I was doing some user research asking people to show me their way of using their web browser and I was specially paying attention to the homepage. These are some of my findings:

- It is very important to have search functionality in the homepage. Users go there as an starting point to a new search.

- People like having relevant information in the homepage, like feeds coming from different websites or news coming from a particular source (e.g. Yahoo!).

- Many users get lost when using tabs. I’ve discovered that many don’t even know what a tab is, the potential of tab browsing is something unknown to many people.

Based on that I prepared my proposal for the design challenge:

It would be nice to get your comments!

Find here more information about the Home Tab Design Challenge.

Is there a limit for multifunctionality? The following imaginary design illustrates the problem of multi-function devices and applications: the solution reaches a point where a big amount of features offered block the access to them and makes the whole product unusable or difficult to understand.

An overwhelmed Swiss knife

Multifunctionality could be also a problem in graphical interfaces. In the following picture there is a screenshot of the FStream applicaton for Apple iPhone, an application to listen online radios and other sound streams. This app used to have only 3 visible options at the bottom:  Play, Favorites and More. Now it is already showing the option “Record”, which, I assume it is only useful for limited amount of radio listeners. Ohh… it’s so easy to add just one more feature!

FStream App for iPhone

Google Android phones (and iPhones) are a good example of multi-purpose devices. Thanks to their good interface design users are able to manage a huge range of different tasks: music, pictures, work, maps and more. Still, they are victims of their own success; multitasking people could feel the need for more than one phone: users can do several things with them, but not at the same time.

Picture from Google Mobile Blog

Logitech Harmony Remote is a device that remotely controls 225000 different devices, including televisions, DVD players, radios and video games. A real do-it-all device. Unfortunately the interface description on the Logitech website is very vague but if the interface is well done it could eventually be a good product for geeks. But they are not going to sell it to my mother…

The Harmony Remote controls 225000 devices

“Reading is an important activity and deserves a purpose-built device”, said Jeff Bezos to the New York Times. He might be partially right, probably many users don’t want to see more features on the Amazon Kindle. Many think the audio book feature is already redundant (why would you need it if you have a great pocket size iPod?). On the other side, Bezos’ statement might just lack of sincerity; maybe he is not putting more features just because the device is limited by a low resolution, black and white, slow, not touchy screen.

The single purpose Amazon Kindle

Few devices can be more purpose-specific than the WikiReader. Many laughed at it when it was announced, now it’s a top seller. Simple interface design makes it a king in the only thing it does: accessing Wikipedia information without complications. Maybe someone using an iPhone won’t need it but what about children?

The single purpose WikiReader

I would like to show you some Poka-Yoke examples.

SIM Cards. Thanks to the trimmed corner, a SIM Card can not be put into a cell phone in a wrong way.

SIM Card. Picture by Declan Jewell.

On Search. Poka-Yoke concept is used by Google’s search box and by other search engines to suggest users possible search terms. In the example, I mistyped “Poka-Yoke” so the search box proposes to search for the right term. The problem with this behavior is that these suggestions could influence what users search.

Google search box.

iPhone. Every time a user starts a new note on the Notes application for iPhone, the upper case option is on and ready for the first letter. This is a way to prevent orthographic mistakes.

iPhone Notes application screenshot.

USB Connector. Thanks to its inner shape, an USB connector can not be connected in the wrong way.

USB Connector. Picture by PJstoneson.

…actually, the shape of the connector not only prevents from connecting it upside down but also to connect it in the wrong place.

Different shapes for each connector. Picture by Goodrob13.

Padlocks. Good padlocks do not release the key if it is not totally locked, making sure that the mechanism is totally closed and avoiding mistakes. In this case safety is a big issue.

A padlock. Picture by Greenkozi.

Back side of a typical digital camera. In this case the Canon Digital IXUS 80.

What you see in the picture above these lines is a  typical digital camera. Last week we went to a huge store to check camera models and we found out that many of them use the following wheel design:

Typical digital camera wheel.

The problem with this design is that the wheel does not behave like a wheel, meaning that it can not be rotated in any direction. In most cases, we saw that wheels were actually 4 buttons put together. Even worse, those buttons usually had totally different functions.

A test with users

During our user research finished recently, we tested several cameras (digital and not) with some users. Basically, we gave them different cameras to try and we observed them playing around. Most of the users were not expert in the use of cameras, what we could call “standard user” for these cameras (not professional).

For the digital cameras, almost all users tried to navigate through the user interface displayed on the screen trying to turn the wheel. Some never noticed that they could actually press the fictitious wheel.

This is the users’ voice: something that looks like a wheel must behave like a wheel, not like a button.

]]> http://www.designvsart.com/blog/2009/08/21/buttons-are-buttons-wheels-are-not-wheels/feed/ 8 http://www.designvsart.com/blog/2009/08/04/an-industry-needs-a-redesign-the-publishing-business/ http://www.designvsart.com/blog/2009/08/04/an-industry-needs-a-redesign-the-publishing-business/#comments Tue, 04 Aug 2009 11:53:55 +0000 Alexis Brion http://www.designvsart.com/blog/?p=498 Design vs Art is following very close the developments on the electronic paper (epaper) industry. We think it is a great technology that is about to explode. Specially ebook readers could be the next big thing. Epaper is making the revolution that will change everything unstoppable. For that reason, the publishing industry needs a redesign.

After hearing about the Amazon-George Orwell incident (article on the New York Times), I decided to try to buy Orwell’s Animal Farm ebook in its original language and to write down on my Moleskine details about that experience. From the beginning the task was set to be difficult; I had an Amazon Kindle and I live in Germany, meaning that I can not buy ebooks at the Amazon/Kindle store.




The above described exercise took me to the following impressions:

Amazon would not sell me the ebook with a European credit card, so I went to Mobipocket.com and bought the digital version of Animal Farm. The Mobipocket software does not work on Apple Macs so I directly downloaded the book and send it to the Kindle using Calibre, an ebook management software. I tried to open the ebook and I got a disgusting message saying that the file was protected and could not be displayed in an unregistered device. Of course, I didn’t know that I could not register a Kindle on Mobipocket.

In case I was not clear enough, I would like to say again that I paid for the book I was trying to open. The whole user experience was totally frustrating.

You are not allowed to read this ebook on this unregistered device.

For copyright reasons you can not buy this ebook from your country.

Even worse, somebody could eventually decide which version of a book a whole nation should read. This is something that might be already happening somewhere in the world, but readers have the chance to travel, buy books somewhere else and smuggle them if necessary; something that is not going to be possible in a digital publishing industry controlled but old copyright laws.

You have to use our German store, buy the German version of this ebook.

Yes, the user experience of buying an ebook at Amazon and have it delivered to a Kindle is great. Everybody loves that. But I have also read comments on forums from panicking customers promising not to activate their Kindle wireless feature anymore, worrying that the ebooks they bought in the past could disappear. The user experience is broken, the system is not trusty anymore.

Delete that ebook from all the devices in this country.

I looked for the electronic version of Animal Farm on a torrent search engine. The book was there. I could have downloaded it for free in a few seconds. It could have been so easy…

I have to say this again: I tried to get a legal copy of the book. I actually paid for the book, but I was not allowed to read it on my device.

To download an ebook illegally is already easier than buying it.

Article by Alexis Brion.

Elderly person talking on the phone. Picture by Deutsche Telekom.

Telephones are always a problem

Elderly people seem to be perfect victims for most home telephones and cellphones. They are difficult to use and they offer a lot of functions that many don’t understand how to find. But telephones are devices with a lot of importance to people, specially during emergencies.

Some companies have been designing telephones for the elderly, for example Doro. Big buttons and limited functions make the following phone a hit for those looking for simplicity. I find the possibility of writing the names on the same phone a great improvement for the older ones.

Doro phone for the elderly. Picture by Doro.

Digital menus

Navigating through menus on a tiny screen is a problem for a lot of people. Many get lost and don’t understand how to select, scroll or go back to the beginning. Interaction designers at Emporia, like at Doro, have been having this in mind and add a memory help notebook directly on the phone. Note that the notebook is all the time facing the user (and not in the back of the headset like in many home phones).

Emporia Time phone for the elderly. Picture by Emporia.

Functionality over style?

Designs for the elderly tend to be ugly: huge buttons, huge letters on a huge screen and terrible colors. But designing for the elderly is designing for all and if the designer is able to produce something appealing to everybody the product could be probably sold to a larger number of people.

The Deutsche Telekom released a home telephone that was initially thought to target the elderly. Not surprisingly a lot of young families are buying the phone. It has big numbers but they still look nice, it has fast dialing buttons and a paper notebook on the charging base.

Again, less digital menus

Something that people are requesting is to have more physical buttons. The Deutsche Telekom placed the answering machine controls on the charging station to make the listening of new messages easier.

Sinus A210 phone designed for the elderly and everybody. Picture be Deutsche Telekom.

That need for adding features

This telephone is including a flashlight and a radio, each function with its own button. Design research might have been revealed that those are important features for elderly people. But they also seem to be there just because it was possible to add something else. A dedicated button for a radio, do we really need that on a cell phone? Is that going to improve the user experience?

Doro phone with radio. Picture by Doro.

Arduino

Arduino is based on open-source hardware and software, it’s easy to use and cheaper than other non-open-source platforms. The Arduino programming language is based on Wiring, a programming environment started at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy and farther developed at the Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia.

You can basically prototype everything with Arduino.

Bug Labs

Bug Labs is another open-source system like Arduino but composed by several modules that don’t need to be soldered. With them, it is easy to create mashups to prototype future electronic device designs. There is a LCD module, another one for audio, another one for motion sensing and more.

Shapeways

If you don’t have access to any 3D printing facility you might want to give Shapeways a try, a 3D printing service that delivers in a few days the 3D parts you upload. The website has its own community, thing that it could be helpful in some cases, for example if you are looking for other designers’ opinion. It also has a 3D parts database that you could use for your prototypes.

First Case

Traveling to the Bavarian alps on a beautiful, high-tech train, I was doing something that the designers of it didn’t do: observing how people use doors and in particular how they would interact with their design. I was lucky enough to be sitting in front of the toilet’s door, enjoying the possibility to look at the passengers trying to deal with the door.

The design: the door had a door handle, a yellow button and a huge sticker indicating that people are not supposed to use the door handle to open the door; instead they should press the button.

What happened here? After many passenger breaking the "automatic" doors, designers decided to add an sticker to their design to try to fix it. Did it work? Obviously not:

Second Case

In Mar del Plata, one of the biggest cities in Argentina, people have been paying bus tickets with cash using machines installed on the buses. This system has recently been changed by another one that uses magnetic cards. These cards have to be loaded with electronic money at city kiosks; once on the bus passengers use the cards to paid for their trip.

The problem with the new design: people that were used to pay using cash were trying to introduce coins and bills inside the magnetic card reader. Probably, hundreds of readers got wroken and had to be replaced.

The solution: designers (or maybe the people in charge of the system) tried to fix the poorly designed system with a sticker saying "DO NOT INTRODUCE COINS". Did it work? Probably not well. 

Why this is happening and what could have been done?

These two products, the high tech door and the card reader, were probably designed without taking into account many parts of the system. Observing a few people interacting with the train door would have been enough to notice that people would try to open the door using the door handle if there is one (and not a button). The same applies to the card reader, designers probably never got on a bus and observed people using the old ticket machines.

Specially hardware design flaws are difficult and very expensive to solve. In most cases a sticker would probably not solve the problem and would make the whole user experience even more confusing. 

A user centered design process should have prevented these design failures: doing field research, talking with people and observing what they need and how they behave in their environment.

All conferences were planned on a symposium day and the whole event lasted about eight hours. The quality and background of the speakers was as motley as it gets. It started with two so called "institutional presentations" by the Taiwan design Center and the "Metropolitan Design Center of Buenos Aires". Promotional videos of both places, a lot of charts and never ending text on the projector. No real talk about design there, even though they repeated the word until it lost its meaning. I suppose they paid to be there…

Yuri Suzuki and Hiromi Ozaki at the Symposium

Within the "Alternative strategies" block Yuri Suzuki and Hiromi Ozaki talked about their "Cybernetic love: future sex project". These people analyze the Japanese society habits from all angles to get to the conclusion that sex practice is integrating elements such as virtual lives and places, electronic pleasure gadgets, robots, etc. till an extent, that a human partner is no longer the preferred alternative. This project is financed by Tenga, a company that develops high quality adult toys. I must say they have a point, check out their promotional video;  if this is not user experience design, I don’t what is!

Ronen Kadushin presented "Open Design" and his way for design to evolve if we really want good design to surround us. We all have seen how open source software gives the best results, now here is a way to do basically the same but with product design.

Ronen Kadushin at the Symposium

Interesting lectures of the block "Sustainability": Ralf Ketelhut from Stoffstromdesign let us know what really happens when products are waste and made us aware how harmful coatings and pigments are in our product. We also saw an example of a very nice nearly 100% environmentally friendly wallpaper. Key to success they said, is to go to the manufacturer, talk to him and find a different way of doing things.

from left to right: the wallpaper designer from eccellence goods, the roll of wallpaper, Ralf Ketelhut

Probably the best example of good innovative design was given by 2012 Architecten. They presented some realized projects in which they rather than recycling they reused material that was considered waste. They identify a source of large quantities of waste material in good conditions and they find a way to use it.

Jan Jongert from 2012 Architecten ans a shot of their Villa Welpeloo

One of their requirements when reusing materials is to take them as they are and add no processing to them when possible, this way it is economically and environmentally worthwhile reusing. Some of these projects are an espresso bar made with used PVC windows and the duchi shoe shop, where car windows make the shelves.

Jurgen Bey gave a nice lecture about how we approach design problems and what could be the role of design in the future. A pity that I didn’t record it… there is a good summary of it in design.nl