Readers might get the impression that I’m pretty picky about technology, seeing as I have an entire blog dedicated to being picky about technology. However, as an engineer and designer, I’m well-acquainted with the myriad oversights that can ruin an otherwise outstanding design, and I’m fairly forgiving when I experience minor flaws in an...
Read more →Credit for this find goes to Rebecca Pelton. The USS Cassin Young is a Fletcher-class destroyer, formerly in the service of the US Navy, and she is a beautiful vessel…with a dark secret. She has a pretty outstanding service record, protecting several other Navy ships during World War II and rescuing many sailors from...
Read more →When I was in high school, I went on a trip to Disneyland with my best friends Robert & Samantha. (They are currently married with two cats, but at that point we were all just friends.) The trip itself was a typical spoiled-high-schoolers-from-Orange-County affair, where we traipsed about being silly and laughing a lot...
Read more →I realize this post is rather long, but bear with me, and remember that I spent twenty times the amount of time it takes you to read it being frustrated. My girlfriend and I have been playing through the entirety of the Myst puzzle game franchise together, and for the most part, we’ve done...
Read more →The last of the 200X’s draws to a close, and a lot of really terrible design decisions lay in our wake. Toyota’s brake debacle, the iPhone 4, and worst of all, there are still symmetrical doors haunting our most populated buildings, making fools of us all. However, not all is despair. As is always the...
Read more →In any sort of design, there is a tradeoff that must be evaluated when deciding what features to add: functions vs. usability. If you give your user a big, shiny, green button that says “GO,” you probably won’t need to spend a lot of time writing a manual, but the user will be limited to...
Read more →Most people don’t enjoy staring at cords. If you’ve got a lamp on your desk, you probably put it in one of the rear corners, both to maximize the amount of lit space and minimize the amount of cord showing. This Ikea lamp has an in-line switch on the power cord (already necessitating that...
Read more →This post was suggested by Ian Katz, of the seriously eclectic Tiny Little Life blog. Cars & trucks have all sorts of special equipment & adaptations for driving at night: the instrument panel can be backlit, the rearview mirror has a toggle switch that reduces glare (and is great fun to play with), headlights...
Read more →The Blackberry Bold 9700 has a tactile keyboard, which puts it a leg up on some other smartphones. However, the action of typing has two interfaces that both need to be considered when evaluating human factors: the human/input device interface, and the input device/software interface. “No problem!” my muscle memory confidently says. “The backspace...
Read more →I’m certain that other restaurants use these glasses as well, but I first saw them in use at Bubba Gump Shrimp, in Long Beach, CA. I was blown away. My predisposition toward very simple things that are very effective is well known, and these things are very much both. Not that impressive, right? It’s...
Read more →If you have a stove, you’ve probably switched on the wrong burner on occasion, returning to the range to find your teakettle staring at you imperviously as a burner adjacent to it radiates away. The problem is that you have a pair of geometric arrangements (your controls are probably in a line, while your...
Read more →Tomorrow’s post about stove controls will address the classic design/human factors problem of mapping stove controls accurately, but I wanted to toss another pan on the pan fire and talk about another beef I have with stove controls. The above pictures is probably at least somewhat familiar to everyone who’s spent any time in...
Read more →