Dr. Ryan Urquhart joins HumanCentric’s Team

Dr. Ryan L. Urquhart has established himself as a researcher, engineer, educator and speaker. We are excited to announce that he has joined HumanCentric as a Senior Human Factors Specialist. Prior to joining HumanCentric, he was employed by International Business Machines (IBM), located in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. While at IBM, his focus was providing human factors support for IBM’s WebSphere and Tivoli software brands. He currently has 4 patents pending as well as numerous publications and technical reports.

His expertise is in the area of human audition, noise and performance, speech intelligibility, and human-system interaction. His formal background is in Industrial and Systems Engineering with an emphasis in Human Factors Engineering. Over the span of 10 years, he has applied human factors principles to a variety of domains and clients, both in government and industry. Prior to joining HumanCentric, the list of clients he has worked with includes: Thomson Reuters, JP Morgan Chase, Sony Ericsson, Thomson Consumer Electronics, Royal Bank of Scotland, and Army Research Laboratory, to name a few.

Dr. Urquhart obtained his Doctoral degree from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Industrial and Systems Engineering, with a concentration in Human Factors Engineering. He received his Master’s and Bachelor’s Degrees in Industrial and Systems Engineering from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. He’s a member of the Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE) and Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES), where he serves as chairperson of the System Design Technical Group.

Learn more about Ryan on LinkedIn
www.linkedin.com/in/drryan

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Kroger’s ScanTunnel recognized as a Top Innovation at the National Retail Federation’s annual Big Show

Kroger’s new Advantage Checkout ScanTunnel was recognized as a top innovation at the National Retail Federation’s annual Big Show this January 2011. Throughout 2010 Kroger has been working with HumanCentric’s Usability Specialists, Industrial Designers and Graphic Designers in order to design all aspects of the ScanTunnel that are user-related. HumanCentric provided ergonomic recommendations for component layouts, customer and associate work flow analysis, product form factor options, and graphic signage in addition to observing shoppers and sales associates during the checkout process both with and without the ScanTunnel technology.

The final ScanTunnel design has resulted in a revolutionary new approach to Point of Sale and retail checkout that involves high speed imaging of bar codes or other identifiers to reduce labor costs and high speed conveyors send groceries through the checkout process in half the time.

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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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First look at the Logitech Revue with Google TV

The Logitech Revue shipped out late last week. It’s the cheapest way to get Google TV into your home entertainment system. The Google TV interface is very similar to Apple TV, Boxee, and other competitors. Unfortunately, Hulu connectivity is missing out-of-the-box, but there is a workaround that requires some easy adjustment to settings.

Overall, I am impressed. I love the size and feel of the keyboard (pictured on the right). Unfortunately, I will need to send mine back since I decided to cut the cord on cable TV service and there is no way to hook up my HD antenna to the Revue box. Google TV’s connectivity to online streaming services such as Amazon VOD and Pandora is not a selling feature by itself. Google TV really shines when it’s paired with a cable or satellite box. The purpose is to provide one interface to access your content, whether the content is live on TV, prerecorded on your DVR, or available for streaming online.

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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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The Internet is now on HDTVs… and here’s the remote.

Google TV, Apple TV, Roku, or Boxee… who is going to win the Internet-enabled TV war? Sony is hoping for Google TV and above is their remote control for the Sony Internet TV, the first HDTV with Google TV built-in. You probably have seen it on a commercial.

The first thought that crossed my mind when I saw this remote was “is this really what I’m going to use to control my TV?”. I’ve been wary of remote controls since CES earlier this year, and I am very concerned that the first round of these remote controls will be clunky and frustrating to use. I am not convinced that simply shrinking the keyboard down is the way to go. At least it looks like it will be very difficult to lose the remote!

As a Logitech fanboy, I have already pre-ordered my Logitech Revue (for Google TV), which will feature a compact keyboard and iPhone/smartphone apps. I’m not convinced that a full or compact keyboard is the best approach for Internet TV either, but it sure does seem a lot better than the alternatives presented by Sony, Boxee, and Apple.

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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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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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Apple’s FaceTime ads trigger emotions and wallets

I’d like to first say that I dislike Apple’s new ads that showcase their FaceTime feature. They feel cheap and are as painful to watch as a sitcom with poor acting. At the same time, I also think that they are brilliant.

FaceTime is one of Apple’s new features for iPhone 4 that supports video chatting with other iPhone 4 users (if you’re both using a Wi-Fi connection). The iPhone 4 has a new camera in the front so you can see who you are talking to (and they can see you). Get a tissue box ready and watch one of the ads:

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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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