Weekly Topics - Week 9: IT, Risks, and Ergonomics

This week’s topic is „IT, risks and ergonomics”. I’m going to write about two Usability cases: One really bad one (a failure) and a good example.

Usability measures how user-friendly a product is. Usability refers to the extent to which a product, system, or service can be used by specific users in a specific application context to achieve specific goals effectively, efficiently, and satisfactorily [1]. User Experience (UX) extends the usability term with aesthetic and emotional features. It measures the joy that the user gets by using the product.

The Juicero juicer

source: [2]

First, I’ll write about a bad UX example: The Juicero juicer. This UX fail is so bad, that the company closed its doors in 2017. The website Careerfoundry [2] claims The Juicero has been lauded by multiple UX platforms and experts as one of the best examples of bad UX design we’ve seen in the last few years—so much so that it closed its doors in 2017 out of shame “. The UX mistake from the juicer is, that you need a solid Wi-Fi connection in order to use the juicer. You also need to download the app on your phone if you want to make juice. Indeed, you need an app to use your juice maker. This juicer maker is just extremely bad in practicality and functionality.

“Having a long list of ‘conditions’ e.g., strong Wi-Fi, a certain type of phone, an app, etc. just to get the product to function means there are too many hoops to jump through for the product to be worth the users’ time.”[2]

Of course, no one wanted to make juicing more complicated than it should be and the product failed.

Duolingo

source: [3]

Now let’s move to a good example of User Experience and Usability: The Duolingo app. Duolingo is an app, that helps people to learn a new language and to practice it in an easy way every day. It is free (though there are some “pro” options) and extremely popular. It became even more popular during the pandemic. But why is it such a popular learning app? The secret is, that Duolingo breaks topics into small pieces and simplifies the entire learning process [3]. Duolingo also works heavily with visual hierarchy, which means that they ask only one question at a time. The screen isn’t overloaded at any times. This helps immensely with reducing the cognitive load. I can also confirm that this app works really well, since I have used it in the past as well.


[1] https://www.usability.de/usability-user-experience.html

[2] https://careerfoundry.com/en/blog/ux-design/10-classic-ux-design-fails/

[3] https://www.justinmind.com/ux-design/examples

 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Weekly Topics - Week 15: IT and Ethics

Image
  source: pixabay This week’s topic is about ethical theories. I’m picking the cultural relativism theory and apply an IT-related example to that. The cultural relativism theory sees that there is no right and wrong in the different cultures. “ Cultural relativism refers to the idea that the values, knowledge, and behavior of people must be understood within their own cultural context.” [1] When someone judges another cultures food it is an example for ethnocentrism. It means, that this person is using their own culture as the center of the world and evaluate other cultures based on that [2]. I found it hard to research a good example for its IT-related application, since most examples about cultural differences are about the different cuisines (eating bugs, eating pigs, etc.) and about their clothing style. The only, at least sort of, IT-related example I could think of is the cash-culture in Germany. Germans often pay for services and purchases with cash, which can annoy foreig
Read more

Weekly Topics - Week 8: Professionalism

Image
source: pixabay This week’s topic is about Professionalism. I'm going to write a short depiction about the IT sector in my home country. I’ll describe how it changed during the last 20 years. My home country is Germany, so we’ll have a look on the IT sector there. 20 years ago, the society for the German language chose the word “multimedia” as the word for the year [1]. A big change in the IT sector is, that nowadays the customers have all the IT equipment at home. The customers turned into users. That caused IT systems so to be more efficient, but also easier to use and cheaper. Sensitivity to data protection has declined significantly over the past 20 years. While Germans are still concerned about their personal data (especially in an EU comparison), they are now much more open with their data. The vice president of the society of informatics Andreas Oberweis said, that “Today, there is more of a serenity about data protection issues that almost borders on carelessness." The
Read more

Weekly Topics - Week 1: IT solutions in history

Image
This week I am going to talk about interesting IT inventions in history. Of course there are many, many interesting inventions. The three I picked interested me the most. The sources for my information are listed down below.  Let’s start with the first IT Invention:  The Black Box (1953) David Warren and his Black Box Prototype [3]  (imagesource: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dave_Warren_with_BlackBox_Prototype.jpg) Did you know, that the Black Box did a huge contribution to the international airline safety? The Black Box is a Flight Recorder, invented in 1953 by David Warren [1]. Warren was a aeronautical research scientist and invented this device, because a lot of high-profile airplane crashes went unsolved. Interesting fact: Contrary to popular belief, the black box is mostly bright orange , not black (like the name suggests). The Black Box Flight Recorder is able to record flight data, cockpit sounds and instruments during a flight. The recorder can storage speech data
Read more