Osiris is the name of the disastrously user-unfriendly online grading system used in the college I teach at. I recently examined it with 1st-year students, to start teaching them what they’ll be dealing with if they implement user-centered design in practice. Read the rest of this entry »
With 35,000 unique visitors each month (and growing), the Fontanel blog created by 2nd-year student Eric Gelderblom and 4th-year student Thomas Moes is quite a success story. The blog has become a unique resource, bridging the worlds of graffiti artists and academically-trained designers. I interviewed the students about their experiences and the secret of their success. What can we learn from Fontanel? Read the rest of this entry »
A trash and treasure shop in my neighborhood is a rich museum of strange and ugly designs from the 1970’s.
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Anything achieved in this school - curriculum, operational protocols, whatever - has a maximum life-span of two years. The same goes for teaching professionals - so I’m now approaching the end of my life-span. Should I try to outlive it? Read the rest of this entry »
A coat rack…but how does it work? Affordances again. Explore and figure it out. Read the rest of this entry »
Incredible but true - a SAM Award (Gouden Reiger / Golden Heron) for our mini-campaign for Meulenhoff Publishers.
How difficult can it be to make a doorbell that is intuitive to use? Apparently very. Look at this thing! Note that the company finally had to label the bell button twice (the word ‘bel’ with arrow and the white label on the bell button, with the name worn away by hundreds of fingers). Note that the the bell icon on this button is on its side instead of the normal, vertical position. The button competes with at least three other square panels which look no less or more like buttons than it does. The entire thing couldn’t do a better job of concealing the most essential feature: the button you press to ring the bell!
Affordances: a classic example of how NOT to do it
This is a good example of what happens when design ignores ‘perceived affordances’. This principle, invented by psychologist J. Gibson and popularized by Don Norman in his book ‘The Design of Everyday Things’. Simply put: the general appearance, especially the shape of things gives you strong intuitive clues about the potential ways we might use them. If something has an opening and is hollow, you might put something in it (think of a cup to hold liquid). If I tell this to a first-year class without an example, they look at me like I’m nuts. But just look at what happens in expensive, professional products like this doorbell! Do any of the little square panels of which it is made look more ‘pushable’ than others?
For more than a decade, we’ve been using little machines on the counters of shops to pay, by inserting our card with the magnetic strip on one side… and usually we insert it into the slot with the magnetic strip on the wrong side. The handy pictogram above the LED screen (above at left) somehow doesn’t work. There have been tens of re-designs, but we still stubbornly misinterpret it. In a moment of brilliance, I figured out how to re-design the pictogram and make it work. A neighborhood office services shop ‘Vlug ‘n Zeker’ (Fast ‘n Reliable) has implemented the pictogram to test my idea - the first results are coming in today…
In this vast, but remarkably transparent and handy book, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman distill fundamental concepts into brief, practical chapters, each followed by a summary and containing a precise set of relevant examples. For learning the foundations of game design, there is simply nothing that even comes close to this book. It’s not always easy going, because of the concise and rigorous treatment of tough theory (e.g., information theory, probability, psychology, system theory). But it has many contributions by important game designers telling how they work and solve problems, and is very practically oriented. After getting it all in my brain, I discovered that I could very quickly identify problems and potentials in the ‘game and play’ aspects of my students’ and my own work, and discard about 70% of the content of other books on the topic as either anecdotal fluff or too nerdy and specific. Read the rest of this entry »