This blog is about product design with a focus on usability and human factors. I am particularly interested in how advances in technology affect the user experience and how the pace of technological change often exceeds the rate of change for human behavior. A great example of this is the increasing presence of software in devices and household products, often labeled under the term Internet of Things (IoT).
In some ways, we’ve come full circle again. The seminal book, “The Design of Everyday Things” by Donald A. Norman introduced concepts of physical product design and applied them to computer interfaces. Now we can take best practices derived from research on human-computer interaction and apply some of them to smart products. However, there are unique aspects of products and systems that combine physical objects with intelligent software and this is a space for a lot of discussion and learning.
Blog Posts
- Usability Practices for Consumer Products Borrowed from Software Design
- Toggle Controls and Affordance
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