The tactile and audible experience of BMW’s i3
“You can hear the faintest murmur of wheel bearings and axles whirr, of suspension heaving, of wind rustling, of tyres swishing – first with slush under the wheels and then later you can hear that it’s just water. Occasionally you can hear the w…
User experience lessons from a startup’s demise
“I will never forget the shock of the first week, September 2012: our surveys had indicated big demand coming up (70 percent of 250 target market respondents had said they would buy the product)…People really liked the idea! Then we got knocked…
Diverse people and diverse ideas make better products
It means something when an influential CEO like Tim Cook, representing a company as widely imitated as Apple, says:
“…from the very earliest days we have known that diversity is critical to our success. We believe deeply that inclusion in…
Finding user motivations between the numbers
Asking users what they want and aggregating those numbers provides data which can seem compelling and conclusive. However, it can also be a fickle guide to making good design decisions. At worst, the aggregate picture removes you from the specif…
Tablets, sunsets and ergonomic misadventures
The number of sunsets observed through the digital filter of an iPad is increasing.
From about the second week in July, when British schools start their summer holidays, the waterfront near my house fills with tourists who flock to see one …
Close yet digitally unseen
Google Now recently gained the ability to search your email for hotel reservations and automatically suggest restaurants near where you are staying. Microsoft’s Cortana has integrated with Foursquare to do something similar. Both hold the promis…
Voicemail on future smartphone experiences
The last three years of smartphone progress can be described in one sentence: faster processors driving bigger screens with more pixels. For users, there is little real world functional difference between today’s flagship products and 2011 de…
Google Glass is a welcome experiment in bad user experience
Google Glass remains confined to a small niche of customers because the technology is unreliable, the features unappealing for most users and the price too high. In time, technological progress will solve issues of reliability and price, but f…