Nice flags (depending on your politics). The placement is unfortunate: they obscure the view of the number being called.

Incredible, but true. From the Nikon registration site.

It was with a pleasant start that I received my change, including a shiny new 2 shekel coin (my first). Sized between a 1 NIS and a 5 NIS coin, its value is about 50 cents, which is a very practical amount. Since I came to Israel, the 5 and 10 NIS bills have been phased out to be replaced by coins; also gone is the 1 agora coin (worth about 0.25 U.S. cents), with the 5 agora coin (1.25 U.S. cents) scheduled for obselescence next year.

I do foresee that this new coin will take some adjusting  to both mentally (to quickly identify the coin my wallet) and practically (not to make payment mistakes). Actually, considering the question, I think that this 2 NIS coin is going to be a problem for a while. The 1 and 5 NIS coins are so far apart in size that I never would confuse them, despite their sharing a color. But this nice new 2 NIS coin is too close to both of those, and will require a lot more attention to identify. The Bank of Israel claims that the size was a deliberate decision, meant to convey the coins value between 1 and 5 NIS. Oh, well. Remember the Susan B. Anthony dollar? It was always getting confused with a quarter… and died a silent death. I haven’t seen too many Sacagawea coins around, either.

*There’s a word I don’t have much opportunity to use, so please excuse the indulgence.

I often enjoy “Top Ten” lists, if only as providing a quick overview of popular opinion on an area outside of that which I normally monitor. Popular Mechanics’ 2007 Top 10 Worst Gadgets list really had me laughing.

Highlights:

• 3001 AD Trimersion HMD: “…But to aim at your target, you have to use your head. That is, you literally wag your head around until the crosshairs line up with your target. This does not simulate being a real person with a real gun; it recreates the experience of being a unicorn with a rocket-launching horn.”

• Husky 5-in-1 Drywall Tool: “The saw, seal punch and surprisingly sharp prybar are all hinged to the same bar, ready to swing out and wait in ambush for an unwitting hand rooting through the toolbox. … This isn’t just a lack of ergonomics. It’s a tool for masochists.”

• LG Chocolate VX8550: “You see, the Chocolate liked faces as much as fingers… So I’d hear a beep for call waiting, look at the screen, and see that I was in the process of sending a garbled text message to an ex-girlfriend. My face, troublemaker that it was, would hang up on me, and even occasionally attempt to delete voice-mails.”

My stove has four knobs linearly arranged for controlling the four burners, which are arranged in a rectangle:

From left to right, the knobs control:

1 = left front.
2 = left back
3 = right back
4 = right front

My mental mapping of the knobs looks like this (colors show which knob is paired with which burner):

I mentally pull the top two burners inward and the center two knobs upward to correlate knobs to burners without having to think about which knob to use.

My mother’s knobs work this way:

1 = left back
2 = left front
3 = right front
4 = right back

This means that I have some trial and error every time I light the stove at her house. I have put some conscious effort into creating a usable mental map for her stove that will help me to use it more easily. It looks like this:

The consciously created mental map does not work very well. I still find myself lighting two burners each time I wish to cook something at my mom’s house. Is my difficulty with her stove a result of the difference between it and my own? Maybe, but the model for my own stove was created without effort, whereas for my mother’s I had to make a conscious effort. Also, I have had trouble with her stove knobs from the time she moved to this house, a good 10 years before I got the stove in my own home. Which all leads me to suspect that the problem is more fundamental than that I am just “not used to it”.

Is it because I have an inherently different view of the “natural” interpretation of the direction in which those lines should be distorted, which matches the inclination of the designer of my stove, but not that of the designer of my mother’s? If so, what is the basis for that difference? Is it a cultural difference? A left-handed brain vs. right-handed brain difference? A stupid mistake by the designer? An idiosyncratic (and random) preference?

As a designer, how do I know if my unconscious assumptions about relatedness are universal? How can I discover and/or predict which assumptions will cause usability trouble in the real world?

As a user, how much testing do I need with a product to reveal frustrating interfaces?

Some stoves just physically lay out the knobs and burners to correlate visually with the burner layout.

But these don’t.

Blackberry has this nice feature where you type a word without bothering with capitalization or punctuation, for example, typing “im” for “I’m”, and it changes it on the fly. (Funny, because there’s no actual spell-check…) It’s a feature that’s convenient, although I tend to under-use it.

Anyway, little glitch, I tried to send someone my Israeli email address the other day. It ends with @netvision.net.il. Except that my alert Blackberry insisted it was @netvision.net.I’ll. I went back to erase/change/fix maybe 6 times, unsuccessfully. Not a helpful feature, in this case! Why should I be in a power struggle with my cell phone?

As with many of my blog musings, this one is written on my Blackberry. It’s one of the main uses I have for it: jotting down thoughts and notes to myself for collection and processing on my laptop later on. I’ll have to move now before I get beaned by a hard date; several have clunked down hard from the date palm under which I am sitting in the warm breeze of a luscious Israeli autumn afternoon. Golden light. Sweet smell of the dates. Some lazy, dusty trees in what was, I guess, an orchard some years ago, but now is the parking lot adjacent to a major corporation. Aaaaaaah.

Update (December 16, 2007):

Found another one: can’t type the word “id” (as in Freudian), or the initials for identification or industrial design (ID). I just keep getting “I’d”.

When is the tradeoff of 95% accuracy offset by the 5% error rate (uncorrectable errors)? Another long tail question? Kind of.