International gesture study published in Spanish

Last year we were part of a 340-person, 9-country study of gestures for touchscreen, mobile devices conducted by the International Usability Partners. We’re very excited that one of our papers about the study has been republished in Spanish in faz, an online magazine discussing user interaction. The full article is available online, Diferencias y similitudes culturales en gestos definidos por el usuario para interfaces en pantallas táctiles, or you can jump on over to our gesture blog to read about it in English.

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Lack of context awareness leaves me cold

My grocery store has moved the greeting cards section to the freezer aisle. Who buys greeting cards? Women. Who gets cold in grocery stores? Women. Seriously, the day I took this photo it was 70 degrees outside, but I brought a jacket with me just so I could put it on while I was picking out cards. If they want to encourage me shop in this area, they have made a big mistake. Did no one think about the users of this section of the store and how long it takes to pick out the right card? Must’ve been designed by a man.

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No Coke, No Smile

Waiting for my car to be ready at the dealership, I watched a man push on this machine twice to get a soda out, unsuccessfully. On the third try he figured it out, and then he looked around as if to see if anyone had noticed how stupid he’d been. But we know better, right? We know it was the designer’s fault, not the user’s. Can you see the design problem here?

Those soda bottle photos are in a completely flat area, and those black rings are actually a graphic printed behind the flat plastic cover (you can see it best if you look at the top-left bottle, and how the reflections go straight across it). But they look so inviting and 3D! That’s where the guy pushed, right on the (apparent) big button with the picture of the soda he wanted. The technical term is a false cognitive affordance, something that visually looked like it afforded pushing but really didn’t. He may also have been affected by prior experience and expectations – there are lots of other soda machines that have large buttons with pictures of the soda bottles on them.

Where should you actually push? Those tiny little silver buttons below. I can understand the original concept of the machine – you can print anything you want and change the graphics easily without the limitations of printouts that fit inside giant plastic buttons, but that freedom of design also allowed some poor graphic designer to create a really bad design. But an interesting design problem to think about while waiting for my car to be ready!

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Oops… wrong floor!

On a recent business trip to Chicago with a colleague, we both were very confused by the elevators in our hotel. Here’s a photo of the buttons out on the floor, and then the button panels from two of the three elevators that went to our floors.

First problem – when we got inside the elevator, I accidentally pressed the number instead of the button. I’d had no problem with the buttons outside the elevator, and these were almost the same, why make a mistake now? In the elevator lobby, the button labels were on the buttons themselves, and there was nothing else to press; it’d be hard to make a mistake with those. But inside, the button labels were (1) separate and round, just like the buttons, and (2) a higher contrast with the background panel, and so caught my eye. A great example of the effect of context on usage.

Second problem – I almost pressed the floor for 18 instead of 19. That’s easy to do, the labels are closer to the button to the left than to the button on the right that they label.

Third problem – the next day when we got back into the elevators, my colleague pressed 22 for his floor and then I pressed 18 for mine instead of 23 and 19. Then we both realized our mistake – this new elevator looked almost identical to the one we’d had yesterday, but all of the buttons were off by one because this elevator went to the 9th floor but the other one didn’t. What amazed me was that it took just one day to form a visual/spatial memory of the location of the button for the floor, and that this happened to both me and my colleague. We had a hard time believing that they would really move the buttons from one elevator to the next, so I had to take these photos to prove it.

Thanks, elevator designers, for this interesting little example of bad design!

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Too much of a good thing

A co-worker recently received the following message while trying to use Expedia to research some travel.  I love that it acknowledges that the site has been overwhelmed by traffic in a friendly, non-technical way.

If you love a good error message or software with a sense of humor like I do, check out some of my previous posts

• You 404′d it. Gnarly, dude.
• Lulspeek 4 awsum error message
• E is for Excellent Error Message!
• The zombies think they have brains

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Don’t Hold My iPad Like That

Last week, the New York Times published an article about the rising popularity of eBooks, and the divide between people that read books electronically and those that still prefer paper books. While the article discussed many eBooks from different manufacturers, most of the interviews were with iPad owners, and the photo illustrating the article included an iPad user. But anyone that has used an iPad would realize that the photo is completely staged because iPads are heavy! No one could hold an iPad like the guy below for any length of time. Well, maybe if your hands are large enough to, say, palm a basketball, but this guy’s fingers don’t even reach halfway across, so that’s a lot of weight hanging on that hand.

The screen on my iPad is gorgeous and I love reading magazines and newspapers on it, but for reading books in bed I go back to my iPhone because it’s light enough to hold in one hand. That’s a big selling point for most dedicated eBook readers, weight. The iPad weighs 24 ounces (1.5 lbs), but the new Kindle weighs just 8.5 ounces, and the Sony weighs just under 9. But I dunno, maybe this guy likes getting a forearm workout while he reads.

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FedEx Changed My Date

I shipped a package today via FedEx. No, correction, I tried to. I scheduled pickup for today via the website, it even let me pick a time window, I printed the shipping label, got a confirmation email for my pickup appointment, all set, but no one came. By chatting with a sales rep and actually reading my email confirmation, I found out that you can’t schedule a ground pickup in my area for the same day, but I had a pick-up scheduled for Monday, as stated in my confirmation email. How did this happen, and how did I miss these dates?

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Electric Toothbrush & Function Allocation

Several months ago I bought my first electric toothbrush, and I have to admit that I’m in love. Not only is it a great toothbrush, but it’s a great example of a classic Human Factors design issue: function allocation between humans and machines. This is an issue that dates back to at least 1951 with Fitts Lists, and HABA-MABA lists, such as:

• Humans are best at (HABA) information retrieval using context and associations, machines are best at (MABA) information retrieval based on long lists and structured information.
• Humans are best at creative and adaptive tasks, machines are best at precise and repetitive tasks.

The lists change as machine capabilities change, but they are helpful when assessing a complex system and looking for places where machine automation can help, such as scanning barcodes at the grocery store instead of typing in prices, and where they introduce new problems, such as airplane pilots having difficulty staying awake during long flights because so many tasks have been automated. So how does this apply to my toothbrush?

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Firefox 4 Beta: Tabs on Top Are Better

With the release of Firefox Beta 4, Firefox joins Internet Explorer and Chrome in placing tabs at the top of the browser application window, above navigation controls, instead of between the navigation controls and the page content.  Application-level functions like settings are now collected into a “Firefox” menu at the top. Buttons that affect the current web page, like back and mark as a favorite, are now lower, closer to the web page. Alex Faaborg, a user experience designer at Mozilla, has posted a video to his blog that explains the new features and the design advantages, but central to the design changes are classic interface design principles: proximity, error prevention, simplicity, context and grouping.

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Don’t hold your iPhone like that!?!

I’m sad to say that my new iPhone has the same “death grip” problem as everyone else. If I hold it so that my hand bridges two of the three metal bands that encircle the device, the reception bars drop. It’s especially bad if you bridge a gap in the bands at the bottom-left corner of the device, right where it nestles into your palm if you hold it left-handed. What was Apple thinking, building the antenna into an exposed metal band around the edge of the phone?

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