Display versus utility

My wife came across the interface for this coffee machine."The instructions display is the small rectangular screen to the top right, which begs the question, why the large screen to the left?"

Clearly the larger screen is meant as an advertising facility. This separation of interaction area and shall we say advertising area strikes me as particularly strange. 

I was struck by the similarity to this and a number area namely  union station in Toronto. One revision the group I worked with had was that the signage timetable and advertising will become all merged. 

My primary reason for this was that at retirement times of peak usage the display would become all utilitarian. Advertising would dynamically give way when navigation and wayfinding became the primary goals of the station. This would have the added advantage for the advertisers of eliminating the so called banner blindness problem. 

Banner blindness is when people know that advertising sits in some portion of the environment and deliberately avoid looking at it. Think of it as cognitive information optimisation. 

so the idea of dynamically mixing information and advertising makes a huge sense from the advertiser.

So in the case of the coffee machine people will quite quickly learn to avoid looking at the adverts. Even today LCD panels don't come cheap so you are effectively adding cost without benefit. 

By combining both displays. Giving you the larger interactive space you improve things like the honeypot effect. Clearly the small black and white display is also touch sensitive. Provision of something as simple as a proximity sensor could easily switch between display as advertising and display as interaction surface.

A really smart coffee machine manufacturer. Would have a number of different adverts which could be dynamically displayed on the screen and then have each coffee machine making its own A/ B testing to see what information it could give to attract people to it.

this would allow the coffee machine to optimise itself for its own local environment. 

So yes a big improvement in usability and a big improvement in sales who could object to that? 

Stakeholders Vs Users

Software engineers tend to talk about stakeholders - product owners, commissioners, support staff,  developers and users. User interface people talk about Users. You might think that the software engineers have got it right after all users are just part of the fluid mix of parties which go to making something right. 

I found this good example of a building from the 2012 Olympics designed by Zaha Hadid. Nice building, the design was done to reflect the fluidity of water. At the bottom is the olympic swimming pool. 

Unfortunately 1700 of the seats on the upper levels couldn't see the pool.  So given all the checks and acceptances by various levels you have to ask your self who was thinking  about this from the users/visitors perspective? Well, no one clearly. It was a rush job and mistakes were made ( it happens in Architecture). Now in this case it should have been fairly obvious, but its easy to see the error when it's something tangible like a building.  In the situation of software you can see that the stakeholders approach can de-prioritise the user's perspective. 
That's why for human computer interaction we act as advocates of the users' view because in the long run a software project is only as good as the people who use it. 

Global warming and usability

 A researcher at CHI2011 said what can usability do about global warming - an awful lot I said. An article has turned up proving my point. 


There is a good article in Scientific American showing that 

1. If you install a smart meter you don't get any energy savings instantly. 
2. Most people don't know how to change the settings on their smart meter to get any savings at all. 

This is basically a usability problem but the problem for a researcher like me is how to get a paper out about getting it right.