Mark Hurst of ‘Good Experience’ wrote an interesting article about the most common usability mistakes. Central question was how to avoid making errors?, and how to achieve better usability?
Mark Hurst argues that whenever a user centered product or website is developed, it is important to stay strategic, always try to improve the business, and listen to customers (as human beings, not as users of a tool).
But in doing so, avoid the following:
1 Not conducting any customer research
2 Making decisions based on made-up user profiles
3 Conducting the wrong type of research
4 Using predefined tasks in usability tests
5 Not inviting stakeholders to attend usability tests
6 Not prioritizing findings from usability tests
7 Not relating research to business objectives
8 Missing the larger strategic picture
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Designer Junyi Heo has designed a digital pot for plants. Why? The pot automatically monitors the condition in the pot to provide optimal conditions for the plant. [Continue reading...]
Meet the new solar panels of a small company called ‘SMIT’. Their products are still under development but has they have promising sustainable products, because it uses the combination of solar and wind energy. [Continue reading...]
A while ago we wrote about the poor usability of parking meters. We now would like to share two alternatives for operating a parking meter. [Continue reading...]
Although this design by Tamer Nakisci is already three years old, it is still actual this day. He won the design competition of Nokia with this concept phone. [Continue reading...]
The ‘RIpple Faucet’ designed by Smith Newnam brings new interactions to faucets. The faucets that we are used to have to manipulators; hot and cold that also controls the flow of the water, or with a thermostat faucet, one for the temperature and one for the flow. The design eliminates this separation of controlling the flow and temperature, with one single movements both can be set. [Continue reading...]
This is an everyday phenomenon on our street; people fiddling around with the parking meter to buy a parking ticket. In this case there were six people together trying to figure out how that machine works. I could take some nice shots because they have been standing there for several minutes. In this article we are going to examine the usability of the parking meter people use every day. [Continue reading...]
Samsung has given a preview of their new MP3 player the ‘S2′. It offers a small storage of 1 GB for playing your music files and it has a built in FM receiver so you can listen to all radio stations as well. [Continue reading...]
Have you ever experienced that when you want to pay with your bank card you slide the card through the machine and it says you did something wrong. Quickly you try again after which the shop assistant tells you to turn around the card; the magnetic part was on the wrong side! [Continue reading...]
Some time ago we wrote about the coffee table of Microsoft; Microsoft surface. At that time it was clear several companies were interested, including casino’s, hotels and T-mobile. AT&T earned the scoop [Continue reading...]
