Coffee machines

This morning I experienced a coffee machine (or rather an espresso maker) at work. I love espresso so I was thrilled. I had these buttons to chose from:

What will you get when pressing the button on the right? My guess was something with milk in it (and I expected the button on the left to give me something cappuccino-like (because of the foam on the top)) - I therefore pressed the middle one. With two cups set behind each other (there was also one with two milky cups behind each other). I was therefore slightly confused and quite embarrassed when the quite normal, and very un-espresso like, coffee floated in large quantities over the edge of the cup. Afterwards I was told by a friendly colleague that the "milk" button would have given me my espresso and the "double-milk" the desired double espresso. This was after I had struggled with the error message from the nice display which told me to refill the water tank but gave absolutely no instructions how to do this. Later on I was also prompted to empty some sort of tray (and again had to ask a colleague for help). Why, I ask myself, do they not use the nice display to tell me more precisely what to do (or rather how to do it)? Granted, the display was not big - but it was big enough to accommodate an arrow pointing in the direction of the water tank (or the tray).

While on the coffee machine track: At work we have another type of coffee machine. Actually there are two kinds but they look identical; one uses grind coffee the other uses whole beans and grinds them on the way to cup. Otherwise they are identical. Well, except that they switched the two top rows which means that when you start the morning getting your first cup of coffee (all bleary eyed) you accidentally get (what they call) espresso but is really nothing more than regular coffee with less water when you expect regular coffee. Why did they switch the top rows?

And finally: impressive how many permutations drink can come from 3 powders (coffee, milk and chocolate) and hot water.

A little bit about Microsoft...

I just went to a 2 day seminar. Microsoft were there and they had quite a lot of PC's running Vista and Office 2007. Man! - That is just really cool. I tried it out some and did not see too many new features - but old ones wrapped in new skin. It's amazing, really, what it did; it just felt like a whole new (and better) experience. I'm looking forward to running this on a regular basis.

On another Microsoft note: Last night I updated my Media Center PC with the newest Rollup 2 update and another patch as well. After this my Live TV was blurry (to say the least); all of a sudden I had this feeling that I had been drinking heavily before turning on the TV. Not very pleasant - especially since I did not get to enjoy the drinking part. I used Microsoft's Update feature (where you're directed to a website and your PC is checked) - a very nice and userfriendly feature. Kudos to the guys from Redmond. I can even see what it has installed (nice long list) - BUT: why don't I get the option of uninstalling (which I really needed after the blurry TV images)? I had to go into the control panel and choose remove programs and then after some looking I found the option to tick of so I could actually see the updates and not only the programs. I somehow have some difficulty seeing my old mom doing this. Actually I know that her local tech-support (me) would get a call. This could have been easily remedied if I had the option of removing the stuff from the Windows Update page (I'm not sure what this involves in programming, though!).

MP3 player usability

I just bought me an MP3 player, The Sandisk Sansa e260. Beautiful - and there's no manual. And no need for one either. Only thing a bit troublesome is the menu-wheel which can be a bit tough to turn and is raised which makes it harder to press the other buttons. But it glows a cool blue when you turn the thing on - completely useless, but the never the less a feature I really love (I can't explain it - there's just something about blue light ;-)).

And to top it off: I plugged it into my Media Centre PC et voilá: New device found - want to synchonize? And then I could just select the music I wanted to transfer to the device. And no hassles with iTunes and strange proprietary formats (other than Microsofts that is).

More real life intervention

I recently moved to a new house. All is nice, but there is one thing that is very strange. The outside handle on the garden door is mounted vertically instead of the usual horizontal. It took me a while to figure out that the door would not be able to open if it was placed in the "normal" way. I can live with it - but it bothers me a bit. What's interesting here is that my wife hadn't even noticed - she just opens the door ;-)

I'm not even sure what the usability learning points in this is - except that even though it is not the standard we can still figure it out. So that means that you will accept strange interaction schemes just because you use it often. This is leading into the "theory" of inductive vs. deductive user interfaces.

So what is this user experience thing?

Well - I guess what it boils down to - at least in terms of user friendliness - is that your interactions with your surroundings does not surprise you. That is: things act the way you expect them to act (as Don Norman tells us in "The Design of Everyday Things"). But why is it, then, that people acting in unexpected ways are not categorized as "not very user friendly"? But rather as excentric?

I sometimes loose my temper with my kids and yell at them. This often (or maybe always?) happens when I've either told them to stop some activity or start it (e.g. getting dressed) a number of times. If my kids knew for a fact that I would consistently "explode" after 3 requests they would know what to expect from me - but as this varies (depending on how stressfull a day I've had or how tired I am) they don't really know, and I'm thus not very user friendly.

Could it be that our interaction with all things mechanical are subject to the same variations. So one day we find the soda machine working fine - but two days later (around 8PM) it's the worst piece of junk?

Just wondering