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!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 7th, 2006 at 7:33 pm and is filed under product usability. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.