The day after Christmas I got emails from the webshops of both Apple and Philips with the same heading: "Didn't get what you wanted for Christmas?" and then of course a subsequent encouragement to get myself what I really wanted in their online shop. Apple phrases it as follows: "Exactly what you wanted and you only have to thank yourself" (see picture below). Right, that's the true Christmas spirit for you. Because thanking other people is a really nasty thing to do.

Instead of sticking with an Android-only user interface, Samsung opted to mix things up with its own "TouchWiz" system. <...> However, Samsung's approach turned the Behold II's navigation into a nightmare. The end result is a disjointed experience, where sometimes you're using Android's menu system, and other times you're using TouchWiz — complete with different looking icons and menu trees.

The crown jewel of this split-personality experience is the multimedia-enhanced widget called the "cube." <...> Not only is the act of rotating the cube strangely challenging, it's mostly pointless. Using the regular menus to launch these tasks is easier, and the ability to store shortcut icons on the home screen negates its necessity. And don't even get us started on the "shake for a random app" feature.

New York Times columnist David Pogue reviews two devices meant to help you get in shape (in other words: lose weight): the Fitbit and Philips DirectLife. Both devices basically consist of an accelerometer with a very advanced algorithm that can interpret from the accelerometer output what kind of activity you are doing. Also, you connect each of the devices to a computer to read the output and get feedback.

The UX Fund is an investment experiment conducted by Theehan+Lax user experience consultants. They believed that companies that deliver a great user experience would see it reflected in their stock price. So they selected 10 companies with a great user experience, using the following criteria:
1. A demonstrated care in the design of their products and Web site
2. A history of innovation
3. They inspire loyalty in their customer base
4. Doing business with them is a positive experience
Subsequently, on November 1, 2006, they invested $50,000 USD (about $5,000 in each company) into Apple, EA, Google, JetBlue, Netflix, Nike, Progressive Insurance, Nike, Research in Motion, Target, and Yahoo. Shares were held for 1 year; they did not adjust the portfolio meanwhile.

The experiment closed on November 6 2007, at which point it had a 39.3% revenue, outperforming major indexes like NASDAQ, S&P 500, DOW, NASDAQ, and NYSE (see figure above). Even though the stocks were sold, the performance of the UX fund can still be tracked, and while I am writing this, in the aftermath of the credit-crisis, the fund is still outperforming the other indexes, having achieved a +15.73% interest since November 1, 2006. The runner up is the NASDAQ 100 index, which at +3.94% is the only index that has a positive score.

Admittedly the experiment may have had some deficiencies. For example, user experience may not have been the one variable that set the selected companies apart from their peers. Maybe the researchers simply chose 'blue chip' stock, that had been performing well over the last years, and thus might be expected to continue to do so. And to me - being a complete non-expert on investing in stocks - the stock portfolio seems a bit light in terms of 'financials', who suffered greatly from the credit crisis, which may explain the large difference in performance over the last year, but not in the time when the actual experiment was run (up until November 6 2007).

However, apart from grievances you may have about the setup, the notion of companies with a good user experience outperforming others is interesting and seems to have some merit. I would love to see user experience specialists and investment researchers team up to do a more extensive (more stocks) and rugged version of this experiment.

[Via: productquadrant]

10/GUI is a concept for a multi-touch UI paradigm for desktop computers. The animation above points out the downsides of the current single pointer (mouse-based) GUI, the problems of applying the multi-touch UI paradigm to desktop computers, and proposes a new UI paradigm, which includes a novel way of arranging windows and menus. 10/GUI is still very much in the conceptual stage. As Robert Clayton Miller, the conceiver of 10/GUI, puts it:

The purpose of the 10/GUI concept video is to inform, inspire, and start discussions.

I am not sure whether it would all work as proposed, but it does inspire and I would love to try it out.

I know, it's too easy, blogging about Chinese signs. But this one - at Pudong airport - really defies me. First of all you are encouraged to "delcarate truthfully", but more importantly, you need to learn Chinese, because someone installed some self-check-in machines in front English part of the sign. Great teamwork!

[Photo: GustavoG]

Dive into 101 things I learned in interaction design school: a set of short, easily digested interaction design principles, compiled by Matt Morphett and Shane Morris. And you can rank each of the principles they post, with one of the best rating scales I've seen so far: Meh - Pretty valuable - Really useful. So come on people, go vote! And I love their drawings, by the way.

Inspired by 101 Things I Learned in Architecture School, by Matthew Frederick.

Toyota will recall about 3.8 million cars and trucks to reshape and/or replace the accelerator pedals. The design of the accelerator pedal in combination with loose floormats may result in the accelerator pedal getting stuck. And of course that's not beneficial for road safety. That's one expensive design (or undesign) mistake.

[Photo and source: autoblog, via Bright]