While making breakfast, Emily had just boiled some water for tea and then had to melt some butter for pancakes. So rather than putting the butter in a cold pan and heating it up from scratch, she put the butter in a bowl and placed it on top of the teapot, thereby using the heat that was otherwise sitting idle. Nice.

I found myself in a newly rented third floor apartment in the thick of the summer. There were no ice cube trays in the freezer. Luckily, I had been to the grocery store to buy eggs, and there was an integrated egg container in the refrigerator.

So I stashed the eggs into the fridge and improvised ice cube trays out of the plastic egg cartons. It worked quite well. They are slightly flimsy when handling them with water. Not bad, though. And the draft angle is quite steep, so the ice releases with a gentle push from below. ]]> http://mike-eng.com/usability-observation-16/feed/ 0 http://mike-eng.com/usability-observation-15/ http://mike-eng.com/usability-observation-15/#comments Fri, 25 Jun 2010 19:44:12 +0000 mrengy http://mike-eng.com/?p=1778

Here’s the handywork of a Boston subway attendant to solve a problem which is mainly out of his control.

The problem is: people at the self-service ticket purchasing stations don’t know which way to insert their credit cards. Errors here during peak hours can be a bottleneck in the system.

This problem could have been solved in a few ways:

1. Constraints. Donald Norman introduced many people to the concept of constraints as a design convention. Basically, if you don’t want a user to do something the “wrong way”, make it impossible to do it that way. Also, if you visually indicate that it is impossible, you will most likely prevent the user from even attempting. This may seem difficult to do with something as two-dimensional as a credit card, but someone got it right with the design of SIM cards (left).

2. Flexibility. In this case, have four sensors in the card reader to accommodate the possibility of the stripe being in one of four possible locations. Of course, this would drive up the cost. Multiply the price of the sensor by the number of these kiosks in a transit system, then multiply it by four, and it will be significant.

3. Proximity (the P in the graphic design acronym CRAP). Another piece of this problem is that the label which demonstrates which way to insert the card is located far away from the card slot. So often the user doesn’t notice it when inserting a card. Then again, as Norman points out in The Design of Everyday Things, if something needs a label, it is badly designed.

The subway attendant’s solution was a noble but limited attempt to bridge the distance between the card slot and the label – a “Band-Aid” sort of solution to a problem that would ideally have been solved earlier in the design process.

The interesting bit is that it took the subway attendant (who watches people use the machines every day) to notice it. If the design team had tested their design earlier on, they most likely would have seen the problem when it could have been corrected in a more integrated way.

Ever wonder what happens to those shopping cart shelters that sit in the parking lot of the supermarket when the market goes out of business? Here’s one example of a re-use for them. An outdoor bench with a roof.

It almost looks as though these slots were designed for this purpose, although it’s a slightly low height for a bench.

An odd pairing of two objects in close proximity: a garbage can and an industrial fan, in a subway station. I tried to put a granola bar wrapper in this can, and it blew away. I’m fairly certain I’m not the only person who has had this problem.

As I see it, this situation could be interpreted in one of two ways.

#1: A simple oversight. Maybe one person placed the garbage can where it is, and later another person planted the fan near it by necessity since it was near the electrical outlet. Or maybe the same person placed them both where they are without putting himself into the situation of a subway passenger throwing away trash or observing how people interact with the setup.

#2: Conspiracy. The cleaning company and the facilities maintenance department of the MBTA worked out a deal. In exchange for a small bribe, the facilities company would create traps such as this, which highlight the need to continue the MBTA’s contract with the cleaning company.

The conspiracy theory is corroborated when one notes the placement of this sign for the cleaning company, located on the wall behind the trap.

Also note that the fan is chained in place – ostensibly to deter fan theft, but maybe secretly to maintain the trap.

Oversight or conspiracy? You decide.

An interesting find. I stumbled upon a fire hydrant on the street with a meter and a hose hooked up to it. Contractors were using it in their construction process on a new building which apparently didn’t have its utilities hooked up yet. I assumed this is how they were billed for the public water they used – on the good old honor system.

Here’s the hydrant in context. It begs the question: If one were to hook up the meter in reverse, would it run the number down? Or would it be fruitless and possibly lead to karmic disaster, as Ferris Beuller experienced?

Another of my grandma’s household innovations. This one involves taking a velcro band that once held together a bunch of cabbage at the grocery store and pinning it to the window to hold the window curtain in place.

Here it is closed.

And here’s a closeup of the velcro band in action. Not shown: the pin hole on the left side of the windowsill from when she switches sides. It’s the ultimate in cheap functionality. Victor Papanek would love it.

This article, Horizontalism and Readability, discusses the origins of scrolling as we know it today. In 1984 with the development of the first Apple Macintosh, the designers introduced the concept of a graphical user interface. With it, they discovered an early problem that there may be too many words and too much content to fit in the allotted space of the computer monitor.

The designers of the Macintosh knew this was an issue that had to be solved through the user interface, and devised an ingenius model that’s still being used today. They found a previous solution in the physical world and ported it directly to the digital space: scrolling.

But the article makes the case that Apple in 1984 got it wrong. Scrolls in a vertical orientation mainly come from idealized versions, but the majority of actual scrolls are oriented horizontally.

A simple Google Image Search will reveal the same sort of pattern. Most of the vertical scrolls are idealized versions, stock illustrations, or clip art, while most photographs of historical scrolls and documents are horizontal in format.

The article goes on to make the case for a horizontal orientation with narrower columns for the sake of readability.

Fascinating. Maybe the decision to introduce scrolling in the vertical orientation wasn’t that simple. But maybe it was. One simple oversight, and we as a society have arguably botched the orientation of the vast majority of a new medium of text.

The article got me thinking – why were scrolls initially oriented horizontally as opposed to vertically? One possibility: when writing on a vertical scroll, the bottom rod interferes with the writer’s hand. Another: when reading, if the scroll is oriented horizontally, the reader can place the scroll on a surface that is tilted toward him/her without the rods rolling off.

The manifestations of this decision for vertical scrolling in the digital realm are all around. Take the computer mouse, for example. The most commonly used mice today still have a vertical scroll wheel. Some intermediary versions have a vertical scroll wheel that the user can push left or right as well.

Then Apple introduces the Mighty Mouse with a ball instead of a scroll wheel, enabling scrolling in any direction. Then there’s the Apple Magic Mouse with no physical scroll device but multi-touch capability that allows the user to scroll in any direction as well as perform various gestures.

And we are moving in a direction-agnostic orientation with mobile devices.

Thinking for a Living, as one might expect, is oriented horizontally.