Caps Lock key demoted

After years of suffering through accidental CAPITALIZATIONS and wondering why keyboard manufacturers give such prominence and high priority to the Caps Lock key, I decided to simply remove it. And wha-la, my life is all the better for it. The key functions remain in tact, as anyone who has accidentally popped a key will tell you, but now, the rubberized button takes up only about 3 mm of space in my life as opposed to about 2 cm. Granted it isn’t very attractive, but it is highly functional, as the risk accidentally tapping the bubble is significantly less than tapping the entire key. Customization rocks.

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Gesture Research – Data Analysis (Part 2: Winners and Tails)

Once all the data reduction was completed, one of the primary questions we had was, what gestures did participants create the most frequently?

To find out the answer to this question, we first sorted the data from most frequent to least frequent. This resulted in a data table that shows the gestures created, the number of people in each country that created that gesture, the number of experts and novices who created that gesture, and the total number of participants overall who created that gesture, all sorted from most frequent to least frequent.

When looking at the data, we wanted to know, statistically, which gesture(s) were created the most often (which we termed the “winner”) and which gestures were created the least often (which we termed the “tail”).

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Moving on Up and Leaving the Coal Mines Behind

The Massey Upper Big Branch Coal Mine disaster which has dominated the news over the last two weeks raises a disturbing professional notion for me. In the late 1970s I was a student at the California State University of Northridge (CSUN) working with Dr. Mark Sanders trying to attain my Master’s degree in Applied Psychological Research/Human Factors.

My professor offered me a job working with him and his team on a project for the Bureau of Mines (BOM) which existed at that time to conduct health and safety related research in the U.S. mining industry. The team was designing and testing personal safety equipment for “low-seam” coal miners, e.g. helmet, kneepads, gloves. It proved to be a fun, if not thoroughly scary, adventure. It was also something else: it was true to the roots of human factors and ergonomics. It was work that was desperately needed and went to the foundations of human factors and ergonomics because it was intended to improve the quality of work life and safety for people who worked every day in dangerous, harsh conditions that threatened their lives in very real ways.

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Gesture Research – Data Analysis (Part 1: Data Reduction)

WARNING: This blog is a detailed description of the data reduction steps and is not suitable for all audiences. Parental discretion is advised. These are professionals; do not try this at home.

The result of the data collection yielded a detailed spreadsheet of all unique gestures (Gesture Glossary) and a results spreadsheet of all the gestures each participant made for each action in every country.

In all, we had 40 participants in 8 countries and 20 participants in 1 country create gestures for 28 actions, yielding over 9,500 gestures in total. Each of these gestures were catalogued according to the lexicon defined by the research team.

As noted in Data Structure, the lexicon collected very detailed information about each gesture.  This detail will prove useful in many analyses. However, for certain types of data analyses, not all of the detail is needed. At times, the detail of the information resulted in gesture differences that were not meaningful. For example, when someone selects a word to cut or copy, it isn’t significant which direction they swipe to highlight that word. Another example: when someone is performing a page-level command (like scrolling), it doesn’t necessarily matter if they perform that gesture over an object or over whitespace. So, we undertook an effort to combine gestures when the differences between them are not meaningful for a particular action.

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Child uses an iPad for the first time

This video is a reminder that there’s so much we can learn from watching others. This 2.5 year-old discovers a common problem that adults encounter: if you hold the iPad with your thumb on the screen, then you can’t use another finger to select an application on the home screen. The problem is that many people will find it natural to hold the iPad this way and now need to change their behavior to accommodate the device.

I am not sure whether Apple knew about this issue beforehand or not, but it demonstrates the importance of testing before release. Here’s a great quote I saw this morning on Twitter:

“A usability test is going to happen before or after you launch. The question is whether you want to be there or not.” - tsharon

Source: YouTube via Laughing Squid

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Group Think and the Perils of Rule-Based Systems

David Brooks, a columnist for the New York Times contributed an article to the Sunday News & Observer on March 21, 2010.  He wrote well of the contrast between individual thinking, person-to-person, perspectives and decision–making and what he called “group think.”  He points out that individual thinking is driven by the tendencies of fairness, embarrassment, social propriety, kindness, and an understanding for and defense of the “underdog.”  Group think, on the other hand, reflects our tendencies for “us v them” thinking and reflects historical shame fests such as the Jews v Nazis, Tutsis v Hutus, and Shiites v Sunnis.  The contrast, is brilliantly mapped onto our current political theatre, and, for many, is a truly scary scenario when taken to its logical extreme outcome.

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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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Fractions of a Second at the Olympics

When athletes are racing one-by-one instead of next to each other, the closeness of the results are a lot harder to perceive. To illustrate how close some of the results in Vancouver were, the New York Times created  cool interactive piece called Fractions of a Second: An Olympic Musical. Turn your speakers on and try the women’s speedskating 1,000-m.  Can you tell a difference between the top two finishers?

Even with both the audio and visual cues, the .02 of a second difference is impossible for me to distinguish. The physical distance separating the two Olympians would be a lot more meaningful to me. The fact that we are much better at distinguishing distance  is one reason why you’ll notice that consumer products such as turn-by-turn GPS units will use distance instead of time to inform drivers when they need to turn. Distance is tangible, whereas time is invisible and fleeting.

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Reading between the screens

I ran into the flight status screens below at an airport in New York City on my way home to North Carolina. My husband and I stared at these screens for several minutes, looking for our flight and trying not to panic that it had been canceled. Then an airport employee walked past and pointed out that they were not in service. How did both of us miss the NOT IN SERVICE sign taped prominently between the two screens? The sign was right in front of us, but it wasn’t near our place of focus, the actual TV screen, and the writing in pen was hard to see from a distance.

There are so many things that could have made this better: write with a marker, stick it to the middle of the screen, cover the screens with paper, perhaps even turn off the broken screens, if that’s not too much to ask? When something like this happens at home or in a small office everyone just knows to ignore it, but in a public setting a sign like that has to scream so that even idiots like me will notice it.

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Sustainable Olympic Medal Design

I am always fascinated by the design the Olympics. From the environmental graphics down to the tiny icons of each individual sport they all have a special relationship to every host city. The 2010 winter games in Vancouver do not disappoint. See the design process of the first sustainable Olympic medals made from electronic waste.

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