Botanicalls is offering a device that twitters you when your plant is running out of water. This means that even I should be able to keep a plant alive. Does remind me a little bit of the plant of the Little Shop of Horrors. The plant even Twitters 'thank you' when watered.

Via Wired.

The Switch Mouse from Humanscale can be adjusted in a large number of ways to fit your hand, providing both left- and right-handed users  with the closest fit possible. Wired praises the product for its 'forward-thinking, ergonomically flawless design'. Strangely, though the mouse's physical ergomomical properties are great, according to Wired the tactile properties of the click buttons and scroll-wheel-like four-way button leave to be desired. A good illustration that ergonomics is about more than just the physical fit of the product. In addition, the aesthetics of the product seem somewhat polarizing: Wired dislikes the design, while others praise it. There's more to ergonomics than just ergonomics.

(illustration from www.lostgarden.com)

In a (somewhat older) alertbox column entitled Why consumer products have inferior user experience Jakob Nielsen provides two major reasons why consumer products suck usability-wise. Firstly, the (physical) consumer products industry lacks a usability incentive.

In the past, manufacturers have had little incentive to emphasize usability. For physical products, customers have no user experience until after they've paid for the device. (In contrast, website customers get user experience up front: if a site's too difficult, they won't do business with the company, as they'll leave long before they get to the "buy" button.)

And secondly, the lack of a usability culture at consumer products companies:

Consumer electronics companies, in contrast, have a history of ignoring user needs. A few cellphone companies do a bit of usability, but in most industries, usability is unheard of. These companies are narrow-mindedly insular, and populated with lifers: automobile engineers only talk to others in the car industry; people designing cable boxes only talk to others in the television industry.

In the chapter Design as Practiced from the book Bringing Design to Software Nielsen's fellow usability guru and business partner, Donald Norman, provides some additional organizational factors that can lead to products that - well - could have been better. It's a hilarious account of best intentions and practical issues.

[...] tells the story of the Macintosh power switch: of how he tried to simplify its placement and function, but was thwarted on all sides by sensible, reasonable technical problems. His central point is that design as practiced is very different from design as taught. In the actual situation, cultural, social, and organizational issues can dominate the user-oriented aspects of design.

There's a quote from a famous Dutch poet: 'Between dreams and deads, laws and practical gripes remain.' The poem is about a man who is considering to murder his wife. Seems to apply to product development as well though. Conclusion: in product development compromises have to be made. If you continuously compromise usability related aspects, you're not going to make this 'easy to use' thingy you had in mind.

There was a short while when people had already discovered (and were offered) the possibilities of text messaging, but mobile phones did not feature an easy way to type text messages (around let's say 1999). Except for Nokia phones, that were the first to (for a while exclusively) feature the T9 predictive text input algorithm. So other companies, like Ericsson, had to figure something out to make texting easier. They came up with the chatboard. I've actually used it a number of times on an Ericsson T10 phone. It's actually quite comfortable to use, but not very practical to carry around and attach it to your phone any time you want to send a text message. In time T9 became the standard, and the physical product solution chatboard, was replaced with the software product T9. The chatboard did came with a nice protective case though. It was almost as cool as those folding palm keyboards.

UPDATE
Now also available as a uselog shirt.

(picture: unplggd)

Ask yourself a question: how many remote controls are lying on my coffee table? Or to be more exact: when I have so many remote controls lying on my coffee table, why is the one that I need always lost? Enter this overview of remote control storage solutions from unplggd (smarter homes fewer wires, hooray!). An array of cool (and not so cool) home brew remote control storage solutions.

Usability problems are prone to surface more often in a product with a lot functionality, wrapped up in a small package; mobile stuff, like portable music players and mobile phones. Operating a 'smart' phone can feel like trying to eat a 12 course meal through a straw. On his website Small Surfaces, Frog Design's Gabriel White, tracks articles about interaction design, user interface design, user experience, usability and social trends related to mobile devices.

The title of his website reminded me of an article called Baby Faces: user interface design for small displays. It's written by - amongst others - by Erik Sparre, who was responsible for the design and usability testing of the UI of Ericsson's T28 mobile phone. And that phone had what I call a small surface. Which makes the achievement of Sparre and his team on that phone even more remarkable.

As indicated in earlier posts (see link overview below) it can be quite hard for consumers to judge the usability of a product while purchasing it, because usability is not an explicit product property such as the aesthetics, feature set or performance (e.g., battery time). But it may help to try out a product in the store. Unfortunately, in many stores it's nearly impossible to try out a product, because there are only non-functional demo's, the products don't work properly, or are (as in the picture) clamped in something that looks as if it came from SAW IV, as is pointed out in this article on losingcontext.com.

Choosing a wireless phone becomes a blind faith decision, based mostly on wireless provider, price, and a feature list. The advancements in mobile user interfaces have been quite pitiful, much of that could be attributed to the fact that customers really have no opportunity to compare shop. Not to mention that for the majority of people, once they purchase the phone they are locked in for two years with it.

Earlier posts on expected usability
> Stabilo 's Move Easy: High Expected Usability
> Expected Usability: All Buttons to the Back
> Quality Label for Universal Design

The Berlin International Design Center, certification institution TUV Nord and the German Design Council have developed a quality label for universal design (sorry, page in German only...). Companies can apply for the certicate, their products will be tested by engineers, test participants, and experts. If the product passes the test it can feature the certificate 'Ausgezeichnet! Industrial Design' on their product. According to the three project partners:

Products that match the criteria of universal design (self-explaining, easy to handle, universally applicable, usable across generations) and the technical criteria (safety, material properties, forces and norms) can be certified by us.

The introduction of the new certificate will be accompanied by an extensive marketing campaign.
Such a quality label is a good idea if you ask me. When you are considering a product, there are all kinds of visible product properties, such as the aesthetics, feature sets, brand, and performance (battery time, etc), but the more intangible aspects, such as production quality, sustainability and usability are nearly impossible to assess. Only by trying out the product, asking people about their experiences, and by knowing about the user test results (which this new seal enables) can the 'consumer' know whether the 'user' will end up with a usable product or not.

Thnx to material Aart for the tip.

Mieke Brouwer at the University of Twente is researching usability problems that arise in dynamic use situations: when products are used for varying purposes, by varying people and or in varying contexts.

Examples are a mobile phone that is used in varying environments under varying circumstances or a ticket vending machine that is used by many different people with varying skills and expectations.

Brouwer considers scenario-based design as a promising strategy to deal with dynamic use situations, as scenarios allow designers to explore a wide variety of usage situations in an early phase.