Posts Tagged: usability

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16
Aug 08

Genesis of the TiVo remote

“Like any remote, the designers were adamant about keeping the remote’s button layout as simple as possible. But with the DVR’s numerous features, the designers needed to create lots of extra buttons. To keep things straight, each button needed to have a distinctive feel, giving the ability to control the remote without even looking at it, which Newby described as a “key Braille-ability” surprisingly helped by the “blank finger parking spots between keys” that were equally important.”

Link: Story of a Peanut: The TiVo Remote’s Untold Past, Present and Future (gizmodo.com)

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6
Jun 08

Complexity in Japanese Phones

“Indeed, Japanese handsets have become prime examples of feature creep gone mad. In many cases, phones in Japan are far too complex for users to master. “There are tons of buttons, and different combinations or lengths of time yield different results,’” says Koh Aoki, an engineer who lives in Tokyo. “Experimenting with different key combinations in search of new features is “good for killing time during a long commute,” Aoki says, “but it’s definitely not elegant.”

Link: In Japan, Cellphones Have Become Too Complex to Use (wired.com, thanks Dano)

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7
Apr 08

iPhone’s breakthrough: touchscreen

InUseful published a usability report on the iPhone.

“What is it then that makes the iPhone different? Most importantly, it has removed one level of abstraction by allowing the user to act on objects using the finger directly on the phone’s surface. The difference between this and having to press keys on a keyboard and watch the screen to see what happens is striking. Instead of having to press one key to focus on the list item representing your contact and then clicking another key to make the call, the iPhone allows you to actually click the contact right on the screen. To scroll, you pull the list itself instead of clicking a down-key, and to flip between pictures in the album, you drag them from one side to another.”

Link: Free iPhone usability report (inuseful.se)

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7
Mar 08

Design for Mobile conference

Barbara Ballard has announced her plans to host a conference dedicated to mobile design in September this year.

“Design For Mobile will be the first North American mobile user experience conference. This will be a two-day conference focused on strategy and tactics for user research, product definition, interaction and other design, and usability testing. A day of workshops and training will preceed the conference sessions.”

Link: Design for Mobile (design4mobile.mobi)

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16
Aug 07

iPhone keyboard study

This slightly unfortunately designed study compares the on-screen keyboard of the iPhone with QWERTY and Bell keypads. People with no iPhone experience were asked to use both their own hardkey-based phone and the iPhone, and the results were then compared.

“Participants made an average of 11 errors per message on the iPhone compared to an average of 3 errors per text message on their own phone. Although the error rate was alleviated somewhat by the iPhone’s self-correction feature, participants were still frustrated.”

Link: QWERTY Texters Demonstrated Drop in Efficiency When Texting on iPhone (usercentric.com)

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18
Apr 07

Mobile testing camera rig

Kelly Goto describes how to build a cheap and cheerful mobile phone testing camera rig.

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Link: DIY gotomobile’s mobile cam (gotomobile.com)

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6
Mar 07

Phones for idiots

I linked to this article only because it has a fantastic title. Enjoy.

“The menu system is a confusing mangle of branching dead ends. It has touch-sensitive buttons that either refuse to work, or leap into action if you breathe on them. One such button also terminates calls, so it is easy to cut people off merely by holding the phone against your ear to hear them. It has no apparent “silent” mode, and when you set it to vibrate, it buzzes like a hornet in a matchbox.”

Link: My new mobile is lumbered with a bewildering array of unnecessary features aimed at idiots (guardian.co.uk)

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25
Dec 06

Samsung gives phones point and click

Convergence has arrived. Samsung’s SCH-V960 now has a mouse. I’ll let the picture speak for itself.

“Users can point the cursor and click directly on icons on MyScreen, similar interface to that on a PC environment, and gain direct access to frequently used menus such as photo album, messaging, and music menu. Users can also use the Optical Joystick to easily scroll through the play list while listening to their music.”

Link: SAMSUNG’s Digital World – Press Release (samsung.com, via)

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11
Nov 06

Don’t shrink designs to small screens

“Shrinking” design paradigms to mobile devices often isn’t the best strategy.

“Designing user interfaces for small screens is a difficult problem, much more difficult than it may seem at first glance. We can not simply take established interface conventions and “shrink” them to baby face size, because just like children have a unique way of life, baby faces are different to desktop computers in ways that we are only beginning to comprehend. But this difference also presents great opportunities for interface designers to find new and valid interface paradigms, paradigms that will be relevant not just for baby faces, but for mass-market computing devices in general.”

Link: Will baby faces ever grow up? (viktoria.se, PDF, via)

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10
Oct 06

Designing the Mobile User Experience

Richard F Cecil writes about challenges facing the next step of mobile sevices.

“Achieving simplicity and speed of access is the key to expanding people’s perceptions of the mobile Web to include information, entertainment, and commerce services. If people are to use these services while they are on the go, we must avoid cramming as many features as possible into them—just so we can claim to have the biggest and best service. Instead, we should focus on offering the features that actually help people accomplish their goals—especially when those goals are time sensitive. For example, if you’re not sure what exit to take off the interstate, you need an answer now—not five minutes from now.”

Link: Designing the Mobile User Experience (uxmatters.com)

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3
Sep 06

Fitt’s Law for mobile devices

Little Springs Design have published a couple of short pieces on applying Fitt’s Law to mobile devices.

“Fitt’s Law (circa 1954) states that the time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target. The further the target is away from the user’s current position, the longer it takes to move to the target. The smaller the target, the more the user has to use fine muscle control and hence take more time to move.”

Link: Fitt’s Law for mobile devices and Fitts Law and softkey optimization (littlespringsdesign.com)

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6
Jun 06

The next generation mobile UI

“Many of these issues are about solving the complexity problem: enabling lots of different features for lots of different users in lots of different cultures. Will tomorrows intuitive interfaces use RFID to allow us to interact with our environment in a more tangible manner, in a way similar to how people in cities like London or Helsinki already use touch-cards to pay for public transport? Probably. Will they have speech-to-text and text-to-speech functionality to enable varied, fast, and context-sensitive input and output? Probably. Will they use motion sensors to allow us to input data in new ways, using movement rather than key presses? Possibly. Will they have different modes, allowing users to prioritise different things depending on context (work / entertainment / personal / social / static / mobile)? Maybe. Will they require a clear understanding of user needs and behaviour in order to be successful? Definitely.”

Link: Mobile user interfaces its time for a new paradigm (the3gportal.com)

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29
May 06

The simple phone meme continues

“As the universe of people who want a cell phone and don’t already have one gets smaller, wireless carriers are counting on advanced services to generate the bulk of new revenue in coming years…

”...But they’ve also shown a growing frustration with how confusing those added features can be. A J.D. Power & Associates survey last year found consumer satisfaction with their mobile devices has declined since 2003, with some of the largest drops linked to user interface for Internet and e-mail services.”

Link: Just Give Me a Simple Phone (wired.com)

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