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.

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

The screen on my iPad is gorgeous and I love reading magazines and newspapers on it, but for reading books in bed I go back to my iPhone because it’s light enough to hold in one hand. That’s a big selling point for most dedicated eBook readers, weight. The iPad weighs 24 ounces (1.5 lbs), but the new Kindle weighs just 8.5 ounces, and the Sony weighs just under 9. But I dunno, maybe this guy likes getting a forearm workout while he reads.