We believe that when someone wants to do something on their computer, they want to spend their time doing it, not deciding how to do it. Well, we don’t think this is necessarily a good thing when it comes to usability. People love having choices, because having choices means having freedom. But something that is fundamentally simple”like changing the time on a wristwatch”should stay simple. It’s right and proper for complicated tasks to take time and expertise to accomplish. Most people dread setting the time on their digital watches, and for good reason. But on newer digital wristwatches”ones that claim to be more powerful and feature-loaded than their analog counterparts”it involves pressing a series of buttons in a hard-to-remember, often unforgiving order. Setting the time on a wristwatch, for instance, shouldn’t be that hard on old analog wristwatches, it basically involved pulling out a knob, twisting it until the watch showed the correct time, and pushing the knob back in again. Some tasks”for instance, teaching a child arithmetic”are intrinsically pretty complicated. But in today’s consumer culture, what should be blamed on bad interface design is instead blamed on the “incompetence” of users. User interface design is incredibly hard, and carries with it a great deal of responsibility this is something that’s taken quite seriously when it comes life-critical systems such as flight control software. If you have trouble using your microwave, it’s not because you’re “not good with technology”, it’s because the people in charge of designing the interface for that microwave didn’t do their job right. The main thing you have to remember”and please remember this, because it could be vital to your sanity”is that any problems you have with an interface are not your fault. Aza will take some time to answer those questions, and then I will begin posting his responses during the week of July 9, 2007. I will keep comments open until ~midnight of June 30, 2007. If you have a question for Aza, please submit them in the comment section of this post. Be warned: Aza is an incorrigible punster, so please do not incorrige. He also enjoys playing the French Horn, which has taken him all over the world as a soloist. For recreation, he does Judo, speaks Japanese, and invents in his lab. Aza has also done Dark Matter research at both Tokyo University and the University of Chicago, from where he graduated with honors in math and physics. By the age of 17, he was talking and consulting internationally by age 19, he was coauthoring a physics textbook because he was too young to buy alcohol and at age 21, he started drinking alcohol and co-founded Humanized. He gave his first talk on interface design at his local San Francisco chapter of SIGCHI at the age of 13, got hooked, and has been speaking ever since. Students of the Toyota Production System will quickly see the very close parallels between humane design and the way Toyota approaches their treatment of people, work environments, and business.Īza brings over six years of interface design and consulting experience to Humanized. In a previous post on Ethnography, I invited Aza Raskin, founder of Humanized, a consultancy that aims to help companies design more humane products - from consumer packaged goods to software interfaces - and, son of Jef Raskin, the inventor of the Macintosh and author of The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems - to possibly answer reader’s questions about design, visual management, ethnography, genchi genbutsu, man-machine interactions, or anything related.
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