ideas

Friday, September 06, 2002

And therein lies the problem. For many years the art of human-factors engineering has been neglected by the computer industry. But as computing power seeps from the desktop further into our daily lives, it’s becoming all the more important to make products that are both easy to use and improvements on what we’re using today. A human-factors approach assumes that the things we’ll carry in the future are not going to be invented so much as discovered—that the answer to the question of what devices we’ll carry will become obvious as we learn more about human behavior.

6:06:58 PM

Handspring Treo 270
You might think that it’s fun to have a continual supply of gadgets and geek toys to occupy your time. In fact, it is tremendously fun. But it’s also pretty hard to keep up—there is just so much stuff coming out. What’s worse, I think, is that most reviewers don’t write reviews that are particularly relevant to the typical reader. They write about the check-list capabilities that a product has or lacks, but reading these reviews doesn’t let you know what it feels like to have the thing in your hand or on your desk.

6:04:51 PM