potpourri

Usability Follies in the News

March 7, 2012
Thumbnail image for Usability Follies in the News

It’s election season which means more opportunities to point, laugh, and cry at the state of voting usability.  The first is sent in by Kim W.  As part of an NPR story, the reporter dug up a sample ballot. Pretty overwhelming and confusing (“vote for not more than one”??); makes me long for electronic voting. Next, Ford is sending out [...]

Read the full article →

HF Potpourri

September 20, 2010

Social networking for your car? As if we need another distraction while driving.  A new system (Bump.com) connects drivers by license plate so you can text message that person that cut you off (Thanks Paul!). Harry Brignull (of the 90percentiseverything blog) collects egregious examples of evil interfaces in his Dark Patterns website. Dark Patterns: User Interfaces Designed to Trick People [...]

Read the full article →

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, [...]

Read the full article →

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, [...]

Read the full article →

Summer-itis!

June 22, 2010

We admit it.  Here at the Human Factors Blog we’ve been slacking in our posts since summer started. However, some of our colleagues have been exceptionally prolific and posted a number of well- thought out posts on usability! Go check out this series from uselog.com — it contains a number of posts from Analyze the consequences of usability for your company to [...]

Read the full article →

HF Potpourri

March 8, 2010
Thumbnail image for HF Potpourri

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 [...]

Read the full article →

Design & HF Potpourri

January 24, 2010
Thumbnail image for Design & HF Potpourri

Comparison of text entry input speeds. Steve Krug (of “Don’t make me think“) has a new book on usability titled Rocket Surgery Made Easy.  See the first few chapters.  [via Photoshopblog] Smashing Magazine has a list of how various websites portray progress in multi-step tasks. A piece on complicated and overwrought design from the NYT.  Choice quote: Sadly, more and [...]

Read the full article →

HF Potpourri

January 6, 2010
Thumbnail image for HF Potpourri

James Rubinstein sends along a this post about a 32 inch LCD TV presumably designed for older users.  It has features such as a dramatically simplified remote control, fewer wires, and a shut-off timer.  [Engadget] Designing Devices is a relatively new blog devoted to “how and why to create devices” from Dan Saffer (author of Designing for Interaction).  I’m loving [...]

Read the full article →

Vision-themed Potpourri

December 20, 2009
Thumbnail image for Vision-themed Potpourri

Today’s potpourri happens to be related to understanding or enhancing what your users see (or don’t see): Google Browser Size let’s you see how much of your web content is visible by users. Rocker Lou Reed (of the Velvet Underground) designs an iPhone app for near-sighted users.  It basically increases the font size in the contacts application.  It appears that [...]

Read the full article →

HF Potpourri

December 14, 2009
Thumbnail image for HF Potpourri

More potpourri from the web: Jakob Nielsen has a new book on using eye-tracking in web usability. View a 32 page chapter PDF (26 mb) for free (via PhotoshopSupport). Using autistics for software quality-control work. Would this work for usability? An obsessive attention to detail is good for design/usability (via Slashdot) The HF/usability company HumanCentric held an internal competition to [...]

Read the full article →

Smells like more potpourri

December 8, 2009
Thumbnail image for Smells like more potpourri

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 [...]

Read the full article →

Usability/Design/HF Potpourri

December 4, 2009
Thumbnail image for Usability/Design/HF Potpourri

Just in time for the end of the year:  Top 10 interaction design books from Kicker Studio Making cooking safe for the blind (via Real World Design) Deciding when you need graphics (via uxforward) We’ve posted before about the man who designs the UIs in movies, but Gizmodo has posted his new streaming demo reel…fascinating. How will reading change with [...]

Read the full article →

HF/Usability Hodgepodge

August 28, 2009

Things too small for their own post but interesting nonetheless…it’s a hodgepodge, a mélange, a potpourri! Stay in touch with those who don’t have or want a computer (via Gadgeteer) “upgrading customer usability without breaking the bank” (via UXforward) If Craigslist got a makeover, what might it look like? (Wired) Men and women use car navigation systems differently (GPSworld)

Read the full article →

HF Potpourri

August 17, 2009
Thumbnail image for HF Potpourri

Some interesting items that have passed through my reader: Jerk can be emulated in software.  Cars with continuously variable transmissions sound and behave differently from other cars.  In this video, the speedometer and RPM smoothly increases (in most cars the RPM would bobble as gears shift and you’d feel a slight jerk).  I don’t know how I reached this page [...]

Read the full article →

HF/Usability Potpourri

June 26, 2009

Study Suggests People Prefer Bing’s Design To Google’s “The study was an intense focus group in which 12 subjects were monitored with eye-tracking cameras as they conducted searches. Afterward, they were interviewed and completed a survey.” (TechCrunch with usability report) Nielsen recommends abandoning password masking in online forms “Usability suffers when users type in passwords and the only feedback they [...]

Read the full article →

Human Factors Potpourri (again)

April 23, 2009

Here are some more human factors-related items that have crossed my blog reader: Twitter is hot!  Oprah recently twittered on her show and apparently fell victim to a usability problem:  the update button was non-obvious so she never posted her tweet (Touch usability) Fellow HFE blog Real World Usability will be posting updates of the Ergonomics Society Conference via Twitter [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries