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Every time I buy a new consumer electronic product, I immediately have a flashback of how the same product used to look like five of ten years ago. Some things have changed for the better (no need to pull your desk away from the wall to let the CRT tube hang back in there and preserve desk space), but a lot of things have become harder to achieve. For example, with every new LCD screen/TV I get, there is a good one-hour period where I would navigate the OSD but exit it unintentionally as that button had one function before but another right after. To complicate things further, manufacturers omit button labels to keep the sleek looks of their screens. If I were to give awards for interface design, one would go to AOC or whoever came up first with the idea to implement a knob on the front surface of the monitor that would double up its function as a push-button. Accessing the OSD and adjusting settings on one of those was the most streamlined process I have ever been through and I’m hoping that it makes a comeback.

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Apparently I am not the only one thinking that scroll wheels should start re-appearing on hand-held devices. I had a brief encounter with an older Blackberry and I must say that neither trackpads nor trackballs come anywhere close for precise bi-directional navigation. A good scroll wheel has tactile feedback, distinctive stepping and doubles up as a push-button for selection. Even die-hard touch-screen fanatics would agree that sometimes it is a good idea to not obscure what we’re supposed to be looking at while browsing. I can see very soon secondary touch surfaces starting to appear on the sides of handhelds.

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Last but not least is my father’s old Sony VHS player that featured an awesome dual-speed tracking wheel. It allows the user to seek/rewind the tape at two different speeds depending on how much we twist the control left or right. For the rest of nostalgic people, I’d say the Griffin Powermate might bring back the good times!

Image courtesy of dpreview

One of the things I enjoy the most in consumer electronics is designers’ ability to add more features that do not require additional controls. Being an owner of a few digital cameras, I am pleased to see that Canon and Nikon (and possibly others) have evolved their interface design to be very contextual – often buttons perform more than one task depending on where you are (in menu navigation terms. You don’t get more features outside of North America ;) ). Here I will talk about the image playback capabilities of my two devices-under-test – a Canon PowerShot point-and-shoot and an entry-level Nikon DSLR, both a good three or more years old. The Nikon has two controls that at first imply redundancy – a wheel conveniently located where the user’s thumb lies, and a four-directional control not far. During playback, at fit-on-screen zoom level, the two work identically, displaying the previous or next image. At higher zoom levels, however, things change. The four-directional control moves the ‘magnifying glass’ over the image left, right, up and down while the wheel allows for browsing through images while retaining the same zoom level and location. Neat, huh?

Bonus: for many years, Canon PowerShots have been capable of jumping through 'pages' of thumbnails rather than driving users insane from hitting the directional keys hundreds of times.

Similar operation I witnessed on my Canon cam where I can zoom in a part of the image, lock the zoom level and position by pressing the SET button (as showed in the picture on the left), and continue browsing through the rest of images using the usual Left and Right controls. Gain in features and no loss of simplicity!

Update

It turned out harder than expected to modify the 125kHz card in order to add a miniature contact. The project shall resume when I get the right tools/equipment…

Special thanks to Mark Fickett for letting me borrow his photograph.

I applaud progressive thinkers like him.

After Googling a little more, I encountered a document from 2007 through Google Books titled Security and privacy in ad-hoc and sensor networks: 4th European workshop … By Frank Stajano.  I have been thinking of a physical implementation of a normally-open switch that can only be controlled manually, which is placed between the micro-controller unit and the antenna, but that is at least a 4-5-year-old concept! Let’s see what the before-mentioned document has to say about that:

TAG SWITCHES.  The work in [41] explores the idea of physically deactivating a tag via a physical bit-dependent switch. If the bit is set to one, the RFID tag answers as usual to a reader query whereas if the bit is set to zero, then the tag is deactivated until the user activates it again. The idea is based on the assumption that only someone with physical access (or close proximity) to the tag can activate it again. Thus, consumer privacy is safeguarded and at the same time, tag functionality is preserved for privacy-friendly environments. The author describes three possible implementations of the physically (dis)connecting the antenna from the chip, much in the same way as the clipped tags in [13].  Other methods include: including electrically erasable ROM memory in the tag, writing or erasing the PCB depending on the user wishes, and using “magnetic bits” in the tags to represent (and set or unset) the PCB bits. In this category, we also include the kill command, which works by completely disabling the tag if the tag is presented with the correct password. Although not application friendly, the kill command is a rather effective mechanism to safeguard individuals’ privacy. [SOURCE]

Image courtesy of stan

Also, let’s hope that the number of cards we stuff in our wallets will soon decrease. Many transit systems are trying to implement their own proximity payment cards, but with the popularizaton of NFC-enabled cellphones (come on, Apple!) and RFID-enabled credit cards my wish might just come true!

In Microsoft Word 2007, you are given a button that brings a drop-down menu with page orientation options. There are only two – Portrait and Landscape. Taking human error into account, chances are, some users will bring up the menu and choose the current setting by mistake, having to bring up the menu again and choose the right one.

My way of seeing things: designers could have implemented a one-click solution to ‘Change Orientation’.

Sony Walkman MP3 player:

This one beats me. Users need to enter a menu that only contains one item. I’ll let you draw the conclusions and come up with the alternative.

The fix: Sony Ericsson have done a good job by introducing a toggle option on many of their feature phones. This removes any redundant steps.

Last but not least: Back in the good old days, websites such as LinkedIn, Facebook or Gmail allowed for a one-click log-out. Now, for unexplainable reasons, users need to pop up a drop-down menu and select the Log Out option. Imagine you having to do that when withdrawing money on your ATM! From a marketing perspective, however, things make more sense: that keeps you logged onto the website for longer.

As I walked into a building that has a good number of access control door locks and a motion detector on every step, I couldn’t help notice that there are still a lot of power outlets or light switches (possibly controlling not only lights) that looked very welcoming. Why not put them behind a proximity card authorization process? Please spend a few minutes to see how this could possibly look like.

What I wished for is a way of instantly getting precise sports timing or locations made available to viewers. The same applies for sports such as sprint racing or car racing where actions happen so rapidly that we need double and triple re-assurance before we go ahead cheer.

Apparently the idea of implementing RFID in timekeeping is not new. However, as I needed to decide on a project for my last semester project course, Google did not yield that many results at the time so I decided to go for it.

I based my prototype on the 125 kHz standard and took it from there. You can take a look at the brief demo I filmed to present to my instructor.