Notes on papers, books and blogs about Cognitive Ergonomics, HCI, philosophy of design and everything interesting
Futurologist Paul Saffo sings the praises of RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) calculators. RPN is a notation that never caught on, as we got stuck in a local optimum: similarity with pen and paper problem solving. The problem is that when transfered to the digital world, the “infix” (i.e. traditional) notation is very inefficient. It’s like […]
The Bloomberg interface is a cognitive artefact which is a part of any stockbrocker’s life. Unfortunately, it’s interface is still stuck in the 80s:
Notice the stark contrast of the terminal’s ultramodern design with the clunky interface. The people at Portfolio noticed this too, and asked three design firms to explore the redesign of the Bloomberg interface (via UX magazine). […]
Guillaume Cabanac is conducting an ambitious experiment on the automatic evaluation of discussion threads on web annotation systems. Web annotation systems are an interesting premise that could make the web more interactive. The problem is that the results are often messy and unusable. This experiment is part of an effort to reduce this mess.
The ultimate […]
The paper “Hidden aspects of the Anaesthesia Chart” has been accepted by the Journal of Clinical Monitoring and Computing (to appear soon).
The paper is concerned with our research in the domain of anaesthesiology and the anaesthesia chart in particular. The most important insight gained was the fact that constraints outside the worksystem that have nothing […]
Pastiche Scenarios borrow characters from works of fiction (novels, TV shows etc.). The use of such characters in scenarios allows the users to uncover facts that would otherwise be hidden. It is a way to overcome the writers block encountered when trying to envision personas, which leads to making them generic and undistinguished (thus creating […]
Khoi Vinh discusses the trade off between features and ease of use. Using Cooper et al (2003) curve on the distribution of experience of users (i.e. most users are perpetual intermediates), he posits the problems users face with products heavy on features:
On the other hand, products designed to map closely to the needs of experts […]
In an interesting lecture, Don Norman extended his human action cycle model, by including a second “intelligent” machine action cycle. This gives rise to three new gaps:
Goal Gap: Goals of Machine and Person can be different Action Gap: The actions taken (or want to undertake) […]
An interesting article on an eyetracking study of news websites conducted by Jakob Nielsen, confirmed what usability gurus were preaching all along (tighter writing, more spaces, no unnecessary images). But there also is a big surprise:
Interestingly the researcher noted that men tend to focus on anatomy of animals too! So the usability guideline is: show […]
An interesting article in the relatively new journal “Artefact”. It examines the evolution of matching tile games (e.g. Bejeweled, Zookeeper etc.).
When refering to his own experiences in designing a similar game, Juul notes how players from different backgrounds appropriated the game in different ways:
During testing, it became clear that players understood the game very differently […]
Dreaming in Code chronicles the troubled history of a software project (an innovative PIM application). It’s a very interesting book, both as an inside look of the development process, and as a great piece of journalistic writing. The team faced many problems and even now 4 years after the initial release, the 0.7alpha4 version is […]
You are currently browsing the archives for the HCI category.
