Dave's Getting Married – Back in a month!

That’s right, folks, now begins a whirlwind month that includes my bachelor party (New Orleans, woo!), wedding, honeymoon, and moving apartments! And in the midst of all that activity, I thought it best to take a hiatus from Unpressable Buttons and come back when I have both the time and energy to resume pondering product design. So, come back in mid-July for a resumption of my daily posts – or subscribe to the blog, and you won’t even have to worry about remembering.
In the meantime, if you need a fix of product design use and usability reading material, I can recommend the following blogs:

• Good Experience Blog - Mark Hurst’s blog focuses on the user experience, touting it as the raison d’etre for all products. Also be sure to check out the Flickr photo group he administers, ThisIsBroken, chock full of designs gone wrong.

• Uselog (aka The Product Usability Weblog) – Jasper van Kuijk's blog on consumer product usability, with consistently excellent examples and intelligent commentary on product design.

• Small Surfaces – A blog by Gabriel White, a former coworker, focusing especially on human-computer interation in handheld devices.

• And of course, the sources for most of my material, Gizmodo and Engadget - dozens of posts a day on gadgets ranging from brilliant to boneheaded. Check’em out, and just think – why will or won’t this work for users? It’s the game I play every day!

I’ll see you all in a month!

Cheers,
-Dave Gustafson

Fake Camera Sounds - Adding the wrong noise for the right reaon...

Digital cameras are a wonderful advancement in photography: they lower the cost and trouble involved with film, provide instant feedback on every shot, and can fit almost anyone's budget and pocket. But there's something that was lost in the transition: the audible sounds of the shutter snap and film advancement. Most point-and-shoot digital cameras have a shutter snap so faint that it can be difficult to hear even when you're listening for it - and none of the noisy film-advancement motors of the film cameras of yore. While it might seem that making a product quieter is generally a good thing, it turns out that users have come to depend on the sounds of the camera for feedback that the shot has actually taken place; without that feedback, neither the photographer or the subject is quite sure if the moment was properly captured. Digital cameras have been designed with different kinds of feedback to deliver that confirmation - beeps and bloops, freezing the live image on the LCD - but none have been immune to misinterpretation (beeps can mean anything, and a momentarily-frozen live image might mean the camera has crashed!). That big clunky shutter sound and the following sound of film advancement still do the trick - and that's why quite a few digital cameras have those sounds built in as the default. It's anachronistic, it's inappropriate, it's extra noise in an already noisy world - but darn it, it works for the user. And that, my friends, is usability design!
(See also: fake engine sounds on electric sports car.)

Ice-warning Road Paint - Color coded safety...

When I learned to drive back in good ol' Ohio, one of the dangers that was drilled into the brains of new motorists was "black ice" - ice on the road that just can't be visibly seen. The only way to know when to worry about it was to keep tabs on the temperature - when you're in or below the low 30's, watch out! Well, it looks like there may soon be some help with that: French company Eurovia is developing a temperature-sensitive road paint which changes color when the temperature of the road approaches freezing. This is a pretty decent advancement in the usability of detecting black ice; previously, reading the temperature was a separate, often-ignored task that was separate from the task of driving. With this stuff, the temperature info is moved right to the road itself, where the driver is already looking for information such as obstacles, directions, etc. It's the right information provided in the right place to really be useful. So, maybe the next generation of new drivers won't need to be as scared of black ice - which will leave them more free to deal with drivers on cell phones...
[via NewScientist, Information Aesthetics, and The Product Usability Weblog]

Folding Bike Handlebars - Where have these been??

Another one for the why-did't-I-think-of-that file - or, for that matter, the why-haven't-these-been-around-for-decades file - these are folding bicycle handlebars, from designer Joe Wentworth on Tuvie. These offer a number of improvements over the solid handlebars of, well, every existing bike: the bike will take less space when leaned against a wall, less space when crammed into a trunk or SUV, and the folded handlebars will lock the steering so the bike doesn't roll-and-fall like they tend to do when leaning. And, as Gizmodo writer Sean Fallon notes, no more "groin-first trips into my exposed bike handlebars." All the more reason these should have been around for decades!

SafeManuals - Online product-manual repository...

We get a great deal of our information online these days that we used to get in print form: news, encyclopedia, dictionary, thesaurus, language translation, movie times, and so on. However, here's one that's been largely ignored so far - product manuals, those little sheets or booklets that come in the box with your new gizmo, guide you through that first setup, and troubleshoot any problems. Having that booklet there is convenient at the time - but once everything's set up and running, it becomes a liability. It will take up space somewhere and be forgotten, but you don't want to toss it, no, you might need it in the future! (And the trees that went into making that paper weren't free, either.) So, along comes SafeManuals.com, a user-uploaded repository of product manuals, designed to let you throw away (er, recycle) those manuals without worry. It fills the gap left by many manufacturers, who for some reason don't always make their own manuals easy to find online. The question is, will it be able to lead the charge for manufacturers to only put manuals online, and spare the resources required to put printed ones in product boxes? It would require the users to sacrifice that one intial bit of convenience in - but it's something I hope we'd all be willing to do. In the meantime, I'm going to go comb through my library of old manuals and toss anything that's on the site!
[via MakeUseOf and Lifehacker]

CPR Flashlight - A rescue-tool mashup...

If you're putting together any kind of emergency kit, it's likely to include a flashlight. (Disasters always happen in the dark? Hmm. Anyway...) So if you're throwing one in there regardless, why not make it do double duty as a talking CPR guide? Yup, this Talking CPR Flashlight talks you through the process of CPR - breathing, chest compressions, and most importantly, how many to do of each and how quickly. It's certainly a worthy idea, but I believe that its interface could use some work - looking at the buttons in the photo, I'm not sure which to hit first, "CPR" or one of the buttons designating it for an adult, baby, or child. And in fact, the choice to represent those categories of people as A-B-C makes those buttons seem more like steps in a process than settings! Maybe icons showing an easily-identified full-body profile of those three types of people would be more clear...
[via BookofJoe and Engadget]

Eco-Drop Shower - Holding your feet hostage to conservation...

The good news: A good, long, hot shower feels great.

The bad news: A good, long, hot shower wastes more and more water and energy the longer it goes.

Since we humans are lousy at delaying gratification in order to make things better down the road, this design makes the gratification much less... gratifying. The Eco-Drop Shower from designer Tommaso Colia on I New Idea features a floor which becomes progressively less comfortable as the shower goes on. See those little rings on the floor in the rendering? They get deeper, more treacherous, and less comfy when you get greedy with the agua. The world - and anyone else sharing your water heater - will thank you!
[via TrendHunter and Gizmodo]

Train Time Indicator - Tells you whether you can make it...

I've recently joined the millions of commuters who depend on trains, and it takes a little getting used to compared to commuting by car. The fact that trains leave only at certain times is the trick, for me - I have to be watching the clock both in the morning and the evening, knowing that I either make the next train or it'll be another wait (sometimes as much as an hour) for the one after that. With that same problem in mind, Tom Lee presents a project of his on DCist: a picture frame which shows, simply, whether or not he has time to catch the current train. The frame shows two amber bars when there's enough time to make it, two red bars when there's not - and the really useful part, one red and one amber bar in the 60 seconds when he'd really need to hustle. I've wasted enough time comparing the clock with the train schedule and doing math in my head that this could be a real simplifying influence on my life, and I'm sure in the lives of many others as well - not to mention something I could point to in order to get coworkers to let me get going! Way to go, Tom - now catch that train...
[via MAKE]

Defendius - Time to think about who you're letting in...

Some people load their front doors with so many locks - knob lock, deadbolt, door chain, floor bolt, maybe two of each - that I'm tempted to think that the time-consuming process of unlocking the door is itself what gives them a feeling of security. Well, for those people (and for a laugh for the rest of us), here's the Defendius door chain from designer Art Lebedev. Totally impractical - unless you just feel safer (an unjustified feeling), or need some time to think about whether you reeeeally want to let that person inside...
[via Engadget]

The Large Display Paradox - Multitasking vs Single Focus...

Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror (a blog dedicated to "programming and human factors," good stuff) describes something he calls the Large Display Paradox: that although pretty much everyone considers larger and multiple monitors to be beneficial, smaller monitors actually enable users to focus better on the task at hand. On a smaller monitor, there's no room to have more than one window show at once - so the user picks a task and grinds away at it, with the other windows unable to distract from the task. Also, there's a small amount of time everyone with a large monitor must spend arranging the windows to their liking - I know I do - and even though it's small it'll eventually add up. (And since it's usually done with a mouse, it's not doing anything good for your wrist, either!) So, should we all be switching to old-school 14-inch 1024x768 screens? A one-window-at-a-time speed limit? For our productivity, sanity, and wrist health - and despite our status-symbol huge-screen displays - maybe so!
[via Lifehacker]

Taking Advantage of Misspelling...

You've gotta love capitalism: if there's any way to make money, people will find it - and that includes exploiting design flaws. In this case, the design flaw is the fact that search engines on eBay and other auction sites are very unforgiving of typos - and the way of making money is by searching for common typos in product listings. It makes sense that someone who erroneously lists a "flat screen moniter" for sale is going to get fewer bidders, because those searching for "monitors" aren't going to see it. The typo-searcher can pick up the product at a lower price - and maybe even resell it for a more realistic market value. Some clever folks have picked up on this, and created tools that specifically search for common typo or misspelled variations of whatever you're looking for - Auction Bloopers and the less-catchily-named eBay Auctions Misspelled Search. Of course, an irony of these services is that if they work too well and become too popular, they'll become useless - but in the meantime, get it while the gettin's good!
[via Lifehacker]

USB Sleep-and-Charge - A welcome addition to an established standard...

As standards go, especially from a usability standpoint, USB has been an excellent one. It's ubiquitous (eeeeverything can connect via USB, with very few exceptions), the connectors are physically easy to deal with (good insertion and retention forces, easy to align, no annoying screws), and it just works (devices identify themselves and spring to life, often without needing to install drivers). Lately, it's also perhaps unintentionally become a standard for charging battery-powered devices - even many that aren't intended to ever communicate via USB nevertheless include the standard USB jacks and voltages so they can grab juice from any available port. Toshiba noticed, and made a simple and brilliant accommodation for those devices: USB ports in its latest computers that provide power even when the computer is off (but still plugged in). Now you don't have to leave your (relatively) power-hogging laptop on all night just to trickle-charge a Bluetooth headset. No complaints here - it's just good, usable design!
[Businesswire, via Engadget]

Smart Brakelights communicate difference between a tap and a slam...

I know it's happened to me, it's probably happened to you: on the highway, at a pretty good speed, and the car in front of you stops a lot more quickly than you'd expect. After the adrenaline rush, you can justify it to yourself - sure you saw his brakelights, but thought it was just a little slowdown, not a screeching halt. Well, why can't the brakelight itself show the difference between those two things? Mechanical engineering students at Virginia Tech under Professor Mehdi Ahmadian asked the same question, and came up with a three-stage smart brakelight, shown at right: that's a lit orange bar in the center for a mild slowing, add some flashing red bars on the side for a more significant slowing, and the whole thing flashing red for a severe stop. Those indicators seem to be intuitive enough that they'd work even without this system being widely adopted, especially for any driver following the same car for a little while and seeing the various states demonstrated in the course of normal traffic. And of course, the overall idea of a three-stage brakelight is certainly worthy, brilliant, and an excellent case of a more usable design having the potential to save lives!
[via Engadget]