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Amazon Go: A reality we are not yet ready for?

For those of you that have never heard about it, Amazon Go is the lastest invention of the tech giant based in Seattle, an "smart" supermarket in which the client just enters using its smartphone, takes whatever he/she wants, and then leaves, without checking out. And how does this whole revolutionary idea works? Well, the answer has just two words: ubiquitous computing. Yes, the shop is, mainly, a ubicom system itself. There are cameras everywhere in the place that tracks the clients, so they know what everyone is taking or leaving; there are also other kind of sensor everywhere, specially in the shelves, also to track what everyone is taking to buy. And everything is, in the end, connected to your smartphone, in which you will be charged for everything you buy. Since this is, as we've said, an ubicom system, we can check that the 3 main properties proposed by Weiser are being satisfied: Is the system networked, distributed and transparently accessib...
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"Oh my, I didn't want to do that!" - Preventing User Errors in Interaction Design

Who hasn't been in this situation when you are using a smartphone app or a webapp on the PC and you make something completely wrong, sometimes even with no option of going back? If someone says that he or she doesn't, either he/she is lying or he/she has never used an app. But, who's responsible for this error? The easiest answer (specially for developers) it's always "the user". But nevertheless, if the user is doing something wrong, it's because there's something wrong or that can be improved in the app. There exists two different so called "user errors": slips and mistakes. Slips Specially nowadays that everyone has one or more smarphones, and that we even use them more that a PC, slips tend to appear in everyone's daily routine. For example, you have an appointment next week and you don't want to forget about it, so you program a notificaion on the smarphone's calendar; but when you are going to save the appointment...

When video game controllers and bad design met

Video games and design have a long story behind them. I'm not talking just about the video game design itself, though that would be a very nice topic for another entry in this blog. No, I'm talking about consoles and, therefore, video game controllers design. I've seen consoles design evolve through years, at least the ones I can remember, since consoles and video games are much older than me. From the squared and basic PS2, passing through the more rounded and nice PS3 to the nowadays and (again) square-like PS4. Nevertheless, this usually responds to a marketing campaign that seeks to sell more units just because it looks more advanced or futuristic from the point of view of that moment. However, the real evolution in consoles design has come with video game controllers. There's been as much controllers as consoles, probably even more, but in these we've seen a real evolution towards usability, comfort and user experience. Here I'm going to present a ...