usability

TechCrunch posted a link to another tool to keep up with the flood of election-related news coming from news services and each of the presidential campaigns.  Dipity Election Center presents news items in a time-line format.

The interface is very cluttered and not exactly intuitive (e.g., unclear what all the little icons below the timeline mean), but an interesting way to present news for news junkies like me.  It presents less at-a-glance information than the website everymomentnow.

How do you keep up with election news?  (if you do at all).

{ 2 comments }

New York’s 11 public hospitals are at the forefront of a national movement to standardize color coding of hospital wristbands to designate patient conditions, in which purple — the color of amethyst — means “Do Not Resuscitate.” Red, or ruby, indicates allergies, while yellow — call it amber — marks someone at risk for falling.

The goal is to prevent potentially dangerous mistakes, like giving the wrong food to an allergic child, or allowing a patient with balance problems to walk unescorted down a freshly waxed hallway. The drive was spurred, in part, by a notorious 2005 Pennsylvania case in which a patient nearly died because a nurse used a yellow band thinking it meant “restricted extremity” (don’t draw blood from that arm), as it did at another hospital where the nurse sometimes worked, when at this hospital it meant D.N.R.

Hospital Bracelets Face Hurdles as They Fix Hazard - NYTimes.com

{ 2 comments }

Easy usability testing on the Mac is now possible with Silverback.  The software looks incredibly simple and is quite inexpensive.  Although it appears to have much less functionality than Morae (on the PC), it is about 30 times cheaper!  They probably shouldn’t be compared since Morae has so much more functionality, but Silverback looks like a good solution to capture footage like users reacting to the game Spore.

Using the built-in camera on the Mac, it records user facial expressions as well as on-screen activity.

Silverback — guerrilla usability testing

{ 0 comments }

Here are some interesting videos about game testing at the user experience firm bolt|peters.  The first is an overview of user testing games and the second video is some humorous test sessions of the game Spore.  Really fascinating stuff.  Note the extensive use of think aloud

Science of Fun from bolt peters on Vimeo.

Spore Research: Outtakes from bolt peters on Vimeo.

{ 3 comments }

But where? Well, that probably depends on where you live. I ran across this post on the Freakonomics Blog (part of the NY Times) bemoaning the difficulty of sorting recycling in Germany*.

We have four different containers in front of our building: paper (blue), packaging (yellow), biological (green), and the rest (gray) — and that doesn’t include the containers for three different kinds of glass (green, brown, and old) at the local park.

Japanese recycling station

We are confused about what goes where and spend lots of time transferring refuse from one container in our apartment to another before deciding where to throw them outside. We’re probably right most of the time — and the additional sorting beyond what we do in the U.S. (where we only have garbage, paper, and glass/plastic containers) does reduce the negative externalities to the environment.

At the same time, the transactions costs of garbage sorting here are substantial, and I wonder if they can be justified by the environmental improvement that results. Our time has value, and that is being ignored.

Oddly enough, over the weekend I talked with a recent German transplant bemoaning the American recycling system as being too confusing because there wasn’t a separate container for each category of garbage. (He specifically wanted a place to put leftover foodstuffs rather than just in the regular trash.) If you think about it, it does take general knowledge and specific experience to put “plastic coated cereal box” and “chicken trimmings” together in a container. Both cultures believe the unfamiliar system slows them down.

Of course, there are still other examples of cultural recycling conventions. In Japan you must divide your garbage into burnable, non burnable and recyclable items. But don’t worry, you don’t have to rely on your own opinion for what is burnable or not (my father puts plastic soda bottles in the “burnable” category, for example):

The exact definition of what is burnable, non burnable and recyclable depends on the municipality.

I would be willing to bet the Japanese make signs in their home to hang above the garbage as a checklist of what to recycle… just like I finally did for Raleigh, North Carolina.

*I wonder if they did a card sort to come up with the categories of items for each bin.

{ 0 comments }

Have you ever seen those cool interfaces or graphics that are shown in movies, mostly sci-fi, and wondered who created them?  I ran across this old post on Flowing data about a guy who creates those “infographics”.  Sounds like a very cool job!  I think I first became aware of infographics/visualization in the 1997 movie Event Horizon (which is when I became interested in HF) and have been a keen observer ever since.  The movie was so-so but I distinctly remember the interfaces for the ship being fluid, novel, and cool.

Or more recently, the multi-touch, gestural interface used by Tom Cruise in Minority Report.

Mark Coleran creates infographics/visualizations for film/tv.  His demo reel is definitely worth a look (quicktime web plug in required).

{ 0 comments }