UX nerd

Finally, part 3: the toaster. A toaster is a small electric kitchen appliance used to toast slices of bread. It has been around, almost unchanged (in its mainstream version) for more than 100 years. Our interaction with it, I suspect, hasn’t changed much either:

During our week-long course with Bert Bongers; Maria, Valentina, Dominika and I redesigned a toaster. You may also want to read part 1 and part 2 of this series of posts to learn about the concepts that we put into practice. Part 3 presents our analysis of the current toaster, and our redesign.

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

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’