For those of you who don't have any plans for the weekend: ZINK (ZeroInk), the company that provides the technology for the new generation of Polaroid cameras, (picture below) has a design challenge for you. The ZINK zero boundaries competition challenges you to design and imagine "new and innovative solutions that enable and enhance printing with ZINK Technology". They would like you to "re-imagine printing and its role in the digital world using the ZINK Technology to fuel the future possibilities of this unique technology platform".

Quite an impressive jury by the way, with people from for example Frog Design, Gizmodo, and Harvard Business School. A (relatively) cheap and fun way for ZINK to get inspired, a good way for you to get noticed (if you want to). Deadline is monday June 8.

Check out this useful overview of usability cheat-sheets from Designer City, USA. And while you're in a learning mood, you might want to look at these lessons for webdesign from water taps. Yes, you read it right, water taps, fountains. For example the lesson learned from the picture above was: If you need massive instructions, you've cocked it up.

A friend of mine was recently a bit insulted/disappointed when she started telling what she thought to be an engaging story to a group of friends, and one of them zoned out and pulled out his iPhone. When catching her raised eyebrow he said: "I already know this story." Having dinner with friends is not quite the same if everyone brings (and uses) their iPhone at the table. Found this picture (entitled iPhone insanity) with the following hilarious description on flickr:

Kevin, Keith and Nick using their iPhones, while PJ watches a movie on Brian's iPhone. And I took this with an iPhone. Ridiculous.

Always having e-mail, phone, photos, movies and news at your fingertips does seem to stimulate continuous partial attention. And sometimes I find it a little rude (guilty myself as well!). Or maybe it's just that the times are a-changing.

UPDATE:
New York Times article on texting and dinner etiquette: Play With Your Food, Just Don’t Text!

For your convenience I have added a Twitter-feed to the possibilities of staying up to date on uselog posts, in addition to the rss-feed and e-mail updates.

If you were not one of the 150 designers and design researchers from industry or 200 students and academics who attended the contextmapping symposium Designing for, with, and from User Experiences, but you had actually wanted to, this is your chance. The presentations, by Liz Sanders, Jacob Buur, and Froukje Sleeswijk Visser can now be viewed online.

Contextmapping?
Under the flag of 'contextmapping', the tools and techniques group at IDE/TU Delft has been exploring designerly techniques of user/context research, in close collaboration with education (600 students) and industries in the Netherlands and across Europe. The symposium took place after five years of this program, on the occasion of the PhD defense of Froukje Sleeswijk Visser, on communicating user experiences to design teams (pdf of thesis and other publications).

Liz Sanders, of MakeTools, talked about large-scale co-creation she has been doing with architectural firm NBBJ, discussing the difficulties in bringing these processes in architecture. Besides giving an impression of the sheer size of the projects (building whole hospitals), and the complexity of developing user-centered design insights, she discusses the tools and techniques that have been used to bring the user experience into building processes.
> see video

Jacob Buur, of the University of Southern Denmark, discussed his experiences in applying ethnographic provocation in companies, and showed examples how video as a co-creation tool can be used to bring out misunderstandings in design communication.
> see video

Froukje Sleeswijk Visser introduced the education program at Delft, and led a series of 10 graduates who related their experience in applying contextmapping, co-creation and other user-centered design processes during and after their studies. These 10 presentations in pechakucha style give an impression of the diversity of companies trying out these techniques, and of the changing Zeitgeist, ranging from the first graduate finding a non-receptive market to several recent graduates who set up their own design research consultancies.
> see video

As a follow up to the previous post, on the danger of killing good ideas by usability evaluation, a second option: killing good a good idea by having a focus group. The video actually beautifully illustrates another notion from the previously mentioned Greenberg/Buxton paper: that today's consumers/users may find it hard to evaluate tomorrow's products. Remember the Walkman legend?

[Thanks to Floris for the tip]

If there's one thing we know that's beneficial for making good products it's usability evaluation, right? So - being the usability zealot that I am - I felt an immediate urge of disagreement hitting me when I saw the title of the CHI2008 paper Usability Evaluation Considered Harmful (Some of the Time)* (pdf) by Saul Greenberg and Bill Buxton. But fortunately I did read the article and discovered Greenberg and Buxton lay out a very compelling argument against usability evaluation being misused as the standard method to evaluate any design, including innovative, conceptually new user interfaces.

Formative versus summative testing
The gist of it is that there's no use in comparing the usability of an immature tangible interaction concept (say, the Wobble Lamp) against an element of a mature on-screen user interface (e.g., Windows 98). It's the innovator's dilemma: you might dismiss a new technology or concept because it doesn't perform sufficiently, but it only underperforms because it is immature; the potential of the immature might be much bigger than that of the existing (see illustration above). You want to know and show what's good about your design, its potential, and what can be improved to reach it. And that is not something that only performing a usability evaluation will give you an answer to.

Abstract
Current practice in Human Computer Interaction as encouraged by educational institutes, academic review processes, and institutions with usability groups advocate usability evaluation as a critical part of every design process. This is for good reason: usability evaluation has a significant role to play when conditions warrant it. Yet evaluation can be ineffective and even harmful if naively done ‘by rule’ rather than ‘by thought’. If done during early stage design, it can mute creative ideas that do not conform to current interface norms. If done to test radical innovations, the many interface issues that would likely arise from an immature technology can quash what could have been an inspired vision. If done to validate an academic prototype, it may incorrectly suggest a design’s scientific worthiness rather than offer a meaningful critique of how it would be adopted and used in everyday practice. If done without regard to how cultures adopt technology over time, then today’s reluctant reactions by users will forestall tomorrow’s eager acceptance. The choice of evaluation methodology – if any – must arise from and be appropriate for the actual problem or research question under consideration.

Alternative methods
As alternatives to usability evaluation the authors suggest design rationale, scenarios of use, case studies, and participatory critiques. I would add user experience sampling, observational research, and in-depth interviews to that. Greenberg and Buxton do a very good job at pointing out that the evaluation of innovative interaction concepts should be formative, not summative, and that usability is just one of the product properties to evaluate a product by.

Read the paper: it's a mind-changer.

See also
> Greenberg's slideshare set of the CHI presentation of the article

Reference
*Greenberg, S. and Buxton, B. 2008. Usability evaluation considered harmful (some of the time). In Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Florence, Italy, April 05 - 10, 2008). CHI '08. ACM, New York, NY, 111-120.

[Illustration: MIT Aurora project]

So, what is human factors (or ergonomics)? You would have thought that a domain that busies itself with creating a fit between people and their tools and surroundings would have chosen a name that fits people's knowledge and preconceptions. But alas. So often human factors professionals find themselves explaining what human factors is. People who call themselves ergonomists have the added difficulty that people find the name hard to pronounce, or plain silly. Oddly enough, you hardly ever see business people having to explain what 'business' is (up until recently at least). In addition to that, as any self-respecting profession, human factors and ergonomics professionals are self-obsessed and feel a need to define themselves.

Those might be some causes for the interesting array of definitions of human factors and ergonomics that Eric Shaver of the Human Factors Blog found in literature. He provides a good overview (including literature references), and, ironically, adds a definition of his own.

By the way, my favorite let's-look-up-this-word tool (visualthesaurus) did not know what human factors is (see image above), but it does know ergonomics. As usual, wikipedia knows them both: human factors, ergonomics.

If someone is out and about trashing mobile phone designs I can't resist, I just have to read. And in this case justifiably so, because it's plain fun: PC world reviews the 10 ugliest and lamest mobile phones. Of course usability plays a role in some of the reviews, as for example for Nokia's lipstick-like 7380.

If you owned the Nokia 7380 and had to send a quick text message to save your life, you’d be dead by now. This handset, which looks like a fancy pencil box, has to go down as one of the most unusable phones ever made. Critics commented that the only thing you could do fast with this phone is answer an incoming call.

You've got to admit that it takes guts though: removing almost all controls from a phone. About almost as gutsy as placing the controls over the screen so that your hand blocks the screen while operating the phone, as on the B&O Serenata.

[Picture from PC World]

Meet Philip's SpotOn LED lamp. I just bought two and I love them. Basically they only consist of batteries, LEDs and a motion sensor. Because LEDs have really low power consumption you can stick these babies anywhere around the house where you need a little extra light: cupboards, hallways, kitchen cabinets. No hassle with installation, power supply, etcetera. Just double sided tape will do it. Brilliantly simple, and only possible since the recent advent of cheap, powerful LEDs. The only thing I think it lacks is a light sensor, because right now any motion triggers the lamp to switch on, even when there's plenty of daylight. And maybe the light could be a little brighter. But otherwise: lovely.

See also this pretty enthusiastic review on Apartment Therapy.