sven.buschbeck » UI

good & bad usablitythe tap example

Sven Buschbeck — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 21:30:05 +0000

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!

Sven Buschbeck — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 23:02:29 +0000

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

» read more »

magnet v0

Sven Buschbeck — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 21:10:23 +0000

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

Sven Buschbeck — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 18:50:14 +0000

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

Sven Buschbeck — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 11:22:09 +0000

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 .