Tough Nut to Crack

Monitoring activities on the web is not new or unique. You have probably heard of Google Analytics (GA), a service that allows to monitor the traffic on a website. Nice graphics and tables show how many people have visited a particular page, where they come from, how long they stay on a page, and so on. This gives a certain impression of the success of a website.

tagged with: social media, metrics

Utrecht Crowd Surfing

A few times a week I travel through Utrecht CS (Central Station), one of the busiest train stations in the Netherlands. If you have never been there: the main hall is basically a large, rather open space that is often full of people. As a matter of fact I think CS secretly stands for Crowd Surfing. Well, to transfer trains I need to walk from one end from the station to the other end and most of the time at rush hour. But even when it’s very crowded, I can cross the hall without any problems and even without thinking much about all the other people around me. And so does everybody else. When I first thought about this, it looked to me as if the crowd is organized in some way. As if someone or something is constantly coordinating everyone, creating pathways in all kinds of directions. In a way like: “you go a bit to the left and you’re going to walk behind him, you need to slow down a little, etc.”.

tagged with: utrecht, crowd surfing, central station, youtube

You cannot afford bad affordance

The day I started to work at the Crossmedialab I tried to adjust my chair. It is one of those typical office chairs that should be adjustable in every thinkable fashion. I managed to change it in several ways - armrests, seat, back - but I just couldn't figure out how to adjust the height. A pretty standard and therefore easy accessible option, I would say. Because I am an engineer, I forced myself to understand how it works. So I first turned the chair upside down to see the mechanisms, but they were all covered up. It was only after a few frustrating attempts of pushing and pulling all kind of parts of the chair that I figured out how to change the height of the thing.

To my opinion the chair - or the designer, that is - should give me clear visual hints on how to adjust it. A lever affords pulling, a door with no handle affords pushing, a cup affords pouring fluids into it and so on. Something that is generally known as affordance or to be more precise perceived affordance. Donald Norman describes perceived affordance as: “The appearance of the device could provide the critical clues required for its proper operation” .    

So, I didn’t perceive any good affordance of the way to operate the chair properly. And that frustrated me. Desk chairs are around for many decades. So they should at least have reasonable affordance to be operated properly. Of course this not only goes for desk chairs, but for any technology. But I often see that designers prefer ‘eye-candy’ above the functionality and that can lead to bad affordance. And that, on its turn, can lead to frustration of the user.

Oh, and you can adjust the height of the mentioned desk chair by pulling (!) a small knob that actually affords pushing. It’s placed at the bottom of the right armrest. But to my opinion an explanation about this function shouldn't be necessary.

_{[1] Norman, D.A., Affordance, Conventions and Design.}

tagged with: deskchair, affordance, form follows function