Category: Good design

Instances of good design

Timeless designs last forever

March 26, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

We humans have this obsession with designing new products, even though many of them die out after a while (some, mercifully, after a very short while!) However, every so often a design is found that is simply so good and sensible that it stays around for a long, long time.

So, here’s an example I ran into in the archaeological museum in Agrigento, Sicily, a town founded by the ancient Greeks.

Bronze Fibulas - a timeless design

The object on the left is a bronze Fibula, made in the 13th century BC. Not one in a thousand people today would recognize the word “Fibula”, but hardly anyone would fail to identify this as a large safety pin. In fact, I saw not one but many of these, in various museums in Europe: they were widely used for many centuries. The second photo shows one from the 8th Century BC, with a more imaginative design (remember, unlike our safety pins these were also meant for decorative effect as fasteners for cloaks and such).

And for all our digital innovations, and perhaps unlike many of them, I doubt this good ol’ design is going to be supplanted anytime soon…

Safety Pins

Smartphone Holsters can stop time!

March 13, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

I got this new Smartphone recently. A couple of weeks later, I find my analog quartz watch is off by five minutes. I take it to have the battery replaced; a week later, same problem: it’s a few minutes out of whack. I send it to be repaired (it’s a good quality Seiko under warranty), and switch to an El Cheapo spare watch I have, which at first seems to work fine; but in a few days, it’s also off. I try another watch – Swiss, this time – same problem duly appears after a while.

Then it hit me: these malfunctions started only after I switched phones. So I thought, maybe the device emits some radio waves that mess with the watches’ electronics? A few tests of draping the watch on the Smartphone overnight (Hey, I’m a physicist, ain’t I?) ruled this out.

PDA holster with magnets in flap

And then, I realized what was going on. The new phone came with a beautiful leather holster. This held the device horizontally on my belt at the left of my body, and closed it with a wide flap that snapped into position with an assertive magnetic click (which has a very nice feel, I must say). It was the magnet all along. This was easier to prove than I thought – hold an analog watch next to the flap, and its second hand stops immediately. With my left wrist brushing the holster randomly, you can see what was happening.

So, what can we do about this? As users, we can switch to non-magnetic pouches, ones with a zipper or Velcro closure; or we can move the device to the non-watch side of the belt. But as pouch designers, we can actually do a lot. The offending holster was designed with two magnets in the flap and two in the body, four in all, and the top ones right at the surface of the holster where the watch could touch it. Other pouches I see around have the magnet in the body, and the outer flap has a passive iron counterpart; thus, in the bad design the outside surface is magnetic (you can snap a screwdriver to it!); the better design is neutral on the surface. Take note, designers!

Alternative holsters

I managed to browbeat an Interactive voice response system!

March 10, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 5 Comments

Interactive voice response (IVR) systems are notoriously annoying. As the joke goes, “For a list of all the ways that Technology has failed to improve the quality of your life, please press 3″…

Some IVR systems are better than others; the best will make allowance for the user’s need to get around them. I ran into a good one today. I called Continental Airlines to do a seat assignment, and this IVR setup gives me a bunch of options that don’t include what I want.

On a hunch, I said loudly: “I want to talk to an agent!”
System: “I think you said you want to talk to an agent. But if you give me your flight details first, I can help the agent serve you faster” (or something to that effect).
I play along and give the flight details to the machine.
System: “OK, your flight is confirmed, as follows […] You can hang up now”.
WTF?!! Hey, it promised! So I say, firmly and loudly:
“I want to talk to an agent!”
System: “OK, I’ll transfer you now”.

Got it? I took a stand and the system capitulated! Have to hand it to them, though: they never mentioned the option to talk to a human, but they included the speech recognition to identify when I ask for it. Good job! [well… almost. I was euphoric for of the three seconds until the system helpfully added: “your waiting time will be approximately 25 minutes”. And it was good at its word this time].

Hats off to a cardboard box

March 7, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

And now, a moment of respect for a truly elegant bit of intelligent design: The humble but ubiquitous cardboard boxes in which we buy chewing gum and candy – the ones that latch closed so they won’t spill their content when we leave them in our pockets, purses, or glove compartments. The trick is in the flap A, which latches into the depression B in the photo below.

Latching cardboard box

Folding a cardboard pattern to make a box is trivial, and we learned to do that as children; making it have a hinged lid is not too hard; but making the box have a self-latching arrangement, all from a single piece of cardboard, is a neat trick.

Latching cardboard box - flattened

No idea who invented this originally; can’t find a patent for it, though there are a number of US patents for folding and filling the boxes on a production line (e.g. United States Patent 6223507). Anyway – well done, unknown inventor!

Incidentally, that Wrigley’s Winterfresh chewing gum is one great way to stay awake when you’re drowsy… it is hot enough to wake the dead!

Don’t forget the Remote Control’s usability!

March 5, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 3 Comments

When you see an ad for a piece of consumer electronics, you seldom see a close up of its remote control. In fact, most people ignore the lowly R/C when making a buying decision. Yet this little item is the main way we interact with our TVs, VCRs, and so on; and a its usability, or lack thereof, is going to impact our user experience many times every day.

Remote control usability comparison
Look at these two R/C units, from two similarly priced DVD players, one mine, one my parents’. See the difference? In the one at the top the important buttons – play, FF, Rew and Stop – are prominent, visible, obvious… in the other, they are hidden among a confusing jumble of similar small buttons. And this means slower operation and frequent errors when you hit the wrong button by accident. We can assume the two arrangements cost exactly the same to manufacture; this is not about cost, it’s about attention to usability in the design stage.

So, of course, the better one is mine, because I always check this when making a buying decision? Well… err…

Mighty Mouse: the best XY input device out there!

March 4, 2008 / Nathan Zeldes / 0 Comments

So many XY pointing devices have been developed over the years… I’ve used light pens, graphic tablets, trackballs, touch screens, joysticks, touch pads, trackpoints, even that weird HP desktop machine, the HP-150 from 1983, where you pointed at the screen and your finger intercepted IR beams crisscrossing the raised screen bezel (this last failed miserably – how could they ignore fatigue from repeatedly raising the arm to touch the screen?!)

But the king of all XY input devices is without question one of the earliest: the Mouse. Only the QWERTY keyboard has greater tenacity (unfortunately, in this case). Invented in 1963 by Doug Engelbart and later commercialized by Xerox PARC, the mouse remains the most popular device in the family, and this is (IMHO) because it is simply the best – it maps extremely well to the brain-hand-screen-eye-brain closed loop, making its action so intuitive as to be transparent. It just doesn’t get any better than that. And interestingly, the exact shape of the mouse is unimportant: almost like cars, they went from blocky to streamlined as time went by, but are just as good in any shape. It’s the basic “movable box with buttons under the fingertips” that is the winning factor; the rest is window dressing.

Here’s kudos to a great design!

Mice (computer and porcelain)