My square meal has six sides.

I'm going to talk about nutrition and information visualization for a while. Nutrition is something I haven't ever really understood very well. For most of my life, I've been sort of reactive about my eating habits, adjusting my diet based on whether I felt I needed to lose weight or gain energy, etc. It's worked well enough for me, but it's not exactly a good way to define one's nutritional plan to get anywhere beyond "surviving" and into the realm of "healthy". I could try harder to understand nutrition, but this is America, so instead I'm going to blame education. Specifically, I'll blame the USDA.

Make sure to have a glass of milk or a History wedge piece from Trivial Pursuit with every meal. (Credit: http://robertleehaller.com/foodgroups.htm)

How to spot a usability failure

Double-tap up then hold down while making a swift clockwise motion in the center to not prevent the history eraser from not being averted.  You have 5 seconds.

 I encountered a light switch this past weekend.  It was the most amazing light switch I've ever seen.  I had no idea one could incorporate that much functionality into a simple light switch, but someone out there decided to change my worldview vis-a-vis lights and the switching on and off thereof.  The light switch was so amazing that I had to request a demo of it, and even after the demonstration of its full functionality, I still had no idea how to use it.

Let me try to explain my understanding of this light switch, gained after careful consideration and review of the instructions (helpfully printed directly onto the switch) and the demo.

1. Double-tapping up or down will fade to full-on or full-off quickly.
2. Holding up or down will fade lights up or down slowly.
3. Tapping either up OR down once will set the lights to a "preset"?  Maybe?
4. Finding a pen and jamming it into the tiny little nook on the right of the switch will set the current level of lighting to be the "preset".
5. Despite the ominous multi-colored glow it emits in the dark, the light switch is probably not a killer robot sent from the future, but I might be wrong here.

I will grant that the owner of said light switch seemed to have a pretty good grasp of how it worked, but then again, she lives with it.  Personally, I like to think that if I walk into a room and see a panel of switches, I already know how to turn the lights on and off.  I believed myself until now to have a knowledge bordering on the encyclopedic of light switch designs.  All five of them.  But if someone casually asked me to hit the lights and I found myself face-to-face with this beast?  They'd have to wheel me out on a dolly.

Grip it and rip it: a concept for touch-scrolling and touch-dragging

It seems that the current model for drag and edit operations on objects in a touch-scrolling environment a la iPhone or Android is to tap-and-hold to initiate an edit mode, wherein the screen dims or the icons begin to jiggle or something else signifies this new modality where the domain is now locked down and the entities within that domain are free to move.  It works well enough, I suppose.  There's another model that involves a "drag handle" on each item that allows it to be moved when you drag up or down from that point of contact.  Also works well enough, but I'm left unsatisfied.

Read on for an explanation of a new concept I came up with.

We don't need no edumacation

Somebody was foolish enough to let me teach some young, impressionable minds about interaction design.  A friend of mine who teaches at University of Virginia asked me to do a guest lecture on Human-Computer Interaction in two of his Software Engineering courses, and now I've posted the presentation on SlideShare, because this thing is pretty cool.

The lecture is pretty much a low-level overview of the field with some good/best practices thrown in there to hopefully get them on the right foot if they're one day out there making the products that I will use someday, but it won't be anything new to the heavy hitters in the field or anything.

Update: Slides seem to be in sync now!

Interaction Design Guest Lecture - UVA CS 3240

View more presentations from Colin Butler.

This phone has more personality than some of my Facebook friends.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/17/puma-phone-hands-on/

It's not often that technology meets playful simplicity quite like this.  There are those who would argue that iPhones are fun and playful, but no, they really aren't.  Not like this, at least.  Lately many devices have started to incorporate playful aspects thanks to the iPhone and the recent movement towards a more personable user experience, but here are some examples of how the Puma phone shown in the link puts them all to shame:

• Menus are "hidden under the rug" and shown with a swipe and a "pull up the corner" animation
• The music player is in the form of a turntable, complete with interactive scratching
• The solar panel on the back encourages outdoor usage and keeps track of how much power you save by using it, with a display phrased in terms such as "## mins of music powered by the sun"
• Retro-analog stopwatch and bike speedometer tools
• A calculator that reportedly chides you for using it on overly simplistic calculations
• A built-in puma

Seriously, just watch the video in the link.

Now, I'm sure Jakob Nielsen would have a field day with some of the usability decisions they've made, and I can definitely see a few ways that the experience may be a little clunkier than it needs to be.  But lately I've been thinking a lot about things like giving devices a "face" and injecting personality and playfulness into the ordinarily cold or inert, and Puma have really surprised me with this device.  I would love to see this become a popular thing to do.

The cup-holder quotient

Cars are a fascinating platform for user experience design.  From the aesthetic and reflective value of a flashy or quirky car to the behavioral considerations of the interior design (can you tell I'm a Don Norman follower?), there are so many factors to the design of an automobile and so many ways in which a car interfaces with its owner's life that the challenges faced-- and often the solutions created-- can be quite intriguing.

Also, they can be quite shiny.

I've read plenty of material on the various human factors of cars and their design.  Also, I've been in a car or two in my day, and I've come up with a theory quantifying how carefully car manufacturers design for the user.

The kind of experience anybody would want.

http://blog.hellohenrik.com/?p=391

A very brief, but very valuable look at how we all want things to operate.  Imagine that before you went to bed, you went into the bathroom and streamlined every aspect of your shower-taking experience so that it would be as effortless as possible when you woke up the next morning.  Now imagine that someone snuck in and did it every day while you were away.

Actually, that's creepy.  Go back to the did-it-yourself version.  Nice, isn't it?

Voice-operated vs. voice-augmented interfaces

Mention the term "voice control" and one of two scenarios usually comes to mind.  The first scenario is of stilted, error-prone interactions, often involving the user repeating himself as the computer dumbly responds with "I don't understand."  Worse, it can lead to the user shouting, "No!" as the phone asks if he would like to call the ex-girlfriend he hasn't gotten around to deleting from his contacts yet.  This would be the "real world" scenario.  The second scenario that may come to mind is of magical understanding, where the computer has all the language comprehension of a fluent speaker.  It readily parses natural language and produces instantaneous results to any query or command.  This is the "Star Trek" scenario.

"Computer, calculate warp trajectory."

"Did you say, 'Call Charlotte Padalecki?'"

There's a pretty wide gap between the two scenarios, and there has been a tremendous amount of time and money invested in pursuing the second scenario.  The idea of controlling a computer with voice commands is an enticing one, to the point that it is in fact often referenced as an archetype of "futuristic" interaction.  This is for good reason: it's not going to happen anytime soon.

Hot-bliggity blog

Welcome to Argh-onomics.  It's my new blog for musings on interaction design, user experience design, usability, ergonomics, user-centric design, human factors, user interface design, or anything that may fit in, on, near, or under any of those categories.  Here's a Venn diagram for those who are confused:

It works just as well in four-dimensional space.

The name of the blog is derived from the term "ergonomics", which is the study of work.  The Greek root -nomos means "laws", while "erg" is the sound I make when I work.  Hence, understanding the laws of work becomes the field of ergonomics.  When I get frustrated while working, I make the sound "argh", and that's where we get our blog name.

I've got plenty of thoughts on interaction design and the pursuit of the ever-elusive smiling user, so if you can count on one thing, it's that there will always be things to talk about for as long as there are people who want to throw their computers out the window.  I hope you enjoy your time here and I hope I manage to update consistently enough to make you want to come back.  Cheers!