Notes on papers, books and blogs about Cognitive Ergonomics, HCI, philosophy of design and everything interesting
Joel on Software describes a new elevator UI which efficiently clusters people going to nearby floors with a small catch: you have to follow the predetermined interaction path -i.e.
SELECT floor GOTO indicated elevator WAIT elevator ENTER elevator […]
Another example of how constraints can shape design comes from the story of how the pentagon got its shape. The initial design was dictated by the shape of the tract, but it persisted even after it was decided to build the Pentagon on another location.
The original rationale for Bergstrom’s pentagonal design was gone. The […]
Jitterbug is a cell phone designed for the aged. There are too models: one with regular keypad and one without. The decision to limit the number of keys (simplicity) leads to some obvious usability problems (”press the No key repeatedly to see call history”). An interesting feature is that in the interest of subtraction, the designers […]
This book by Caitlin Zaloom is an anthropological study of markets and traders’ practice, that also investigates the effects of digitization has had on the field. It is a very interesting and deep study of a field that seems to have reached a local optimum. It shows how the physical configuration of space hindered the development […]
The history of the mouse wheel (via Coding Horror) is quite revealing concerning the opportunistic nature of the design process and shatters our illusions about the analysis>synthesis, theory>practice sequence.
The design and function of the mouse wheel (atfirst zooming, then scrolling), altered during the course of the project by observing users and forging Latourian coalitions with Microsoft divisions and Office Project teams.
Experimenting with new hardware features (wheel as a button) led to new software features (panning):
Around this time, we also made the wheel a button — you could press it as well as roll it. I remember David Jones, an […]
The Moore’s law of storage has interesting consequences for the lifestreaming concept (especially of the MyLifeBits variety). The hypothesis is that we’ll have 10TB flash sticks in twenty years (via Jim Rossignol’s blog):
10Tb is an interesting number. That’s a megabit for every second in a year — there are roughly 10 million seconds per year. That’s enough to store a live DivX video stream […]
“You have to listen to the users” is the mantra we constantly hear and preach. But what if the users don’t know what they really want? Apart from the usual examples in workplaces, I recently came upon the case of “quicksaves”. Users demand a quicksave feature, but are not above abusing it, as this post shows:
Being […]
