Amazon claims that the “Kindle”, their new wireless reading device is revolutionary, because it “reads like real paper”, and I have to admit having kindle-envy from the moment I watched the video demonstration. Years from now, we will likely note the Kindle’s release as a landmark day in reading history, and will consistently place it near the top of those “most innovative gadgets of all time” lists.

I, however, despite my famous quote “Now that I think about it, I’m quite looking forward to interactive paper”, will not be one of the early converts to the Kindle… for one major reason: Money! Not only is the device $400, but you have to buy the books at retail price. Only suckers pay retail for books.

I get free and cheap books through several methods:

My Library! - I can search the county catalog online and have any book delivered to my local branch (for FREE), within 72 hours. Sure, I pay my fair share of late fees, but the money saved on books (especially ones that I borrow and DON’T like) makes it worthwhile.

Book Swapping Sites - I use PaperbackSwap, though there are a number of them out there. What I like about PBS is that there is no fee for a transaction (users pay their own shipping), and that I can gain credits by simply sending out books to any user — there is no need to find a user who wants the exact book that I have and has the exact book that I want.

Half.com/Amazon Marketplace/eBay - Unless you are looking for a niche product or something that has *just* been released, it can usually be had for less than half price on one of these sites.

So, unless there is some social reason why you need to read a book the week it comes out (i.e. Harry Potter), or it is a rare, non-mainstream title, there really is no reason to pay retail for a book.

Which brings me to the Kindle. If I pay $400 for one of these bad boys, will I also have to shell out more for everything I read? When I am done with a book, will I be able to resell the “used” version via Amazon marketplace? Will I be able to import free eBooks from other sites on the web like Project Gutenberg? Will I be able to trade Kindle “books” with other Kindle users?

One might argue that the Kindle price of books is far lower than hardcover new releases, so people who do buy a lot of those might benefit from Kindle. Sure, that is true, but at $5 savings per book (using Amazon prices), you will need to buy 80 books to break even, and this isn’t counting your ability to resell, trade and share real books that you purchase.

I realize this is just one way to look at the Kindle. There are many advantages. Firstly, the Kindle is really cool. Books aren’t. That’s worth something, right? It is also smaller and more convenient than many books. It has additional uses like the ability to preview books, get news and blog feeds, use wikipedia, etc. Features like word lookup, page and quote annotations, etc, may end up making the Kindle experience “better” than reading a book.

I’ll admit it: I want one! My only point is that they will need to address the social sharing and reuse values that regular books bring to the table if they ever want to replace them. (Or, just stop selling books. ;o)

• More info on the Kindle, including a must-watch video
  
• 17 Ways to Get Free Books Online

I was lucky enough to have the chance to play around with somebody’s iPhone for about five minutes the other day, and I have a few thoughts about the interface:

1. First of all, the scrolling interface for websites, Google Maps and YouTube is absolutely stunning. The ability to simply move around the page with your finger is incredibly intuitive and easy. As with anything seen in a commercial, I was a little bit skeptical about this, but playing around with it myself has me convinced.

2. Typing with the iPhone is terrible, especially for someone used to working on a Blackberry. When the phone is turned vertically, so that the keyboard keys are smaller, it is virtually impossible to type anything. Every character that I attempted to type was the incorrect one. When I turned the phone horizontally, I was able to type somewhat effectively, however the lack of physical feedback offered here was still a major problem. This phone is great for browsing the web and using fun applications, but it’s got a long way to go before it can compete with something like a Blackberry or the Treo for business productivity (i.e. email).

3. The Internet connection was incredibly slow. I tried to load eBay, I tried to load ESPN, and neither would load within about a minute. (I’m able to use my Blackberry in the very same location and load pages a lot faster.) Interestingly, however, the YouTube application that lives on the iPhone loaded relatively quickly.

4. While I used the iPhone several people hovered around me, stretching to get a look. This phone certainly is a phenomenon.

This post was dictated using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9.

I have had the opportunity to play around with Dragon NaturallySpeaking software and I am trying it out for the first time right now with this very text. I have taken the tutorial, which took about 15 minutes to get the basics down and learn a little about how to use some of the features and tools that they have in the program. It’s cool because they have more editing than I expected; selecting words, using undo, adding capitals and punctuation is all very simple to do. For example, it was rather easy for me to italicize simple to do and the last sentence. I did have a little trouble with it because when I was finished, my cursor was in front of the punctuation mark that we use the end of a sentence which I can’t currently use because when I say. It shows a. I hope you get the gist.

For this paragraphs I’m not going to make any corrections verbally or not I haven’t typed anything us thus far but I have made some verbal correction based on the things I learned in the 15 minute tutorial to serve unfair for the Dragon NaturallySpeaking people to say that he went there program is bad because it doesn’t pick up exactly once and because it is quite easy to undo so if I wanted to change the word serves to sort of above or delete the word he in the Indo sentence people to say that he went there were hacked the word into whatever that is in the last sentence I could relatively easily just by saying the command selects into (() as you can see I’ve had a little trouble with this particular paragraph however as I said it’s relatively easy to make edits in such. It’s also relatively easy to insert bold, Caps, and other formatting.

All in all the most difficult thing for me so far is remembering to speak punctuation. Supposedly there is an autopunctuation feature, but haven’t seen anything to suggest that it is actually working now.

I’m going to continue to play around this program and I promise that I will keep you posted as I do so. Rock on.

How have we not come up with a better way to build vending machines than with those stupid coil things? Have we all not lost our money only to watch our desired snack selection hanging by an edge and out of grasping distance? With all the technology in this world we can’t come up with something better?

Ever since the whole “whole grain” craze hit the US, food manufacturers have become more and more deceitful regarding the whole grain content of their foods.

Personally, I am a big believer in the whole grain movement. Two years ago, I lost 30 pounds, mainly due to a diet that consisted of almost entirely whole grain carbs. As such, I’m always on the lookout for breads, pastas, crackers, etc, that are 100% whole grain.

The problem is that almost everything is labeled “whole grain” these days, yet most of these products only contain a minimal amount of whole grain. Take this ECCE PANIS “Multigrain Boule” that I saw in ACME the other day; on the back of the bag, in large letters, it says:

“WHOLE WHEAT FLOUR, FLAX SEEDS, OATS, CRACKED WHEAT, BULGAR WHEAT, WHEAT BRAN, AND WHEAT GERM ARE DELICIOUSLY COMBINED IN THIS SWEET MOIST BREAD.”

What you are told, if you are into this kind of thing, is to look at the ingredients to make sure “whole grain” flour is the first ingredient. In this case, this text seems like the ingredients, but is actually just marketing text. Looking to the side of the bag, in much smaller text, regular wheat flour is actually the first ingredient.

A coincedence? Maybe, but I believe the food makers are purposely trying to deceive the public into thinking they are buying healthy food.

Is this a good thing?

I saw a magazine ad for HP’s new touch-screen computer the other day, and it got me wondering how soon we’ll start to see these types of PCs in every home (or, perhaps every home for people who read this blog and are probably early adopters to some extent).

Do you think you will want one soon? I’d like one in my car.

I used a second-hand, first-generation iPod for some time, then upgraded to the sleek, think video iPod a little over a year ago.

Although the new one is better in many ways, most notably being far thinner and lighter, I’ve always preferred the old “click” wheel over the newer smooth scrolling wheel.

• Although the new “smooth” wheel makes the click-wheel seem klunky, the physical feedback that the clicks gave me made it far easier to scroll to the correct selection. With the new wheel, I commonly go too far with my scrolling and end up with the wrong selection.
• In the winter, when I was wearing gloves, I was unable to use the smooth wheel; I never had this problem with the original. This might seem to be a minor issue, but for me it was major as I typically use my iPod in the car, and during the winter I commonly wore gloves in the car.

Everyone seems to love the iPod design — am I the only one who has gripes? Post thoughts below.

Did you ever notice how big some liquid laundry detergent bottles are getting? I’m all for buying stuff like that in bulk to save cash, but if I can barely carry the container, I think I’ll pay a few extra cents for the smaller size.

What other examples of this phenomenon can you think of?

Building a wine cellar is a difficult proposition; you need space, money and time. These are obvious points, but there is one other thing that is less obvious and perhaps the most difficult — knowing which wines to cellar and for how long.

Did you ever see a wine label say “Drink now through 2010″, or “Best cellared for five to fifteen years”? Of course not. I’ve even visited many vineyard websites and have never once seen this mentioned by the producer. For those who aren’t extremely knowledgeable in this area (most of us), the only way to find out whether a wine should be cellared or not is to get lucky with an online review or know somebody who knows.

Why is this? From a marketing / sales standpoint, the percentage of people who purchase wines to cellar must be extremely low, so I can understand why a winery wouldn’t be promoting the fact that a particular wine should be stored, but on the other hand if they are making wine that will be even better in five years, wouldn’t they want people to know this?

One good thing is the emergence of wine sharing sites on the web, such as cellartracker, cork’d and winelog. These sites allow the experts to provide some extra information about wine and help n00bs try to learn more about how to build up a nice collection.

I’ve been using Cellar Tracker because it has a large community of serious oenophiles. Cork’d is a bit more light and fun; I haven’t really played with Wine Log yet.

If you’re like me, you may spend a lot of iPodding time using the Shuffle Songs feature. It’s a great tool for the lazy man (ahem), and especially nice for car use (where I typically use my iPod) since driving while navigating the screens probably isn’t the best idea. I do, however, have a few suggestions for how to improve this feature.

1) Shuffle Profiles
The biggest frustration that I have is the limited controls over what is included in shuffle. One could probably argue that the whole point of “shuffle” is that the user gives up control of what songs play, but I still believe that creating shuffle “profiles” with different rules would be a great improvement to this feature. This would obviously have to be handled through the iTunes interface (one of the general challenges with the iPod, that so much of the customization is done through a different program). The user could choose from a list of things to include or exclude from the profile, i.e. by artist, genre, keyword, etc.
(I realize that iPod does have such a thing as “Smart Playlists”, but this seems more appropriate for smaller playlist features, thought admittedly I haven’t used it all that much.)

2) Batch Exclude from Shuffle
A user can pretty easily exclude a single song from shuffle, but this needs to be done individually, which makes excluding an entire album or artist to be quite time consuming. If batch updating of (certain) tags is allowed, why not allow batch shuffle exclusion?

3) Jump out of Shuffle into Album/Artist
I typically use the shuffle feature when I don’t have something particular in mind to play; yet it is also quite common that shuffle picks a song by an artist that inspires me to hear more from that artist or album. To do this, however, I have to navigate through the menus to find those songs, which is somewhat annoying, especially while driving. If there was an easy way to jump directly to the artist or album, this would be very helpful.

That’s all for now; I’ll add more ideas if I can think of any.

I’ll admit it. I know nothing about hair care. I once went several years without even touching a brush. However, if you know me you know that I’ve been wearing my hair much longer these days, and with the winter weather the way it is around Philly, using a hair dryer in the morning has become a necessity. So, I’ve started using my HLP’s hair dryer each morning; I’m sure my technique is flawed, but at least my head gets warm.

Anyway, there is one usability flaw with this product that drives me absolutely crazy — the little “cool” button that sits just at the top of the hair dryer handle. Most people, including me, hold this thing kinda like a gun, with a hand around the bottom piece — yep — right where the “cool” button sits. Because of the placement of this button, I find myself hitting it at least once a day. My first reaction, naturally, was to recommend that “cool” become just another setting in the temperature gauge (located lower on the handle), but I am told that “cool” is something used to “set” hair after blow drying, and that perhaps it does make sense to have easier access to this button. That being said, it still gets in the way of plain old normal hair drying on a regular basis, so they really ought to put it somewhere else. And in the future, perhaps even test their products with clueless users like me before bringing them to market.

On my recent trip to Chicago I flew United, who now offers “Economy Plus” on all flights — seats that are towards the front of the plane and offer about 5 inches more legroom than the normal coach seating. Upgrades were offered during check-in for $34 per leg from Philadelphia to Chicago (the round trip ticket was around $225).

Is it worth it?

Read the rest of this entry »

Ok, so maybe I can’t really claim anything is the “Top” Firefox extension, because I surely haven’t seen them all… but here are two that I’ve been turned on to recently:

IETab: Allows you to open IE-only sites (that don’t work or crash in FFox) in a new tab. I assume it basically uses IE in the FFox interface. You won’t believe how quickly you’ll use it! (Only works on Windows with IE 4+.)

Tab Mix Plus: This has a lot of tab-related features, but the real boon for me is that you can set it up to open new window links (target=_blank) in new tabs. If you like, you can open all popups in tabs as well. This is tabbed browsing at its finest!

There was an article in the Wall Street Journal the other day regarding Dunkin’ Donuts and their latest marketing push to move more towards the Starbucks coffee shop model. What struck me most was the research methods they used — they paid a group of die-hard DnD customers and paid them $100 to switch to Starbucks for a month, then also paid some ‘Bucks regulars to frequent DnD at the same time. At the end of the project they conducted interviews with everyone to find out each customer’s impressions.

The data showed two distinct groups — which DnD refers to as “tribes” — of people. The ‘Bucks regulars felt DnD was unoriginal and boring, while the DnD tribe felt Starbucks was pretentious and snooty.

As a result of all this, DnD is moving towards a more “coffee shop” model, completing their transformation from purely a donut shop in the 80’s to a coffee-first destination with food today. Newely remodeled shops include granite countertops, curved espresso bars, constant music, yogurt parfaits and open pastry shelves. Because their customers, however, are not quite ready for the Starbucks schtick, they are trying to keep this model more down to earth, more straight up coffee and bite to eat and less coffee, cd and witty magnet set. In fact, they recently changed the name of their new “paninis” to “stuffed melts”, since customer feedback suggested that “panini” was too snobby. (One step at a time…)

It will be interesting to see how the remodeling, along with some new marketing campaigns that we should see shortly, will change the perception of DnD over the next year or so. At the very least, their creative research should be applauded.

When I first saw that ESPN Mobile commercial during the Super Bowl, I thought it was just some mobile web page you got on your regular phone. The commercial was cool — a guy sits with a phone as all kinds of sports go on around him (with mostly famous athletes), but I really wasn’t all that intrigued.

Interestingly, I was totally wrong about the service. It is actually a phone and whole new phone service specifically called ESPN Mobile. There are several exclusive applications that allow the user to keep up to date with all the lastest sports scores and news.

I learned this by watching the new, far more annoying commercials that ESPN has just brought out. The Super Bowl one was “cool” and fun to watch, but it didn’t tell me the data I needed to understand the service. The new commercial annoys me, but tells me the info I need. And, it makes me actually consider the service. (I’m not getting it, but I at least thought about it.)

I suppose my point here is that sometimes “ugly” is more effective, if it gets the message across. Maybe ugly is the new black.

They gave away free HFI calendars at World Usability Day back in November, and I was quite excited to replace the cookie-cutter scenery calendar on my cube wall with a new one filled with geeky goodness. However, the darn thing is so heavy that it keeps falling off my cubicle wall! I did try removing the thick cardboard that was perhaps inserted for stability (which, in reality, had no purpose), but that had no effect. The pin holding this thing up just gives in each and every time I put it up! The irony here, of course, is that the usabilty calendar is not usable. Who would have thunk it?

While we’re at it, the dates on this calendar are extremely small. In fact the current month takes up just a small corner of the large calendar page. Now, certainly, as a user interface professional I am interested in things like “Studying User Population” (February’s topic), but I also use a calendar as a, well, calendar. Relegating that information to such a small portion of the page doesn’t exactly make it easy to use. Additionally, there is no last month/next month display, so I have to reach up to turn the page (and in the process yank this bohemoth off my wall) just to see the next month. Again, difficult to perform basic calendar functions.

Bottom line here is that I’ve replaced my HFI calendar with an ugly free one I got from some vendor. Its not cool to look at, but it is easy to use!

I’m not sure why I’ve been picking up on “user experience” issues in the food and food service industries recently — I guess I love food and therefore get easily frustrated when these issues hamper my enjoyment of the cuisine I enjoy consuming so much.

Case in point: I was out to dinner the other night and I ordered a rack of lamb. The server informed me that the chef recommends the lamb medium rare, which worked out well as I planned to order it that way anyhow. As such, I expected the lamb to be cooked to a solid pink throughout. When it arrived, however, I was disappointed to find the lamb dark red in the center, barely cooked at all.

Aside from the general annoyance that comes from sending food back when the other person at the table has their entree, I became even more frustrated after discussing the situation with a passing waiter. While apologizing, he told me that “the chef’s medium rare is generally pretty rare“. A kitchen error (especially at an expensive “fine dining” restaurant like the one we were at) is troubling enough, but this piece of information was even more agitating. If the chef considers medium rare to be rarer than what is considered medium rare by the general public, why didn’t the waitress tell me that when I ordered the food?

As only a dorky UX professional would, I got to thinking about Jared Spool’s current knowledge vs. target knowledge theory. My current knowledge at the time was the common definition of medium rare. (This may be somewhat debatable, but I’ll stand by my opinion if epicurious agrees.) The target knowledge, in this situation, is the chef’s version of meduim rare. With no other explanation on the menu or from the waitress, as a customer I could only assume that this restaurant’s medium rare is the same as the common opinion. And because I assumed that my current knowledge was enough, I had a terrible experience.

Interestingly, the only restaurant (in my experience) that consistently does this well is Outback Steakhouse (which hardly qualifies as fine dining). At Outback, when a steak is ordered, the server always confirms the temperature ordered for clarification. For example, a customer ordering medium rare will be told something to the effect of: “that will be slightly red in the middle with a little pink” (Outback’s temperatures lean to the rarer side). This effectively fills the gap between current knowledge and target knowledge!

Perhaps in the future, I’ll take more time to clarify with the server to ensure that what I consider medium rare is consistent with the chef’s perception. Wouldn’t it be easier, however, if we all just used the same terminology for the same thing?

After successful visits to UI9 and UI10, plus another trip to Kendall Square for a Forrester Boot Camp, I’m starting to get pretty familiar with the area. If you’re thinking of going to UI11 or any future UIConf put on by UIE, here are some recommendations for non-conference related activities: Read the rest of this entry »

The Marriott Marquis in New York City (where I recently stayed for the 2005 Forrester Consumer Forum) has an elevator setup unlike any other I’ve come across. But before I get into what made them so special, I need to get this out of the way: The elevators were widely seen to be a complete nightmare by everyone staying at the hotel. At times, you could wait 20 minutes just to catch one, and when it finally came it would be so packed that you couldn’t even get in. On one occasion, people had to actually get out of an elevator because it was so overloaded, it could not work properly. This, however, seemed to be less related to the design of the elevator “interface” and more related to the fact that only a couple elevators (out of 12-15) seemed to be working at any given time. The Marquis is a huge Times Square hotel — two or three elevators can’t possibly support that traffic.

Anyway, the big difference between these elevators and every other one you’ve ever been in is in the order of things: One who wants to use the elevator must enter the destination floor BEFORE getting on. If this is done correctly, the computer behind the scenes spits out which elevator to ride (labelled by letter). Once inside an individual unit, there are no buttons — it will stop at your floor if you have pre-entered the number and followed the instructions correctly. I’ve included a photo of the keypad itself at right. To operate, you enter the floor number on the numbered keypad, then wait for the chosen elevator to appear on the little screen. Read the rest of this entry »

As part of a recent health kick, I’ve started eating a lot of Smucker’s Natural Peanut Butter. Although natural peanut butter has a decent amout of fat, its low in saturated fat and contains absolutely no trans fat, so its basically all mono and poly fats (the good kind). It also has no cholesterol and is high in protein and fiber. But I digress — The reason I’m bringing it up here is to discuss the poor usability of the packaging of this product (and basically all natural peanut butter products).

For the unfamiliar, one must stir natural peanut butter before eating it, as the oil naturally seperates to create a messy goup. It is, however, virtually impossible to stir thick peanut butter without spilling it all over the outside of the jar and the counter. (Come to think of it, I have a similar problem with sesame tahini that I use to make hummus.) I’ve tried keeping the jar upside down for a day or two, pouring out the oil before stirring and then slowly bringing it back in, and even taking a bunch of the PB out into another container before stirring, but each time I’ve ended up with a total mess. I’ve tried to stir with a knife, a spoon and a wooden spoon, but still ended up greasy. I’ve also learned that if it isn’t stirred correctly the first time, the PB gets extremely dry by the end of the jar.

So, how can this be improved? Skippy did just release a “non-stir” natural PB, but it contains added sugars and oil so I’ve decided to stay away from that. I do think that a larger jar (or less PB) would help a lot — if there was some space between the top of the contents and the top of the jar, the problem would be alleviated greatly. (I’m sure, however, that this would cost the producers more money and is thus unlikely to happen.) Perhaps there is a specialized implement that could be created to stir the PB effectively? I’d buy it.

Anyone else have any great ideas? In the meantime I’m going to go have a snack…