In many hotels you can order pay-per-view movies. Exhausted travelers get to see a movie they actually like and hotels get to make little money. And because of the latter you want to give the pay per-view-feature a prominent place on the remote. Firstly, you want to point out to your guests that pay-per-view is available, secondly, you want to make it easy to access the function. One of the interaction designers I interviewed for a case study called the former approach 'marketing through interface design'. And there's nothing wrong with that, as long as it doesn't get in the way of the other use cases in a product.

However, in the case of the remote pictured above, the pay-per-view button has the appearance (red) and position (upper part of remote) that is normally reserved for the on-off button. Thankfully you can't purchase anything as long as the TV is not switched on. However, when I was trying to switch the TV off, I suddenly found myself in the pay-per-view movie menu. So I guess the interaction designer accomplished what he was trying, or was told to do.

Generic Work Process is an immense online overview of methods for user centered design (with a slightly unfortunate, non-descriptive name), created by students and researchers of the Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences. The methods are conveniently categorized by product development phase:

• Research & Analysis
• Concept
• Design
• Develop
• Implement

The Design Methodology Project at KAIST resulted in a similar wiki-like overview, of which also a poster (pdf) was made. With regard to posters of the user-centered design process, I'm still a fan of the UPA's board game version (order here), and the Namahn underground map of user-centered design of digital products.

See also
> Usability methods table: choose the appropriate approach
> When to use which user experience research methods (Jakob Nielsen)

[Generic Work Processes found via: usabilityblog]

Electronics keep getting cheaper, and people keep drinking alcohol. Those are I suspect the underlying reasons for the appearance of products with what I would call 'unnecessary interactivity'. The things that make you say "Why?" and that make the more technically inclined and socially handicapped say: "Because we can!" Don't get me wrong, I’m all in favor of innovation. But I am also in favor of innovating in a way that makes sense. Thus: A Top Ten of Unnecessary Interactivity. To keep the selection process subjective but transparent, here's the selection criteria:

• Making it interactive brings no added value to the user
  
• The interaction was poorly designed and/or implemented
  
• It's annoying

The result: ten 'inspiring' examples from both academia and shops. And once you've gone through the list, one question remains: why do people feel compelled to 'improve' kitchen appliances by adding electronics and internet connections?

10. The yoyo-powered MP3-player

I love the idea of using human power as an energy source for an MP3-player. That actually makes sense, but there must be a more practical and less embarrassing way of powering your music player then by swinging a yoyo.

9. Farting iPhone applications

Pushing a touch-screen to hear a farting sound remains funny for about three seconds. Developers of similar finger-pulling applications are actually suing each other, because of - get this - trademark infringements.

8. Rollover alarm clock

It’s not that often during a usability test that you get participants asking you whether they are allowed to smash the product. The AJ3136 alarm clock provoked that reaction from multiple participants (we use it in a course on observational research at IDE, because it is such a satisfying product to evaluate). It has a playful design, with the funny little feature that it can produce a different wake-up signal depending on which side you rotate it on. However, as one of the (authentic) reviewers on Amazon points out:

You have to handle it with care, or it would generate big noise.

Handling with care? That sounds more like nitroglycerin than like an alarm clock. In addition, our participants had big trouble turning that big noise off, and thus got tremendously frustrated. Needless to say it won an award.

7. Electric pepper-mill (with flashlight!)

Why create a battery powered peppermill with a built-in flashlight, you say? Because you still want to make pasta with freshly ground pepper even if you injured your wrist and the electricity company goes bankrupt and you are all out of candles.

6. ‘Cute’ paperclips and lazy dogs

Affective computing with a mischievous twist. I don’t want a puffy puppy asking me questions; I want to search my hard drive. I don’t want an annoying paperclip making inappropriate suggestions and not finding the answers to my questions. You can’t compensate for poor performance by throwing in an animated character or two.

5. Touch-screen shower controls

Imagine a touch-screen operated shower in which each family member can store his/her own shower settings, such as temperature and duration. You’re imagining it? Good, because it exists! We spotted it at this year's ISH fair (no documentation online yet, but it's similar to this one). That’s one less thing to really, really annoy me in the morning: turning on the shower.

4. The Internet/touch-screen fridge

What exactly it is that drives kitchen appliance manufacturers to equip refrigerators with an Internet connection and/or a touch-screen is beyond me. Apparently on of the bigger benefits is that your fridge can order food. That would require your eating behavior to be as predictable as what suit the mad scientist from The Fly puts on each morning. And for the touch screen: is it really such a fuss to access the Internet through your laptop or are laptops no longer allowed in the kitchen for some reason? Or maybe you can manage your shopping list on that screen. But wait, you could also just… look inside the fridge. Or use a whiteboard marker. This one did have strong competition from the Internet-connected oven.

3. Weather-forecasting toaster

A toaster that prints the weather forecast on your toast. Sure, why not? Would have loved to see the sales pitch on that one. (See also: the digital image toaster)

2. iBrella: the iPod controlling umbrella

Even though it's thousands of years old, there are useful ways of innovating the umbrella. You can make it storm resistant as they did with the marvelous Senz umbrella. Think a little wilder and you can make the handle show you the weather forecast. Out-there, but I can understand the reasoning. But why the hell would I want to operate an iPod with my umbrella?

1. Blendie

We have a winner. Blendie is a voice-controlled blender that you operate by modulating the pitch of your voice (movie). Why? Because we can. Or: because we had the funding anyway. Or because we are having a cocktail party this evening and are looking for some entertainment. Based on the premise that 'the person speaks the language of the blender’. That's one disturbing piece of interaction design.


You disagree?
Or you have better suggestions? Feel free to leave your suggestions in the comments.

Thanks for all the input for this list from my colleagues at the ID StudioLab and my research group at IDE, and thanks to Walter for triggering it with his brilliant musings about the Spaceballs Fallacy.

I was trying to speak English yesterday. Or more specifically, I was trying to communicate a URL to an English-speaking colleague and now I am sure: calling the World Wide Web the World Wide Web was a fundamental mistake. Or to be more specifically: including 'WWW' in URLs must have been an idea from someone who communicated more via written text than via speech. Abbreviating World Wide Web into WWW does not make it any faster to pronounce at all, and secondly saying doubleyoudoubleyoudoubleyou takes more concentration than saying World Wide Web. And finally it makes you (are at least me - a Dutchman trying to speak English) feel silly. So in terms of usability the abbreviation WWW falls short with regard to its efficiency (time investment and required effort) and satisfaction.

[Movie: the history of the Internet, via infosthetics]

From June 8 to 10, 2009 the Ergonomics in Design subcommittee of the International Ergonomics Association (IEA) is organizing the ErgoDesign Forum in Lyon, France. If I understand the somewhat peculiar text on the website correctly, the goal of the event is to stimulate the exchange of knowledge on ergonomics in design between the various disciplines that are involved in product design, such as marketing, management, quality management, manufacturing, but of course also design and ergonomics. The application areas touched upon in the event are:

• Medical design
• Sport and leisure
• The quality of working life
• Daily life and at home
• Transportation and urban life
• New technologies appropriation

A mother and her children on a bicycle in Amsterdam. One of the children is in what the photographer calls 'the suicide seat'.

Imagine you are a designer having to design a product for country or community you are pretty much unfamiliar with. Let's say you're an American designer that lands the assignment of designing a bike for everyday inner-city transport in the Netherlands. You need to learn as much as you can about your user group and their behavior. That requires extensive, expensive and complicated user research, right? Not necessarily. The photo report Amsterdam Bicycles illustrates what an incredible amount of information you can distill from standing on a street corner for 73 minutes. San Francisco based software engineer Brian Wilson stood on a corner of the Amsterdam Nieuwmarkt for 73 minutes, took 83 pictures of people riding their bikes and annotated them with comments that expressed an ever increasing amazement of what these crazy Dutch people were doing to and on their bikes. A few brilliant examples:

• Multiple Riders on One Bike - With or without any extra seats or foot-pegs for the extra riders, you will see 1 or 2 or even 3 extra passengers side-saddle, balancing precariously, standing, sitting, whatever it takes so they can hitch a ride with a buddy or parent. This is so common I had to stop taking pictures of it because it would prevent me from capturing some of the other trends.
• The long dresses like the [this picture] seem like they would be avoided, but apparently not.
• This one [referring to the picture above, ed] shows a common "3 person bicycle rig" I saw a lot. You'll notice the kid in back is just sitting on the bicycle freight rack, feet dangling and looking bored. Also looking bored is the kid in the suicide position in front of the bicycle. Mom of course is wearing a stunning white dress and lipstick and has a nice purse over her shoulder, and *NONE* of them are wearing bicycle helmets.
• Spectacular Gigantic Unbreakable Security Chains - Almost all of the bicycles in Amsterdam are what I would call "beaters", which means they are beaten up, scraped, bent, out of tune, and have bad paint jobs. At the same time, all these beaters have these GIGANTIC security chains that look like they should be the chain on the anchor of an oil tanker ship.

Of course, a part from taking the pictures the analysis and annotation might have taken some time, but you'll manage doing that within one day. I think his report is a great example that even an unexperienced 'user researcher' can produce a wealth of design information in a limited amount of time, given the fact that he or she is in the right place at the right time.

I was on a plane, watching a movie on my iPhone. Forgot my own earbuds, so I had to use the (crappy) headphones the airline supplied. Which, as it turned out, were not powerful enough for me to clearly hear the movie dialogue and then I - the product millions of years of evolution - did the following: I held the iPhone closer, apparently thinking that this would enable to hear the movie dialogue better. Sigh. A split second after doing this I became conscious of the utter uselessness of my act, and found myself looking around stealthily to see whether someone had witnessed the temporary mix up of my senses.

[Photo: Riggle]

At a symposium about cultural diversity and design that I visited a while ago I heard the following description of culture, which I think is pretty accurate:

Culture is a system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts that members of a society use to cope with their world and with one another, and that are transmitted from generation to generation through learning (Boden, 2006).

More simply put (and shorter) culture is 'how we do things here.' Being somewhat artifact-obsessed, I especially like the fact that in this definition artifacts are considered a part of culture. In addition, the definition states that that culture is something that is transmitted through learning, which came to mind when I ran into the blue fire extinguisher on the right in the picture overhead. In 'the west' we've come to associate red with danger. Emergency stop buttons are red, traffic lights signaling you to stop are red, fire extinguishers are red. The latter does not go for fire extinguishers in Asia though: they're blue.

The explanation I was offered is that in much of Asia (particularly in China) the color red is omnipresent, because it is associated with for example prosper, or - in the case of China - it's the national color. That makes red a pretty useless color if you want to make fire extinguisher easily noticed. Whatever the cause, the blue fire extinguisher at the Dragon-Inn in Borneo made me stop in my tracks. To my Dutch-culture-biased eyes it looked strange, which made me notice it. Though I probably would not have looked for something blue had there really been a fire.

The rest of the world may be drooling over it, but Japan is not really warming up to the iPhone, according to Wired. The tech-fashion magazine gives a number of reasons why not:

• The iPhone has a relatively expensive monthly data plan, in a market that is very competitive;
  
• It lacks features that are common in Japan, such as multimedia messaging, video recording, and a TV-tuner;
  
• The low-quality camera;
  
• It's not Japanese. The Japanese are pretty hostile towards foreign brands, as Nokia and Motorola experienced earlier;
  
• And - adding insult to injury - the Japanese think it has an unfashionable design.

The story sparked a heated debate on the Wired website to the point where Wired editors found themselves having to make changes to the original article, and close the comments because they contained remarks getting dangerously close to racism. Or "Why Wired-readers don't like Japanese that don't like the iPhone and journalists that cite from previous articles by their own hand."

[Illustration from crunchgear]

Yes, using Skype is cheap and (sometimes) convenient. But if you're in a noisy hotel lobby and you need to stick your head in your laptop to be able to hear and make yourself heard, Skype can also make you look like a fool.

The use of Skype can also result in a back ache.