90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

We all know that design influences people emotionally, but have you ever considered the possibility that possibility that design alone can actually influence the health of your users? This article by Steve Silberman on wired.com (August ‘09) discusses the psychology of tablet design and the placebo effect:

“[...] the placebo response is highly sensitive to cultural differences. Anthropologist Daniel Moerman found that Germans are high placebo reactors in trials of ulcer drugs but low in trials of drugs for hypertension—an undertreated condition in Germany, where many people pop pills for herzinsuffizienz, or low blood pressure. Moreover, a pill’s shape, size, branding, and price all influence its effects on the body. Soothing blue capsules make more effective tranquilizers than angry red ones, except among Italian men, for whom the color blue is associated with their national soccer team [...]“

Sadly, the information in the above box is presented, in typical wired.com style, without reference to any actual research. If you want to read more, you may want to check out Meaning, Medicine and the ‘Placebo Effect’, a book written by Daniel Moreman (the anthropologist mentioned in the quote).

→ Found via Hacker News.

Out of Box Experience (OOBE) design is a discipline that consists of designing the details of the first few moments of owning a product, from the point of peeling off the shrink-wrap to the point of powering it up and trying it out for the first time.

I carried out a few OOBE design projects while I worked at Flow Interactive and Amberlight. A few months ago I got chatting to Pete Gale of CogApp, and it turned out he’d done some similar work for different clients. So, we got together and wrote this presentation for UXbri back in May. I’ve finally got around to putting it on Slideshare.

If you’re interested in how iterative research & prototyping is used in industry to create great User Experiences, then you should find this pretty interesting. (Using a feed reader and can’t see the presentation? Click here)

I usually hate it when people blog about their sprogs but suddenly I understand… My daughter Lilly was born on saturday afternoon, 7 pounds 14, a little bundle of joy.

I’ll be fairly offline over the next two or three weeks, but I will be making a quick appearance at UX Brighton on Tuesday 13th May, where I’ll be giving a talk on out-of-box experience design. If you’re local, why not come along? I promise not to bore you with baby stories.

OK, maybe I will just a little.

A great quote that sums up the art of User-Centered Writing:

“Bad writers worry about whether the reader will understand them. Good ones are more concerned about how well they understand the reader.”

- Paraphrased from Lindsay Camp (2007)

Has anyone else noticed how great Facebook image tagging is?

Granted, it is only for putting names to faces, but it’s incredibly quick to use (say 5 seconds per photo), and it’s really satisfying. Your friends see you’ve tagged them (the images appear in their news feed on their facebook homepage), and usually respond with a comment or by tagging some of your photos in return.

Compare this to Flickr where image tagging feels heavyweight, tiring and you get no quick payback for your effort.

Come on Flickr – you’ve dropped the ball on tagging. It should be a rapid, social and fun activity!

Microsoft Surface is a pretty amazing piece of research: tabletop touchscreen computing done really well. But, the “origins” section on the Surface website strongly implies that the whole concept of tabletop computing originated from Microsoft. It didn’t. If you find this stuff exciting, you should check out some of the prior research in this area.

MERL’s diamond touch : one of the first multi-touch technologies (works by running an electronic signal to your finger via your chair to identify each user).

IPSI’s roomware: this is an entire room decked out as touchscreen surfaces that are all linked together.

Stanford’s Tabletop groupware: they’ve done tons of stuff in the area. You may recognise some of the gestural stuff that also appears in the MS video.

Jun Rekimoto’s work (Sony) this includes “holotable”, “smart skin” and “augmented surfaces”. Jun is a genius- in my opinion, his research is genre defining.

I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing that Microsoft are building on top of prior research – this is, after all, what research is all about. I’m just trying to say that there are some talented people and research groups out there that also deserve recognition for the state of the art today.