Tag Archive for usability

Conceptual Design, Errors, Featured, Interaction Design, Interface Design, Perception, Perceptual Blindness, Perceptual Focus Errors, Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy

Where to post the “OK” Button on the Screen?

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OK Button on Early Mac

I have very strong opinions about where on the screen the OK or NEXT or SUBMIT buttons go in relation to CANCEL. Without giving it away, I’m going to walk through the design decision tree and provide a lot of references for both sides of the issue — yes, there are strong feelings about the right versus the left position choice. I’m not alone! Passive versus Active Buttons Active Buttons are the ones that advance the action to the next level. Passive ones return the users to previous state, negate the action sequence. OKAY, OK, NEXT, SUBMIT, ACCEPT, GO are all active buttons. CANCEL, BACK, PREVIOUS are action that reverse forward momentum and push the user to places they’ve been before. HELP and INFO sidetrack the user and distract from forward thrust of activity. In general, product designers want to move the users toward their goals — thus we want the perceptual focus to be on the action buttons. We want to make sure that users fist see the way forward, and then click on the right button that propels them forward to completion of the task. All distractions and side movements should be downplayed with Interface Design with the…

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Conceptual Design, Interaction Design, Interface Design, Perception, Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy, Scaffolding, Users

Special Preview: Wearable Computing (Steve Mann)

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The next chapter in the Interaction-Design.org tome on human-computer interaction design is now up for an early review to my readers. This chapter takes on Wearable Computing and is written by Steve Mann. Mostly, this is a historical review of Prof. Mann’s experimentations with wearable computing devices, and for those unfamiliar with this subject area, this is an interesting introduction. On the left, you can see an early version of wearable computing: Steve Mann’s backpack based system from the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. But as always, I have a slightly different take on this topic… The Little Mac That Saved My Son’s Life Almost 18 years ago, I went into a preterm labor. At 24 and a half weeks into gestation, this was very scary. At the time, San Francisco Children’s Hospital was pioneering a program for high risk pregnancies (which mine just turned out to be). Two doctors, Dr. Kuts and Dr. Maine, figured out how to use an old Mac SE, a modem, a telephone, a subcutaneous pump, and a belt which measures contractions to allow women like me to stay at home as much as we could (as opposed to spending months in the hospital). Here’s…

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Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy

Special Preview: Disruptive Innovation

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Needs-satisfaction Curve of a technology by D. A. Norman

Interaction-Design.org The folks from Interaction-Design.org have just completed their newest chapter: “Disruptive Innovation” by Clayton M. Christensen. This chapter is an excerpt from Dr. Christensen’s 1997 book “The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail,” published by Harvard Business Press. His newer book, “The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators,” published in 2011 on Kindle, is a follow up to the ideas in the first book and those expressed in the Interaction-Design.org chapter. Disruptive Innovation The main idea of this chapter can be summed up by Donald A. Norman’s graph (see below). This is a graph of product performance over time — think of “product” is its most expansive form. When the product is first introduced into the market, it might not be “ready for prime time”, as we say — meaning that the product is: difficult to use, or too expensive, or replacing a well-established way of doing things, or has a high learning curve: even difficult to use products can have a shallow learning curve that allows small accomplishments right away by novice users, or requires a large ecosystem of other products and services that are not widely available: think electric cars…

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Attention, Attention Controls Errors, Conceptual Design, Personality, Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy, Scaffolding, Working Memory

Emotional Scaffolding

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Processing emotions takes time and energy. Part of the working memory is taken up by analyzing the emotional state of others, environmental stresses, personal feelings, and anxiety. Since working memory is an extremely limited resource, anything that takes up space there without our bidding (against our will) takes away from our ability to think through situations, to problem solve, and to make well-reasoned decisions. Instead of thinking, we are using up the working memory for processing emotions. Sometimes, emotions are just the right thing to focus on — to pay attention to. How does this painting makes me feel? Do I like this person? This music feels good… But if you are taking a math test, focusing on how much you really hate test-taking takes away from your ability to take the test. It is very common for individuals to “get” the subject matter, but fail the test. Some people are good at dealing with anxieties and some have trouble controlling their attention controls away from fretting. That’s one of the reason some educators are talking about doing away with summative assessments (final exams) in favor of continuous assessment (assessment as part of learning) — the on-going observation of students’…

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Interaction Design, Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy, Scaffolding

Special Preview: Philosophy of Interaction and User Experience

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A person uses a piece of software, a Web site, or any other product — “virtual” or “real” — to achieve a goal. The design of interaction with these products can either help or form obstacles that interfere with the realization of that goal. A product is easier to use when its interaction is designed to meet the needs of its intended audience. Product designers who consider those needs produce far more effective interaction solutions than those who base their designs on aesthetics or business needs alone. But how does one go about “considering” user needs and then come up with a design solution that works? Oscar Wilde famously said: The pure and simple truth is rarely pure and never simple. Pure and Simple design is similarly rarely pure and never simple to develop. I my class, Cognitive tools for Product Designers, we explore what users bring to usability. We all arrive at the scene with different baggage — our experiences, education, perception, memory, and so on are unique to each of us. No two individuals interpret an experience in exactly the same way. While this sounds daunting, we shouldn’t give up on design all together. We all have some…

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Attention, Background Knowledge, Conceptual Design, Interaction Design, Language, Perception, Pipsqueak Articles, Product Design Strategy

Thinking about the Science of Communication and Interaction

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Alien Senses

In the Galaxy Far Far Away… What if sentient being evolved on a planet with permanent cloud cover? What if these being never saw stars? Would they still be able to discover the laws of nature? These kinds of hypothetical thinking questions — the Gedankan Experiments, as Einstein put it — are very useful in science. I’ll try to use them here for analyzing product design and communication. So what senses do we need to communicate? And what body appendages are necessary to produce this communication? Note that it helps keep track of these separately. Aroma-bet When I was little, I “designed” a language based on smell: each smell was assigned a character in an alphabet and, strung together in sequence, my smelly letters transcribed into words — the Aroma-bet. There were several problems with this: It was difficult to get an alphabet-worth of distinct odors; Arranged next to each other, the odors started to blend into each other, making “reading” difficult; I got a very bad headache; My mom didn’t like her expensive perfumes used in such a creative way… And I couldn’t remember what letter each smell stood for, requiring the creation of a smell-o-dictionary, which in turn…

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