Simian design links to Chris Heilmann's article I am User, hear me roar!. A nice collection of web-design insight from a user's perspective.
I visited a website and they resized the browser window. I thought, "did they really do that?" and proceeded to re-adjust back to my favorite size. Clicked to go to another part of the site and they did it again. I'm gone, who cares what they are selling?
It's easy to get lost in the beauty (or "rightness") of a design. I do it all of the time. Nobody cares what's going on behind the scenes. As much as you'd like to take each user aside and explain things, all you have is the few moments when they walk in "the door."
From my experience writing code and manning user feedback at Mapblast:
- Nobody cares how hard it was to make
- If someone takes the time to call you an idiot, it means they care: you should listen to what they say, no matter how badly/rudely they say it
- If most people report the same problem do not put in help text or javascript to make them do it right: rethink, redesign
- The design isn't done until a few million users have beat the crap out of it
- You should be able to look at log files and user feedback and understand everything
- Be prompt and courteous answering feedback
- Don't take it personal
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email thisI happened to walk by when the office fax machine was getting a new "ribbon" the other day. Over the years I've seen many methods of getting ink from a print head onto a piece of paper, but this one takes the cake.
The printer has one huge ribbon (8.5 inches wide by who-knows-how-many-feet-long) which the print head whacks against the paper. Here you can see some fax spam in reverse, as all of the whacked ink was removed from the ribbon. One line of fax (empty or not) per line of ribbon.
One benefit, or disadvantage, to this approach is that every fax you get can be read from the ribbon. You could store the old ribbons in a safe for future reference rather than filing away reams of paper. For that matter it probably doesn't need any paper, just scroll back through the ribbon every once in a while to see what you've been faxed.
Other methods of printing:
- print head heats thermally sensitive paper: fun for science/art projects
- thin ribbon moves one character at a time under impact print head
- paper electrostatically charged by print head laser/light, ink sticks to charged spots and is fused on by heat
- microscopic jets of ink squirted onto paper (or microscopic hot wax)
- ink pen(s) on a servo-controlled plotter carriage
- "routing" material away (ie. wood printing)
Can you think of others?
Your #2 up there encompasses a lot of ground, including variations of the thin ribbon being an impermeable plastic with a thin layer of single use ink (ala your fax machine, but narrower), or the ribbon being a fabric with a liquid ink; and variations of the striking device from a belt with characters on it to a ball with characters on it to individual arms for each character to a row of pins which make up pixels.
And I've used printers which used rotating drums of negatives of the character set and a strobe light to expose black and white photographic paper (old CompuGraphic typesetters), and printers which used scanning lasers to expose color photographic paper (assorted modern photo printers).
How about braille printers, which poke holes in the paper?
And all of these technologies are just for one-offs. Where multiple copies are useful (and I mention these because sometimes recycling old ideas in new contexts works) there's the increasingly misleadingly named (because there's rarely stone involved nowadays) lithography, which I suppose is really now called offset printing, there's fixed raised type with ink rolled over the top of it before it's pressed on to the paper, and there's embossed printing, with negative and a positive raised plates that deform the paper.
Right you are, Dan, thanks for the additions.
And I forgot all about carving the flat side of a potato, dipping it in ink, and stomping it all over things.
Don't forget Hektor, the computer controlled can of spray paint:
http://www.hektor.ch/
Reminds me of the time I got charged the wrong price at the local "weeds and seeds" store. I've been shopping their over a period of 15 years. I had bought some bulk dried pea soup and had writte a tare (the weight of my container) of .9. The clerk had only take .09 off the weight so the soup cost me $5 when it should have been $1. When I went to get my $$ back, another clerk said that I had written the weight WRONG. I should have written it .90, and the clerk would not have made the mistake. I responded that in the 15 years I'd shopped there, no one told me I HAD to write the tares that way (attempting to imply it was their training and not my error). Instead of apologizing and telling me how the human error was made, she pissed me off.
Your suggestions are really great customer service/design examination criteria!