Recent Posts

Critique: Electric Kettles UX

Photo of the two kettles next to each other on a table top.

Tec-Ed CEO Stephanie Rosenbaum joins Tim Keirnan for a critique of two different electric kettle designs that heat water quickly and precisely: the KRUPS BW3140 Savoy and the Cuisinart CPK-17 PerfecTemp.Both designs accomplish the goal but in very different ways. The KRUPS kettle has its user interface in its base and excellent balance in its carafe, while the Cuisinart has its user interface in the handle of the carafe with better labeling, but worse ergonomics for the carafe itself. We discuss the details thoroughly, along with reflecting on how complex a user population can be for even the most simple tasks like heating water. Keep that user research going, whatever your product or service. People are so fascinatingly different.

Also, Stephanie received the UXPA’s Lifetime Achievement Award the day before recording this! Go read about her groundbreaking career helping to create the UX field while you listen to her in this episode.

NOTE: Tim’s memory was faulty about the cost of the kettles. They were closer to $90US each.

You can find more details and photos for these products at the KRUPS website and the Cuisinart website.

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Buyer Beware: The Insteon Dilemma

Sign post that reads "Not In Service" on it.

One of the values we have on the show is that a product or service should make one’s life better by purchasing it. What defines a “better” life is up to the individual. But we hope people will consider how bringing a new product or service into their life will impact that life, either before or after purchase. If the company you bought from shuts down after the purchase, or during a subscription, that’s a problem.

I feel sorry for the customers of Insteon, which shuttered its operations last month and made many customers very unhappy. I’m currently not a user of home automation, but I can only imagine how annoying it is for people who have bought into any kind of product or service ecosystem when key parts of it go down, sometimes permanently. And especially if you rely on a system to automate your home! This well-written article at Hackaday explains the whole sorry mess in concise detail. My thoughts after reading it are twofold:

  1. Any company can fail or simply drop support for a current product or service, but it’s worse when the product involves servers doing things for you as part of the user experience. The Insteon products and services were not self-contained in a particular standalone device, such as a microwave oven or lawn mower would be. Part of the Insteon value proposition was the product is part of a connected service. No connection, no service.
  2. The proprietary nature of many products’ engineering and software means that if the entity owning that stuff goes out of business, the ability for anyone to maintain and support the products goes, too. This Insteon situation makes me more interested than ever to support companies that do open source development in their products as part of their business model. It’s not a guarantee that a project would keep going despite a business failing, but it allows for the possibility of a dedicated group of volunteers or a different company to continue supporting and developing a product.

Pine64 is one such company that is doing business in a different way that may help its products be less likely to disappear from customers’ lives. I bought their PineTab tablet and will be publishing a podcast episode about it soon. There are some intriguing things going on at Pine64.

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Critique: 401K Website Usability Failure

The word "Fail" in red rubber stamp style

Tim recounts a 401K benefits website usability failure to cohost Dave Mitropoulos-Rundus. They then discuss the foundational importance of usability testing and of tracking the all-important time on task metric. A simple rollover took Tim and his financial advisor at the credit union 15-20 minutes across two customer support staff conversations rather than simply completing the rollover online in 5-10 minutes. Not good.

Even in 2022, the most professional-looking website can disappoint customers if UX breaks down in the most fundamental tasks. Don’t let this happen to yours! Especially with financial services sites and medical sites, customers may hold your site, and your brand, to a high standard of expectation.

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Critique: 2016 Scion FR-S

Photo of Tim in front of his new car.

Five years and 50,000 miles in the making, this critique of the 2016 Scion FR-S (aka Subaru BRZ or Toyota 86) puts the long in longitudinal review! Cohosts Eric Penn and Ryan Malcolm return to help Tim discuss the complete customer experience with the car from encounter, to decision, to purchase, to initial use, to longitudinal reflection.
The “Toyobaru” is in our opinion one of the most successful user-centered car designs we’ve ever experienced. Toyota and Subaru aimed this car at a finely focused customer base and created something with an enthusiastic following and enough sales to continue the model into a second generation. It never tries to be all things to all people. Rather, it creates passion and loyalty in its customers’ hearts by focusing tightly on what they value in a small, lightweight, rear wheel drive sports car that is affordable.
This episode is way longer than usual at 100 minutes, so here are the segment timings:
00:00-51:00 Encounter, Decision, Purchase, Initial Use
51:00-1:07:34 Longitudinal Use and Final Year
1:07:35-1:21:19 Second Generation Improvements
1:21:20-1:40:33 Special Guest and Conclusion

A design this pure, with a customer profile so well-defined, is proof that large corporations can delight customers if an executive champion and a dedicated team work in concert to achieve their customer-centric goal.

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Interview: Public Space Design with Sour Studio’s Pinar Guvenc

logo for Sour Studio

Pinar Guvenc, a partner at Sour Studio, joins Tim for a discussion on how this consultancy does their Architecture, Interior Design, Product Design, and Public Spaces work. They are a hybrid design studio with the mission of addressing social and urban problems through sustainable and inclusive methodologies. We discuss Sour’s use of co-creation panels and extended collaboration with all the diverse stakeholders on their projects, as well as a case study in public space design they did in Taksim Square in Istanbul, Turkey. Sour is proud to say they work “with” clients and stakeholders, not “for”.

Check out their work on making accessibility a priority in product design with their Degree Inclusive antiperspirant packaging and their ADA 1.0 clothing form that helps retailers make fashion accessible to people with disabilities.

You can find Sour at
https://www.sour.studio/

Read some information about Taksim Square as well as view some photos.

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Critique: Digital Audio Player UX From Samsung and Sony Compared

Close-up photos of the Sony and Samsung digital audio players

Instructional designer Brian Duck joins Tim to discuss two topics:

  • Why are designers of all types still having to persuade  some companies that we need access to end users on our projects in 2021?
  • Why is Sony’s ultra portable digital audio player UX so bad compared with Samsung’s player from 15 years ago. Doesn’t anyone benchmark anymore?

00:00 – 08:00  We commiserate on the need in 2021, in some companies, to explain the fundamental need for early access to the end users of our projects rather than accept what managers dictate as “What the users need”. Too many places still think requirements can be determined without proper stakeholder involvement.

08:00-40:00 We discuss the lack of progress in portable digital audio player UX by contrasting the superior UX of Samsung’s 15-year old YP-U2J design with Sony’s recent NWZ-B183 design that Tim is disappointed by. Brian tries each player for the first time to provide “newbie eyes” in this informal discussion (this is not a usability test, just a quick gut check with Brian on these to players’ designs). We discuss the importance of benchmarking a product category’s UX among competing products before starting a project, and ensuring that those benchmarks are met or exceeded. We don’t have any inside knowledge at Samsung or Sony about these two projects, but the glaring UX mistakes in the Sony are difficult to understand in 2021.

Our summary of UX advice for the portable digital audio player design space is what Samsung did right in 2006:
* Employ high contrast for easy reading in dim light and for users who have difficulty with fine print both on screen and on the body of the player.
* Employ large enough text for the same reasons both on the player and in the screen.
* Provide an asymmetrical cap shape and make sure it fits tightly to protect the USB port from being damaged.
* Provide an asymmetrical shape of the player itself to make it easy for users to operate by feel without eyes on. This includes the headphone jack location for players that are not solely bluetooth.
* Provide large enough and easily recognized hard buttons for basic function like Play, Next, Back, FF, REV.
* Ensure the firmware operates the hard buttons consistently as on the Samsung–the Sony unit changes the direction of the Next and Back buttons based on which menu screen a user is navigating, infuriating!

Here’s a positive review of the Sony DAP that contrasts with Tim’s disappointment.

Here’s a very quick YouTube video of a delighted Samsung customer whose YP-U2J still works great after 15 years. Build quality matters as well as UX!

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Interview: Gordon Olson on Green Water Heater Design

The Torii Industries logo

Gordon Olson, CEO of Torii Industries, joins Tim Keirnan for a discussion about a new design of tank-less water heater. Tank-less water heaters remove the need for a large water tank to be heated 24 hours a day for occasional hot water use. Besides being inefficient use of energy, traditional tank water heaters can fail catastrophically, and provide large amounts of landfill waste after their useful life is over.

The Torii solution will replace the old centralized water heater with a tank-less model that uses a carbon foam inside the pipes of the unit to heat water very quickly for use on demand, without exposing metallic components to the hot water that leads to oxidation and subsequent wear. Sensors and software will monitor the components and enable part replacement before any failures occur, which will reduce the need for recycling due to continual part replacement.
You can visit Torii Industries at https://toriiway.com/

And this article about carbon foam is pretty interesting from 2002.

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Interview: Medical Packaging Design with Dr. Laura Bix

Photo collage of ambulance on track, usability lab, and Dr. Bix opening a medical package

Dr. Laura Bix from the Michigan State University School of Packaging returns to the show! Her latest project was researching the packaging of medical supplies used by EMTs in the field as they stabilize patients and transport them to the hospital in the ambulance.

Dr. Bix describes how most medical supplies are normally packaged for the highly controlled Operating Room environment and how they might not work as well in the field and in ambulances. From initial investigation ideas, to recording ambulance environments on closed tracks, to constructing an ambulance simulator usability lab for testing the opening of packaging with EMTs under repeatable conditions, Dr. Bix talks about all phases of the project.

Here is an article on Dr. Bix’s work at the school, including the study we talked about in this episode–and from which I used two excellent photos for these shownotes, thanks MSU:
https://www.canr.msu.edu/news/packaging-the-industry-no-one-thinks-about-but-saves-lives

There is a donation drive going on now to renovate the School of Packaging building. The last update to the facility was in 1986 and it’s time for some improvements. Check it out and contribute if you can to this excellent department that does so much to train some of the best professional packaging designers in the world. NEWS FLASH: Dr. Bix just told me the school received a 10.8 million dollar grant donation. Great news!

More links about the MSU School of Packaging:
https://www.facebook.com/MSUPackaging
https://www.linkedin.com/company/msupackaging/
https://www.instagram.com/msupackaging/
https://www.instagram.com/msucoppac

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Interview: Memoir Design with David Loehr and Greg Swenson

Photo of author holding his new book.

Tim Keirnan interviews author David Loehr and designer Greg Swenson about the new memoir That’s How Strong My Love Is: From Rock and Roll to James Dean. This book is unique in that David, the world’s foremost archivist of James Dean’s remarkable life and career, saved so many artifacts from his own interesting life experiences to document them, including ticket stubs, posters, autographed photos, clothing from various periods, photos, badges, pins, stage designs, newspaper clippings, and more. It’s a good thing he did, as some of the stories in this memoir are pretty amazing and might have encountered skepticism without the evidence at the end of each chapter. Greg worked with David to design the presentation of the memoir text and the appropriate artifact photos and scans, plus the cover.

The book is a delightfully detailed ride through the pop culture and counterculture of rock and roll music, its scenes, and its people, from the 1960s forward. The legend of James Dean, both the acting and the person, is a continuous reference point. David’s writing is marvelously free of the ego some memoir writers indulge in, and his encounters with household names in entertainment are fascinating yet down to earth. Some anecdotes are humorous, some are frightening, all are interesting. If you were there in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, or if you are just discovering those decades in pop culture history as a younger person, this memoir has something for everyone.

David’s memoir is on sale at the following places:
The James Dean Gallery (well worth visiting in person)
Ebay.com
Amazon.com

Greg’s cookbook, Recipes for Rebels, is another book design triumph and is available at the following places:
The James Dean Gallery
Recipes For Rebels site
Amazon.com

Watch the incredibly good 8-minute documentary Lenny’s Shirts about Lenny Prussack’s fashion design career. It has some wonderful scenes of Fairmount, IN, in an intimately hypnotic blend of images, video, and Lenny’s unique voice recounting his amazing career. Independent filmmaking at its best. Lenny’s current fashion designs can be found at his Etsy store.

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Critique: BinaxNow COVID-19 Antigen Self Test

Photo collage of the BinaxNow test kit with a completed test card showing a negative test result

This is a solo episode in which I critique the design of Abbott’s BinaxNow Covid-19 Antigen Self Test. This test is available in retail stores (in the USA a pack of two costs, in June of 2021, about $20). It tests for proteins one’s body makes when fighting a Covid-19 infection, the symptoms of which not everyone experiences in the same way. The use of rapid antigen self tests could revolutionize public health for COVID and beyond. Imagine getting ready to visit someone you love whose health is compromised in some way that makes them highly susceptible to a disease that is going around your area. A rapid self-test can put minds at ease, especially for symptoms that allergies can mimic. Use of rapid self tests can protect coworkers, family, friends, etc., because if enough people use them during a time of an outbreak, those who may test positive for being infectious can self-isolate and prevent the spread while they contact their doctor to get help if needed. Self tests make the invisible become visible so people can make healthy choices. I also think it’s important for the results to be private for the person testing themselves and not report the test result via phone or computer to an organization that may or may not respect patient confidentiality. The BinaxNow test is non-electronic so I like it for that reason already. The patient is free to divulge their result if they want to, and could even take the test in front of someone if some kind of confirmation of the result is needed, but privacy is built in to the design by default.

The BinaxNow test is as easy to use as advertised. The only improvements needed in my experience are a lower price per unit and less daunting technical communication. Perhaps for regulatory reasons, the BinaxNow instructions have a LOT of text on a double sided poster. But the instructions worked for me in the first use, so criticizing the instructions might be unfair.

As promised in the episode, here are some  links about the advantages of cheap, easy to use rapid antigen self tests from the two experts discussed in this episode. There are no doubt other experts out there and I encourage you to do your own research. Depending on one’s personal risk profile and the risk profiles of the people around you, this product category may have a lot to offer the world.

Dr. Michael Mina’s radio interview about rapid self-tests:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1XTc29ZGtM

Dr. Mina’s article from December 2020 about rapid self tests’ ability to stop Covid-19 spread quickly:
https://time.com/5912705/covid-19-stop-spread-christmas/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_term=ideas_covid-19&linkId=104733190

Dr. Robert Epstein’s Carrier Separation Plan to use rapid self tests to stop the spread of any pathogen in a population:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2021.640009/full

A good paper on the importance of testing frequency and fast results for reducing an infectious disease:
https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/1/eabd5393?utm_campaign=SciMag&utm_source=JHubbard&utm_medium=Twitter

The development of a rapid saliva test is on the way:
https://theshillongtimes.com/2021/05/21/new-rapid-antigen-test-can-detect-covid-in-saliva-accurately/

Another saliva test for Covid-19!
https://www.pleasantonweekly.com/print/story/2021/05/14/livermore-company-develops-first-rapid-saliva-covid-19-test

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