design

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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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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Contact lens solution safety can be a complex if-then task

June 9, 2010
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We’ve posted before on confusing bottles, even those with labels. This latest problem comes from a type of contact lens solution that burns your eyes if you use it immediately, but does not if you’ve let your contacts sit in it for a long period of time. Excerpts from the write up at Consumer Reports: It is a hydrogen peroxide solution [...]

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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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Users: Are they the people using the towels or the people replacing the towels?

May 13, 2010

Answer: They are hopelessly intertwined.

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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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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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Personas & Windows Phone 7; Apple Mouse Fix

March 15, 2010
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Two unrelated posts; both usability-related: I’m sure that Microsoft has used personas in design and evaluation before, but have they advertised it so broadly–even bragged about it?  I think one of the major benefits of personas is that it focuses development (and evaluation) reducing feature creep; something that the old Windows phones were definitely guilty of [Engadget]. This third-party “fix” [...]

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Complex Clickers in Class

March 8, 2010
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I will be teaching general psychology to a large undergraduate class this Fall.  I had planned on using the “Clicker” to encourage interaction with students (link to company that makes them, wikipedia page that describes them).  They are essentially remote controls that allow the instructor to record votes from students.  For example, I could present a multiple choice question to [...]

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HF Potpourri

March 8, 2010
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Touch Usability’s Kevin Arthur is soliciting input for a presentation he’s doing at UPA Designing for Human’s Rob Tannen posts an online video of a presentation (ergonomics for interaction designers) he gave at the School of Visual Arts in New York Edward Tufte will help us understand and track where stimulus funds are going (via Slashdot) The Internet does not [...]

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Human Factors Blog @ SXSW

March 4, 2010
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Anne was invited to be a panelist at SXSW on Friday, March 12 at 05:00 PM.  SXSW is a yearly music, movie, and interactive media festival held in Austin, TX.  The title of the interactive panel is With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility: The Future of Video Games. Here is a description: Video games are more popular than ever, and [...]

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Making virtual worlds more accessible – a new context area for Human Factors

March 4, 2010
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The Consumerist blog (of Consumer Reports) posted an article on the state of California suing Sony because their online Playstation services were not accessibly designed. Quoted from The Consumerist post: At the crux of the plaintiff’s failed case was their contention that, because PlayStation allows people all over the world to connect and play games together via their now-repaired PlayStation [...]

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