Last week at the Microsoft PDC it was clear that all presentors were not only well trained for the job but also that they were leveraging tools to make their "Customer's Experience" great.
How many times have you presented using a projector and that people have been complaining on the font size or the overall readibility of the material presented on the screen?
This does not have to be. I am culprit of this lack of concern for my participants, well... not anymore.
I downloaded ZoomIt. Try it, your assistance will thank you for that!
Tuesday, 24 November 2009
Wednesday, 4 November 2009
When the design IS user centered...
Been silent for a while although I have a pile of topics to cover here, not all directly related to process improvement... although... user centered design is non arguably a process improvement in the context of product creation activities... This is what this post is about.
Last year I offered myself an Ipod touch. Loved it at first sight as everyone. However I was quickly disenchanted when I noticed how the Music playing application was lacking advanced features. After all, beside selecting music and playing it you couldn't do much (it is still this way today) and to make it worse some functionality are implemented reverse. One notable example is how Apple offers us to manage play lists, rather than being song centric it is play list centric. Tell me who sits with its Ipod to create playlist? Unless I am so weird, it is when a song plays that I am thinking about which play list I want this song into. Anyway, I digress...
Apple did surprise me though with the way the implemented the concept of requesting a song via the Remote application. This is a piece of beauty from a user centered design stand point.
For the Remote application neophyte, Remote allows someone in a wifi zone where an Itune is found, to control it. This privileges can be granted to guest at your place.
Before the digital era we were stacking records to order the play list. Well, this is more or less what the Remote application and the ITune DJ allows to do with the "Request a Song" feature. This becomes very interesting in a party when many people have IPhones or IPods, it allows people to browse and search your library and request and vote for songs. Making the music experience of your gathering tied to your guests preferences.
What makes this feature useful is the fact that it is user centered, that it directly relates to a human behavior.
The point here is that as software consumers we should not tolerate anything but user centered designed products. It is obvious when you see such products, you can always relate the software flow to the related human behaviors and in all cases this makes the software much simpler and nicer to use.
This is the endeavor the company I work at has embarked on more than 3 years ago now. Since we cannot resolve the peace and war problem, let's make the world a better place to live through user centered designed software!
Read the other side of the coin
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