"Fire! Fire!" Following the procedure you rehearsed endlessly - and at the most inconvenient times - you run to the escape map to find out where in the building you are located (officially), only to discover that you are here and there. In your slightly panicked state of mind you see on the map that you are in fact in two places at once. So either you are experiencing an out-of-body experience, or someone screwed up while drawing the map. And to add to that they chose a high-gloss finishing to protect the map, making it even more unreadable.
Two things you definitely want to make easy to use: stuff you use a lot and that will drive you crazy if you have to do a cumbersome task again and again (think mobile phone, ticket machine), and those things you only use once but then under highly critical circumstances (think emergency brack, warning lights in a car).
Thanks to Frederic for the tip.

Texting while walking down the street is a dangerous combination. According to this study carried out by the British directory service company 118118, last year more than one out of ten British people needed treatment for injuries including broken noses, cheekbones and even in one case a fractured skull, caused by walking into things while sending an sms message. The Daily Express calculated this means that 6 million Brittons got hurt last year. Although, admittedly, the research was based on a sample poll:

Research among 1,055 adults discovered that 63 per cent concentrate so hard when they are texting that they become “blind” to objects around them.

Makes you wonder about the sample doesn't it? How many people do you know who had to be treated in the hospital as a consequence of mobile phone use while walking? And considering that 'in response to the research' 118118 is now offering padding to lamp posts (see movie) and the amount of free media attention that is getting, we might want to reconsider the value of this study. Though I don't want to withhold this piece of advice from you:

Mobile phone users are now being advised to use template messages to speed up texting and look up every five seconds to avoid hazards.

(Via Bright)

The remote control on the left was submitted by Steven. It's a so-called 'universal remote', which he used to replace his old one, that broke down. Anything that's made to do everything usually does not allow you to do the thing you really needed to. As Steven describes it:

There is some color coding, but when there are so many buttons, that's not much help. But the worst part was that I held it upside down half the time. One day I put the a little sticker I took of an orange on the front of my remote. Since then I'm doing much better.

The cartoon on the right - How Grandma Sees the Remote' comes from UnpressableButtons (in turn via Gizmodo). It features buttons like: 'TV-explodes', 'cause nationwide blackout' and 'no clue' (click image to enlarge). Put yourself in the shoes of grandma who simply wants to see her favorite television show, and has to wrestle herself past picture-in-picture, autotune, and the electronic programming guide.

The grandmother of a friend of mine had a television with so many functions the remote actually had two sides. 'Basic' functions on one side, 'advanced' on the other, and the whole remote would slide into a plastic sleeve, so you would only access one side at the time. However, grandmother ended up accidently reversing the remote all the time, and calling here children to ask how to switch on the television. In the end they brought out the gaffer tape and fixed the remote solidly on the 'basic' side.

Finally, the UPA is coming to Europe. Well, actually it's a European version of the UPA conference that will be held in Torino, Italy on December 4 to 8, 2008 and is entitled: usability and design: cultivating diversity. A variety of submission formats is available, from 1,5 hour presentations to peer reviewed papers. The themes of the conference include:

• Industrial Design and Usability
• Cross-cultural Design and Usability
• Designing mobile Usability
• Usability and Creativity
• Managing Design in Organizations

At last, a usability conference that is going beyond the human-computer interaction and the web. The majority of the topics is spot-on on my research, so I guess I'll be seeing you in Torino.

I was not really aware that there was a problem, but a particular brand of milk in the Netherlands now features an indicator to show how much milk there's left. I usually just shake the thing to check whether there's something left. Although, I must admit if you're cooking and have to add exactly 250 ml's of milk, it might be handy. The milk bottle icons on the side seem A) a bit of an anachronism, and B) redundant. Halfway the carton there's this icon that says your milk carton is half-full. I'm all in favor of providing consumers with information, but this one seems to go a little bit overboard...
Via: Illustir

(Picture: 185vfx.com)

How to restrain yourself in the candy store?
Hmmm, but maybe I also need this. And that. And that! It happens to all of us: you set out to buy a simple mp3 player, and you come home with something monstrous that has all the features you 'think you might need one day'. Guess what, the same thing happens to project managers in product development. You set out to make this product that fulfills an important, basic user need, and your team (and you) keep on adding new 'handy' stuff to the list. Feature creep. Or featuritis. Or Blithe. Ending up in feature fatigue on the consumer/user side.

Tips
Six Revisions has eight tips on managing feature creep. In software development, mind you, but I think that there's something to be learned from it for product developers.

Feature creep, also known as scope or requirement creep, refers to unforeseen requests for additions and changes that are outside the project scope. It typically happens due to inadequate requirements gathering, poor initial planning, and an unclear protocol for change implementation, among other things.

Doing one thing right
You could also chose to focus on the essentials. 37signals is a company that makes tightly-focused, very easy to use, powerful web-app-building software. And they were criticized for keeping it simple, according to this article in Wired.

But not everyone was convinced of Rails' revolutionary potential. Critics had been saying that Rails wasn't versatile enough.

There you go. You do one thing right, but you don't do all those other 207 things that you could do. I don't think they really mind the criticism at 37signals though, considering the 2 million account holders of Basecamp, their online collaboration software. Read the 37signals blog 'signals versus noise' by the way; very much worthwhile. The product-equivalent of the 'doing one thing right' strategy? Muji's wall-mounted cd-player by IDEO.

Do everything (and layer it)
A colleague of mine gets pissed off every time someone mentions feature creep as something that needs to be fought. "Consumers (the side of people that buys stuff) want more features as they buy the product. And you need to sell your product. To become president, you need to get elected," he says. He has a simple philosophy: put any feature in there you want, as long as it doesn't get in the way of people that don't want to use it. Or that don't know of its existence, for that matter. Interesting approach, although it does require a lot of time to design and implement all these functions; it makes your product awfully complex to develop.

See also
> Features, features everywhere

Earlier posts about feature frenzy
('frenzy' is another good synonym we can use, nice alliteration don't you think?):
> Defeating Feature Fatigue
> Office 2007: New Features, That Were Already There
> The Giant Army Knife

Unplggd posts about the differences between men and women in their preferences concerning consumer electronics, and especially HDTV sets.

A recent study done by Hitachi and KRC found that 32% of women would want a 50-inch or 60-inch screen compared to 43% of men, and that seven in ten women are not comfortable explaining HDTV technology compared to only about half of men.