Usability Quote of the Day

May 23, 2012

There's something very odd going on here. If designers made completely unrealistic assumptions about the physical world when designing technology, then we would blame them (and likely sue them) for technical incompetence. Yet when they make grossly unrealistic assumptions about human nature... we don't blame the designers, we blame the unfortunate people who are just trying to do what the design requires. -- Kim Vicente, The Human Factor, p. 45.    (via interaction-design.org)

Saturday, May 28, 2005

Designing a better cell phone user interface

"Given that the cell phones on the market seem to be so often badly designed - at least in terms of usability - it seems that the industry could use some sort of design reference. Cell phones have been on the mass-market for rather a while. Surely by now someone would have taken a stab at writing up some sort of guidelines, or offered some sort of reference design?

Went searching and - oddly enough - did not come up with much.

  • Tiresias - Guidelines (Mobile Phones)

  • MIDP GUI Programming: Programming the Phone Interface

  • Trace and phones

  • Excerpt from “Everyone Interfaces”

  • Trace Center Cell Phone Reference Design 1


  • Seems that most of the guidelines are focused on folks with disabilities. To be brutally honest, free-market companies care very little about the disabled as they represent only a very small portion of the market. On the other hand, there does not seem to be focus on usability for mainstream consumers. Maybe I did not look in the right places. On the other hand, since the end result - the devices on the market - is so poor, we have to assume that effectively no one else is able to find relevant information." (Via Preston L. Bannister)

    TRACE Center Cell Phone - User Interface Design, Human Computer Interaction (HCI), Ergonomics


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