A while ago, Dutch Newspaper De Volkskrant pointed out some interesting issues about Microsoft's new office suite in an article on 'A New Guide to the Office Maze.' (subscribers only and in Dutch. So, a summary below).

At a US conference Bill Gates gave the development team of Microsoft Excel a huge compliment for the features they had come up with in the new version of Excel. Too bad that those 'new features' already had been a part of the spreadsheet program for the last three years. Gates had simply not noticed them in the previous version.

However, Gates was in good company. Steve Ballmer (Gates' successor) revealed that most Office users have no idea of what was possible with the software package. "Nine out of ten of the new possibilities people would like to have in the new edition of Office, were already part of the current one," according to marketing manager Paul Coleman. "The users simply couldn't find them."

Research Microsoft performed revealed that office workers that used Office 2003, only used 23 'core features' on a regular basis. For your reference: Microsoft Word alone offers 1500 tasks. By performing an extreme makeover on the user interface of the Office package, Microsoft claims to have been able to raise the number of features that are used regularly to 60 or 70.

Also Read:
Office 2007: Purging Bloat to Fashion Sleek (NY Times)
Microsoft Office 2007 easier to use (Blog of Don Dodge, Director bladiebla manager etc for Microsoft)

Those of you who have been active as DIYs (Do_It_Yourselvers) over the weekend and managed to hit your finger with a hammer or electric screwdriver will be happy to see this: the Magwear magnetic wristband. Holds your screws and nails while you are hammering away happily.

via: core77.

The Ring alarm clock for couples by Meng Fandi did not win this years BraunPrize, but I would buy it straight away. It features two rings that vibrate to wake the one who's wearing it. Thus you can set your own wake up time, sneak out of bed and leave your partner sound asleep. Well thought through, and the BraunPrize jury also gives praise to the elegant design that reflects the image of two people sleeping side by side. That's true, but the design also very elegantly reminds you which of the rings is yours (assuming you always sleep on the same side of the bed...)

(via Bright)

Technorati Tags: consumer product usability, design, interaction design, social interaction

(Picture from bathing-bape)

Apple's choice to only deliver the new iMac with a glossy screen seems to have sparked a lot of discussion. Previously I mentioned that Wired was not entirely pleased with the high-gloss-high-reflection finishing of the screen and a review by David Morgenstern on ZDnet. But some other people are taking punches at gloss finishing as well. Arstechnica's John Siracusa takes a look at the iBook's glossy screen. He illustrates his story with some pictures from a flickr account from a guy named Roger. Siracusa doesn't like blingbling, it seems:

So, what's the big deal? Consider some synonyms for the word "glossy." Gleaming. Shiny. Reflective. Now you're getting it.

Meanwhile, iMac users seem quite enthusiastic about the design choice as can be read on the macrumours forum. On the other hand FileHeadGeorge disagrees on the ZDnet forum (responding to the Morgenstern review), sparking a lot discussion on the subject.
I don't know whether I would prefer glossy or matte. At the moment I would settle for any new iMac, as long as it's given to me. But if I would buy one, I think I would like a choice, as there was for the iBook.

Technorati Tags: consumer product usability, design, usability

(The Tivo remote control, with the clearly visible yellow pause button)

A somewhat older (2004), but insightful story in the NY Times on the development of the Tivo remote control. We all know the omnipresent, but disaster-like remotes, that have an overload of functions neatly arranged in a 7 by 14 matrix of small buttons with even smaller text labels.

A typical remote may have some 40 buttons, with functions that are hard to divine. Often the labels -- ''toggle,'' ''planner'' and the like -- are no help. The device can feel like an afterthought, thrown together without any planning at all.

The TiVo remote control, however, is a device that is so easy to use, it even has the blessing of Mr. Nielsen (no first name needed I presume):

''They did a really good job,'' said Jakob Nielsen of the Nielsen Norman Group, a technology consulting firm in Fremont, Calif. Mr. Nielsen called the oversize yellow pause button in the middle of the remote ''the most beautiful pause button I've ever seen.''

A very interesting accomplishment of the design team was to be able to keep the number of buttons on the device as low as possible. 'Less is more' is a slogan that many designers use, but that is not always reflected in the designs these designers make. However, the design team of the Tivo remote managed to hold the fort:

''Buttons proliferate on remotes like rabbits,'' Mr. Newby said, adding that he and his designers, who ranged in age from 25 to 45, had ''bloody battles'' over which ones to include. They managed to hold the number at 30, a considerable achievement given how many functions the TiVo receiver performs.

I think that the remote control is more and more getting the attention it deserves. If I walk into a audio-video store these days, finally they don't just display the tv sets, but in most stores they also show the remote. For one this allows you to touch the part of the TV set you will be actually using to control the box on the wall (I presumer were talking flatscreens here...). Secondly, if the remote is provided in the store, you can actually see what the UI of your TV is like, instead of just trusting the salesman that "this one is real easy to use, because all models of this brand are..."

On a side note: this Worth-1000 entry shows a solution for never losing your remote again.

See also these other remote control posts:
- The Story of A Peanut - the history of the Tivo remote (Gizmodo)
- Harmony control not so usable (uselog)
- I Love My Remote Control (uselog)
- Fruit Sticker Fixes Unusable Universal Remote (uselog)
- One Person per Household Understands the Remote (uselog)
- More Than Four Remotes in 75% of Dutch Homes (uselog)

(Left: a more comfortable, horizontal keyboard that was preferred by users to the vertical one (right), but is only used in the browser (left picture taken from: handful of nothing))

AppleInsider and Mobispa report about usability studies of the iPhone, both performed by User Centric. The Mobispa article reports on a study that was performed on the first day of the release of the iPhone and gives an overview of the strenghts an weaknesses with regard to the usability of the iPhone. An interesting observation is that most users prefer the horizontal keyboard input (as seen above) - which is only available in the browser - to the vertical one.

Most participants used the landscape (horizontal) view while searching for a website (The New York Times.) The horizontal soft keyboard was definitely preferred over the vertical keyboard orientation.

AppleInsider highlights another study - also by User Centric - study that goed more in depth on the iPhone's virtual querty keyboard, and shows it to be far less efficient than a physical (mini) querty keyboard, as you find for example on the Blackberry. Or, as User Centric puts it:

"Despite the keyboard similarities, QWERTY phone users took nearly twice as long to enter comparable messages on the iPhone compared to their own phone."

Regardless, the outcomes of the study, User Centric has found a great source of free publicity.

Wired's Gadget Lab reviews Apple's new iMac and loves it. Except for a minor comment about the high gloss screen we saw earlier on the iBooks. It looks incredibly cool, but Wired classifies it as a great case of 'design' versus usage:

Glossy screen looks pretty, but reflects any ambient light to a distracting degree.

But just to be clear, there's no doubt that the iMac looks incredible:

New, shockingly thin keyboard looks like a million bucks. Every designer in our office was drawn inexorably into the iMac's orbit, like dingoes to a daycare center.

Meanwhile I'm waiting for the first laptop that I can take outside on a sunny afternoon and still read the screen. Not that's what laptops were meant for.

UPDATE: Also check this blog post entitled "Does the glossy screen of the new iMac suck?" by David Morgenstern on the Apple Core blog on ZDnet.

Technorati Tags: consumer product usability, design, usability

The Usability Professionals' Association (UPA) has chosen 'the many faces of user experience' as the central theme for the 2008 international conference. This time the UPA is not just inviting usability professionals, but anyone who impacts and is interested in usability.

Many types of professionals touch the user experience of a product. Marketing specialists, graphic designers, computer scientists, business analysts, psychologists, information architects, technical writers and others bring valuable perspectives to usability and user experience. UPA 2008 invites you to share perspectives and learn from the experiences of other practitioners.

Hail hail, to this theme, as it almost fits one-on-one to my PhD research in which I perform case studies of the development of electronic consumer products, to find out what negatively and positively impacts usability. In those studies we have taken what we call a multi-disciplinary, integrated approach. We assume that the product manager, industrial designer en development engineer impact usability to a large extent. I think I'm going to have to write a paper for the UPA conference this year.

Technorati Tags: business and usability, consumer product usability, usability, usability events, user-centred design

Once in a while you run into these myths involving product usage. This is one I heard a few times and started chasing a while ago.

A European car manufacture decided to start exporting to the US, but sales were unsuccessful. After a thorough investigation, it turned out that American consumers considered cup holders an essential component to the car. A car without a sufficient number of cup holders was not an aoption. And cup holders was what this European car supposedly lacked.

As I heard it, this example included Volvo. I can't confirm that this was just about Volvo, but I did find this article (Backman 2007) in which the authors, who did a case study at Volvo cars, say the following:

The development of cup holders for the US market is a representative example. Despite very poor customer satisfaction scores on the feature, European auto producers (including Volvo Cars) failed to implement adequate cup holders. Instead of trying to develop insights and knowledge about how American customers actually used the holders, the companies continued working with quantitative measures and metrics.

So I suspect that Volvo indeed had some trouble with their cup holders. And it still does. Read this review of the Volvo S40 (dated 2007...).

The cup holders still (I've wanted a Volvo for 3 years!) are chintzy and insufficient. None in back. In front they're too small for larger drinks and look like they'll break.

Whereas in the legend I heard that the absence of cup holders was the source of the problem, by now it's just the problem that Europeans drink coffee in their car (hence the smaller cup holder), while Americans want to put water bottles or Coke cups in theirs.
But now it's time for Volvo's revenge. For the XC90 they performed an extensive qualitative study of 'Hollywood Wives' to learn how to design the new interior. As a result the new XC90 has... 18 beverage holders, according to this article in the New York Times, which elaborates on the phenomenon of 'living in your car'.

Cup-holder ubiquity has reached the extreme in the Volvo XC90 sport-utility vehicle, which has 18 beverage holders - nine for standard cups and nine to hold large bottles. The vehicle seats seven passengers.
Why so many holders? "There is space for it," said Dan Johnston, a Volvo spokesman. "We know people drink and drive and have different kinds of beverage containers."

No matter how you feel about having 18 beverage holders, by performing qualitative research instead of just holding on to customer satisfaction metrics, Volvo is trying to overcome what Frederik Dahlsten, calls customer satisfaction rut.

Interested in the history of the cup holder? Read Drink Me: How Americans Came to Have Cup Holders in Their Cars.

Technorati Tags: automotive, consumer product usability, usability