Andrew Wirtanen is a usability specialist in Cary, NC More »

Experience Is The Product

Peter Merholz (Adaptive Path) posted on his blog this week that his slidecast “Experience Is The Product” hit 400,000 views. Peter gave the talk at dConstruct 2007 in Brighton, UK. The presentation argues for focusing on the experience rather than technology and features. It’s a great talk that uses examples of good user experience design [...]

SmartScreen: Time to jailbreak my iPhone?

I haven’t found a compelling reason to jailbreak my iPhone, but SmartScreen for iPhone just might be one. The application allows for widgets on the iPhone lock screen. Of course, there are all sorts of privacy concerns here, but for simple useful applications like weather or a calendar, this is great. Check out the demo [...]

Revolutionary New Laptop with No Keyboard

The Onion just released one of its funniest Mac-bashing videos yet. It’s the day before the last (and Steve Job-less) Apple keynote at MacWorld, and I think this video is a great follow-up to my last post on Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCIs). BCIs are keyboardless and so is this new laptop dreamed up by The Onion [...]

iPhone Tip: Enable Caps Lock

Here’s a quick tip for all of you iPhone users:

Settings > General > Keyboard > Enable Caps Lock

Now, when you quickly tap the Shift key twice on the keyboard, it will turn blue and become a Caps Lock!
Why wasn’t this enabled by default? I have tried, on numerous occasions, to figure out how to enable [...]

Usability Emergency: Japan Needs Better Phones

Usability specialists take note: Japan is in dire need of an easy-to-use phone with features they are accustomed to (mobile TV, credit card payment, GPS). It’s an interesting problem, since cellphones are radically different between the US and Japan. Japan is on the cutting edge, and mobile phones in the US are relatively outdated before [...]