Andrew Wirtanen » HCI

Experience Is The Product

Andrew Wirtanen — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 15:53:44 +0000

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 that we still use today, three years later (e.g. Nintendo Wii, iPhone, iPod, Tivo, etc.).

By the way. Slideshare doesn’t give you valid XHTML for embedding, but I found this tutorial that shows you how to embed valid slidecasts.

CRISTAL: Control your living room with your coffee table

Andrew Wirtanen — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 02:00:53 +0000

Researchers at the Media Interaction Lab of Upper Austria University have demonstrated an alternative use for Microsoft Surface tables. It’s called CRISTAL: Control of Remotely Interaced Systems using Touch-based Actions in Living spaces. In the demo video, you can see how the interactive table controls the entire living room, from the TV to the Roomba. It’s a pretty cool idea that is aimed at improving the living room user experience by consolidating remote controls and making devices more interconnected.

My concerns are that interactive tables are very pricey and the angle of control could be awkward for the user. Also, you can’t exactly keep magazines on your living room table any more, and kicking your feet up on a $10,000 multi-touch computer just doesn’t seem like a good idea… maybe someday these things will be more affordable and CRISTAL will be a reality.

Click here to view the embedded video.

[Wired via Gizmodo]

Chroma-Hash makes confirming your password easier

Andrew Wirtanen — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 23:53:56 +0000

One of the most frustrating things on the Internet is when you have to type in a password twice. Sometimes, a website will force you to hit the “submit” or “log in” button before it tells you that the passwords don’t match! Chroma-Hash is a jQuery plugin that securely generations a color bar for each password field. If the color bars don’t match, then the passwords don’t match.

I love this idea, but of course it wouldn’t work as well if you are color blind (or blind, for that matter).

[Chroma-Hash Demo via information aesthetics]

Texting While Driving–the Flash game!

Andrew Wirtanen — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 19:04:02 +0000

The New York Times has released a driving simulation Flash game that tests your ability to multitask. It’s far from scientific (and so was the NBC driving experiment) since the game requires a constant rate of lane switching and has a constant rate of incoming text messages, but it’s fun and educational nonetheless.

While I initially thought that banning texting while driving was ridiculous (i.e., why not ban eating while driving too?), I am seeing it more frequently. Also, it is more challenging to text with touchscreen phones because they lack tactile feedback.

[New York Times via Waxy Links]

Tips from Two Tweeps

Andrew Wirtanen — Thu, 28 May 2009 01:53:13 +0000

Boston has a very strong usability community, which every year turns out in great numbers to their own annual “Mini-UPA” conference in the spring. It’s called Usability & User Experience and it actually has grown to compete with the national UPA conference.

A couple of my former peers at Bentley (@jledwell and @kaniasty) created a great presentation on Twitter called “Tips from Two Tweeps: How User Experience Pros Find Value on Twitter.” Apparently, the presentation drew a full room and sparked great conversation. The presentation mentions @uxforward, a user experience link sharing service, which I started back in December ‘08. @jledwell now does a lot of the posting for @uxforward.

[@jledwell's blog: Compete on Usability]

Designing for Big Data

Andrew Wirtanen — Sat, 02 May 2009 13:43:32 +0000

Jeffrey Veen (Small Batch, Inc.) gave a great talk on data visualization at O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco recently (March 31-April 3, 2009). He provides a history of usage of visualizations, including the first subway map (the tube map) and John Snow’s map that is credited with ending the 1854 cholera outbreak in Soho, London. He then talks about how visualizations have changed from telling a story, to allowing users to discover their own stories.

It’s a clear, concise (20 minutes), and modern look at information visualization.

Click here to view the embedded video.

[Veen.com via Waxy.org Links and information aesthetics]

OK/Cancel Buttons on the Web

Andrew Wirtanen — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 16:06:05 +0000

I’m a member of ACM SIGCHI (Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction) and I had a great time recently at CHI ‘09 in Boston. Recently, all members of ACM received a postcard with instructions to vote in the board elections. The postcard directed members to a website similar to this:

I had to enter my PIN twice. Why?

Well, the right button is typically used to continue. I saw “Return” and I figured this web page was probably authored by a developer, because “Return” often means the same as “Enter” (i.e., keyboards have a key labeled either “Return” or “Enter” and it does the same thing). I didn’t read the sentence below because it was under the buttons, so I didn’t think it was applicable to them.

Election Services Corporation, you need to fix this. You’re probably going to get a lot of emails from the SIGCHI community anyway, since things like this bother us. I would suggest having one “Login” button vertically aligned with the text box and a “Cancel” text link underneath the button where the “Return” sentence is.

More OK/Cancel references:

Primary & Secondary Actions in Web Forms (lukew.com)
OK-Cancel or Cancel-OK? (useit.com)

Touchscreen Phones for the Blind

Andrew Wirtanen — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 22:31:07 +0000

Making touchscreen phones accessible seems like an impossible challenge. But, the Eyes-Free Android project is working on it! Skip to about 2 minute mark for the demo.

Click here to view the embedded video.

[Gizmodo]

Revolutionary New Laptop with No Keyboard

Andrew Wirtanen — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 04:03:16 +0000

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 staff. It’s good to see input devices different than the keyboard and mouse, no matter how ridiculous they may be:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Brain-Computer Interfaces

Andrew Wirtanen — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 03:02:27 +0000

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) are both scary and very promising at the same time. As evidenced by this 60 Minutes video, BCIs are an essential tool already for many disabled individuals. BCIs can provide the ability to use thought in order to type, produce speech, and control prosthetic limbs.

Could BCIs finally replace the old WIMP (window, icon, menu, pointing device) model of computing? Imagine using a hat with your laptop instead of a keyboard. It would be strange, but could allow you to type as fast as possible (once the technology is perfected).

[via Designing for Humans]