the street, so I went to go do that before [...]

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“Magic” Apple Mouse

February 2, 2011

Check out this post on www.uselog.com about the Apple Magic Mouse.* The post covers it from design, to instructions, to packaging! *I thought Mickey was the magic mouse?

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Online Map Readability: A Comparison

December 3, 2010

Justin O’Beirne presents an extremely thorough and interesting analysis of why Google Maps appear more readable than its competitors. I’ve noticed this as well. It’s one of the major reasons I still prefer Google Maps despite some very compelling features of Bing and Yahoo maps. One visual trick that Google applies to maps is a localized de-cluttering around major cities. [...]

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Afford-door-ances

October 4, 2010
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The picture above was taken from the Starbucks near the convention hotel for HFES 2010. Rich and I were walking in there at 6:30 a.m. when we saw a man exiting the doors, shaking them violently, and uttering curse words. We had to laugh when we saw what made him so angry – a push bar on the inside of [...]

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Too standardized? – The problem of tube identification in hospitals

August 25, 2010
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When it comes to efficiency, creating standard sizes and connections saves money, production efforts, and makes for easy substitution when one runs out of an object. For example, I was delighted that lid for one brand of pot perfectly fit my new frying pan. Unfortunately, there are times when we do not want parts of one object to fit another [...]

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Blogging APA Division 21: Maximizing Stimulus-Response Compatibility

August 19, 2010
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Kim-Phuong L. Vu was this year’s winner of the Earl A. Allusi Award for early career achievement. Her presentation covered maximizing stimulus-response compatibility to optimize human performance. Vu reported on her studies of people’s performance under different levels of stimulus-response compatibility. For example, high stimulus response compatibility occurs when a blinking button needs to be pressed. The blinking is the stimulus [...]

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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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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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