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

Facebook Crosses the Line (Again)

Facebook is notorious for launching features seemingly without any user research. In 2006, Facebook launched the “News Feed”, which led to an unprecedented backlash in social networking. Ironically, two years later it seems that all Facebook users have gotten acclimated to the News Feed and now enjoy the feature. (It was actually the lack of [...]

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 Japan is on the cutting edge, and mobile phones in the US are relatively outdated before [...]

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 [...]

Customer Service in the Information Age

Over the past month, I have been buying a lot of stuff for my new apartment and getting settled. While most everything has gone smoothly, I have had to contact customer service a few times and I’ve been overall disappointed with how companies have handled my relatively small issues.

Case 1: Oxo
I’m a big fan of [...]