SSIMZ DESIGN

In Busun KOSES Conference, I met a lady from NHN. She came to me after my presentation and expressed her interest in my study. Today, we communicated by email, and she told me that she wrote a summary of my study on her blog. She asked me approvel. I was quite happy since she did really nice summary. Check the address:

http://blog.naver.com/ssim98/150017983764

I read her blog and I can feel her passion towards design and research. I am really happy to know her.

Bad usability example

If you want to change the ring of the incoming call of mobilephone, which menu would u like to choose?

• My phone
• Organizer
• Entertainment
• Setup

My first choice was "Setup". When I tried to change the ring of my phone(Samsung, SPH-E3000), I searched all submenu in "Setup", finding out nothing I can do to change the ring. Then I tried to search "My phone", I also failed to change it. Next, I began to search "Setup" again, with the hope that I may missed some submenu in the first trial. Finally, I end up extremely exhausted with finding the function.

Some times later, my desire to find the ring changing function rised again. I searched all menus that I thought could content the function. At the end, I found out that the function is in the last menu that I would like to search, "Entertainment". The path is "Entertainment"--> "Music Box" --> "Bell". I was kind of angry with the menu structure design. It is so confusing and lack of usability. Eventhough I learned how to find the function this time, I am not sure how long can I keep it in my mind. The classification doesnt make sense to me at all.

I heard some people also complained their mobilephone is difficult to use because of menu structure. Now I feel that the user-friendly interface is more important than the product appearance to me. Without usability, no matter how pretty the product is, it can only be called craftwork, not a product.

SamSung SPH-E3000

Tangible Interface-'Real' Desktop

The concept was published on CHI2006 conference. By concerning users' real working environment, this concept proposed a tangible interface which is similar to the real desktop. It lets users have more 'real' interaction with those files on desktop. Many ideas are quite interesting: for example, the idea for prioritizing the file and trashing the file and so on.