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

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 [...]

Cellphone Tip: Automatically Dial Your Voicemail Pin

Sick of entering your pin every time you want to listen to your voicemail?
Here’s how to automatically dial your pin # on a Verizon (P2K) phone:
go to Message Center > Message Settings > Voicemail No.
after *86, go to the Dialing Menu (center softkey on my dinosaur phone) and choose Insert Pause
enter in your pin [...]

Wii Want to Go Home!

Last Sunday morning I stood in line for 1.5 hours at Toys”R”Us in Cary to get my hands on my very own Nintendo Wii. I was #18 out of a line of what amounted to at least 60 people. Only the first 28 got Wiis. It was fun standing in line, and a kid behind [...]