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

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 Japan is on the cutting edge, and mobile phones in the US are relatively outdated before [...]

Texting While Driving

Update (7/6/08): Gizmodo has pretty much summed up my thoughts on this subject in this entry.
I was hoping it wouldn’t come to this, but a bill banning texting while driving is moving on to the state Senate in my home state of Massachusetts. From the Mooninite controversy to the Big Dig, Massachusetts doesn’t have a [...]

Early Human Factors Driver Attention Research

From the Human Factors archives comes a very interesting video of early research conducted on Route 128. With all of my trips between Bentley College and Cape Cod over the past couple years, I used this stretch of road quite a bit. Fortunately, I didn’t have a helmet obstructing my view every couple seconds.
This early [...]

Firefox 3: A Few of the UI Improvements

The Mozilla Foundation is to browsers what Apple is to computers. Mozilla has learned how to question existing paradigms and improve upon existing designs. I’ll admit that I thought Firefox 2 was nearly perfect from a UI perspective (from a performance perspective, not so much).
Here are a few examples on how Firefox 3 continues to [...]