A collection of 38 posts

<p class="MsoNormal">Interaction design is about interfaces, which means it is about synchronizing the events of different systems, about memories, buffers, queues and waiting rooms. Waiting is an unavoidable component of interfaces, an unavoidable part of life. Just as dirt collects in crevices,...

<p class="MsoNormal">I've been spending a lot of time in hospitals recently. No, not as a patient, as an observer &mdash; following doctors and nurses on their grand rounds, watching patients get admitted, nurses doing shift changes, pharmacists filling prescriptions, and then watching nurses act...

Many of our clever ethnographic and field methods are designed to find unmet needs. You know what? Most are far better off if they stay unmet....

<span>The automobile industry is badly in need of guidance on human factors. Excellent people already work in the companies, but they suffer the problems faced within the consumer electronics and computer industries over the past few decades. This is an important arena, one where human-centered d...

To school or not to school, is that the question? Should you go back to school? Whatever you do, remember that you must continually be learning. It is essential to keep up with rapidly evolving practices, with new technologies, procedures, business models, markets, and so on. So no matter what yo...

The automobile industry is ignoring all the advances in user-interface design, and all the lessons about safety. Unlike home computers where bad design is simply a nuisance, with automobiles, bad design can be a major safety issue....

Robots are coming, but what does this mean to ordinary folks? First of all, don't believe all the hype. Three likely directions for the future are entertainment, home appliances, and education. We can start with today's existing devices and slowly add on intelligence, manipulative ability, and fu...

Human-Centered Design has become such a dominant theme in design that it is now accepted by interface and application designers automatically, without thought, let alone criticism. That&rsquo;s a dangerous state &mdash; when things are treated as accepted wisdom. The purpose of this essay is to p...

Wonderful user experience is important, but neither necessary nor sufficient. If the company fails, it doesn&rsquo;t matter how good the experience was. For us, as a discipline, to be successful, we need to understand the entire picture. Our job is to make the company succeed....

Consider the modern automobile. It is a wonder of computation. multiple CPUs, hundreds of miles of cabling. Automatic this and automatic that. Lots of automatic stuff. How do we automate sensibly, controlling some parts of the driving experience, but ensuring that drivers are kept alert and infor...

Many have had difficulty with my article "Human-Centered Design Considered Harmful" In particular, I failed to make clear what I meant by "Activity-Centered Design," (ACD) and how it differs from "Human-Centered Design"(HCD). Some people think I have renounced everything I have said before. No, ...

<p class="MsoNormal">I consider it part of my self-imposed job requirement to purchase and try out every new technology. How else am to know the pleasure &ndash; and trauma &ndash; associated with their potential and their realization? My experiences demonstrate the need for the field of HCI expa...

<p class="MsoNormal">Designing a product requires many skills, and it is the rare individual who has them all. Design is, therefore, an exercise in teamwork, where each team member brings in a different mix of skills, attitudes, and values. Alas, quite often, members think their own set of attrib...

We have evolved as physical creatures. We live in a complex, three-dimensional world filled with physical objects. We are analog beings in an artificial world of digital devices, devices that abstract what is powerful and good from the physical world and turn it into information spaces, usually i...

The practice of HCI is mainly still an art form. The practice of Ergonomics is a rigorous engineering field. OK, so I oversimplified in order to get your attention, but listen up: there is a lot of truth in that simplification....

Web 2.0 is coming. Rich Internet applications (RIA) are here. Hurrah! The internet has caught up with the desktop, at long last. As a result, they provide some natural experiments in emotionally-attractive websites, allowing us to contrast the more traditional, static html page website with these...