This alarm clock/nintendo gun assembly is the best expression I have ever seen of how I feel about alarm clocks and waking up. Buzzz Buzzz Kapoww! See this one and more at www.selfmadeobjects.net.

As a bonus on the innovative alarm clocks post: another top-10 of 'coolest' alarm clocks, including one that measures your sleep cycle and determines the appropriate moment to wake you, and the Kuku Alarm Clock, which - and I quote - "at your set time, begins laying its little eggs and starts chirping away. Unless you return all the eggs into the basket, it won’t stop buzzing!"

I'm starting to get more and more fascinated by BMW's iDrive as a sample case of the development, adjustment and relaunch of a product with poor usability. As a Christmas present for all you people who enjoy watching BMW wrestle with its own invention and trying to reach a point where either iDrive has reached an acceptable level of usability or the company can discard the concept without losing face: here's another inspiring selection of iDrive reviews.

The Truth About Cars: BMW iDrive Editorial
"It seems unlikely that the Seven's (bmw 700 series, ed.) target market- slightly older than middle-aged plutocrats- will be bothered about using iDrive. [...] BMW knows this. They have so much faith in the iDrive system that you can operate all the car's major functions without touching the controller. Traditional rotary knobs regulate airflow and temperature. All the usual buttons operate the windows, seats, central locking, defrost, etc. If BMW believed that iDrive was the intuitive future of driver control, why did they equip the new Seven with two CD players? Maybe it's because the dash-mounted single CD can be operated manually, while the six-stack system requires iDrive."

Technoride: Mid-Course Correction for BMW's iDrive
"That means you will be able to program a favorite destination, a phone number, or an audio setting into each button, bypassing iDrive's slide, turn, and press-to-select methodology. This marks the third version of iDrive. The first, in 2002, had eight general functions that you selected by first sliding the controller in one of the eight compass directions. Version 2, circa 2004, reworked the functions to just four (communication, navigation, entertainment, and climate control). This third variant adds the function buttons, much like programmable PC function keys (they can be programmed, you know, just that no one does anymore) or radio buttons on your car audio system, to the four-way iDrive controller."

The Mobile Experience Blog: BMW iDrive Really Sucks
"As mentioned earlier, because the system is so slow, I often pre-select faster than what the system can keep up thereby causing it to take me to the wrong menu screen or inputting the wrong value."

IVY is a concept from TUe students for an external hard disk that visualizes the amount and structure of the data that are on the disk, using the SequoiaView treemap algorithm. SequoiaView can be used to locate large files that haven't been accessed for a long time, or to quickly locate the largest picture files on the hard drive. The hard disk is fitted with an oled display to continually update its appearance to represent the contents.

This concept and similar ones (flashbag usb drive, insync twisted hard drive, hard drive capacity gauge) can be found on infosthetics, everybody's favorite information aesthetics website.

Sometimes you get the feeling that your helpdesk is fromt he middle ages, right? This one really is...

This brilliant overview of innovative alarm clocks is a celebration of creativity in interaction design. And sometimes also sadism. I was especially charmed by the idea behind the jigsaw puzzle clock: you have to complete a small puzzle to shut it off, thus forcing your brain into motion. That might be useful for me. That and an alarm clock that would tilt my bed. Another charming example of thoughtful interaction design is the sfera hanging alarm clock, which climbs a little further up to the ceiling every time you snooze...

(picture by vesuvius)

I like it if a product does not enable you to do something stupid with it. Or if it at least discourages it. Let me take a really simple example. If I start my car to go driving at night, and I forget to turn the headlamps on, my dashboard stays dark. This is logical, as you only need dashboard illumination if it's dark, and most people only turn the lights on when it's dark. But to me, a dark dashboard is also a warning that my outside lights are not on yet. I could of course know that by simply looking out the front window, or looking at the switch, but to me the dashboard illumination is this nice extra but unobtrusive warning.
On the other hand, this whole situation does not apply if you drive with your headlights on during daytime, as quite a few people do here in the Netherlands (it makes your car more visible). But then, if driving with the lights on is obligated, as it is in Sweden, most cars will automatically switch the lights on as you start the car. So for those people my whole argument above is basically a mute point.


A nice would-be detail in dashboard design I found in this post on core77. If you look at the fuel icon on your dashboard, the idea is that on which side the hose is on in the icon, indicates on which side of your car the fuel cap is. I wonder whether a lot of people would notice such a subtle visual reminder, so prompted by this post I told my friends about my new discovery and was eager to try it out. Too bad that the first car that I tried this on (a Daihatsu Sirion) disappointed me: the fuel cap was on the other side than what the icon indicated. A lot of readers of core77 discovered the same thing:

As numerous readers with access to actual automobiles have informed us, the tip mentioned above simply isn't always true. But it'd be nice, wouldn't it?

Related posts:
> Car Usability
> Dashboard Usability: Comparing Volvo S80, Citroën C6 and Lancia Thesis
> Usability Evaluation of Multifunctional Systems in Vehicles

(click image to enlarge)

The Hong Kong Central-Mid-Levels Escalators are the longest outdoor covered escalators in the world. Just to be sure - as more often in Hong Kong - the proper authorities have specified the proper behavior on the escalator. Here are two of the most brilliant rules:
- nr 4) Do not walk against the flow (Now why would I want do that?)
- nr 8) Do not activate the emergency switch, except in an emergency. (As opposed to whenever you're feeling bored...)

Consumers may return products because they consider them too complex (picture taken from The Cristian Science Monitor website)

The Christian Science Monitor has a good overview-article on the increasing complexity of electronic consumer products and the consequences for product returns: a fast rate of return. What I find particularly interesting is the role of the retailers. On the one hand the article points out that if consumer electronics are too hard to understand, the retailers are caught in the middle between their customers and their suppliers, with an estimated cost of product returns of about $100 billion per year.
On the other hand - contrary to popular belief - it's not just the engineers who keep pouring more and more features into products, it's the sales people as well: more buttons means more features means more sales arguments. So here we have retailers complaining that products become too complex, while on the other hand their only sales strategy is selling products based on features. Ever heard a sales person in a store telling you that: "Well, this products has not as many features, and costs a little bit more, but it is really easy to use, so in the end it brings you more value for money." Consumer electronics retailers should revisit their sales training to be able to sell easy-to-use products to the general public. And consumer electronics manufacturers should develop a marketing strategy to support that sales strategy.

Another interesting issue in the article is that, as many articles before, it quotes a study performed by Elke den Ouden, that pointed out that from a technical point of view there is nothing wrong with a large part of products that are returned by the customers.

Half the products returned to stores are in good working order, but customers can't figure out how they work, says a recent study conducted at the Technical University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands.

It's tempting for me to go along with the notion that half of the product returns is due to a lack of usability, but to put it bluntly, the authors of this article make the same mistake as so many authors before. Den Ouden pointed out that almost half of the product returns was not due to any technical malfunction of the product. It did NOT say that all of these non-technical faults were due to usability issues. If you read her thesis, you'll see that the non-technical faults might have a number of other causes, such as too high expectations by the clients ("There is no music on this mp3 player..."). Nevertheless, Den Ouden does indicate that a considerable portion of product returns might be due poor usability (or product complexity, that depends on how you put it), the question is how big that portion is.