At the same height and Length of a Mini Cooper (but classified as a motorcycle), the VentureOne is a fully enclosed vehicle that is surrounded by a steel “safety cell” and other safety features typically found only in cars—things like side impact beams, driver airbag, rear bumper and engine shield.

The passenger compartment and the front wheel tilt when cornering; however, the forces are aligned with the vertical axis of the driver’s body, resulting in the driver being pressed into the seat rather than pushed across it.

Joel Spolsky has a couple of very interesting posts about elevator usbiilty: [linky 1], [linky 2].

The second link brings up an interesting usability bug around users being forced to use two different elevator interfaces, one for work and one for home.

I couldn't resist telling you the second usability bug with those elevators where you select a floor before getting on. People who work in buildings with the new elevators but live in buildings with traditional elevators report that when they get home at night, they sometimes get into the elevator and then just stand there, expecting the elevator to know their floor already.

Now I think something that's much more relevant to everyone reading this is the difference between the automated faucets in public bathrooms and old school ones with handles.

Do you ever find yourself sliding your hands under a faucet and waiting...waiting...eh, oh it's got a handle.  Cause I do.

Very interesting how quickly automated faucets integrated themselves into our environment and expectations.

I think a lot of people have seen this:

And it certainly has been written about at length, even over at oreillynet.com. So what do I have to add to the conversation. Well I'd like to talk about how this can be viewed through the lense of good user interface designs and the decisions you make when creating a new one.

Your Opinion Is Irrelevant

The young lady's opinion at the begining of the video is a perfect illustration of bias. Essentially it illustrates one of the great product management mantras, "Your opinion is interesting but irrelevent." By the end of the video clip you find out that her initial opinion was completely false.

Get the data before you make any decisions.

Morse code is a great illustration of a design choice. Here we have a method that speeds up the transmission of text across the wire (or wireless).  The choice is around user education.  Current phone texting takes virtually zero training, morse code takes more.

Even if Morse code is A LOT faster, in a cost benefit analysis it still probably makes sense to use the current standard UI.  Although it might be interesting for some phone manufacturer to try it out.  For some reason it sounds right up Blackberry's aisle to me...

Links:
Pocket Morse 1.3
Morse Coder 1.7

Update: Well hopefully the replaced video will stay live for a bit. But nevertheless I did find something else that is interesting during my search for a replacement. Check out this:

Notice the keybooad sitting next to it? It's our old friend Steampunk Keyboard Dude, better known as Jake. Check out the project page: telegraph

It is a new look and feel. 

What do you think?