good & bad usablity
the tap example

Every­one inter­ested in HCI and Usabil­ity saw the cover pic­ture of The Design of Every­day Things by Don­ald Nor­man. But there are exam­ples about good and bad usabil­ity all around us, every day and I want to share one of mine.

I real­ized how much more com­fort­able the shower tap at my par­ents place is, com­pared to the one in my shared flat.

Don’t move! If you touch it and you are lucky, the water gets only turned off… oth­er­wise you get frozen or boiled.

A good exam­ple of a water-tap for a shower.

The exam­ple to the left  is a typ­i­cal one — most prob­a­bly fol­low­ing an assump­tion like “this tap is work­ing for the wash­bowl, so it will do for a shower as well”. As it is mounted waist-high, it is easy to reach, also by mis­take, which can be quite dan­ger­ous as it can eas­ily be turned towards hot water by a slight touch. The re-engineered exam­ple on the right shows a func­tional and easy-to-use solu­tion, in addi­tion, the water tem­per­a­ture can be set up very pre­cisely, but most impor­tant, there is no way to change the water tem­per­a­ture by acci­dent as it is selected with a knob. Addi­tion­ally, due to the knob, its almost impos­si­ble to reach the han­dle, which is used to set up the water amount, by accident.

use all your fingers
multi-touch!

Heard about those home-made multi-touch screens using infrared LEDs? We did it

» read more »

magnet v0

I fin­ished the first pro­to­type imple­men­ta­tion of mag­net, a generic tool to visu­al­ize coherences/similarities between eni­ties of any data set.

» user test & more info »

sign selector

While test­ing some ideas for a juke­box appli­ca­tion for my “media cen­ter” com­puter, I came to a point, where the user should be able to select an inter­pret or song from a huge list. If he knew the exact name, scrolling through a sorted list should be ok, but still a way to nar­row the list by typ­ing some ini­tial let­ters would be much faster and con­vinient. This should not be dif­fi­cult on a thouch screen, but as I also wanted  this appli­ca­tion to work on mouse-only devices, as a key­board was for exam­ple too space con­sum­ing in my con­fig­u­ra­tion. So I ended up try­ing to find an inter­face com­po­nent, allow­ing an user to enter a view let­ters with a point­ing device like a mouse or a track ball.

It is basi­cally a pop-out tech­nique, but mak­ing use of mov­ing the mouse pointer in two dimen­sions, than the com­mon lin­ear approach. Oper­ati­ing this first pro­to­type ver­sion on the left is still a lit­tle rough though.

Content and navigation as zoomable UI and masked floating layer

See the Zoomable UI/floating layer nav­i­ga­tional approach of my old (unmain­tained!) home page (in german).

This ver­sion of my home­page fea­tures a new nav­i­ga­tional con­cept com­bin­ing the idea of zoomable inter­faces and a masked float­ing layer. I cre­ated this appli­ca­tion as exper­i­ment while search­ing for con­cepts and idea about how to inte­grate con­tents and nav­i­ga­tional layer.

After infor­mal feed back of user i asked to give it a trail, I had to find, in the end, this RIA will stay more an exper­i­ment than a easy to use infor­ma­tion portal.

The text and media con­tained is in ger­man and has not been update ever since, addi­tion­ally the guest book is deac­ti­vated. There­fore give it a trail but do not take the con­tent seri­ous .