Blogging as therapy

Trying to get a rebate issue solved proved to get me riled today. Cable internet company sent me to three phone numbers, three chats and an email. Seven people!! One of the reps accidentally disconnected me. One customer service rep gave me the number to Devries U. I wonder if they all thought that was just too funny. I am not impressed with the phone calls to Charter Cable today. I will change service as soon as I can. That is the problem with living in the rural part of the state. Very little choice. To top it all off I do not even own a TV so I definitely do not need the cable for that...just need Internet for my job and my education.

Above is a screenshot to the rebate company's online tracking help system which I got to after negotiating many hard-to-find links. LINKS WITH NO UNDERLINE OR OTHER COLOR THAN THE REST OF THE SITE. They do it on purpose...I mean seriously. As the screenshot shows I cannot submit this helpdesk ticket because see the red highlighted line? It says I am missing some input. But look at the drop down menu...there is not the ability to "chose" anything. I guess they figure they'll make folks so unhappy they will go away. Ok so that is broadbandoffers.com and they deserve the way to make a customer happy - NOT award tonight also. Dummyheads.

User friendly control panels

Beth and I were talking last Institute about the "freshman 15" or the weight that one puts on during their first year in college. Well, since I began grad school in 2006, I have put on a freshman, softmore AND junior 15 so this year I bought a really nice treadmill. The biggest problem with grad school hasn't been the grad work, but the second job that I've been carrying as well as my full-time one, which has me in front of a computer way more than any human should be.

I was a bit nervous that the control panel of this machine would be difficult to use, but it is not. I have not (like most Americans) even opened the instruction manual. All that I need to do to make this work is put the red key in (bottom middle) and press the start button on the lower left. This makes the machine go at a half a mile per hour. Then I can simply click the speed button along the righthand side to increase the speed, and I can change the incline on the lefthand side as well. There are also handles on each side that have up and down arrow buttons for speed on the right handle and incline on the left handle. SO easy - start slow, increase after a couple of minutes, get up to heartrate and do the amount of time there and then slowly cool down. What can be easier. There are all kinds of programmable buttons along the middle horizon...but for now I don't feel the need to program anything...

In The Design of Everyday Things Donald Norman speaks to control panels that are easy looking but not necessarily easy to use. This results from what he describes as the complexity of actions that can can be accomplished only through a rich complexity of execution by the user. I think this panel above is the perfect marriage of ease and complexity. If you want ease it is there, if you want programmability - have at it! And this interface meets Norman's criteria of grouping the buttons into logical, functional modules. Bravo Sole!

The Role of Emotion in Design

Once I started to think about things in terms of product design it’s as though I descended Alice's rabbit hole and have new eyes. I have read sections of Donald Norman’s Emotion Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things with enthusiasm. In the book he delved into design from the perspective of usability, aesthetics and practicality. I will no longer look at teapots in quite the same way as he uses this simple item to illustrate how we put emotion into the purchase of things in our life and how they are often imbued with meaning. Think about being inside of a Pier One store and looking at twenty-five models of teapots. Will we choose one because of its visceral design – they way it looks? Or from a behavioral perspective, i.e. its usefulness and the pleasure we derive from it? Or do we buy one that has a story of some sort to “tell” about “who we are” and how we choose to live our lives? What Norman really is saying is that emotion plays a bigger part in our lives than our rational, logical tradition. There’s a chapter about the role that music plays in our emotional lives and how some design seeks to capitalize on that. In the book is an example of a teakettle designed to evoke the same notes as steamers and barges on the Rhine River. There’s too much sound and noise in my life – so as you can see from this example – my teakettle which has a very handsome and practical aspect has no whistle anymore – because it was too annoying…

Screen Capturing with Jing

I found a new free tool for screen captures that can be shared with anyone. I learned about it from an online instructor who is using it to be able to see the results of his student's LabSim scores. After it is loaded to the computer its icon is this sun that hangs out at the top middle of my desktop.

If I mouse over it expands like the photo above. Left-side click is the tool itself. Middle-click is the storage location for one's screen captures and the right-side is for settings and tools, help and the quit button.

I launched it to take a photo of my screen and it helped me set up the screen-capture size. Then I clicked and it took the photo then using the tools in the vertical tool bar you see above I added an arrow, a custom text box, and I highlighted the area of interest.


Once I was done adding the elements I used the horizontal navigation bar you see above to save. Then I exported it to a web folder using Picasa. And below is the finished product!! Using Shneiderman's Eight Golden Rules of Interface Design I would conclude: It was consistent in its round fun-ness. There were never any errors. I could undo easily. Everything was easy to understand. I definitely felt like I was in control of the tool and that it responded to my actions. Displays were simple and I was never in short-term memory overload.

From Drop Box