Ok, ok... The movie's enacted. But the feeling's real enough...

Technorati Tags: consumer electronics, consumer product usability, usability

Lateral thinking guru and futurist (among others) Edward de Bono has published an engaging book on simplicity, featuring among others principles of simplicity in design and hilarious quotes such as "An older woman in Holland spend a week in a shopping mall because she could not find the exit". Food for thought in a book that is simply called Simplicity.



MIT professor and Philips Simplicity Advisory Board member John Maeda has turned his blog on the laws of simplicity into a book, which is appropriately entitled The Laws of Simplicity. Originally - on his blog - he had 16 laws of simplicity, which were then reduced by three, and now in the book it's ten laws. A good demonstration of how to simplify simplicity

Technorati Tags: usability

An appealing design (left) with a 'cute' UI (on the right, click image to enlarge)

A colleague of mine brought this Thomson radio to my attention. It was designed, or as it says on the device 'art-directed', by design-guru Philippe Starck, but actually designed by. And as appealing as it might look, my colleague's neighbor was not able to adjust the volume. That might lead you to question my colleague's neighbor mental health, until you take a closer look at the user interface on the device. I once read the UI design mantra 'Cute' is not a good adjective for systems. Hear hear. But then again, we're talking 'design' here, so usability might not be the highest priority for this device/target group.

Technorati Tags: consumer product usability, consumer products, design example, usability

From an ergonomics point of view the laptop is a torturing device, causing for example neck pains and tense shoulders. Over time several solutions have been brought up, including laptop stands such as the ErgoQ, laptops with detachable keyboards, and a wireless mouse that charges in your PCMCIA slot. And now we have a new addition to that illustrious group. The flybook is a laptop with a screen that can be set at variable heights.

Donald Norman has an essay on his website about minimizing annoyance for mobile phone users.

Nearly one in three (30%) adults say the cell phone is the invention they most hate but cannot live without, according to the eighth annual Lemelson-MIT Invention Index study.

Technorati Tags: consumer electronics, consumer product usability, consumer products, usability

Apparently there's a whole bunch of things that can go wrong when you use the Nintendo Wii game console. For instance, you should not try to dress it up to look like Garfield (as shown above). See all the warnings here. And then there's this post at vgblogger.com featuring some movies of how first time users are able to deal with the thing. Although one should not that these first-time users did not use the Wii entirely voluntarily.


And is it just me, or do the Wii controllers really look like a remote for an in-hospital entertainment system to others as well?

Thanks to Bob for the tip.

Technorati Tags: consumer electronics, consumer product usability, manuals, usability, usability study

Reporters of the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant got the opportunity to try out the new Opel Corsa with an integrated bicycle rack (is this a typical product for the Dutch market?). After having tried to fit his bike to is for 45 minutes, having broken several components and his bike the reporter gave up, and called Opel to tell them that he could not figure out their product. Opel sent a technical guy who installed the reporters bike solidly in 5 minutes. The reporters conclusion was that he did not do his homework. My conclusion is that Opel designed a bicycle rack that's too hard to use and their help-desk will receive a lot more phone-calls. Fortunately for us there's a movie of the whole thing (in Dutch only).

Technorati Tags: consumer product usability, design example, automotive, usability