Dave Gustafson, a mechanical engineer at Frog Design, recently started a blog at www.unpressablebuttons.com, on 'product design use and usability, designs new and old, inspired and uninspired - the little things that matter'. What it comes down to is that Dave writes great posts - a lot of them - on product designs that could have been a little better, or are really good from a usage point of view.
Personally I like the fact that he does not make usability the only thing in product design; he also has a keen eye for other aspects in product design, such as engineering and branding. Take look, for example, at his comments on the 'Ring' alarm clock for couples that was selected for the Braun Design Prize.

Apparently, in Hong Kong you're not allowed to hump the vending machine. I wonder why that is. Let's take a closer look at that sticker. Ah yes, now I see it: if you hump the vending machine, it will tilt, and a rotten smell will rise up from under the machine. Much clearer now.

More Signage
> Confusing bus exit sign
> How to Behave on the Escalator
> Gender-Biased Signing

There's nothing wrong with mobile phone companies doing research. Really. It should enable them to make better products. That's probably the reason why Nokia conducted a survey on multitasking behavior among phone users among more than 5000 respondents. And then they issue a press release entitled "Survey results confirm it: Women are better multi-taskers than men":

The results of a recent global online survey conducted by Nokia indicated that women are better at multitasking than men with 60 percent of respondents, both men and women. Only six percent of women believe that men are better at doing more than one thing at a time.

Interesting, you would say. But that's not why I'm posting it. I'm posting it because I have a problem with it, and my problem is this: we're talking about a survey asking people whether they consider themselves and others good multitaskers or not. So the title of the press release should have been: "women and men consider women better multitaskers". Now of course that does not produce as sexy a headline as the current press release has. But it would be closer tot the truth. The survey Nokia did only indicates how people think of themselves and of others. If you want to know whether people with certain demographics are better at a particular type of behavior than others, you have to perform field studies or observational studies in the lab. Well, maybe a survey can provide hint. If you ask people about actual behavior (facts) and not about attitudes. Let's see what the press release says about that:

Forty-seven percent of respondents to the Nokia survey indicated that they have sent a romantic or controversial text message to the wrong person and 56 percent of women did that.

Right, women were better at multitasking, but somehow, more women send text messages to the wrong person than men do. To be more precise, 47% of the overall survey respondents indicated they did this, and 56% of the women did. Which means the number of men who  have sent a sensitive text message to the wrong person must lay even below 47%, which is the overall percentage. The only thing Nokia did is to get an indication of whether people believe the kitchen-table wisdom that women are better than men at doing multiple things at once. I would have expected a little more from a company like Nokia.

UPDATE: a colleague of mine, Ilse van Kesteren, who will be defending her PhD thesis shortly, in her thesis provides an interesting proposition on the subject: "The idea that men can't multitask is nonsense - they can easily keep track of 9 football matches simultaneously.`"

Technorati Tags: mobile phones, usability, usability research, user research

I doubt whether anyone could withhold from smirking when Jakob Nielsen started bashing BMW's iDrive interface for the BMW 7-series. Somehow it's always interesting to see a renowned brand go face down with the usability of a high profile product. The New York Times also took a shot at iDrive in this 2002 article entitled Menus Behaving Badly:

In a lesser car, you might simply twist a knob. In the 745i, tuning the radio is an interactive experience at 75 m.p.h. After a bit of this, you may wonder what's the fuss over handheld cellphones.

If you want a small preview of the iDrive experience yourself, take a look at the iDrive instruction movie above. Personally, I had a hard time keeping track... I heard that BMW dealerships were actually giving courses to their customers on how to work the iDrive interface. User group properties might also come into play here: the average BMW 7-series owner might age between 45 and 55, and not be the most tech-savvy, mobile phone devouring user.

Another NY Times article - Driven to Distraction - points out what I believe to be a fundamental flaw of iDrive: using a screen and menu-based in interfaced in a usage situation (driving) that places a considerable cognitive load on the user. The wonderful thing of having 'hard' buttons on your dashboard is that you can use your 'muscular memory' to locate and operate a function.

Dialing up a particular radio station -- one of 700 functions iDrive controls -- requires almost all of these movements, as well as a fair amount of attention to a dashboard screen.

BMW is a company that is not particularly well known for intensive user involvement during product development. "BMW knows what's good for the customer," seems to be the company's mantra. In terms of cutting-edge technology and styling that might be true; the company does come up with high quality cars with a very distinctive form factor (that sometimes take some getting used to...). But I think that a user interface - especially a radically new and very important one - should always be thoroughly tested, and I can't imagine that this has happened on the first iDrive.

Of course, BMW is not the only car maker that's implementing a 'state of the art' interface. Audi has Audi MMI (multimedia interface), and Mercedes has COMAND (COckpit Management And Navigation Device, (how's that for an acronym!)). Wayne Cunningham from CNET reviews all three systems. So I guess this is the future, but I'm not sure we should go down this road. BMW disagrees and promotes its newest version of iDrive with the slogan "maximum usability, minimum complexity". They've got guts, those Germans.

Technorati Tags: automotive, car usability, usability, user-centred design

I visited the IASDR2007 conference this week and saw some excellent presentations on design research. I also presented a paper entitled 'Usability in Product Development: After Sales Information as Feedback', on using after sales information as a source of usability information. In a case-study that we conducted at five international consumer electronics companies the possibility emerged of using after sales feedback, such as customer support, satisfaction questionnaires and the monitoring of product service use as a source of information on the usability of products that are on the market. Below you'll find a short summary of the article, and a pdf of can be found on my Delft University research page.

Actual usage is the best user test
The development process of consumer electronics is often pressured, leaving relatively little time for user testing, so prioritizing on what product aspects to focus is a necessity. You simply don't have time to optimize all functions. After sales feedback can point you towards aspects of your product that are causing usability problems. During the product development process, the maturity of the prototype grows, from early scenarios to late beta testing samples. However, the most mature 'materialization' of the design there is, is the product itself. When the product is on the market we have the most mature 'stimulus material', with the best representation of 'test participants' in their real context of use. The best user test situation you can imagine!

Limited design freedom
The only thing is, by that time you don't really have any design freedom left (see the illustration above). But... the consumer electronics industry has a very cyclic nature: new models are often built upon older designs, which means that information from a previous product can be very valuable as input for the next generation. Some companies even do 'running changes' on their products (make changes to a model while it is in production).

Terms and conditions do apply...
However, there is a number of conditions and downsides on using after sales feedback, such as the limited 'granularity' of the information. Often you don't know what is wrong, but you do know that something is wrong. If you want to know more, read the paper.

My other publications on this subject
Want to know more? Here are links to uselog posts about publications from my research on usability in product development practice (includes links to the PDF documents).
• Usability in Product Development; A Conceptual Framework (research paper)
• Usability in the Development of Consumer Electronics; Issues and Actors (research paper)
• What Turns Usability On? (Two-minute explanation of my research on YouTube)

The history of the Sony Walkman might be one of the most fascinating product development stories ever. Low-end Mac beautifully describes the development of the Sony Walkman. One of the interesting elements of the story is that the whole concept was sparked because Sony's honorary chairman was using an advanced prototype of a portable tape-recorder. How a personal experience can convince a manager of a product's potential.

One regular user was Ibuka, then Sony's honorary chairman. He used the player on airplane trips, but he found the player too heavy for everyday use. He instructed the tape recorder division to create a smaller version for his personal use.

The story includes inks to the Sony history website, putting an end to a lot of third party-hearsay stories on how the Walkman was developed. Instead, we now have Sony's own internal hearsay as well. On the Sony website the project is described in a way that seems very un-Japanese to me. (Though this might be due to my lack of knowledge of the Japanese.)

Had this project gone through the conventional planning, approval, testing, and other development stages, it might never have seen the light of day. Sony might have just concentrated on developing a smaller version of the Densuke stereo tape recorder instead. However, Ohsone encouraged his staff to try their ideas before they had time to think about the difficulties that might arise.

UPDATE: Another (more illustrated) account of the rise of the walkman and other personal stereos on www.pocketcalculator.com.

Smashing Magazine provides an overview of 30 usability issues to be aware of. Though, as usual, the stuff is mostly web- and software-related (there's not a whole lot of eye-tracking studies being done on consumer electronics...), most if it applies to consumer electronics or other categories of consumer products. Anyway, it seems like a useful reminder, with 30 items across categories like: Rules and Principles, Psychology Behind Usability, Glossary: Terms and Concepts.
And oh yes, there's an awful lot of discussions to be had about the 7±2 rule, but to me the list just seems like a useful list of reminders or rules of thumb while designing and developing new products, and... there's a lot of cool terminology in there with terms like 'banner blindness', 'hotspots', 'gloss' or 'Baby-Duck-Syndrome'. Wouldn't it make you sound extremely cool if you could use those words in the next design meeting? By the way, 'Baby-Duck-Syndrome' refers to the following:

Baby Duck Syndrome describes the tendency for visitors to stick to the first design they learn and judge other designs by their similarity to that first design. The result is that users generally prefer systems similar to those they learned on and dislike unfamiliar systems. This results in the usability problems most re-designs have: users, get used with previous designs, feel uncomfortable with new site structure they have to find their way through.

By the way, I love the irony of starting a list of '30 usability issues that are often forgotten' by mentioning the 7±2 rule.

Technorati Tags: consumer product usability, usability, user interface design, user-centred design

John Maeda is seeing simplicity everywhere in this very entertaining TED talk called simplicity patterns. (Watching the talk seems as good a way as any to celebrate World Usability Day)

Technorati Tags: consumer products, usability

This may seem like a ridiculous price-proposition. For € 1,50 you get half a liter of Spa Blue (non-sparkling mineral water) and for half the price you get three times that amount of water. This indeed seems ridiculous, until you hear that you find these prices at gas stations and railway-station mini-supermarkets. And at those locations the value of a bottle of water that you can carry around easily and can stuff into your bag is higher than that of higher volume bottle. So here, ease of use is valued over content. Which means the value of usability is: (half a liter in a half-liter bottle) - (half a liter in a 1,5 liter bottle) = €1,50 - €0,25  = €1,25 per half liter.

Technorati Tags: consumer product usability, usability, user-centred design