humor

Humans and Automation on the Colbert Report

August 1, 2011

Look! A human factors colleague on the Colbert Report! Does this mean we’re cool? Dr. Missy Cummings, Associate Professor at MIT Director of the Humans and Automation Lab The Colbert Report Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

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Miller Column Inception (or the geekiest movie you’ll see today)

May 11, 2011

Miller Columns are the browsing/visualization technique used in the Mac OSX Finder. It was inherited from the NeXT operating system (one of my favorites). I personally prefer this to the tree view that’s common in Windows Explorer. The embedded video below summarizes the essential action of the movie Inception (spoiler alert!): INCEPTION_FOLDER from chris baker on Vimeo. (via Kottke)

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Does this color make me look fat?

May 2, 2011
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Funny post from Consumer Reports showing that perceptions are altered by color: Wearing black is the time-honored technique for appearing thinner without shedding an pound. Apparently it works for the iPhone 4, as well. Recently an avalanche of news and tech sites reported that the white iPhone 4 was thicker than the black iPhone, even showing side-by-side photos claiming it [...]

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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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Usability vs. Providing an Experience

January 10, 2011
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Some humor for 2011: a “Things people have never said about a restaurant” website. My favorite excerpts: “I really like the way their cheesy elevator jazz interacts with the music I was listening to in iTunes.” “I hope the phone number and address are actually images so I can’t copy and paste them!” “I go to restaurant websites for the [...]

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The Elusive Moodle!

December 9, 2010

Had to share this funny usability story. Google released the top searches by city today First on the list for Raleigh, NC was “moodle ncsu.” Topping the list for Charlotte, NC was “moodle nccu.” Moodle is the recently adopted open source courseware system we (NCSU: North Carolina State University) use. When I use Moodle to interact with my classes, I [...]

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Furniture-flavored Pancakes

October 20, 2010

Things are quiet because we’re both hammered by the Fall semester. But enjoy this humorous image of a lack of discriminability in product packaging (via Consumerist):

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Ergonomic Advice from Star Trek

August 5, 2010

From xadamx via Gizmodo.

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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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This does not bode well for the on-device user experience…

February 2, 2010
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Gizmodo reviewed the Nook e-book reader from Barnes & Noble. Unfortunately (for B&N), the process of opening the package was so cumbersome, most of the review dwells on that aspect: In other words, the Nook packaging actually necessitates these lengthy instructions, as ridiculous as they are in their own right. Somehow, Barnes & Noble invented a box that’s every bit [...]

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Tabs, tabs, and more tabs…

January 11, 2010
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This post on Smashing Magazine about vertical navigation had me thinking about the book Anne and I are writing (manuscript due this Friday; panicking…I’m a 10 on the Wong-Baker scale).  In one of the chapters I discuss tab navigation.  When I was looking for a particularly bad example of the use of tabs I remembered Amazon’s website circa 2000.  Fortunately, [...]

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Encouraging Sanitary Behavior at the Urinal

December 19, 2009
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From reader Scot M. comes this NPR story. To encourage proper “aiming” at urinals, some places are now placing images of bugs so that men have something to aim toward. I’ve seen these at Schiphol Airport as well as my local grocery store bathroom (and I live in a tiny town). Keiboom in Amsterdam says the original fly idea was [...]

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Smells like more potpourri

December 8, 2009
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The end of the academic semester is upon us in the U.S. so we’re backed up with deadlines which is why we’re having Potpourri again for lunch. But tasty potpourri: First, a curmudgeonly three-part series on things that give too little feedback or have too few buttons: I just got an iPod Shuffle which uses a system of taps on [...]

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HFBlog at HFES 2009 in San Antonio

December 2, 2009
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We were at the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual conference in San Antonio.  This post is merely here to collect our six-part posts on various talks.  These only scratch the surface of what was presented. Part 1:  The Mechanical Bull Part 2:  Eliciting knowledge structures Part 3:  Health, Internet, and ROBOTS! Part 4:  Hearing and understanding Part 5:  Rich [...]

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Solving Beer Estimation Difficulties

November 20, 2009
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The subtle change in the diameter of a glass can hide large changes in volume. Unfortunately for us, we’re terrible at estimating this, even when we logically know it to be true. For example, a few millimeters at the top of a pint glass equals an ounce of liquid, while the same height measure at the bottom of the glass [...]

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HFES Conference Part 5: Automation & Trust & Google Maps

November 4, 2009

During the conference I had a very personal experience with the effects of automation reliability on trust and subsequent behaviors.  First, a bit of background.  There is a large body of research examining how humans interact with automated systems (Global positioning systems, for example).  Human-automation interaction is quite complex; being affected by many factors. Julian Sanchez (of MITRE) presented a [...]

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