Creative, clear and engaging presentation that explains what usability is, and how to achieve it by Lennart Grötzbach.

Us humans were not designed to work behind a computer all day. In fact we were not designed to be in the office all day. We find it hard to concentrate, only drink coffee, and don’t relax sufficiently. Here’s number of programs that tries to coach you into more productive or healthy behavior. Call it persuasive technology (technology that intentionally changes attitudes or behaviors through persuasion and social influence), call it nudging, or call it design with intent, the idea is to get you do do what you want to do even though you can't always do that.

Writeroom
A word processor that only allows you to type basic text, but most importantly, it blocks out the screens all other programs, so you can be fully focused on writing what you need to write. As the makers put it themselves, Writeroom "helps you overcome the challenges of your digital life."

Freedom
With the introduction of internet into the office, at your desk you can access the world and the world can access you. You need to concentrate and do not want to be distracted by e-mails or be tempted to browse the web? Freedom blocks all your Internet connections for as long as you tell it to. And there’s no other way to regain access than to sit it out or restart your computer. Apparently Windows users are better at not-surfing the web, because the program is Mac-only. [via unpressable buttons]

Spa Watercoach
Drinking enough water is good for your health, or so they say. Around 1,5 to 2 liters per day is what you should strive for. However, with the coffee-centered culture at most offices that’s hard to maintain. The Spa watercoach enables you to keep track of how much water you drank, and it gives you gentle reminders if you forget to drink. And ok, it tells you to drink a glass of 'Spa' (which is a brand of mineral water), but I guess it will work with tap water as well. Sounds all too basic, but I have to admit: it works for me to get a small reminder now and again.

Workpace
This one I find debatable, but ok. The idea is that to prevent RSI (carpal tunnel syndrome) you should pause regularly when working on the computer and do some physical exercise during those pauses. Workpace signals you to take micropauses if you’re working too intensely (it measures keystrokes and mouseclicks) and once in a while pops up, blocks the screen and provides suggestions for some physical exercise. The problem I had with it: 1) when I am stressed out and working hard to finish something, the (forced) pauses made me even more stressed, and 2) those exercises made you look silly.

There's one thing though: maybe you should not use all these programs together. Imagine the Watercoach and Workpace trying to send you messages, while Writeroom is designed to keep blocking out all distractions...

More uselog posts about product impact:
> Product Impact: How Products Change User Behaviour
> Design Strategies for Sustainable User Behaviour
> User-friendly energy meter can improve sustainable behaviour
> Electric light: new technologies take some getting used to

Maybe it's because I used to live in a student home where everyone was scavenging the kitchen for food, that I love the Electrolux Flatshare Fridge. It's a modular fridge, designed to give each flat-mate (read: student) his/her own private stowaway, that (s)he can keep as dirty or clean as (s)he wants, and it should reduce the risk of your flat-mates drinking that one bottle of champagne you we're saving for celebrating with your girlfriend. I don't see any locks on doors in the design, though. That might be the next step... The design was one of the submissions for Electrolux' yearly DesignLab competition.

[Via Etre]

Damn, I feel cheated! I’ve had an iPhone for about a month now and all of a sudden I find out that there’s a button in the headset (picture). There’s absolutely no visual indication – that UI fetishists might label affordances – that that button is there. There is a hole that indicates to me that there’s a microphone, but no bump in the plastic, printing, or anything that tells me I should push that part of the product to answer a phone call. I consider myself not a complete moron when it comes to consumer electronics, but to be sure I checked whether a colleague of mine - who had also recently gotten an iPhone - was aware of the button, but thankfully I was not as idiotic as I thought: he too had not yet discovered it.

Skipping a song while riding a bike
Why is that button important to me? Because I have been biking around trying to go to the next song by using the touch screen. Not very comfortable, not very safe and a huge step back from my earlier iPod nano, which I could easily operate while it was in the pocket of my jacket. Why I feel cheated? Because I even remember thinking that it was a shame that my iPhone headset did not have an answer button as my SonyEricsson K800 headset (picture below, on the right) had. Now it turns out the button is there after all. So why did I miss it even when I wanted it to be there? The button is mentioned in the Finger Tips Guide (pdf) that comes with your iPhone, but somehow, in the excitement of finally having my hands on the iPhone I missed that. Actually, it is also mentioned in the manual, and in the feature list of the software update I recently installed, which is how I happened to come across it.Reading the manual (or not)
So you may ask: why didn’t you read the Finger Tips Guide? To be honest, even though the guide was extremely concise, I just scanned it and then I knew enough to get started. Operating the device was so easy that I discovered most things along the way. Except for this button, that is. So in way the extreme intuitiveness of the iPhone, in combination with the lack of visual clues caused my non-discovery. In addition to my own laziness, that is. Now you can blame me for being stupid, but the fact remains is that I missed the button. And if I did that, so did a lot of other people. Well, at least enough people for howtomobile.com to make a tutorial on using the iPhone headset, in the comments of which we find this little one-person dialogue...

2 Responses to “How To Use The iPhone Stereo Headset”
Dan Kaufman on August 28th, 2007 4:00 am
Where is the mic button? My headset looks just like the one in the picture but there is no button anywhere…
Dan Kaufman on August 28th, 2007 4:04 am
oops! found it! if anyone else is similarly confused - there is no visible button. you just squeeze the little mic cylinder in the center.

Design minimalism versus visual clues
Now, I love the minimalist design of Apple’s products. And you have to admit, the design of Apple’s headset is way more stylish than the Ericsson headset. But I also like an ‘honest’ design, that the form factor of a product gives me some feed forward on what it’s for and how it can be used. I like to 'discover' a device as I am using it, but to be able to do that I need the device to give me some clues. Apple previously did the minimalism thing on the mighty mouse, where they (finally) introduced a two-button mouse, only to disguise it as a one-button mouse. Why? I have that mouse, and to be honest: the right button doesn't work as well as on a conventional mouse. To me, these are examples of minimalism gone one step too far.

UPDATE
Oh, the diversity of opinions... At the same time I rant about not finding the iPhone headset button, Dave Gustafson of unpressable buttons gives praise to the same button. And I agree with him: once you've found it, it's a joy to use. Except for going one song back when playing music; this requires three clicks. I usually end up going one song forward (two clicks) and pausing (one click).

More uselog posts about iPhone usability:
> iPhone usability studies
> More iPhone usability stuff
> iPhone usability test: how people really use the iPhone
> Not every touch-screen phone is an iPhone
> Please fix the iPhone: free user feedback for Apple
> The iPhone: No Manual

Apple's newest iPod Nano enables you to go to a random song by shaking the device, something that SonyEricsson introduced about a year ago on their W910. It seems quite a natural way of interacting: the gesture symbolizes what you want the product to do. It's like shaking a sweetener holder to randomize the content, with each sweetener tablet being a song (uh well, ok, with sweeteners it doesn't really matter which one you get, but you get the idea...). It's a manifestation of what some people call tangible user interfaces, in which a person interacts with digital information through the physical environment.

The notion of shake control for digital media players was patented by a company called Outland Research (seemingly the same company that recently patented smart soles for adjustable shoes). So I guess that either Apple and SonyEricsson 'lawyered-up', or have their own - slightly different - patents, or someone is making quite some money from Apple and SonyEricsson implementing shake control.
Interacting with the MusicCube (Bruns, April 2005)

But it seems there's a catch to that patent. Now, I'm no intellectual property expert, but as far as I know a condition for getting something patented is that it is novel, which means the notion should not be in the public domain by the time the patent was filed. So I am somewhat amazed that the provisional application of this patent was filed in November 2005 and it was awarded in 2006, while this paper on the music cube, which proposes and shows the viability of shake control for digital music players was published at the April 2005 SIGCHI conference; a not completely obscure and unknown institution.

More uselog posts on tangible interaction:
> Ten examples of daily tangible interaction
> Tangible interaction: design strategy for usability
> Tangible interaction prototypes at IDE
> MusicCube: a tangible interaction concept for music
> Emotional intelligence in design: thesis defense of Stephan Wensveen
> Rich interaction camera: thesis defense of Joep Frens

(picture at top from areamobile.de)

Getting a usability issue acknowledged
Usability is not a numbers game. In a project meeting you can't say to the usability specialist: "We're supposed to be at 65, in last meeting we're at 58. How are we doing?" It's a rather qualitative issue. And in a business context qualitative issues run the danger of being ignored or overlooked. Previously, I wrote about the designer-user gap, which is a difference in understanding of the product between the designer and the user, causing the designer not to be able to anticipate what the user might need or want. The thing is, designers are actually a pretty empathic breed of product developers. The engineer-user gap might be even bigger than the designer-user gap. And to fix usability problems you really need all team members involved. No sense in designing a better interface if no-one will implement it.

Feeling it
Sometimes, simply telling other development team members the result of a usability test is not enough. They might challenge the setup of the test, debate or negotiate the results, come up with the classic 'did you have the right participants?' However, have your team mates present during testing, and you hardly ever get into discussions like these. It might be hard to put numbers on usability problems, but there's no arguing with seeing a user being angry at your product. I believe the key here is empathy. It's not just about knowing what's wrong with the product, it's also about acknowledging that to users this is a serious issue, and about being motivated to fix that for them.

Third age suit
To have its ergonomics specialists and engineers feel what is like to operate a car when you're - say - seventy, during the development of its 2000 Focus, Ford used the Third Age Suit, that was developed in cooperation with the University of Loughborough. It is a suit that restricts your sensory capabilities (vision, hearing, touch), and movement, to simulate what it's like to be eighty.

Said Vivek Bhise: "It's one thing to read customer feedback in a marketing study," it's a whole different thing to feel what they're feeling while driving a car. This has been a real eye-opener for our engineers."

Empathy in the front end
A colleague of mine, Froukje Sleeswijk-Visser is currently writing up her PhD thesis about the communication of user research in the front end of product development, where empathy also plays a large role. One of the conclusions: huge numbers of marketing data are not enough for designers to feel inspired and know what to make. They need high resolution, rich data. But most of all, they need to feel engaged.

See also:
> Mobilistrictor: the Third Age Suit
> BBC news: the suit that makes you feel old

(Photograph: mobilistrictor)

Apparently thinking it was some new kind of check in method, an elderly Swedish woman followed here suitcase and stepped onto a luggage belt at Stockholm's Arlanda Airport. Just to point out that for a user to be able to use something properly, the first step is identifying what the product is for.

Take a look at this concept design for automated airport checkin by Floris Wiegerinck, of which the design makes it a little less likely that a person would want to follow his/her suitcase.

[Photograph: dennisworld]

(Motorola Q: pretty powerful, but strange UI mistakes)

To analyze the demise of Motorola's mobile phone division, Gizmodo interviewed a number of ex-Motorola employees, and to a large extent attributes Motorola's problems to its company culture, which is dominated by engineers.

Insiders always start by attacking Motorola's corporate culture, formed decades ago when radio was the company's bread-and-butter. Motorola made its bones building end-to-end systems—not just hardware, but the infrastructure that supports it. That, in turn, has led to a culture in which engineers reign supreme, and are allowed to sneer at their more right-brain-inclined colleagues. Marketers? Designers who focus on usability as opposed to circuitry? At Motorola, they're peons.

See also:
> Motorola: the loss of a once-great company
> NY Times' David Pogue on the Motorola Q
> Video: making phones at Motorola (uselog)
> Motorola's poor UI (uselog)
> Flexible controls on the Motorola Rokr (uselog)

[Via: smallsurfaces]

See how it ends at swissmiss [via core77].

And while we're in this 'funny' mood, we might as well take a look at Dilbert's co-workers saving a million dollars with a special kind of usability method.

Say you're a woman. If you're not, pretend for a moment, because I need you to have a handbag. A handbag that contains your wallet, mobile phone, remote to your car, home keys, and a navigation device. Basically, it contains everything. Now imagine it gets stolen. Recently, someone pointed out the following scenario to me:

The thief takes the bag, looks in the navigation device for the most recent destination (which is probably where your car will be...). He/she goes there, uses the remote for the car. Bleep bleep, and that's your car: gone. Next, the thief looks up your home address, in your own navigation device. Most navigation devices allow you to enter your name, address and phone number in case you lose the device and someone wants to return it. Next destination: your home, of which they have the keys. As long as you haven't noticed the bag is gone, they'll might be in time to go through your stuff there as well.

So by loosing one bag you loose your wallet, your car, and your home may get broken into. Three solutions: don't put in your home address and name, only enter your (mobile) phone number. And two, because they might drive to the runner up recent destination, guessing that's your home: password protection on your navigation device. Annoying, but safer. And thirdly: call home as soon as your bag gets stolen and ask someone to go to your house and watch it. Or just don't carry everything in one (hand)bag. By the way, the 'home address' issue goes for your smart phone as well, though a smart phone might not point thieves to your car.