UI Design Newsletter – December, 2000

Insights from Human Factors International

In This Issue Bob Bailey reviews:

What does the near future promise for usability?

Usability-related observations from COMDEX

What does the near future promise for usability? As designers what issues are we going to have to solve over the next few years? I attended COMDEX a few weeks ago and made the following usability-related observations.

The two most important usability-oriented themes were having

1. more palm-sized units, and
2. more wireless applications.

In other words, truly useful individual computers are getting smaller, and more applications are becoming wireless. This means that as usability professionals, we must learn to do better with smaller screens and slower transfer rates.

The products that seem to have the best (near-term) potential of improving usability in computer-based systems are the personal digital assistants (PDAs). It seems that the PDAs are here to stay, and their size seems to have been standardized around the original Palm Pilots.

The most promising new usability-related technology was Bluetooth. Bluetooth allows designers to use low energy radio frequency (RF) signals to improve the communication effectiveness of many nearby devices (within 30 feet). Bluetooth will allow devices within the same room to communicate automatically and wirelessly. This communication can be done without any human interaction at all.

Monitors are moving:

• away from fat, heavy CRTs
  - toward much thinner LCDs and plasma displays,
• away from the traditional 4x3 orientation
  - toward the 16x9 (HDTV) aspect ratio, and
• away from the standard-sized (17-21 inch) monitors
  - toward both much smaller and much larger monitors

There are essentially five display sizes for which we must learn to design. Each size has a different set of strengths, limitations and design challenges:

• the very large (up to 63 inches)
• the traditional desktop (15 to 21 inches)
• the laptop or clipboard (12 to 15 inches)
• the PDA (3 inches)
• the cell phone or wristwatch (1 inch)

Keyboard changes include:

• the addition of even more special-purpose, programmable buttons, and
• the elimination of the 10-key numeric keypad on many models.

Mouse changes include:

the addition of more buttons to the mouse itself, with each button being individually programmable, and
making the mouse wireless and adding a thumb-controlled rollerball, which allows the mouse to be picked-up and held (i.e., a hand-held wireless mouse).

What I did not see this year:

• major usability-related advances in Web technology, Web tools, Web anything,
• useful advances in the use of sound, animation or video,
• any good reason to use smaller laptops with smaller than standard keyboards, and
• any promising new, commercially viable, input or output devices for regular users.

Finally, I think the most clever usability-related product was Palm’s folding keyboard. The keyboard folds down to almost the size of the Palm itself. When unfolded, it is the size of a standard keyboard.

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