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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You 404′d it. Gnarly, dude.

That’s an error message I saw on coffecupnews.org recently, I’m not kidding. I love it!

It has several elements of a great website error message

• It does NOT blame the user
• It has a sense of humor
• It provides some suggestions for what to do next
• It wraps the error message in all of the standard parts of the website – logo, search box, links to the most popular articles, etc.

It could use a little improvement, but not much

• Explain what happened – most people don’t know what a 404 error message is, and “lost at sea” is a little vague, although most people will probably guess that the page doesn’t exist
• Point out in the text of the error message that the site has a search box, although again most people will probably find that on their own.

My favorite error message is still the one I saw on Sesame Street’s website [blog], although the iPhone lolcats app gets the most points for style [blog].

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The zombies think they have brains

I am hopelessly addicted to Plants vs Zombies for the iPhone. The plants are fun (pea shooters that shoot frozen peas), the zombies are silly (floating across my pool in a giant inflatable duck? Hah!), Crazy Dave is the best (rock and roll!), and the awards are even better (Don’t Pea in the Pool). It has a certain style about the humor which comes across in the game messages, the notes that the Zombies leave for you after you complete a series of levels, and the almanac that reminds you of the capabilities of your plants and the zombies you’re fighting against. But what really got me was the hilarious help message. The help message got me on several levels. First, it was seriously funny and totally in keeping with the humor of the game, like the error messages for LOLcats [blog] and Sesame Street [blog]. Second, it made sense to me that the zombies that populated the game were so confident of their success that they didn’t need to write any help for the application.

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Reading between the screens

I ran into the flight status screens below at an airport in New York City on my way home to North Carolina. My husband and I stared at these screens for several minutes, looking for our flight and trying not to panic that it had been canceled. Then an airport employee walked past and pointed out that they were not in service. How did both of us miss the NOT IN SERVICE sign taped prominently between the two screens? The sign was right in front of us, but it wasn’t near our place of focus, the actual TV screen, and the writing in pen was hard to see from a distance.

There are so many things that could have made this better: write with a marker, stick it to the middle of the screen, cover the screens with paper, perhaps even turn off the broken screens, if that’s not too much to ask? When something like this happens at home or in a small office everyone just knows to ignore it, but in a public setting a sign like that has to scream so that even idiots like me will notice it.

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Lulspeek 4 awsum error mesage

I’m always on the lookout for a good error message. I love the one I saw on Sesame Street’s website [blog], but even better is the one for the lolcats (or I Can Has Cheezbuger?) app for the iPhone. If you’re not familiar with lolcats, it’s silly pictures of cats with captions, and the idea is that since your cat is talking, the captions have lots of spelling and grammar errors. If you’re not a cat fan, there’re also loldogs and lolrus. The image below is the error message I get on my iPod Touch if it’s not connected to the network.  I love it because it keeps the spirit of the app, with the same misspellings and references to cats wanting cheeseburgers and being mischievous. Even if I can’t see any new lols, at least I can laugh at the error message.

P.S. The full text of the lol is: After a busy day of orchestral rehearsals, the horn section takes a break

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Good design from limited functionality: corn husker

In the fall I took my nephew and niece to Ganyard Hill Farms to pick pumpkins, get lost in the corn maze, and go on a hayride. An unexpected bonus of the trip was the corn husker. I grew up in New York City and had never seen one before, and I thought it was the coolest device ever – just a few moving parts were enough to get the job done.

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Party Video Games: Design for New Users

Games are an interesting design challenge because if they’re too easy they’re no fun, and if they’re too hard they’re no fun, and “easy” and “hard” may be different for different people. Party games, or video games that you’d break out with a group of friends, are a special challenge because they need to be fun for the group, which may contain people with mixed skill levels or experience. Wii Sports is a great video game because the direct interaction style is fun. Want to swing the tennis racket? Just swing the controller! But it quickly became a party game, even for people that didn’t play video games. Why? Because it was intuitive, easy to learn. No need to memorize complex combinations of button presses used in many video games. Instead, people could pick up a controller and start playing immediately.

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