• 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?

The toothbrush takes care of the aspects of brushing my teeth that a machine is best at.

• It vibrates the head of the toothbrush, moving the bristles across my teeth much faster than I could ever hope to do (machines are better at small, repetitive motions).
• It automatically stops after the ADA-recommended 2 minutes, so I keep brushing until it stops (machines are better at judging time).
• It has a special beep (really a brief change in the vibrating speed) every 30 seconds that lets me know when to switch quadrants, so that I don’t over- or under-brush different areas (again with the time).
• It even has a quick 1- minute mode for days when I’m in a rush to make sure I get at least some minimal brushing in, since humans are even worse at judging time when they’re stressed (machines don’t get stressed about being late).

That leaves me, the human, to focus on the things that I’m better at, like slowly moving the toothbrush and getting that brush head into the back corners of my mouth. I get better brushing coverage, since I’m not distracted by trying to also keep up the repetitive brushing motions (humans aren’t very good at doing multiple things at once).

Cleaner teeth and a quick lesson in function allocation. I love it!

There are some problems with consumer products that you don’t discover until people start using them. For example, I bought my iPad in April, but it wasn’t until June when I started wearing shorts that I realized that the metal back is really cold! However, this is a problem that the mobile phone industry has known about for years. It was one of the factors in moving from external to internal antennas; users like to rest a finger on the antenna while making calls, which greatly interferes with reception. It’s because skin is slightly conductive, which is exactly why Apple can use a capacitive touchscreen on the iPhone (instead of a resistive touchscreen, which requires pressure), and why you can’t use your iPhone with gloves on.

Using this external antenna was a carefully deliberated decision by Apple to achieve a particular look and shape. As a consulting company that works in product design, we are very aware that there are tradeoffs to be made between usability and design. In our own design process, we try to carefully balance aesthetics, fun, ease of use, and efficiency. You take into account how the product looks, how people react to it, how they use it, how many people will experience anticipated difficulties, and how severe these difficulties are. Not wanting to put a cold iPad on my lap? Not a big problem. Dropping a call because I’m holding my phone wrong? Huge! Apple is known for pursing elegant designs, which is why the front of the iPhone only has one button and their mice have none, but design should never come at the expense of basic functionality.

According to engadget, Apple’s suggestion is to hold the phone a different way. That’s ridiculous! It goes against one of our mottos in Human Factors and Usability, “fit the task to the person, not the person to the task.”  Or you can buy a case. This is why Apple has for the first time released their own iPhone cases, called bumpers, which insulate the band from your hand. I hear they’re selling like hotcakes. But I’ve never put a case on my iPod Touch, it’s too beautiful and thin, and certainly don’t want to cover up my lovely new iPhone. So now I have to choose between a phone with stunningly beautiful industrial design, or a phone hidden inside a case that can actually make calls. Completely ridiculous!

I’m sure that in a few weeks there will be dozens of companies offering their own cases and solutions, and hopefully some of them will be more elegant than the plastic bumpers from Apple. But shame on you, Apple, for giving design a bad name by creating a phone that forces you to choose between aesthetics and functionality! No one should have to make that choice.

Do you have long fingernails? Do you live in a cold climate and often wear gloves? Well, device manufacturers may be ignoring you.

There are two popular types of touchscreens: capacitive and resistive. Capactive touchscreens (e.g. iPhone or iPod Touch) work when a conductive object (e.g. finger or stylus) touches the screen. Resistive touchscreens (e.g. Garmin or TomTom GPS unit) work when pressure is applied to the screen. Digitimes reported on February 12th that most Taiwanese touchscreen manufacturers are not going to manufacture resistive touchscreens anymore.

Personally, I prefer capacitive touchscreens and I think that the majority of people do too. It doesn’t get too cold in North Carolina, but I did need to buy some special gloves that work with my iPhone. However, there is a market for resistive touchscreens and we see it in our usability labs at HumanCentric all the time.

Device manufacturers should strive to explain both types of screens and give their customers an option instead of forcing them to conform.

Come see some of the new ‘sophisticated and sleek‘ home decor accessories HumanCentric designed with PartyLite.

You will find traditional objects with a modern twist. Keep an eye out for lotus-inspired flourishes and obelisks that have found new life in new materials.

The Super Mario Party series of games has been a popular Nintendo party game for years, and it’s now on its 8th version. The game is oriented around dozens of mini-games, short games that last only a few minutes. Losing a single game isn’t a big deal because you play so many, and different people will be good at different mini games. You can also play a game in “practice” mode as many times as you like before starting the formal competition, which is important because in a 2-minute game you don’t have time to learn the controls. But the way the instructions are presented is terrible, so I found myself skipping the training and relying on my nieces and nephews to explain the rules. When I did really badly we’d go back to read the instructions and discover they’d been playing it wrong for weeks. Here’s why I disliked the instructions:

• Instructions are in a separate screen that you have to choose to read. No six-year-old (and few adults) will stop to read instructions before playing.
• There is a time gap between reading and using a move, so you are likely to forget it.
• All the moves are presented together, which makes them harder to learn than when you only learn one at a time.
• As an experienced user, watching someone read instructions is supremely boring.  I felt bad making the kids sit and watch while I read the instructions.

Wii Sports Resort has dozens of sports games, ranging from archery to skydiving to frisbee golf to swordplay, and each with several play variations (individual, team competitions, etc.). Like Mario Party, it’s a great party game because it has a variety of mini games to choose from. But it’s better because even though each game requires a different use of the controller, Nintendo has done an outstanding job of of integrating training into the game to helping newbies start playing.

Here’s what Wii Sports Resort did better than Mario Party 8:

• Practice mode allows you to learn the moves before starting a timed/scored/competitive game.
• Instructions are interspersed into the practice, with text overlaid on top of the screen as you try the move. It’s better for you because you can read the instructions while trying them out. It’s also better for everyone else because watching someone play a practice mode more entertaining than watching them read, and at least you can laugh when they swing their racket five times and still miss the ball.
• You are presented with one move at a time, and have time to practice before learning the next.
• Illustrations provide a basic level of instructions for those that can’t read, like young children.
• You use your own Mii (personalized avatar), and it remembers which Miis have been trained.
• Practice is always available if you want to repeat it.
• Games are used for sports that require extended training, such learning to steer your canoe by collecting ducklings and returning them to their mother, or learning how to aim your frisbee by popping balloons.

Wii Sports and Wii Sports Resort are great games because swinging the controller is like swinging a bat or a racket or a golf club, which makes it lots of fun. But what interests me as a product designer is that Nintendo has done such a good job of desiging the games for ease of learning.  This is a key element for party games, to make sure that someone other than the game owner has fun. If you are designing instructional media, I highly recommend playing these games to see some examples of good instructional design. A game should be challenging because it’s a good game, not because it’s hard to learn the controls.

Zomm has created a keychain fob that’s a Bluetooth accessory for your phone. It pairs with your mobile phone, and then it beeps if it gets more than 50 yards away from your phone, to help you remember to take your phone with  you.  It also doubles as a personal alarm and way to talk to emergency personnel. The folks at CES also thought it was cool, they awarded it “The Best of Innovations” Award. This is a great example of design to avoid mistakes. For many of us it’s pretty difficult to leave home without keys because we have to lock the front door and start the car, but it’s much easier to forget your phone at home or on a table at a restaurant. With Zomm, as long as you have your keys, you’ll remember your phone.  If you keep your phone in your purse it can help you remember both, but if you forget your keys too you’re completely stuck.

The Internet is coming back in a big way to HDTVs. Since WebTV debuted in 1996, things have certainly changed. The biggest revelation is that we’ve realized we don’t want websites to look the same way that they do on our computers. The past two years of CES have introduced a large number of Internet-ready set-top boxes (STBs) and Internet-enabled TVs. Along with these changes, I’m afraid that something is being overlooked, something small but very necessary: the keyboard.

Source: Gizmodo

The above image scares me for three reasons: (1) it seems Vizio is stepping into the physical keyboard arena for the first time,  (2) I don’t use the remote that came with my TVs and (3) I don’t want a bigger remote for every STB that has text input. I’ve been a longtime supporter of Logitech’s Harmony Remotes, and I hope that they will create a solution soon to accommodate this problem. There’s also the possibility of mobile phone apps that can control devices over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. The Apple TV remote iPhone application works great, for example.

TV/STB manufacturers need to accept the fact that the remote control business does not have to be tied to the display business. The idea of buying a TV without a remote control included may seem strange. But isn’t is also strange that I have several remotes sitting in my media console that will never be used? Physical keyboards are actually very complex, and I think TV manufacturers are better off investing in their core product and partnering with a universal remote company. The remote control is an accessory just like audio/video cables, speakers, and receivers.

If you haven’t heard, the entire surface of the Magic Mouse is touch-sensitive, and the mouse supports several touch gestures for interacting with your computer. So head on over to our other blog, TouchThinking, and read all about it!

TouchThinking is a gestural interfaces blog that members of the International Usability Partners contribute to (including us, HumanCentric).

I had always used a can opener like (A), where the body of the can opener is positioned along the side of the can, and you squeeze the handles together and turn the knob to open the can. My new can opener was a lot like (B). It still had two handles that you squeeze and a knob that you turn, but you place it on top of the can instead of on the side. I tried to use it in the same orientation as my old can opener, and it chewed up the edge without cutting anything. There were several traditional human factors design issues at play.

Mental models, or our internal understanding of how something works: I expected to hold the can opener to the side of the can because that’s what I’d done before. If I’d seen a commercial or photo of the product in use I might not have tried to use it the way I did, but without those tips I went on my personal knowledge of how can openers work. Can opener (C) is also a smooth-edge can opener, but has been designed so that you hold it to the side of the can, like my old one, which matches my mental model of how can openers work.

Cognitive affordances, or design clues that show us how to interact with a product: the new can opener looked very similar to my old one, and didn’t have enough visual clues to show me how to use it properly. Can opener (D) has a flat surface that looks like it should mate with the top of the can; if it were curved, then you’d put it on the side of the can.

Physical affordances, or design that physically allows you to do something: the new can opener was physically able to engage the can in the wrong orientation, but wasn’t able to actually cut. Can opener (D) has clear cognitive affordances that indicate you should lay it flat along the side or top of the can. But if you try to lay it along the side of a can sitting on a table, you quickly discover that it’s too tall, it just can’t be done, the can opener doesn’t physically afford placing it along the side of the can. You have to place it along the lid, forcing you into the correct position.

If you ever used 5.25″ floppy disks, you’ll remember that 3.5″ disks were a huge improvement because they had better physical affordances. Floppy disks are basically flat squares, so you can insert them 8 different ways. The smaller floppies were slightly rectangular, and had some holes and a diagonal cut corner that meant you could only insert them one way. The cognitive affordances were still poor, and it still took several tries to figure out the right orientation, but only one orientation would slide all the way in.

USB plugs are all designed so that they can only be inserted in the correct orientation, but they have varying degrees of cognitive affordances to give you hints about the correct orientation. I find the tiny ones so small that I can’t see which way to orient them, and the big flat ones look so similar from a distance that I can’t tell, but the square ones I always get right the first try.

For another example of physical and cognitive affordances, check out our blog about the Sidekick LX.

All-in-all, the iPhone has delivered on that promise. Nothing demonstrated that better than a recent trip to Paris. I have done a bit of international travel, but this was to be my first time to France. France is famous for not wanting to speak English to tourists and I don’t know a lick of French and I was traveling alone, so I did more than my usual preparations for this trip.

The best thing I did, though, was to take my iPhone and to find 3^rd Party apps that would be useful. After calling AT&T and purchasing an international data plan for one month, I downloaded a number of great applications to help me get around.

Metro Paris – this one was perhaps my favorite. It contained a map of all the metro stations, their names, and schedules. It also determined the best route to get from one station to another. I was able to get around to just about anywhere in Paris on the Metro

Paris – This is an offline map of Paris. It contains names of the main roads and names of all the Metro stations superimposed on the map. Best of all, it was GPS enabled and could plot my location on the map.

Between these two apps, I was able to get around Paris very easily. Using Paris, I could plot where I was and find the nearest Metro station. Once at a Metro station, I could use Metro Paris to get anywhere else in Paris. And, I could do all this without carrying around a map and looking like a tourist the entire time. When I needed greater accuracy or needed to know which direction I was facing, I could use Google Maps. But since that used data and the other apps didn’t, I used Google Maps rarely. With these apps, I never got lost at all and always knew where I was and how to get to anywhere else.

French Pro – This was a great app for translating English into French. It is cleverly laid out to quickly find the French phase you need and even speaks it so you can simply imitate the sounds. It’s not great for learning how to hold a conversation, but it is great for asking a simple question.

With these 3 apps, I had no trouble getting anywhere or asking for anything I needed in Paris. This made my trip to Paris that much more fun and demonstrated the power and value of 3^rd party apps when cleverly designed.

Oh yea, it placed phone calls too.