UX nerd

Some time ago, I had a lecture by Bert Bongers on the use of sensors and actuators to enhance interfaces. Besides discussing the different existing sensors and actuators and their usual and unusual applications, he introduced the concept of device parsing and mentioned some topics from The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman. And, in the end, we got to work during one week redesigning a toaster and building a prototype that could be used as a proof of concept and eventually to run user tests. So, this is what this post is about:

• The book, or part I: The Design of Everyday Things
• The clock, part II: an intro to device parsing, and the parsing of a clock as example
• The toaster, part III: our redesign of the toaster, using a different combination of sensors and actuators, following Norman’s principles

(I’ll leave talking especifically about sensors/actuators for some other day, I have a rather ambicious project on them, but it’ll have to wait until I finish with the emoticons and the pagination :)

So, today: the book.

Continue reading ‘The book, the clock and the toaster. Part I’

I’m now in the middle of a project to find out how the use of emoticons in IM conversations relates to the use of actual facial expressions and, together with my colleagues, I have to set up an experiment. We have this plan about how we’re going to do it:  we have interesting literature about the subject, we have a nice and original experiment design, we’ve found the technology we need to carry it out and we’ve almost figured out who we want as participants. But at the end of out to-do list for today “# of participants” is still there, sporting a devilish wink >;-) So, how is sample size chosen when doing an experiment?

Continue reading ‘The choice of sample size in an experiment’

Around a month ago, I got to do my first solo project. With great power comes great responsibility and, luckily, the ability to choose the subject that better suits my interests :) And this is how I embarked on the redesign of browser error messages.

Browsers are old. It’s weird. I would have thought that major industry players would have figured out this kind of core issues by now. Error messages are not about new or experimental interactions, their design is probably as linked to basic UX design principles as can be. That’s why I was startled when I started to get the answers to my questionnaire… users mistaking DNS errors with HTTP 403 response codes and attributing SSL certificate warnings to malware. There’s a lot of educated talk on the web about how bad some error messages are, these however are savvy users’ rants and none of them come close to describing how the average users misses on their web experience, one of my participants even describing the experience as “distressing” :S

Anyway, after a week of questionnaires, qualitative analyses, guideline drafting and prototyping, I came to understand why error message design is not a popular discipline and some other interesting conclusions.

Continue reading ‘Browser error message redesign’