Nowadays, when usability sounds a little bit old fashioned. But it still gives interaction designers very good challenges. I was a design a form where the user could select his arrival time. The old solution from which my design started, used a dropdown menu with 24 hour time format. You had 1.00 to 24.00. I thought that I should have had to look into alternatives to a long list of values. The first thing I considered was the a second...

Some days ago I was having a look at monster.com, a website for job posting and carrer development. It has a new cool design that I had not explored yet. I think the visual is pretty solid and well-done: the search box lets you choose between your country (the domain you are surfing on, e.g. dot com for the US) or the rest of the world. And it worked quite well for me (even though I am Italian and changed domain on purpose). However, since...

I visited New York last week but I didn’t have any wi-fi at my hotel (the router seemed to not be compatible with my Mac ). I said ‘okay, no problem. let’s find a Starbucks!’. And there was one just around the corner. Sweet, I thought. On the window there was a sticker saying that there was an AT&T WiFi Spot. Double sweet. My experience at Starbucks As soon as I get in touch with the waitress and ask for the...

I have been reflecting during the last months about usability and how tests are conducted. I am doing a lot of experience at Venere.com where we test our prototypes in many different ways (and this is not banal at all if you think that I am talking about Italy!). I will probably get back to you with some examples of an interesting method I’d like to explore more. I call it bird’s eye method and that’s why: you make the...