The Design for Usability Symposium of November 12 will be viewable via a live webcast. It will remain online afterwards as well. The symposium starts at 9:30 am CET (GMT+1).

Your chance to see inspiring presentations by Gerrit van der Veer (President of ACM SIGCHI), Cees van Dok (frog design Europe), Abbie Vanhoutte and Robert Eijlander (Océ) and yours truly.

The symposium is fully booked, though you can still sign up and try your luck on the standby list or watch the webcast in an adjoining room if everyone does show up.

In this article in Design Issues design historian Paul Atkinson presents an insightful, amusing and at times depressing analysis of the rise and fall of the tablet computer, from the early pen computing of the RAND tablet, via the Momenta Pentop, to the inevitable Apple Newton Messagepad.

Technological or social challenge?
An interesting aspect of the article is that Atkinson analyses the issue from both the social constructivist and the technology determinism perspective. Social constructivists suggest that a complex range of factors are involved in the success of products, and that social factors have precedence in the process. From the technology determinist's perspective "technology and technological change are independent factors, impacting on society from the outside of that society—and that technology changes as a matter of course, following its own path, and in doing so changes the society on which it impacts."

The technological challenges have been solved...
In the end Atkinson suggests that the technological challenges that hampered early tablet PCs have been overcome, and it might be more of an issue of user acceptance than of technological shortcomings that stood and stand in the way of tablet-PC-world-dominance. Users may not want the complexity of the desktop or laptop personal computer in a handheld device and may prefer keyboard input over writing on a screen, especially because - for now - writing on paper is still considered far more comfortable than writing on a screen. So the questions that the history of the tablet PC highlights are: "Can we do it?" versus "Should we do it?"

Reference
Paul Atkinson Paul (2008) A Bitter Pill to Swallow: The Rise and Fall of the Tablet Computer. Design Issues, Autumn 2008, Vol. 24, No. 4, Pages 3-25, MIT Press.

[photo: CNET]

I'm currently attending the congress of the International Ergonomics Association (IEA2009) in Beijing, where I will be presenting a paper on 'expected versus experienced usability' (stay tuned, I'll post it thursday, after the presentation). Being here I thought was a good reason to list some of the upcoming usability and ergonomics conferences for 2009 and 2010. Enjoy!

MobileHCI09
September 15-18, 2009 - Bonn (Germany)
The 11th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services.

DPPI'09
October 13-16, 2009 - Compiègne (France)
The 4th International Conference on Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces.


HFES 2009
October 19-23, 2009 - San Antonio (USA)
The 53rd Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.


DfU Symposium
November 12, 2009 - Delft (The Netherlands)
On World Usability Day 2009, the Design for Usability research project is hosting a symposium on usability in product development practice. Save the date for a whole day of engaging lectures, workshops and meeting user-centered design professionals and academics.

CHI 2010
April 10-15 April 2010 - Atlanta (USA)
The 28th conference of the ACM special interest group for Computer Human Interaction (or SIGCHI, or CHI).


UPA 2010
May 24-28, 2010 - Munich (Germany)
The annual meeting of the Usability Professionals' Association.

On November 12, World Usability Day, the Design for Usability symposium on usability for professional and consumer electronics will take place in Delft. The event targets usability and design professionals as well as academics. The morning program features state of the art lectures on usability and design:

• Gerrit van der Veer (president of CHI): Designing for a moving target - from functionality to usability to experience
  
• Cees van Dok (creative director frog design Europe): The challenges in interaction design for consumer and professional electronics
  
• Abbie Vanhoutte and Robert Eijlander (Océ-Technologies): Usability in a productive print environment
  
• And, well ehh, me, with: No silver bullet - why making usable consumer electronics requires organizational change

The afternoon program consists of workshops for usability specialists, designers, and product developers, with subjects such as: managing design for usability in practice, advanced user research and evaluation, guiding and changing user behavior, and small usability techniques.

Participation in the symposium is free of charge, but tickets and especially workshop slots are limited, so registration is required. The event takes place at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering of TU Delft, in The Netherlands.

When I buy tools, usually I don't buy the cheapest ones, because I like them to stay in one piece for a number of years. But when buying this Black & Decker jigsaw I did not only get a product that seems durable (so far, at least), but also one where considerable thought has been put into making a user-centered design.

I might not be the sharpest tool in the shed (nudge nudge, wink wink), but I don't know by heart at what speed a jigsaw should be set for each type of material. Hence my liking of the speed dial on my new jigsaw (picture above) that lets you choose based on the material (wood, plywood, plastic, etc), but also lists the speed.

The second remarkable aspect of the jigsaw were its blades. At first I was angry, because I thought my saw lacked the blades that were supposed to come with it. Then I looked inside the manual and saw that the blades were actually in a compartment on the saw (see picture below). Like the speed dial, the blades are labeled with the material for which they are intended. I should point out that I was a bit annoyed that I could not find the blades to begin with, but that might be fixed by adding a usecue or a temporary label to the compartment for the blades. And as a colleague remarked: it remains to be seen whether the labels on the blades will stay on when you use them. So far they did, but I've only used the saw once.

And the hard-core do-it-yourself types might find it pathetic that I need all this extra information, but to me this whole product shouted: "Hey, we are Black & Decker, and we have put thought into how you will use this."

Smashing magazine has a good compilation of (web) usability findings and guidelines, among which "Most users do not scroll" and "Blue is the best color for links". If you're on top of the subject it's not particularly new information, but its written down accessibly and attractively and it's very actionable information.

Placebo buttons are 'false positives'. They're design elements that look like controls, but that actually don't do anything except to give you the illusion that you are in control. Both the NextNature and Design With Intent blog provide an interesting discussion on the subject. See also this 2004 story in the NYT on placebo buttons at pedestrian crossings.

[picture from NextNature]

In contrast to the somewhat opaque sign in the Beijing subway of the previous post, this sign - found in what is supposedly one of Beijing's Beijing duck restaurants - is very, very clear: no shit.

While on the subject of signage, be sure to check out this English/Welsh sign, and the background story on how it came about. (Thanks to 'anonymous' for posting it in the comments of the previous post).

Today I presented, on behalf of my fellow authors and myself, an exploratory study on expected and experienced usability in electronic consumer products at the IEA2009 congress on ergonomics. You can download the full paper (pdf), or read a summary below. The study shows that expected and experienced usability can differ significantly under the influence of usage, how expected usability can be influenced, and what the effect of poor experienced usability can be.

Aim
In the paper we explore why consumers do not seem to have a very pre-purchase distinct preference for usable products, even though these would probably satisfy them more after purchase. We wanted to explore the hypothesis that this might be due to the fact that it might be to hard for consumers to judge before use whether a product is usable or not. We call the pre-use assumptions that people have about the usability of a product expected usability. Experienced usability is the opinion people have about usability after use. We wanted to explore what product properties influence expected usability, and whether and when there is a difference between expected and experienced usability. And what the consequences of that are.


Method
To study this, we showed people a number of consumer electronics products (1 navigation system, 3 alarm clocks), asked for their opinions through a questionnaire and an in-depth interview, gave them the product to use at home for two weeks, and then reassessed their opinions. So contrary to most studies on this issue people got to use the product for an extended amount of time and in their own environment.

What you see may not be what you get
The results showed that people's assessment of product usability can differ significantly before and after use. Expected usability was influenced by brand, price, styling and functional form. In addition, indications were found that expected usability can be influenced by marketing efforts, previous experiences with similar products, and opinions of other people. It was shown that product appearance (aesthetics and functional form) can be a misleading predictor for experienced usability. In other words: what you see may not be what you get.

Price as an indicator for experienced usability
For one of the alarm clocks a significant gap was found between expected and experienced usability. After having used this product the participants indicated they were considerably less willing to pay the indicated retail price. As one of the participants put it: "I would not use this alarm clock even if I would get it for free!" They seemed to use the price they were willing to pay as an expression for the poor experienced usability. These participants also rated usability as a more important product property before then after use. To paraphrase Tractinsky (2000): "When something is unusable, beauty no longer matters."

Functional form, styling and expected usability
The appearance of the product seemed to impact expected usability in two ways. The functional form aspects, such as number of buttons and screen size seemed to impact the participants' anticipations about the user interface of a product, while the styling of a product seemed to project a more general image of being easy to use or being aimed at a target group for which products need to be easy to use (children). So designers could use a products appearance to heighten expected usability. However, then the experienced usability needs to be in line with expectations, because disconfirmation of expectations is one of the triggers for customer dissatisfaction.

Reference
Kuijk, J.I. van, E.E. Preijde, E.N. Toet, H. Kanis (2009) "Expected versus experienced usability: what you see is not always what you get." IEA2009: 17th World Congress on Ergonomics, August 9-14, Beijing, China.

Ran into this little gem of a sign while riding the Beijing subway.

I will be taking a break from uselog for the coming month. See you on September 14th.

For those of you who don't have any plans for the weekend: ZINK (ZeroInk), the company that provides the technology for the new generation of Polaroid cameras, (picture below) has a design challenge for you. The ZINK zero boundaries competition challenges you to design and imagine "new and innovative solutions that enable and enhance printing with ZINK Technology". They would like you to "re-imagine printing and its role in the digital world using the ZINK Technology to fuel the future possibilities of this unique technology platform".

Quite an impressive jury by the way, with people from for example Frog Design, Gizmodo, and Harvard Business School. A (relatively) cheap and fun way for ZINK to get inspired, a good way for you to get noticed (if you want to). Deadline is monday June 8.

When replacing their old ATMs with newer touchscreen models, US bank Wells Fargo hired design firm Pentagram to redesign the on-screen interface. Holger Struppek, who did the visual design on the project, has a highly illustrated story of the design process on his weblog physicalinterface.com.

In the story there's an excellent example of branding versus usability considerations when designing a user interface:

However, blue seemed to be a color that was genuinely pleasant to look at, and even though it was “off-brand”, everyone could live with it. It provided great contrast to the red Return Card button and the yellow alert boxes. During user testing, we presented participants with our color choices and got the same results: “It’s calming”, “I like the blue sky”, ... and so we went with it.

Surprisingly, Wells Fargo recently switched the UI to the current tan color scheme. I don’t know what prompted that decision, but it does bring it back in line with their brand.

[Via: Jane Pyle]

One of the 'founding fathers of HCI', John Carroll, has written an excellent historic overview of how the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) developed, diversified and matured. A must read, really puts some developments into perspective.

Today, largely due to the success of that endeavor, HCI is a vast and multifaceted community, loosely bound by the evolving concept of usability, and the integrating commitment to value human concerns as the primary consideration in creating interactive systems.

Somehow Toshiba came to the conclusions that this is future of home entertainment. Or at least back in 2006 they thought so, because then they presented this helmet offering its user a full 360 degrees view of movies and video games through an integrated 40 centimeter dome-shaped screen. If this is the future of home entertainment I think that in the future we will all have really well-developed neck muscles and no self esteem. The picture is from a 2006 article in the Daily Mail, but it's so outrageous I thought it still deserved some attention.

See also:
> Movie from TV Tokyo showing the helmet (in Japanese)
> Fox News: Virtual-reality helmet gives 360-degree view

Philips Research usually does not work on the next big thing in consumer electronics, but on the next-next big thing in consumer electronics. To give you a sense of the timelines we're talking about: back in 1994 they were exploring the possibilities of the networked home in the WWICE project.

Over the past years user-involvement has become more and more important when they develop future product concepts and now Philips Research is opening up: on their SimplicityLabs website you can see, evaluate and contribute to new interaction concepts. The presentation is not extremely engaging, and some of the concepts may make you wonder: will I ever use this? But that's the idea...

An interesting new product proposition from ModuMobile: one tiny basic mobile phone module (pictured above) slides into a multitude of modules (below) that extend its functionality or just change the looks. Like Nokia's Xpress-on covers, but with built-in functionality. For now they're just selling in Israel.

See also:
> Techcrunch: Modu Comes Out Of The Woodwork With A Truly Innovative Mobile Offering



[Lower picture from TechCrunch]

So how is it that Microsoft Windows, with all the effort put into user experience design, does not seem to be able to measure up to Apple computers in terms of usability? There are probably many answers to that question, some of which involve stuff like creating a cult, appealing aesthetics, brand perception and legacy issues.

Owning the eco-system
One very important factor, I think, is summed up in the Mac vs PC commercial breakthrough. Mac and a therapist are trying to convince PC that it's not his fault that he's underperforming. The therapist says: "Unlike Mac, whose operating system and hardware are all made by the same people, your stuff comes from a bunch of different places. [...] Under those circumstances, who could expect everything to work together the way they should?"

This is a very interesting question, as consumer electronics are turning more and more into complex systems. The question is: how do you get all the parts of the system to work together seamlessly? I see two options: monopolize the eco-system or standardize it.

Monopolize the eco-system
If you look at the iPod/iPhone system it goes beyond just the hardware-software alignment that is mentioned in the commercial. Apple creates and/or controls the hardware (iPhone), firmware (iPhone OS), software (apps), connection software (iTunes), content delivery (iTunes Store) and software delivery (App Store). Owning the whole eco-system of a product makes it easier to create usable products as you can coordinate the application of user experience design guidelines, and deal with connectivity and interoperability issues. And though it might be argued that Apple's complete control over the eco-system might result in higher prices than an open market situation, consumers do get a better user experience for that price.

Standardize
Another way to at least get the different components of a system to work together - to ensure interoperability - is to standardize. As an industry you define a common standard. And stick to it. Think of for example USB plugs, Wifi signals, or compact cassettes. If you choose not join the standard, as Philips did with the VIDEO2000 video recording system, you run the risk of isolating your users from the rest of the system. VIDEO2000 users could not rent video tapes because they're medium was not the standard.

However, getting to a standard can be an excruciating process. It can require one system becoming so dominant it is the de facto standard (like CDs), an industry seeing a big advantage to standardization, or simply forcing it by law, as with the European Commission demanding standardization of mobile phone chargers. And even when interoperability standards have been established, some manufacturers may deliberately deviate from it - slightly - so they can claim to adhere to the standard (that's another check-mark on the box), but sales people will still have the argument that it might be better to purchase all equipment from this one manufacturer, because then you'll know for sure it will work.

Interoperability and/or UI consistency
However, standardizing for interoperability is one thing, but what about user interfaces? What if - for example - you want to run a Route66 personal navigation application on a Nokia mobile phone? Whose interface should be dominant? The Route66 interface that is optimized for navigation, and that users of Route66 software are used to, or the Nokia UI, in order not to break within-product UI consistency? I don't think you're going to solve that one through standardization. Monopolization works better. I think we can expect the TomTom iPhone App to adhere to iPhone design guidelines.

So am I in favor of monopolies? No. But I do see some bright sides.