I have been traveling abroad for business recently and I have a number of questions:

• Why do I have to pay for Internet access at most hotels? It's like being told there's a shower with hot water in the room, only to find out on arrival that there's a coin-o-mat next to it.
• Why do some hotel rooms still have safety-deposit boxes that don't fit a laptop? My laptop is probably the most valuable item I carry with me, but I don't literally want to carry with me all the time. Please, hotel owners: give me a safe that fits a 15 inch laptop (it's not like I'm asking for a power plug inside the damn box, right?).
• Why are power sockets still not a standard part of the interior at both airports and in airplanes? On airports, you can literally see business travelers crawling over the floors to find a socket hidden under some furniture element. And yes, I know that if I want a power plug during flight I could go business class, but that's a lot of dough for a little juice.

Other posts about usability and travel on uselog:
> Inflight Entertainment Becomes Ergonomics Nightmare
> Of Inflight Entertainment Annoyances And Blind Execs
> Boarding Pass Design Imitates Fix by Users
> Swedish Woman Puts Herself on Luggage Belt
> Redesigned Airport Check-in Saves Millions
> Confusing Bus Exit Sign

[photo: rudyneeser]

A hilarious and (unfortunately) very recognizable description of the pitfalls of automatic oven cleaning - amongst others, in this post about the biggest blunders of the staff of consumer reports:

Our engineer tried to turn the oven off but discovered that once the self-cleaning mode had been started, it couldn’t be stopped. Quick thinking prevailed—he went to the circuit breaker box and shut off the power. The oven, however, remained locked and the cutting board continued burning. It took the local fire department to pull the range out of kitchen and put it the driveway for the fire to finally burn out. Even then, the door could not be opened until the oven had cooled down.

[Via: The Human Factors Blog] [Photo: Bengt-re]

Here's another interesting study that shows an effect of poor usability. According to a survey conducted by British Telecom Home IT Support seventy-one percent of Britons has up to 10 gadgets lying around the home unused, as they find them too hard to use. Over half of Brits have abandoned gadgets because they don’t know how to use them properly. The study also shows that 94 per cent of people who experience problems with their home IT are too scared or proud to seek expert help. Over 80 per cent of those who have a problem try to fix it themselves, or ask family and friends for advice.

[Via Core77]

Breaking news: the iPhone is not perfect. On pleasefixtheiphone.com iPhone users can submit changes and rate change proposals for the iPhone. If you're a product development company this is a wonderful position to be in: users/consumers organizing themselves to provide you with with feedback.

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
> Hidden iPhone headset button: design minimalism gone too far
> The iPhone: No Manual

UPDATE: THIS POSITION HAS BEEN FILLED. For other PhD positions in Delft, check this webpage.

The Design Techniques (DT) research group at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering of Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands is looking for a Ph.D. candidate for the project “Generation Y interactions”. PersonalIy, I can recommend doing a PhD project here (at the moment I'm finishing one of myself): good facilities, good people, and you're taken very seriously. Act fast, as they are recruiting now (see contact info at the bottom of the post).

Design research for generationY
The project will focus on developing new interaction techniques for the so-called Generation Y office workers. Born in the 1980s and early 90s, they are digital natives, which have experienced digital technology their entire lives. Thus they have developed new ways and habits of interacting with their digital world, putting very high demands on the applications, services, devices and networks that enable and support these interactions. To cater to this new generation of workers, future business applications and services should fit in with richer ways of interaction that go beyond keyboard, mouse and display. The goal of the PhD project is to develop and explore these new ‘Generation Y interactions’ and to study how they could affect future ways of working.

Collaboration between academia and industry
This project is a collaboration between the DT group and Exact Software. The DT group, which is associated with the ID-StudioLab, focuses on developing methods, tools, and techniques to support designers and design teams in the early phase of the design process.

UPDATE: THIS POSITION HAS BEEN FILLED. For other PhD positions in Delft, check this webpage.

More information
Find the full description here (pdf). For more information, please contact Gert Pasman.

At Welie.com - Patterns of interaction design you can find an extensive toolkit containing examples and insights on design solutions for a particular interaction problem (for web- and software). Like for example "Users need to access information or functionality but they only need in under certain (temporal) circumstances", for which this is mentioned as a possible solution.
According to the author of the site, Martijn van Welie, the presence of the library doesn't mean that designers should stop thinking:

It is no substitute for creative design, [...] Every 'solution' described in these patterns may succeed in one context but may also fail in another. The challenge is to understand why and how it depends on elements of the context of use.

However, it is a great resource for interaction designers. Something similar should become available for interaction design for electronic consumer products.

"Everything is just a few hundred clicks away, nothing could be more intuitive."

A while ago I was cycling and got a call on my mobile. I was listening to music, and the headset doubled as a hands-free set, so I picked up the call. A few minutes into the conversation, I noticed I was holding the microphone close to my mouth. But from a sound-quality perspective this was not necessary at all. I think I was trying to prevent confusion (similar to this situation) when standing in a group of people at the traffic lights, or just making sure innocent bystanders wouldn't think I was mentally disturbed. Since then I've noticed lots of people making the 'Hey, not crazy, on the phone here!'-gesture (as in the above pictures from flickr [left], [right]). Or maybe they just have really lousy headsets.