• 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!

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.

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.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) is chartered with protecting the public from bad product design and recalls thousands of cribs due to the inability of some parents to follow directions. Now granted, often many designs and instructions for assembly are so bad as to be flagrant violations of all that is “design holy”, still three to four million cribs. And why, because a handful of children are injured, a smaller number die. Please don’t over-react. I understand the anguish of parents who lose a child or who are feeling guilty because their child was harmed or frightened.  I get the anger they feel in this day and age over desperately needing to find the right scapegoat. However, the penalty seems to vastly outweigh the crime here and the solution seems to be all wrong.

Along with cribs, we now see a recall of 3.4 million window shades by IKEA. Why? Because a child almost choked by having the cord wrapped around its neck. The agency says about 500 children have choked to death since the early 1980s. They estimate about one child a month dies. This is horrible, but design cannot replace the watchful eye of parents. Design recalls cannot replace the common sense and even “over-protectiveness” and “hyper-vigilance” parents need to exhibit for their infants and toddlers. There are far more creative ways for an infant or toddler to harm them selves than we think because we survived, probably due to our parents over-protective natures, when we were growing up.

Recalls have severe impacts on all the stakeholders. Manufacturers, distributors, retailers are all hurt, some even destroyed by such recalls. Consumers are often left with poorly designed and dangerous items because the cost of replacing them is beyond their means. e.g., cribs. The confusion, inconvenience, cost, and disruption of lives due to these mass recalls are manifest. Don’t get me wrong, those who knowingly and willingly introduce poor designs for profit sake, e.g., use of lead-based paint or tainted dry-wall from China, deserve retribution, but often recalls are based on oversights and unintended and unexpected consequences rather than intentional bad practices.

It seems to me as a human factor trained professional who works in product design, usability testing, and safety, that the CPSC and other agencies tasked to protect the consumers in this country have options. Quite simply, the CPSC should require hazard analysis, risk-analysis, and usability testing for all products deemed capable of harming a person. For example; chainsaws, power tools and products children and toddlers interact with should be tested.  Such requirements need to be enforced, especially for products made overseas and sold to the U.S. market. There are professionals and methodologies time-tested and true to accomplish that very goal. The fact that there are businesses, which do not use them, doesn’t mean a company should not be required to do so.

As John Wooden, historic coach of the UCLA basketball program, once said, “If you don’t have time to do it right, when will you ever have time to do it over.” These are truly sentiments of wisdom worth recalling.

The environmental catastrophe happening in the Gulf is horrific. No one really understands the ecological consequences from this mistake yet. In a CBS survey, 70 percent disapproved of BP’s response. Designers agree too and are using their voice to express their disapproval. Greenpeace is asking for a redesign of BP’s logo.

View Logo Gallery

Enter the Greenpeace BP logo redesign competition

Learn more about the Deepwater Horizon oil spill

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].

A Jacaard two-way agreement score is a measure of the similarity or differences within a set of data. It ranges from 0 to 1. If all the items within a dataset differ, the score will be a 0. If all the items within a dataset are exactly the same, the score will be a 1. Thus, higher scores indicated greater similarity of items in the dataset, and thus higher agreement.

Table 1. Agreement scores for novices and experts

As can be seen in this dataset, Novices and Experts had very similar agreement scores, with a few exceptions (outlined in blue).

We also conducted a visual inspection of the data itself . We looked at the detailed results for both Novices and Experts, as shown in Data Analysis (Part 2: Winners and Tails), and looked for differences between the two groups that were explainable based on experience. We found no strong pattern to any of the differences we saw that was explainable based on experience (aside from the pattern already noted above for Zoom In and Zoom Out).

As mentioned in Data Analysis (Part 3: Cultural Differences), however, we investigated the cause of the seemingly cultural influence on Scroll Up, Scroll Down, Back, and Forward. These actions are directional in nature (people tended to view the Back Action as retrieving a page to the left of the visible page and the Forward action as retrieving a page to the right of the visible page). In each of these, roughly half the participants scrolled one way while the other half scrolled the other way. In looking at this data a little more closely, it shows France and Spain tending to go one direction with many of the other countries going the other direction. At first, we thought this may be a cultural difference. However, when looking at the data closely, we discovered it was actually an experiential difference.

Swiping up to scroll down is a behavior found in most touchscreen devices that do not show scroll bars and that are “finger-driven” touchscreen interfaces. Swiping down to scroll down is a behavior found in most non-touchscreen devices (those that use navigation keys) and in touchscreen interfaces that do show a scroll bar, most commonly found on “stylus-driven” touchscreen interfaces. We hypothesized that experience with finger-driven interfaces may provide a better explanation of the differences that we saw in these actions

So, we classified every user’s phone as a “finger-driven” touchscreen phone, a “stylus-driven” touchscreen phone, or not (“none”) a touchscreen phone at all (made up of the Novices in this study). We then looked at the number of people who own a finger-drive touchscreen phone and the direction that they scrolled, and the number of people who own a stylus-driven touchscreen phone or didn’t own a touchscreen phone at all and the direction that they scrolled. In the end, we found that those who own a finger-driven touchscreen phone were far more likely, in general, to swipe up to Scroll Down, swipe down to Scroll Up, swipe left to go Forward, and swipe right to go Back. Thus, it seems what was once thought to be a cultural difference was in actuality an experiential difference.

Tables 1-4 below show the results of this analysis.

Table 1. Back

Table 2. Forward

Table 3. Scroll Down

Table 4. Scroll Up

>> Follow this research at http://www.humancentric.com/GestureResearch

The first analysis we ran is: did one country use certain gestures more than any other country? To answer this question, we analyzed the top 38 gestures (gestures that had more than 40 people use them) and ran a chi-squared analysis to identify if one country used that gesture more than another. There were no significant differences found in that analysis. Thus, this analysis did not identify any significant differences between countries in their use of the top gestures.

The second analysis we ran was to assess whether one country used certain types of gestures more than another. We classified all the gestures into 2 categories:

1. Direct manipulation
2. Symbolic

A direct manipulation gesture is a gesture where the participant using gestures that relate at least loosely to the real world. So, to move an object, the participant touches the object and then physically drags it to a new location. Or, to scroll, the user will touch the screen and push it one direction or another.

A symbolic gesture is a gesture where the participant creates a symbol that conveys a desired action, such as drawing a question mark for help or making an “x” over an object to delete it.

We ran an Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) to evaluate the use of direct manipulation versus symbolic gestures. We ran an 8 x 2 x 2 ANOVA to analyze the differences shown by 8 Countries (China, Finland, France, Germany, Finland, India, Spain, UK, USA),  2 Genders (Male, Female), and 2 levels of Experience (Expert, Novice). This analysis showed the main effect of Country was significant (p <0.01), as was the interaction between Country and Gender (p < 0.05). The main effect of Country was very interesting and we looked at it in more detail. Subsequent analyses showed the following differences depicted in Figure 1.

Figure 1:

The third analysis we conducted was actually more of a visual inspection of the data itself. We looked at the detailed results from each country, as shown in Data Analysis (Part 2: Winners and Tails), and looked for differences between countries that were explainable based on culture. We found no pattern to any of the differences we saw that was explainable as based on culture (aside from the pattern already noted above that Chinese participants used more symbolic gestures than any other country). We did find a pattern that at first looked like a cultural difference (see the results for Scroll Up, Scroll Down, Back, and Forward), but in further analyses discovered that it was actually an experiential difference, which we will discuss next.

>> Follow this research at http://www.humancentric.com/GestureResearch

According to an article in the May 17, 2010 News & Observer, a young man died on the road between Pinehurst and Sanford near the intersection of US 1 and NC 42. The report indicated that he hit a car head-on in the northbound lane of US 1. The car he hit had no lights on according to witnesses. One witness said the car was stopped. The driver of the dark vehicle was also killed. The young man hit it at speed head-on, suggesting that the “dark” vehicle was heading the wrong way or somehow got turned around in the northbound lanes. The police told his father that “they doubted that he ever saw it.” What a waste. High school aged, football star, coming home from seeing his girlfriend at her home in Pinehurst. Gone in the blink of an eye.

Gone in the blink of an eye that could not see the danger ahead in the road. Even something as large as an automobile. Even though his car lights were working fine. While this blog opens with a tragic story, its point focuses squarely on issues of visibility, conspicuity, and night vision. When our highway speeds outrun our headlights, our vision at night fails to protect us. When an object is dark, our closing rates can preclude our ability to see, think, and react. The end result is often fatal.

3M Corporation in the 1970s developed a product line referred to as “retroreflective” material. It was a fabric coated in a liquid which contained thousands of small hemispheric shaped “half” beads which possessed a mirrored concave interior. When struck by a light source, the hemispheric mirrored shape concentrates the light and actually reflects a more concentrated light back toward the source. As a result even poorly lit objects could be seen from much larger distances and the conspicuity of these objects is enhanced many fold. Conspicuity is different from visibility in the sense that an object can be made more conspicuous relative to other objects in the visual field. In other words, within the field of visibility, some objects become more conspicuous than others, thereby drawing our attention to them and increasing our awareness of them. All objects are visible, but some standout more. The beauty of this technology is that it exists in varying forms such as fabric and paint. It is cheap, time-tested, and true. More importantly, it is passive, requiring no energy source, no switch, no effort or workload.

Now to the point, we have all seen this technology on bicycles and baby carriages. We have seen it a thousand times on jogging clothes including jackets, shirts, and shoes. We have used it on highway signs, motorcycles, helmets, and even on the rear of truck trailers. Research demonstrated years ago that when retroreflective tape was used around the border on the rear of a truck trailer, following drivers could better judge their closing rate and adjust their speed or lane changes accordingly and more safely. I know something about this because in the 70s, I did research on coal mining that used different patterns of retroreflective fabric on miners’ suits to improve their conspicuity to equipment operators and each other in the mines. Today mining safety inspectors as well as other miners continue to use such materials on their coats and helmets.

Another positive aspect of the material is that it is cheap relatively speaking to other options for improving safety. How you might ask does this relate to the tragedy with which I opened this blog? How, in all these years, in a danger filled activity such as driving at night, have we decided that cars should have only “active” lighting systems? Why do car manufacturers not employ “passive” materials known to increase conspicuity and, as a result, safety in night driving situations. Here we have a technology that has been around for 40 years that improves visibility and conspicuity, increases attention grabbing characteristics of objects, makes drivers more alert to dangers, increases the distance at which drivers can effectively function at night. Something that has been in use for many years in highway related designs and yet, is not employed as a part of the required safety system in the design of automobiles.

Like the high mounted center tail brake light which immediately reduced rear collisions in traffic, such a simple and elegant human factored answer to the problem could easily be realized. Imagine that the young man had been able to see the car beyond his headlights, it glowed and attracted his attention, he slowed immediately, if for no other reason than curiosity, and he realized early enough that it was something in the wrong place at the wrong time, at all costs to be avoided.

Had automobile designers, manufacturers, and regulators employed such a low-cost, simple improvement as requiring the implementation of retroreflective paint on the automobile, perhaps one young man driving from Pinehurst to Sanford on a dark night in North Carolina would be still be alive.