In this article, Oliver Reichenstein, talks about the everyday user experience and why our favorite products become our favorites. [Link]
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All things have an interface. Shaping interfaces is shaping the character of things. The brand is what transports the character of things. When looking at McDonalds, iPod, Nintendo DS it becomes quite obvious that the interface is the brand.
No Forks, no Knives, no Language Skills
16 columns submenu horizontal, I think, standing at the counter at McDonald’s. I scroll left and right and put a simple cheeseburger in my mental shopping basket. 16 columns, yet so usable. “Cheezubaagaa kudasai” I hear myself say, and glancing at the cashier display and the French fry machine interface, I hold my breath: Wow. Why did I never realize? Being a foreigner in Japan, I decide to go to McDonald’s because at McDonald’s I don’t need to deal with language. I could get much better food in a similar price range if I were ready to think, read Kanji and explain myself. But I’m not, as I’m hungry.
I’ll fill you Without any Brain Stress
McDonald’s is very easy to use, I then think, and then the McDonald’s interface looks the same all over the world. Yes, that is why it is so successful. A simple interface. I don’t need to think when entering, ordering, paying, eating at McDonald’s. McDonald’s doesn’t make me think. That’s what the McDonald’s brand promises the hungry stomach: We’re sweet and we’ll fill you without any brain stress. Continue reading “The Interface of a Cheeseburger” »
From the Nielsen Norman Group, an article about creating an “efficient” experience. [Original Link]
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The typical web experience is a series of slow, stuttering steps, punctuated by moments of utter boredom. We can do better, and we can do it without faster processors, servers, or networks. How? By taking advantage of subjective time.
Time: Objective vs. Subjective
Objective time can be accurately measured with a stopwatch. “It took 3 minutes and 4.78 seconds for the water to boil.” Subjective time is different. We humans are notoriously poor at judging time. Sadly, pleasurable experiences slip by quickly while dull or disphoric experiences drag on forever. A classic example lies in our universal subjective impression that water-heating time is attention-dependent: “A watched pot never boils.” Why? Because watching a pot is a boring experience. Instead, our parents taught us to avoid this phenomenon by carrying out a parallel activity, one that will engage our minds so that the time passes by quickly. (One effective strategy I was taught in boyhood was to spend the time not thinking about elephants.)
(We do have a “loophole” in our inability to judge the passage of time. We are quite good with the very short intervals found in music, and one can develop a fairly accurate internal “stopwatch” by humming a favorite song and noting how long a particular passage takes. Humming the same song at a later date will take very close to the same time.)
Our subjective inaccuracy has different causes. For one, time simply appears to speed up when we are engaged and slow down when we are disengaged. For another, we suffer amnesia during the time it takes to make a decision, even a little one, such as what cursor key to press next. This decision interval is equivalent to the time it takes to find a mouse, leading people to believe that cursor keys are faster because their subjective experience is faster, even though stopwatch studies, including my own, consistently find cursor keys about half as fast as the mouse. Continue reading “Slashing Subjective Time” »
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