10.22.2009
Jon Howarth /
Community Involvement /
Gestural Interfaces /
Human Factors /
User Experience /
User Research
Dr. Dan Mauney and Dr. Miranda Capra gave a presentation at a “works-in-progress” forum on Tuesday, October 20 at 1:30pm at this year’s Annual Conference of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society in San Antonio, TX. Dan and Miranda’s talk was titled “Cultural Influence on Gestural Interface Design”. They described a recent study conducted in association with the International Usability Partners in which they collected user-generated gestures from 40 people in 9 countries for 28 common software commands (e.g. zoom, scroll, cut, copy, rotate).
Dan is releasing regular blog posts about the study at http://www.humancentric.com/GestureResearch.
10.21.2009
Jon Howarth /
Usability Lab /
User Research
Do you ever find that you need to create a recording of two camera feeds? We developed a way that uses only free software (if you have Microsoft Windows) and is pretty straightforward. Read more »
10.09.2009
Jon Howarth /
Usability Lab /
User Research /
Web & Software
Usability professionals and other research-focused professions often find the need to record screen video. This blog entry is intended to introduce you to basic approaches to capturing screen video and to explain the tradeoffs associated with these approaches…
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08.12.2009
Jon Howarth /
Consumer Products /
Human Factors
Source: sidekick.com
I recently had the opportunity to use the Sidekick LX for an extended period of time. The phone has a unique swivel screen that serves as a perfect example of the difference between physical and cognitive affordances in the design of products. A physical affordance helps a person physically perform an action with a product, and a cognitive affordance helps a person think about or know how to use a product. The Sidekick has great physical affordances for opening the screen but poor cognitive affordances to indicate how to open the screen.
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07.20.2009
Jon Howarth /
Human Factors /
Usability /
User Research
As I was walking from my desk to the company break room, I noticed the variety of ways in which my colleagues and I have “annotated” computer equipment that we use. Here are a couple of examples:
- I put a piece of tape on one side of the USB dongle for my wireless mouse, so that I know which way to insert it into a USB port on my laptop. The dongle is symmetrical; without the tape, I would have to guess which side of the dongle should be facing up.
- One of my colleagues has drawn a red arrow on the lid to her laptop near the back hinge. The power port is on the back of her laptop and the arrow allows her to plug in her power supply without having to turn around the laptop.
- Another colleague uses a blue Velcro strip to wrap her computer power supply. The strip is permanently attached to the end of the power supply that plugs into an electrical power outlet, not the side that plugs into the computer. The strip helps her easily identify which plug is hers when she wants to unplug her laptop from a power strip that has other devices plugged into it.
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06.09.2009
Jon Howarth /
Human Factors /
Transportation /
Usability
source:publicradio.org
After returning from a business trip in Chicago, I received a letter from my rental car company indicating that they were charging me a fee to transfer three tickets from the Illinois Tollway to my name. I thought that there had to be a mistake because I did not remember driving through toll booths without paying. In fact, I didn’t even remember driving through any toll booths at all. I called the rental car company and explained the situation. The customer service agent told me that they get a good number of calls regarding transferring tickets for toll violations. She explained that the tollways are set up so that people driving cars with an I-PASS transponder, a device that is mounted in the car and works with a prepaid toll collection system, can continue driving on the tollway without stopping at toll booths. People driving cars that do not have an I-PASS transponder must exit the tollway to pay tolls at toll booths. The reason that I didn’t remember driving through a toll booth was because I hadn’t driven through one. An Illinois Tollway camera had taken a picture of my license plate each time I failed to exit the tollway to pay the toll.
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