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

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.

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!

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.

I encountered some interface blunders during Logitech’s setup.

One of the steps during setup is to opt-in if you want to receive updates from Logitech (left half of the image above). By default, the box is not checked, but has a grayed out check that looks like it could be checked. So, I naturally checked it then unchecked it to make sure I would not receive emails from Logitech.

Another step is to set up an AV receiver (right half of the image above). I’m not convinced the majority of the public knows what an AV receiver is, but the biggest problem is that the acronym “AVR” is used. I consider myself very tech savvy and I had to think about that acronym because I seldom see or use it.

Other than that, the setup process was pretty good.

My only other complaint centers around HBO GO. If you don’t subscribe to HBO with your cable or satellite service, then you can’t use HBO GO. Back in February, Forrester analysts said that HBO could flip the switch at any point to allow anyone to access its content (for a price). In my opinion, they are missing out on a lot of money by not opening the service to everyone. People understand that HBO is premium TV and would be willing to pay for it if they didn’t want to go the ad-supported route (e.g. Hulu).

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!

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.

The page where you fill out the shipping details has many boxes (10, to be exact), and one of them lets you pick the ship date to print on the shipping label, like this:

There’s another box in the next column that lets you schedule a pickup, like this:

Here’s my assessment of the task and design elements that contributed to my problem.

1. The first box let me choose a date, so in my mind I had already chosen the date I wanted the package to get shipped, check that checkbox in my mind and I didn’t think about it again.
2. The second box has an alert telling me that I can’t schedule pickup service today, but this alert is not next to the date selection box. My eyes skipped all that text and went straight to the pickup times.
3. The alert was purple in an area of black text, and the circle is a similar design element used for the calendar menu – blends right into the page.
4. The second box chose a pickup date for me that was different from my ship date. Because it picked the date automatically, I never reviewed it at all, and it guessed wrong about the day I would want a pickup. Automation is no help if it gets it wrong.
5. The dates are all numbers. Numbers are easy to scan over and miss, and half the time I don’t even know today’s date, so even with the number I could look at it and still not realize that August 16th isn’t today. Both the pickup date here and the date in my confirmation email should list both the numbers and text like Monday, to help prevent me from making a mistake.
6. If the system had been really smart, I think it might have noticed that my pickup date is different from my ship date and asked me if I really meant to do that. I haven’t studied shipping habits, perhaps lots of people do this and they would all get annoyed if there were a confirmation every time they picked a different pickup date from the ship date, but I’m not them and I’m annoyed that it didn’t help me notice this.
7. I think FedEx and I have a different ideas about what “Ship date” means. To me it means the day that the package gets into FedEx’s hands, but that can’t be what it means to them because then they wouldn’t let me set a ship date that’s earlier than my pickup date.

A lot issues here, many of them subtle and difficult to predict or possibly even observe in a usability test session. So while I can’t thank FedEx for picking up my package, I will thank them for an interesting design puzzle to untangle, and an excuse for telling myself that it’s not my fault my package didn’t go out today.

Proximity: page controls are lower and so closer to the page itself.

Error prevention: how many times have you stopped your music because you accidentally used your music tab to browse to a new web page? Now your Pandora tab can turn off the navigation bar to prevent this mistake.

Simplicity: the “navigation toolbar” is simpler because it contains only navigation functions. Browser tabs that don’t need the navigation toolbar can simplify the interface by turning it off.

Context: Web pages can add a toolbar at the top of the page, under the tabs, that makes it easier to access page functions. Since this toolbar is under the tab, it only shows when that tab is selected.

Grouping: the screenshots below illustrate how the current design has page functions (blue) mixed together with navigating to a new page (green) and application functions (yellow), but the new design has a cleaner organization and separation of these features.

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:

Click here to view the embedded video.

When I was a kid, I was an avid reader of the Sunday comics section of The Boston Globe. The Sunday comics were in color and also had exclusive games and questions for kids. One Sunday, I replied to the question “what do you think will be invented by the year 2000?” I answered “phones that you can see who you are talking to” and my name and answer was published the following week (this was a big deal to a kid from Massachusetts!). Little did I know back then that the feature wouldn’t be in demand until the year 2010 and with the iPhone.

One thing that Apple has done well with the iPhone is communicate its value through ads.  They first marketed the iPhone as a do-everything device and showcased different features like YouTube. Beginning in April 2009 they focused on apps, and now they are focusing on FaceTime. All of their ads have made the iPhone look very easy to use.

In the field of user experience (UX), emotion is now seen as a critical element. The release of Patrick Jordan’s Designing Pleasurable Products in 2002 and Don Norman’s Emotional Design in 2003 triggered wide understanding that usability is not the only thing that matters. An easy to use product does not necessarily mean it’s enjoyable to use.

Apple understands that there is value in communicating that its products are enjoyable to use. For example, think about their iPod campaign with silhouettes dancing in front of multi-colored backgrounds with upbeat music.

The FaceTime ads are full of people smiling, laughing, and sharing important moments. The ads make it look like you need to own the device. They use emotion as a persuasion. And that’s why they’re brilliant.

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].