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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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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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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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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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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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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Cheap Interactive Prototyping with HTML

An interactive prototype is a useful tool for a designer to relay and test their vision.  Send a prototype to your stakeholders for their approval.  Have participants use it during user testing.  Give it to your developers so they understand the final product.

There are many prototyping tools out there, from Visio to iRise, OmniGraffle to SketchFlow, Flash to Expression Blend, all with widely varying costs, features and limitations. Might I suggest using HTML, CSS and JavaScript?  Often used for web development, they can also be used to create your interactive prototypes.

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Reuse our Recycling Presentation on Prezi

Our friends over at Prezi just released a new feature – Reusable Prezis.  This new feature allows you to start with an existing presentation that was created by any member who chooses to share their work – you can keep the layout, keep the content, improve it, or just mix it up however you like.  We are excited to say that our presentation for the TriUPA Design Challenge is one of the featured Prezis selected for the initial feature rollout. We can’t wait to see how you use it – please share our work with the rest of the world as you see fit and be sure to let us know if you find it helpful for any of your upcoming presentations.

For those of you who don’t know already, Prezi is a fun and unique alternative to PowerPoint.  It does away with the concept of “slides” and has helped us find interesting ways to share the “big picture” during our presentations, especially when we are speaking in front of larger groups.  It is a relatively new tool for our team, but we have found that it gives us a little edge that helps to set our work apart. We hope it will do the same for you!

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