Yes, they are likely to be forgotten when days are busy.
Not new, but good to read it again.
- Focus on the Primary Task
- Elevate the Content that People Care About
- Think Top Down
- Give People a Logical Path to Follow
- Make Usage Easy and Obvious
- Use User-Centric Terminology
- Minimize the Effort Required for User Input
- Downplay File-Handling…
(Source: developer.apple.com)
That applies ANY project. Great tip!
Don’t spend too much time for planning your study!
Sometimes do first improve next works much better.
Your plan will never be perfect - it just needs to be good enough to point you in the right direction and should continually evolve.
What the…. it’s something really new….
In fact, there are disabled people who plays piano with their own tongue, so I think it is not too crazy as it seems.
Thanks joshbyard!
Researchers Develop Interface for Paralyzed to Control Machines With Their Tongues:
A group of engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have created a way to control… just about anything (but most likely, things like wheelchairs) with a combination of a magnetic tongue piercing and a paired retainer.
The user would press the tongue piercing against different parts of the retainer to send signals.
…The system is called the Tongue Drive, and it relies on a waterproof retainer on the roof of the mouth containing a Li-ion battery, induction coil for charging, and and several magnetic contact points to detect the position of the tongue-mounted magnet. It’ll then beam the signal wirelessly to a mobile device—iOS devices like the iPhone and iPod Touch are mentioned—and the mobile device shoots those commands over to whichever device is meant to be controlled.
(via Steer Your Wheelchair With Your Computerized Tongue Piercing | Popular Science)
Touch gestures on WIndows 8 and its usability issues
Here is one very good article about new Windows 8 UI, metro, from Windows developer group themselves. You can see neat breakdown of touch gestures in Windows 8 and potential issues.
Must read if you are interaction designer that involves touch gesture stuff.
Via: MSDN Blogs
HTTP STATUS CATS: HTTP STATUS CODES ILLUSTRATED BY CATS
It is being said visualize as much as you can, do not use jargons, and unnecessary task put aside to background. But web browsers still give us uninteresting codes for some reason. So, someone obviously tried to visualize them with cats for more intuitiveness.
It’s not the SF story, but what if all the cars in the world are completely automated? Anyway, watch this video.
Human Factors experts know that automation can help people, but too much automation can cause boredom, confusion, frustration, and ultimately accidents. However, what if your vehicle is completely automated? Well, all cars in the world are automated, the story would be much different, I guess. And fully automated car is actually in a practice phase already.
AI cars that they tested look really intelligent and stable. You will be surprised the fact that the technology is advanced this far.
One major aspect of usability study is to take out unnecessaries and well present essentials. In that perspective, minimalism is one significant design approach to get things right. This article will help you to think about “what is a proper way of minimalism” with out messing up.
Minimalism, interestingly enough, is usually born out of excess. In all arts, in all ways of life, we start out by taking and adding whatever we can.
When we start to realize that more is not necessarily better, and that we can get by with less stuff, we try to simplify by removing unnecessary elements so we can focus on what’s truly important.
There is still the fat-finger problem, which the users’ finger occlude a target they are about to touch and it causes inaccuracy/error, exists on Kindle Fire. In addition to this article, I would like to say that touchable area mappings on Kindle Fire and iPhones/iPads are slightly different: actually iPhone’s touch area mapped almost 5-6 mm lower than a graphical object, while Amazon Kindle mapped a bit more above than that. (See Holtz and Baudisch, 2009 to understand the reason behind this offset)
Since iPhone/iPad/iPod touch interaction is de-facto standard in mobile touch device world, such a deviation could cause user confusion and unnatural feelings.
Amazon Kindle Fire came to multi-touch device market much later than Apple. Amazon could have taken advantage of newcomer’s flexibility by putting much ambitious design in their design, but what they brought is quite conservative design, which, in fact, is much less cooler than their competitor’s device in my perspective.
Source: Jacob Nielsen’s Alert Box
Rapid development of touch-screens, wearable computer, and contextual design reach this future. I really loved the idea of translator-AR glasses!
Thanks to my friend Stephen Brown for posting this!
Didn’t know this :o
Mac OS X Lion - Hold down the character key on your keyboard for a popup menu of the accented variants of said character. Use keyboard numbers for quick selection.
/via Jan van der Asdonk
