Human Factors

New Zealand is a real coffee country. Not that we actually grow coffee beans, but when it comes to preparation, our barista are the best in the world. After drinking a coffee in one of the cafés in Wellington you’ll find it hard to drink your Cappucino, Latte or Macchiato elsewhere in the world. But apperantly it was not good enough for New Zealand to have first class coffee makers in the country, they wanted to revolutionise the coffee preparation. Which led to the existance of one of the most unnecessary products on earth: the Riccocino. The Riccochino is a FROZEN coffee you’ll get at the gas station and prepare yourself by putting it into a special microwave oven. Depending on how many coffees you’d like to prepare at the same time you choose a button, in case you want two Riccocinos (hopefully because you have vouchers for two free cups) it takes 3.15 minutes. Then you open the lid of the cup and find out that there is still some kind of ice cube in the middle of your cup. You put it back into the microwave, press the “Boost” butten, just to realise after 10 more seconds that your Riccocino ist still not hot. Three more attempts and some fire sparks in the microwave later your coffee is hot, but it doesn’t taste good, in facts it’s pretty disgusting. Very sweet, so that the first sip feels like a chocolate treat, but I felt sick after drinking about one third of the cup. Thanks that it was for free… Conclusion: time-consuming, circuitous, probably unhealthy (due to the microwaving and additional ingrediences that don’t belong to coffee) and not tasty at all. I guess, this one won’t stay on the market for long…

Ok, I admit that this doesn’t fit 100% into the Usability/User Experience topic. But this hot blonde gives us some real hard facts on internet pornographie, which could count als background information for intelligent advertisement. Watch and enjoy!

I just joint three new groups on my favourite network platform Xing:
Web Design and Usability
User Experience
and Webtest – lassen sie ihre Internetseite analysieren
After having a look into the topics they are currently discussing I start feeling a bit more competent: I can follow their ideas, come up with similar solutions for some problems and feel more part of what they’re talking about than a few weeks ago. It’s still a long way to go, but apparently I’m doing good at the moment ;-)

I just found out that Intergen, a New Zealand provider of Microsoft based business solutions with offices in Wellington, Auckland and Christchurch, offers what they call “Twilight Seminars”. These are free “informal late afternoon sessions designed to inform you about current trends, technologies and initiatives in the space where business and information technology overlap” and last month they had two guys talking about User Exprience and Usability. One of them was Trent Mankelow from Optimal Usability – seems that I finally find the Wellington experts in this field. Obviously I missed the session, but fortunately it is available online and so I watched it this afternoon. You can find it here, it’s an hour long and gives a quite interesting overview of both topics.

Millions of people surf the internet each day, but do they know what they are doing and have they ever heard the term “Web 2.0″? German magazin Stern wanted to know and sent Ralf Sander to talk to polling firm SirValUse, who recently did a case study in Germany and the US. They found out that in Germany 36% of the internet users have heard about Web 2.0 while 28% of the Americans had an idea about this term. But it is really important to know the generic term of something to use it? People can handle Wikipedia, MySpace, Youtube and Flickr without knowing that they belong to the shiny world of Web 2.0, right? And over 90% of the people surveyed did and do so every day.

The main diffence between the two groups is, that Germans love using encyclopaedias and discussion forums, while amongst the Americans video and photo related webpages have the highest level of familiarity. Interesting fact is that in both countries the often critisised self-portrayel or posturing is not something people want to practise in front of the whole wide world: photo albums and information in social networks are mainly meant to be seen by friends and family. The exchange of information, mutual taking and giving, sharing specific knowledge and interesting data are more important for the users, before they even think about placing personal data online.

Although the article is not very lage, the data delivered are quite interesting. I’ll try to find a more detailled source for the survey, hope I’ll find something in English language…

The guys from Get Elastic have created a couple of funny videos to show how an online-shopper’s common experiences would look like in the real world. Have a look at The crazy, messed up world of ecommerce, you can even win Amazon vouchers if you’re lucky.

There’s no doubt that it would be pretty helpful for me to attend a conference and listen to various usability experts to become more experienced. So I had a brief look which events in the near future could be useful for me and so far I found a few really interesting ones:

1. The Usability Week organised by the Nielson Norman Group and held in Hong Kong, Washington D.C., London and San Francisco. Unfortunately this has just taken place in the last couple of months and I missed it :-(
2. UPA’s “Patterns: Blueprints for Usability” but this has taken place mid June as well, so I missed this one, too :-(
3. World Usability Day in Hamburg, Germany in November this year. But I can’t see myself spending this much money to attend a one-day-event. So most likely I will miss this one as well :-(

These were the most interesting conferences I could find by briefly scanning the internet. Does this mean that I can’t get face-to-face encounters with experienced experts?