Unpossibilities…

With the upcoming group presentations at school it might be a good idea to work on our PowerPoint skills. Watch a presentation by comedian Don McMillan, who attempts to give some good advice on using the PowerPoint tool properly.

Good luck!

Have you ever wondered why most text is printed on a light background? How many times have you tried reading a full article on your computerscreen and dozed in or completely stopped reading the article? I've thought about it occasionally. Sure, articles can be boring. But you also might consider the color scheme that's being used on the article. I believe the same applies to text-editors. I'm using Textmate (by Macromates) on my Mac for programming in all sorts of languages. It has always been using its default color scheme, dark colored text on a white background. However, today I decided to invert the color scheme and was amazed how good it felt (here's a screenshot). The reason for doing this can be hard to explain. I've stumbled upon an article written by Roger Johansson about this issue. Roger published an interesting discussion on “Light text on dark background vs. readability” a while ago. When reading the comments made to Roger's article, you'll notice the different opinions people have and their reasons. Continue reading...

An application should not only be graphically attractive, also its usage should be experienced as easy to learn and easy accessible without reading a 100+ pages manual to get you started. These points are based upon the strong- and weaknesses of an application (in this case a Survey Management System).

To ensure a good user experience of your final application use in-between prototype testing, also referred to as "Try and Tested". You don't have to create fully operational parts of your system, but be sure it does give the correct impression. During our project we've occasionally asked our clients to work with specific parts of our application. Example:

Question 1: "Could you create a new question with the appropriate answers?" Question 2: "Is there anything you'd like to edit?"

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Yesterday during my train ride I read a book about interaction design. Here's an interesting article I stumbled upon.

The article: A provocative idea is that computers should apologize when they make a mistake. Reeves and Naas (1996), for example, argue that they should be polite and courteous in the same way as people are to one another. While apologizing is normal social etiquette in human behavior, especially when someone makes a mistake, would you agree that computers should be made to behave in the same way? Would users be as forgiving of computers as they are of one another? For example, what would most users think if, after a system had crashed, it came up with a spoken or written apology such as, "I'm really sorry I crashed. I'll try not to do it again"? Would they think that the computer was being sincere? would the apology make them forgive the computer in the way they forgive other people, after receiving such an apology? Or would it have no effect at all? Worse still, would users perceive such messages as vacuous statements and regard them simply as condescending, thereby increasing their level of frustration? How else might systems communicate with users when they have commited an error?

The motion: The use of anthropomorphism (the propensity people have to attribute human qualities to objects) in interaction design is an effective technique and should be exploited further.

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