One of the perks of spending some time abroad is that you get to be naive again. You are not accustomed to the design of what you interact with in daily life, so you see new things. I've had the opportunity and pleasure of spending two months at Northwestern University's Segal Design Institute and MMM-program. And for all the things I thoroughly enjoyed in the US, I must say, it was not the design of the coins and banknotes.

What confused me about US coins
First of all, looking at the coins (pictured above) you can see that it's not very clearly indicated what the denomination of the coins is. On most of them it is printed in quite a small typeface, and in the case of the 10 cent coin it doesn't even say that it's a ten cent coin. Just 'one dime', which basically is jargon to an ignorant foreigner like me. And then there's the size. The five cent coin is bigger than the 10 cent coin (but the material looks very similar). I guess it's because traditionally the value of a coin was inherent - it should actually be worth what it represented. Once again, no biggie if you've been using it for years, but for me - the naive Dutch guy - that was pretty confusing. Especially because in the line at the counter you don't usually have lots of time to start reviewing each coin. You'll get nasty looks from the people in line behind you.



The old Dutch Guilder coins
Now, here's a range of coins that's different: the coins of the old Dutch Guilder. Sorry for the slight hint of chauvinism here, but this is just the best example of functional coin design I know. They're obviously all designed using the same design language. The designer, Bruno Ninaber van Eyben, chose to communicate the denomination of the coins using their size, material, typography and a system of lines. Note that the 10 and 5 cent coins only have vertical lines, the guilder and the quarter have horizontal and vertical lines, and the 2,5 guilder coin (rijksdaalder) has vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines. I can't be sure, but I think a naive user would have less trouble with these coins than with the US coins.

US banknotes
In addition to being outsmarted by coins, there were banknotes to make my life harder. My gripe with US banknotes (but many bills all over the world have the same issue) is that they all have the same color. Basically in your wallet a stack of Dollar bills looks like this:



And those are actually 1, 10, 20 and 50 dollar bills in that picture. The only way to distinguish them properly is to read the denomination. Recently the five Dollar bill got a slight makeover, making the denomination easier to distinguish, but the overall color of the banknote remains the same. By the way, you don't have to be foreign to notice this issue. AmericanRichard Smith has started the The Dollar Redesign Project: anyone can submit their designs for a better Dollar.

Dutch banknotes of the guilder
But aren't most banknotes of the same generic color? Well, no. Take a look at these - again, I'm sorry - Dutch banknotes by Ootje Oxenaar, once heralded by the English visual design magazine Creative Review as the most beautiful money in the world.



But actually I'm not into them because of their beauty. I love the functional use of graphic design in these banknotes: because of their very distinguishable color scheme (and slightly different sizes), if you put them in a stack in your wallet, you get this:



And that makes it much easier to locate the right one. Now, the aforementioned Guilder coins and bills have of course been replaced by the Euro coins and banknotes. But thankfully the Euro bills and coins have the same properties that made the 'design of the Guilder' so appealing to me: differences in color and size, clear typography, and an overall design language. Though I should say I find the graphic design of the bills not particularly inspiring.

A lack of incentive
So why are there so many poorly designed banknotes around? These are products that are used by millions everyday. Why not make that usage a little easier? Well, I think first of all there is no incentive for the creator of the notes to implement a better design, as usage problems with bills don't cause product returns or customer complaints at the help desk, and people have no alternative. Users of the - let's just say - Australian Dollar will not suddenly turn to the Euro because the Austrialian Dollar could have been designed better. And there's lots of incentives to keep stick with an old design: tradition, nostalgia, etc. The design of the Dollar bills stems from the 1930s. That's a good deal of tradition, right there. And if you want to do it right you have to design and replace a whole range of coins or bills at once. That's quite the logistics operation. So in the end it probably all comes down to the motivation of a country's central bank.

More about Ootje Ooxenaar
> Transcript of lecture by Ootje Oxenaar on designing banknotes
> Interview with Ootje Oxenaar on YouTube

On phones with a regular keypad (left) on every numbered key there's three letters as well, allowing for the use of phonewords or vanity numbers. Think 1-800-flowers or 1-800-rent-a-car. In the US, advertisers often only list the phoneword (as in the photo below). But I was just wondering: how do you enter a phoneword number on a Blackberry keypad (pictured right), where the distribution of letters and numbers over the keys is different? As it turns out, you need to use a workaround.

It's good to get inspired by other disciplines once in a while. Here's a combination that I hadn't seen before, but that put a smile on my face when I did: FoodUX - gastronomic inspiration for UX designers. As the author puts it:

FoodUX is a passion synergy of the creation of memorable culinary experiences and the design for compelling user experiences.

When I first saw the products pictured above I was not sure what to make of them. You are wondering what you are looking at? They're actually fire extinguishers from Fire Design. However, in case of fire I would like anyone who's around to be able to find the fire extinguisher in the blink of an eye. And a cool graphic design doesn't exactly help to identify these objects as being fire extinguishers. They might as well be one of those hip 'design' SIGG bottles.

When someone has to find something quick, it helps if the 'something' is looking like they expect it to. In which case it helps to conform to the norm. And in western countries a bright red fire extinguisher (and not blue) is still the norm. Of course fire extinguishers don't have to be ugly. They can be quite stylish, as Maarten Heijltjes and Sanne Pelgrom demonstrate with their award-winning submission for a design competition for a new fire extinguisher.



[Fire Design extinguishers via thinkemotions]

In their review of this wall-mountable Samsung blue-ray player Wired points out an annoying trend in home entertainment electronics: they're a pain to install and setup properly because of the huge amount of connections and settings.

Initial installation proved to be a troubling process of trial-and-error steps to get all the features working properly. Like all entertainment electronics today, the bulk of setup and navigational controls falls to the remote, also encased in a shiny black luster. Basic controls are hidden under the front panel with easy-to-miss, touch-sensitive backlit buttons. Discs are inconveniently slot-loaded on the side.

This product seems to be a matter of valuing 'design' over usability. It's kind of hard to make a 1,5 inch thick blue-ray player and also make it comfortable to plug all the cables into it. And touch-sensitive controls definitely look cool, but 'controls' is actually not such a good word for them; LG learned that on the Chocolate. No wonder AT&T started offering a home cinema installation service.

A while ago I was amazed by having found someone who had arranged her iPhone icons by color. Now there is a new version of that - to the extreme. TechCrunch reports that at the Apple WWDC Event, Apple hooked up a bunch of cinema displays into a Matrix-Style App Wall. On it are the icons of the more than 50.000 apps in the app store. Each icon will pulsate for a while when someone buys the app. I want one at home.



[via infosthetics, photo: liquidx]

Because they are so incredibly charming and ridiculously simple I had to give some love to the Swedish mobile phone maker Doro. They recently got an iF Gold Award for outstanding product design for five of their products, among which three mobile phones. CNET reviewed two Doro phones (one of which reminds me a bit of the ITT Easy5) and mobilehealthnews interviewed Doro's Jerome Arnaud, who made the following interesting statement:

Doro aims to help those who are still in the majority of seniors who have not gotten used to mobile technology, are unfamiliar and would never accept it as it exists today. In some cases it’s not a matter of whether they are actually able to use it, but rather if they can connect with the image that the product conveys. Even if, a given 80-year-old could use iPhones, Arnaud argues that it is very likely that person would reject the iPhone simply because of the device’s youth-centric branding.

More uselog posts about simple phones:
> Simple phones and basic phones
> Easy to use Nokias

[photo: CNET]

In this article in the Journal of Applied Ergonomics, entitled 'From telephones to iPhones: Applying systems thinking to networked, interoperable products' the authors point out that consumer electronics have turned into complex, networked platforms for services, as opposed to the 'as is' stand alone consumer electronics of twenty years ago. Designing these products, they argue, requires a systems thinking design approach. In the insightful, but sometimes a bit fuzzily worded article, the authors use the iPhone as a case study to illustrate their point. Below I've listed a number of trends they identify, emphasizing what I consider the most important ones, and supplemented here and there with my own examples.

Increased complexity
Current consumer electronics can perform a broad range of tasks. Often a product category, such as mobile phones, may have started out basic (consider the first telephones), but the very presence of this new product triggered people to think about new possible functions for the product, in a process that the authors call coevolution, resulting in what's known as feature creep or blithe.

Product-service combination
Often consumer electronics are part of a service offering, as in for example the mobile phone, which is an interface to the service your telecom provider offers. As the authors put it:

Are some consumer products becoming a bit more like services? Is it the case that ‘‘It’s not what you sell a customer, it's what you do for them. It’s not what something is, it’s what it is connected to, what it does.’’?

Networked
In addition electronic consumer products are becoming more and more networked: your DVD recorder is part of a network with your TV and cable decoder and possible you've even added a home theatre system to that. This - in combination with a sometimes near-criminal lack of standardization in the consumer electronics industry - offers a splendid opportunity for a whole range of new possibilities for system failure, interconnectivity, and usability issues.

'Connected'
Now if you have a blue-ray player instead of a DVD-recorder your personal network is in turn connected to the Internet. The authors of the article don't explicitly distinguish between 'networked' and 'connected', but I like the distinction between a product being connected to other products in a local network for the purpose of reinforcing or enabling each others functionality, and a product being able to access a communications network (such as the Internet) for the purpose of accessing or communicating information. Interestingly, apart from accessing information and services, connectedness gives product developers the ability to update the product after they have launched it, which is standard practice for software, but pretty new for consumer electronics.

Systems thinking
These trends suggest you no longer sell people a product that offers a specific functionality. You give people something they can customize according to their needs. There's a shift from - as the authors put it - end products to initial conditions (for product use). However, that makes it kind of hard to predict how people will use your product and how to design it, and that's where systems thinking approach comes in.

Systems thinking is ‘‘a framework for conceptualizing or viewing the world’’ (Carvajal, 1983, p. 230). In this regard the networked, interoperable consumer products that are the topic of this paper are conceptually no different from any large-scale system to which ‘systems thinking’ is normally applied. Although rarely seen in this way, certain types of product can also be seen as '‘a set of interrelated elements’’ (Hall and Fagen, 1956 cited in Carvajal, 1983) and a ‘‘regularly interacting or interdependent group of items forming a unified whole’’ (Merriam-Webster, 2007). [...] In a sense the information-age raises the systemic level at which products need to be considered, in other words the designer needs to include more of the world in their design..

A new framework for human-product interaction
As a consequence, when looking at human-product interaction frameworks (which indicate what components make up the interaction and how they are related) we should not only consider the interaction between the individual user and his/her product, but also the interaction with other products and other people, as I outlined in this earlier post and this article on user-centred design for sustainable behavior.



Reference
Walker, G., Stanton, N., Jenkins, D., Salmon, P., March 2009. From telephones to iphones: Applying systems thinking to networked, interoperable products. Applied Ergonomics 40 (2), 206-215.

I've added a number of new designs to the uselog shirtshop. And because it seems a bit silly for an Internet shop only to ship within the EU, in addition to the original shop, I've now added a second shop that ships worldwide: uselog shirts | worldwide. This may cause some confusion, but for EU citizens it's cheaper to order in the EU shop, that's why I'm keeping the original shop online.

What do Apple and Pure Digital (the maker of the Flip Video camera) have in common? They both have products on the market renowned for their usability, partly due to a focus on the essentials. But they share something else: failure. Big time failure. TechCrunch takes a look at the predecessors of the Flip and concludes that:

Pure Digital wasn’t always selling hit products - it took seven years for the company to get it right. In the meantime, they launched products that just weren’t quite the right thing at the right time.

And while Apple is by now considered the pinnacle of product innovation, design and usability, the company has had it's fair share of failed products, that by now journalists are of course very willing to highlight (Forbes, Wired, MacLife). But appropriately, the Wired article is entitled 'Learning From Failure', because the question arises whether the iPhone would have been the iPhone if it had not been preceded by the Apple Newton and the Motorola ROKR. Then again, Apple's still struggling with AppleTV, and that was preceded by Macintosh TV. So I guess that failing doesn't offer any guarantees either.