Tag: usability

Learning Gestures

Spent the last couple of weeks observing an elderly relative first purchase then use a digital camera for the first time. What stood out? The touch screen on the Sony T50. Why? Human motor skills depreciate over time and the soft keys are larger and less fiddly than anything than can be squeezed on the physical form factor. But the bonus? The speed at which a (relative) novice learnt and understood gesture based interaction – sliding her finger left and right, to navigate photos.

i hate (most) gadgets. now there seems to be one built around usability. interesting

Walking in the City

London is one of the most beautiful walking cities in the world, but it’s often hard to navigate above ground. Many people use the tube map to find their way walking the streets, even though it distorts our perception of distance and direction. As a result, people often use other transport modes even for short distances, when walking would be quicker and more pleasant: 1 in 20 people exiting Leicester Square tube station were found to have travelled a distance of less than 800m.To combat this over-use of motorized transport, and to get people out there using their feet, the exhibition proposes that London unite its myriad of bewildering street signs both typographically and formally: the same height, dimensions, fonts, terminology, etc. This will make it harder to lose oneself – and, in theory, it will also encourage people to go for a stroll around “one of the most beautiful walking cities in the world,” without relying on mechanized transport.

london’s inscrutable street signs are both a menace and a joy for losing yourself exploring. i’m sure analogies to info architecture could be found 🙂

Choices = Headaches

I’m sure there’s a whole team of UI designers, programmers, and testers who worked very hard on the OFF button in Windows Vista, but seriously, is this the best you could come up with?

Image of the menu in Windows Vista for turning off the computer

Every time you want to leave your computer, you have to choose between 9, count them, 9 options: 2 icons and 7 menu items. The 2 icons, I think, are shortcuts to menu items. I’m guessing the lock icon does the same thing as the lock menu item, but I’m not sure which menu item the on/off icon corresponds to. On many laptops, there are also 4 FN+Key combinations to power off, hibernate, sleep, etc. That brings us up to 13 choices, and, oh, yeah, there’s an on-off button, 14, and you can close the lid, 15. A total of 15 different ways to shut down a laptop that you’re expected to choose from.

joel nails it. both linux on the desktop and windows try to make things “configurable” to cater to everyone. blech.

Craigslist Ambition

dissects the visual cleverness of craigslist (and how it is a yahoo-sized business in the making)

Now Craig’s lead-into-gold trick is that he gets his posters to accurately classify their spam. Into 160 categories. Holy Toledo Jacob Nielsen. You can’t have a pulldown with 160 things in it. 50% of your users wouldn’t get a pulldown with 3 things in it right. Ah, but it’s not a pull-down. 50% of the entire homepage is a giant selector devoted to classifying posts.

Boston’s Fare Collection

The tickets. On the bus and on the subway (known in Boston as the “T”), they are accepted in only 1 of 4 possible senses. If you enter a ticket in the wrong direction, it is rejected. Already, a bus driver passed me through without paying because I dipped the card the wrong way the first time (nice trick, I know). When the amount purchased has run out, the temptation is to leave the ticket on the top of the gate as you pass through. I’m not alone. New York and DC have the same problem. I hear they plan to encourage re-use by introducing a plastic card instead of the paper ticket. That hasn’t happened in New York, however. People ditch the plastic cards, too.

rekha on the MBTA fare machines

ui failure

yesterday, we came back from DC, and when we wanted to get on the T at airport station, there was a huge queue. apparently, MBTA had decided to replace the one, 2 second process of “hand over $1.25, get token, insert token, pass barrier” with a 2 minute ordering process with their new ticket machines. the new machines had such a lousy UI that each machine had an MBTA employee assisting with the ordering. instead of a big button to get your damn ticket, you have to wade through a forest of choices (hablas espanol? single ticket, monthly pass, lifelong membership? pay with card, check, sale of daughter? receipt? fries with that? sign up for T frequent commuter miles?) with that familiar touch screen experience (ie, 50% of the time the screen doesn’t recognize your choice). given that just about everyone just wants to get a single ticket and has $1.25 ready, not making that a default accessible with one push is mindless. at least you can recharge your charlie card..