Tea bag usability

Every morning, the first thing I do when I enter the office is preparing myself a cup of tea. That's how I start the day, with a hot mug of tea (or infusion whatsoever).

Whenever I try out new stuff, here's my user journey:

I pick the tea I want to try full of curiosity & expectation
I unwrap the tea bag & throw the paper wrapper into the dust bin
I pour hot water in the cup
I put the tea bag in the cup
I recover the wrapper from the dust bin to know the right infusion time.

This happens *every single time* I pick a new tea flavour, for most of the process is done without thinking.
And as most of the things that happen *every single time* and cause trouble because of information, it's a design fault.

Here's the fault: the infusion time is printed on the wrapper.

Odds are no one considered the use case I'm in.
Having the infusion time printed on the piece of paper hanging from my cup instead of the wrapper wouldn't increase cost to the producer. Yet it would save me and countless others a hand in the dust bin.

Minor improvements can make a huge difference at times.
It's time to go back and check whether there's any use case you didn't consider in your last design. :)

Gesture interfaces meet MYO

Natural interfaces are something that we've been talking about for a while now and in the last years ideas and products involving or enabling them blossomed and became intertwined with our daily lives.

Even though gesture interfaces had been in the field for around 3 decades, even 10 years ago it was hard for common people to think we would all have handheld devices gesture controlled in our pockets today. Yet we do. The iPhone was a great innovation that pushed technology to take a huge leap forward.

But iPhone was just the first step.
Wii first and then Kinect completely changed how games have been played.

Touch interface has been transferred to computers as well (just think of the Touch pad first or at the latest Microsoft Surface & Asus Pads) and Leap promises to transfer the gestural kind of experience to a computer screen as well.

Yet, somehow, technology has always been a strong enabler: we must touch a screen or have a camera looking at us & be in a specific space region in order to transform our actions into behaviour. Quite far from the "feels like magic" idea of great design, ain't it?

I believe the game is getting tougher now that a new competitor has shown up. MYO define itself as "The next generation of gesture control" and it's not hard to believe them!

MYO is nothing more than an armband (plus valuable APIs) which allows you to behave as a human controller to any device - once a set of movements has been linked to specific behaviours (and you know what does what - yes, this is not really "natural" as Norman says), you can just control the program/device by just moving your arm. In this case you wear the controller, which is much less constraining than ever.

Have a look at their video to understand its potential:

If this strikes an inner cord of yours, just go ahead and preorder one: you still have more than half a year to think of how to make use of it - the first products will ship in late 2013. What are you waiting for, then?

WIAD 2013 *my* summary

Today I attended the World Information Architecture Day conference in Milan - a conference on IA that takes place every year in different cities in the world on the very same day.

There was much food for thought, plus the opportunity of practicing a little more my sketch notes.

So here you go *my* summary of almost the whole of it (talk #4 is missing):

"Analogico, Digitale, Pervasivo. Il rapporto con lo spazio e con il tempo
negli ecosistemi informativi complessi." by Federico Badaloni 

"User testing nello sviluppo di un'architettura dell'informazione:
il Card Sorting" by Marco Buonvino

"Il postino di Neruda e il design. Un case study di mobile banking"
by Italo Marconi

"Architecta 2013" by Claudio Muci

"Per una Architettura informativa Objects Oriented" by Luca Petroni

"IA - Not sexy?" by Cesare Bottini

"Architettura della simulazione. Sistemi, flussi, interfacce,
esperienze: spostare l'utente al centro di un preventivatore assicurativo"
by Stefano Pedrioli

"Concetti, ontologie, architettura della conoscenza"
by Stefano Bussolon & Dario Betti

And what better time and place to present the new Milan UX bookclub T-shirts? A big Thank You goes to Daniela for having the idea and to Valerio for allowing us to use his special font. Guys you're great!

See you next year! :)

The perfect cookbook

Yesterday I had a dinner to celebrate my birthday with my university female friends and they gifted me with a handmade cookbook with some of the recipes I always ask them hints about (I'm not sure if I ever talked about my passion for cookery in this blog).

This present shows they care for they knew I wanted to collect their fabulous hints & tips somewhere. But there's more: they paid attention to what was important to me and built "the perfect Serena's cookbook".

Indeed this cookbook is simply perfect!
It's a ring binder where every recipe is stored in a plastic bag. You can take out the recipe you need and then forget about it while cooking: you can spill anything over it with no worries, all you have to do is to swipe it clean once you're finished.

Thank you soooo much girls! :)

PS: I already talked about cookbooks a couple of years ago in this blog post

Why I take sketch notes (and why you should too)

I first saw live sketch notes at UXLX conference last year - not that I had never heard of sketch notes, yet I had not seen them live before then.
All the sketches were hung in the hall right after each session. Live Sketching people were fantastic in fixing on paper the core concepts of every talk and the flow of it - it felt you could grasp the sense of the talks you did not attend.

Just have a look yourself:

You can also browse through Live Sketching gallery

I've always been a visual person, and those sketches stroke some inner chord of mine. It took a while, but as soon as I caught the wave of change in my life and was gifted a plain page Moleskine, I decided I would start using sketches in my notes.

Here are the sketch notes I took at an event I attended last week called "Personal Branding e Reputazione in rete" by Marco Massarotto:

I must say that having switched to sketch notes has been a major improvement in my note taking: any time I look back at the sketch notes I've taken so far there's no need to read to know what they are about, I remember the whole story at a glance and dive into details (text) quicker and only if needed. I'm sure that with practice this will improve a lot and I will be able to take notes more effectively, which in turn will help me to focus more and to better remember what I hear.

There is scientific evidence for the utility of sketch noting - here's Sunni Brown's TED talk about how doodling helps retainment:



Given all these plus, why shouldn't we all be taking sketch notes?

For those of you who think they cannot draw, here's a book that will help: The back of the napkin by Dan Roam.

So just don't worry and give yourself a chance and some time - and let me know how it goes :)