uselog.com | the product usability weblog

The Touch project: exploring the possibilities of RFID

2009-07-16T09:14:00.005+02:00

At nearfield.org you'll find a weblog on nearfield communication, run by the 'Touch' research project, which investigates the possibilities for new interaction styles using near field communication (NFC). The project features an inter-disciplinary team involved in social and cultural enquiry, interaction/industrial design, rapid prototyping, software, testing and exhibitions. It is based in the Interaction Design department of the Oslo School of Architecture and Design in Norway. The project ends this year, so it will be interesting to see the end results rolling out.

Online concept evaluation in Philips' Simplicity Labs

2009-07-14T09:41:00.006+02:00

Philips Research usually does not work on the next big thing in consumer electronics, but on the next-next big thing in consumer electronics. To give you a sense of the timelines we're talking about: back in 1994 they were exploring the possibilities of the networked home in the WWICE project.

Over the past years user-involvement has become more and more important when they develop future product concepts and now Philips Research is opening up: on their SimplicityLabs website you can see, evaluate and contribute to new interaction concepts. The presentation is not extremely engaging, and some of the concepts may make you wonder: will I ever use this? But that's the idea...

Overview of digital camera user interfaces

2009-07-10T10:24:00.006+02:00

Gizmodo provides an extensive overview of the user interfaces of all major digital camera manufacturers such as Canon, Nikon and Samsung.

User interfaces matter in these cameras more than ever because they’re increasingly the major way you drill down to change settings or switch modes—rather than manually cranking a dial, like on a pro DSLR. Some are pretty good (Canon, Samsung) while some are pretty bad (Casio).

[Via Small Surfaces, which sadly fell silent after a streak of excellent posts]

When a UI paradigm reaches its limits: Office 2007

2009-07-08T09:31:00.009+02:00

In this presentation at Mix08 on the development of the Microsoft Office 2007 'ribbon' interface, Jensen Harris, design lead for the MS Office User Experience team provides an excellent example of how a UI paradigm can reach a point, where it has to be overhauled completely, because it can no longer sustain the increasing functionality of the product. In the 45 minute presentation he very openly discusses Microsoft's struggle of fitting all (new) features into the existing user interface, leading to 'interesting' UI elements such as hidden menu items, task panes and paperclips.

See also:
> Adaptive path interviews Jensen Harris about the ribbon
> No new features in Office 2007

[Via HBR blogs]

13-year old reviews the original Sony Walkman

2009-07-03T09:11:00.003+02:00

On the occasion of the 30-year anniversary of the Sony Walkman BBC's The Magazine asked 13 year old Scott Campbell to trade his iPod for the original Sony Walkman for a week, which led to a (hilarious) review, including gems like this one:

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.

Earlier the simplicity of the first walkman was heralded in an article called Objects of Desire (members only) in Technology Review, which included the following quote:

"It has simplicity of use," says Logan. "You could give it to someone who's never used one before and they can use it. "

And at the time I read that, I totally agreed. Only to be proven wrong by 13-year old Scott. Back then, in the 1980's, you could give the walkman to anyone and they'd know how to use it (also because in comparison to an iPod it has way less features), but today's (younger) users lack some of the required knowledge to interact with it. Once again it turns out that there is no such thing as a usable product. It really depends on who will interact with the product, what knowledge and skills this person has, and in what kind of context the interaction takes place.

[Via Nickbaum]

Usability as sales argument for Sharp copiers

2009-07-02T13:55:00.005+02:00

In addition to Xerox - just push the green button - and Océ, who have been paying attention to the usability of their copiers and advertising that, we can now add Sharp to the 'usable copiers' list. Or at least advertised as usable. In the commercial above, the protagonist asks the following question:

Why does my company have so many different printers and copiers, all different brands, with different controls? Give me one product line with a big colorful LCD screen and common controls. [...]
And I don't wanna use one of those mini-screen keyboards! How about: a built-in keyboard?
Was that too much too ask?

Designing usable money is not nickel and dime stuff

2009-06-29T14:18:00.003+02:00

One of the perks of spending some time abroad is that you get to be naive again. You are not accustomed to the design of what you interact with in daily life, so you see new things. I've had the opportunity and pleasure of spending two months at Northwestern University's Segal Design Institute and MMM-program. And for all the things I thoroughly enjoyed in the US, I must say, it was not the design of the coins and banknotes.

What confused me about US coins
First of all, looking at the coins (pictured above) you can see that it's not very clearly indicated what the denomination of the coins is. On most of them it is printed in quite a small typeface, and in the case of the 10 cent coin it doesn't even say that it's a ten cent coin. Just 'one dime', which basically is jargon to an ignorant foreigner like me. And then there's the size. The five cent coin is bigger than the 10 cent coin (but the material looks very similar). I guess it's because traditionally the value of a coin was inherent - it should actually be worth what it represented. Once again, no biggie if you've been using it for years, but for me - the naive Dutch guy - that was pretty confusing. Especially because in the line at the counter you don't usually have lots of time to start reviewing each coin. You'll get nasty looks from the people in line behind you.

The old Dutch Guilder coins
Now, here's a range of coins that's different: the coins of the old Dutch Guilder. Sorry for the slight hint of chauvinism here, but this is just the best example of functional coin design I know. They're obviously all designed using the same design language. The designer, Bruno Ninaber van Eyben, chose to communicate the denomination of the coins using their size, material, typography and a system of lines. Note that the 10 and 5 cent coins only have vertical lines, the guilder and the quarter have horizontal and vertical lines, and the 2,5 guilder coin (rijksdaalder) has vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines. I can't be sure, but I think a naive user would have less trouble with these coins than with the US coins.

US banknotes
In addition to being outsmarted by coins, there were banknotes to make my life harder. My gripe with US banknotes (but many bills all over the world have the same issue) is that they all have the same color. Basically in your wallet a stack of Dollar bills looks like this:

And those are actually 1, 10, 20 and 50 dollar bills in that picture. The only way to distinguish them properly is to read the denomination. Recently the five Dollar bill got a slight makeover, making the denomination easier to distinguish, but the overall color of the banknote remains the same. ~~By the way, you don't have to be foreign to notice this issue. American~~Richard Smith has started the The Dollar Redesign Project: anyone can submit their designs for a better Dollar.

Dutch banknotes of the guilder
But aren't most banknotes of the same generic color? Well, no. Take a look at these - again, I'm sorry - Dutch banknotes by Ootje Oxenaar, once heralded by the English visual design magazine Creative Review as the most beautiful money in the world.

But actually I'm not into them because of their beauty. I love the functional use of graphic design in these banknotes: because of their very distinguishable color scheme (and slightly different sizes), if you put them in a stack in your wallet, you get this:

And that makes it much easier to locate the right one. Now, the aforementioned Guilder coins and bills have of course been replaced by the Euro coins and banknotes. But thankfully the Euro bills and coins have the same properties that made the 'design of the Guilder' so appealing to me: differences in color and size, clear typography, and an overall design language. Though I should say I find the graphic design of the bills not particularly inspiring.

A lack of incentive
So why are there so many poorly designed banknotes around? These are products that are used by millions everyday. Why not make that usage a little easier? Well, I think first of all there is no incentive for the creator of the notes to implement a better design, as usage problems with bills don't cause product returns or customer complaints at the help desk, and people have no alternative. Users of the - let's just say - Australian Dollar will not suddenly turn to the Euro because the Austrialian Dollar could have been designed better. And there's lots of incentives to keep stick with an old design: tradition, nostalgia, etc. The design of the Dollar bills stems from the 1930s. That's a good deal of tradition, right there. And if you want to do it right you have to design and replace a whole range of coins or bills at once. That's quite the logistics operation. So in the end it probably all comes down to the motivation of a country's central bank.

More about Ootje Ooxenaar
> Transcript of lecture by Ootje Oxenaar on designing banknotes
> Interview with Ootje Oxenaar on YouTube

How to dial phonewords on a Blackberry?

2009-06-26T15:03:00.004+02:00

On phones with a regular keypad (left) on every numbered key there's three letters as well, allowing for the use of phonewords or vanity numbers. Think 1-800-flowers or 1-800-rent-a-car. In the US, advertisers often only list the phoneword (as in the photo below). But I was just wondering: how do you enter a phoneword number on a Blackberry keypad (pictured right), where the distribution of letters and numbers over the keys is different? As it turns out, you need to use a workaround.

FoodUX: for UX designers that are hungry for more

2009-06-23T14:34:00.002+02:00

It's good to get inspired by other disciplines once in a while. Here's a combination that I hadn't seen before, but that put a smile on my face when I did: FoodUX - gastronomic inspiration for UX designers. As the author puts it:

FoodUX is a passion synergy of the creation of memorable culinary experiences and the design for compelling user experiences.

When graphic design gets in the way

2009-06-18T20:16:00.003+02:00

When I first saw the products pictured above I was not sure what to make of them. You are wondering what you are looking at? They're actually fire extinguishers from Fire Design. However, in case of fire I would like anyone who's around to be able to find the fire extinguisher in the blink of an eye. And a cool graphic design doesn't exactly help to identify these objects as being fire extinguishers. They might as well be one of those hip 'design' SIGG bottles.

When someone has to find something quick, it helps if the 'something' is looking like they expect it to. In which case it helps to conform to the norm. And in western countries a bright red fire extinguisher (and not blue) is still the norm. Of course fire extinguishers don't have to be ugly. They can be quite stylish, as Maarten Heijltjes and Sanne Pelgrom demonstrate with their award-winning submission for a design competition for a new fire extinguisher.

[Fire Design extinguishers via thinkemotions]

Bue-ray player installation annoys Wired reviewers

2009-06-15T14:35:00.006+02:00

In their review of this wall-mountable Samsung blue-ray player Wired points out an annoying trend in home entertainment electronics: they're a pain to install and setup properly because of the huge amount of connections and settings.

Initial installation proved to be a troubling process of trial-and-error steps to get all the features working properly. Like all entertainment electronics today, the bulk of setup and navigational controls falls to the remote, also encased in a shiny black luster. Basic controls are hidden under the front panel with easy-to-miss, touch-sensitive backlit buttons. Discs are inconveniently slot-loaded on the side.

This product seems to be a matter of valuing 'design' over usability. It's kind of hard to make a 1,5 inch thick blue-ray player and also make it comfortable to plug all the cables into it. And touch-sensitive controls definitely look cool, but 'controls' is actually not such a good word for them; LG learned that on the Chocolate. No wonder AT&T started offering a home cinema installation service.

Apple App Wall: color organized icons to the extreme

2009-06-12T15:52:00.007+02:00

A while ago I was amazed by having found someone who had arranged her iPhone icons by color. Now there is a new version of that - to the extreme. TechCrunch reports that at the Apple WWDC Event, Apple hooked up a bunch of cinema displays into a Matrix-Style App Wall. On it are the icons of the more than 50.000 apps in the app store. Each icon will pulsate for a while when someone buys the app. I want one at home.

[via infosthetics, photo: liquidx]

Doro's super-simple mobile phones

2009-06-11T15:00:00.006+02:00

Because they are so incredibly charming and ridiculously simple I had to give some love to the Swedish mobile phone maker Doro. They recently got an iF Gold Award for outstanding product design for five of their products, among which three mobile phones. CNET reviewed two Doro phones (one of which reminds me a bit of the ITT Easy5) and mobilehealthnews interviewed Doro's Jerome Arnaud, who made the following interesting statement:

Doro aims to help those who are still in the majority of seniors who have not gotten used to mobile technology, are unfamiliar and would never accept it as it exists today. In some cases it’s not a matter of whether they are actually able to use it, but rather if they can connect with the image that the product conveys. Even if, a given 80-year-old could use iPhones, Arnaud argues that it is very likely that person would reject the iPhone simply because of the device’s youth-centric branding.

More uselog posts about simple phones:
> Simple phones and basic phones
> Easy to use Nokias

[photo: CNET]

Consumer electronics have become complex systems

2009-06-09T14:55:00.011+02:00

In this article in the Journal of Applied Ergonomics, entitled 'From telephones to iPhones: Applying systems thinking to networked, interoperable products' the authors point out that consumer electronics have turned into complex, networked platforms for services, as opposed to the 'as is' stand alone consumer electronics of twenty years ago. Designing these products, they argue, requires a systems thinking design approach. In the insightful, but sometimes a bit fuzzily worded article, the authors use the iPhone as a case study to illustrate their point. Below I've listed a number of trends they identify, emphasizing what I consider the most important ones, and supplemented here and there with my own examples.

Increased complexity
Current consumer electronics can perform a broad range of tasks. Often a product category, such as mobile phones, may have started out basic (consider the first telephones), but the very presence of this new product triggered people to think about new possible functions for the product, in a process that the authors call coevolution, resulting in what's known as feature creep or blithe.

Product-service combination
Often consumer electronics are part of a service offering, as in for example the mobile phone, which is an interface to the service your telecom provider offers. As the authors put it:

Are some consumer products becoming a bit more like services? Is it the case that ‘‘It’s not what you sell a customer, it's what you do for them. It’s not what something is, it’s what it is connected to, what it does.’’?

Networked
In addition electronic consumer products are becoming more and more networked: your DVD recorder is part of a network with your TV and cable decoder and possible you've even added a home theatre system to that. This - in combination with a sometimes near-criminal lack of standardization in the consumer electronics industry - offers a splendid opportunity for a whole range of new possibilities for system failure, interconnectivity, and usability issues.

'Connected'
Now if you have a blue-ray player instead of a DVD-recorder your personal network is in turn connected to the Internet. The authors of the article don't explicitly distinguish between 'networked' and 'connected', but I like the distinction between a product being connected to other products in a local network for the purpose of reinforcing or enabling each others functionality, and a product being able to access a communications network (such as the Internet) for the purpose of accessing or communicating information. Interestingly, apart from accessing information and services, connectedness gives product developers the ability to update the product after they have launched it, which is standard practice for software, but pretty new for consumer electronics.

Systems thinking
These trends suggest you no longer sell people a product that offers a specific functionality. You give people something they can customize according to their needs. There's a shift from - as the authors put it - end products to initial conditions (for product use). However, that makes it kind of hard to predict how people will use your product and how to design it, and that's where systems thinking approach comes in.

Systems thinking is ‘‘a framework for conceptualizing or viewing the world’’ (Carvajal, 1983, p. 230). In this regard the networked, interoperable consumer products that are the topic of this paper are conceptually no different from any large-scale system to which ‘systems thinking’ is normally applied. Although rarely seen in this way, certain types of product can also be seen as '‘a set of interrelated elements’’ (Hall and Fagen, 1956 cited in Carvajal, 1983) and a ‘‘regularly interacting or interdependent group of items forming a uniﬁed whole’’ (Merriam-Webster, 2007). [...] In a sense the information-age raises the systemic level at which products need to be considered, in other words the designer needs to include more of the world in their design..

A new framework for human-product interaction
As a consequence, when looking at human-product interaction frameworks (which indicate what components make up the interaction and how they are related) we should not only consider the interaction between the individual user and his/her product, but also the interaction with other products and other people, as I outlined in this earlier post and this article on user-centred design for sustainable behavior.

Reference
Walker, G., Stanton, N., Jenkins, D., Salmon, P., March 2009. From telephones to iphones: Applying systems thinking to networked, interoperable products. Applied Ergonomics 40 (2), 206-215.

New uselog shirts (and now shipping worldwide)

2009-06-04T14:03:00.004+02:00

I've added a number of new designs to the uselog shirtshop. And because it seems a bit silly for an Internet shop only to ship within the EU, in addition to the original shop, I've now added a second shop that ships worldwide: uselog shirts | worldwide. This may cause some confusion, but for EU citizens it's cheaper to order in the EU shop, that's why I'm keeping the original shop online.

The Flip and Apple got it right by failing.

2009-06-02T15:37:00.010+02:00

What do Apple and Pure Digital (the maker of the Flip Video camera) have in common? They both have products on the market renowned for their usability, partly due to a focus on the essentials. But they share something else: failure. Big time failure. TechCrunch takes a look at the predecessors of the Flip and concludes that:

Pure Digital wasn’t always selling hit products - it took seven years for the company to get it right. In the meantime, they launched products that just weren’t quite the right thing at the right time.

And while Apple is by now considered the pinnacle of product innovation, design and usability, the company has had it's fair share of failed products, that by now journalists are of course very willing to highlight (Forbes, Wired, MacLife). But appropriately, the Wired article is entitled 'Learning From Failure', because the question arises whether the iPhone would have been the iPhone if it had not been preceded by the Apple Newton and the Motorola ROKR. Then again, Apple's still struggling with AppleTV, and that was preceded by Macintosh TV. So I guess that failing doesn't offer any guarantees either.

Friday afternoon lead: ZINK design competition

2009-05-29T18:09:00.009+02:00

For those of you who don't have any plans for the weekend: ZINK (ZeroInk), the company that provides the technology for the new generation of Polaroid cameras, (picture below) has a design challenge for you. The ZINK zero boundaries competition challenges you to design and imagine "new and innovative solutions that enable and enhance printing with ZINK Technology". They would like you to "re-imagine printing and its role in the digital world using the ZINK Technology to fuel the future possibilities of this unique technology platform".

Quite an impressive jury by the way, with people from for example Frog Design, Gizmodo, and Harvard Business School. A (relatively) cheap and fun way for ZINK to get inspired, a good way for you to get noticed (if you want to). Deadline is monday June 8.

Checklists and water taps for usability in design

2009-05-28T13:30:00.001+02:00

Check out this useful overview of usability cheat-sheets from Designer City, USA. And while you're in a learning mood, you might want to look at these lessons for webdesign from water taps. Yes, you read it right, water taps, fountains. For example the lesson learned from the picture above was: If you need massive instructions, you've cocked it up.

What the iPhone can do to dinner with friends

2009-05-25T03:16:00.002+02:00

A friend of mine was recently a bit insulted/disappointed when she started telling what she thought to be an engaging story to a group of friends, and one of them zoned out and pulled out his iPhone. When catching her raised eyebrow he said: "I already know this story." Having dinner with friends is not quite the same if everyone brings (and uses) their iPhone at the table. Found this picture (entitled iPhone insanity) with the following hilarious description on flickr:

Kevin, Keith and Nick using their iPhones, while PJ watches a movie on Brian's iPhone. And I took this with an iPhone. Ridiculous.

Always having e-mail, phone, photos, movies and news at your fingertips does seem to stimulate continuous partial attention. And sometimes I find it a little rude (guilty myself as well!). Or maybe it's just that the times are a-changing.

UPDATE:
New York Times article on texting and dinner etiquette: Play With Your Food, Just Don’t Text!

Follow uselog on Twitter

2009-05-25T01:03:00.010+02:00

For your convenience I have added a Twitter-feed to the possibilities of staying up to date on uselog posts, in addition to the rss-feed and e-mail updates.

Contextmapping symposium videos online

2009-05-20T04:50:00.003+02:00

If you were not one of the 150 designers and design researchers from industry or 200 students and academics who attended the contextmapping symposium Designing for, with, and from User Experiences, but you had actually wanted to, this is your chance. The presentations, by Liz Sanders, Jacob Buur, and Froukje Sleeswijk Visser can now be viewed online.

Contextmapping?
Under the flag of 'contextmapping', the tools and techniques group at IDE/TU Delft has been exploring designerly techniques of user/context research, in close collaboration with education (600 students) and industries in the Netherlands and across Europe. The symposium took place after five years of this program, on the occasion of the PhD defense of Froukje Sleeswijk Visser, on communicating user experiences to design teams (pdf of thesis and other publications).

Liz Sanders, of MakeTools, talked about large-scale co-creation she has been doing with architectural firm NBBJ, discussing the difficulties in bringing these processes in architecture. Besides giving an impression of the sheer size of the projects (building whole hospitals), and the complexity of developing user-centered design insights, she discusses the tools and techniques that have been used to bring the user experience into building processes.
> see video

Jacob Buur, of the University of Southern Denmark, discussed his experiences in applying ethnographic provocation in companies, and showed examples how video as a co-creation tool can be used to bring out misunderstandings in design communication.
> see video

Froukje Sleeswijk Visser introduced the education program at Delft, and led a series of 10 graduates who related their experience in applying contextmapping, co-creation and other user-centered design processes during and after their studies. These 10 presentations in pechakucha style give an impression of the diversity of companies trying out these techniques, and of the changing Zeitgeist, ranging from the first graduate finding a non-receptive market to several recent graduates who set up their own design research consultancies.
> see video

How to kill a good idea: the focus group approach

2009-05-18T16:46:00.007+02:00

As a follow up to the previous post, on the danger of killing good ideas by usability evaluation, a second option: killing good a good idea by having a focus group. The video actually beautifully illustrates another notion from the previously mentioned Greenberg/Buxton paper: that today's consumers/users may find it hard to evaluate tomorrow's products. Remember the Walkman legend?

[Thanks to Floris for the tip]

The danger of usability evaluation

2009-05-15T15:48:00.011+02:00

If there's one thing we know that's beneficial for making good products it's usability evaluation, right? So - being the usability zealot that I am - I felt an immediate urge of disagreement hitting me when I saw the title of the CHI2008 paper Usability Evaluation Considered Harmful (Some of the Time)* (pdf) by Saul Greenberg and Bill Buxton. But fortunately I did read the article and discovered Greenberg and Buxton lay out a very compelling argument against usability evaluation being misused as the standard method to evaluate any design, including innovative, conceptually new user interfaces.

Formative versus summative testing
The gist of it is that there's no use in comparing the usability of an immature tangible interaction concept (say, the Wobble Lamp) against an element of a mature on-screen user interface (e.g., Windows 98). It's the innovator's dilemma: you might dismiss a new technology or concept because it doesn't perform sufficiently, but it only underperforms because it is immature; the potential of the immature might be much bigger than that of the existing (see illustration above). You want to know and show what's good about your design, its potential, and what can be improved to reach it. And that is not something that only performing a usability evaluation will give you an answer to.

Abstract
Current practice in Human Computer Interaction as encouraged by educational institutes, academic review processes, and institutions with usability groups advocate usability evaluation as a critical part of every design process. This is for good reason: usability evaluation has a significant role to play when conditions warrant it. Yet evaluation can be ineffective and even harmful if naively done ‘by rule’ rather than ‘by thought’. If done during early stage design, it can mute creative ideas that do not conform to current interface norms. If done to test radical innovations, the many interface issues that would likely arise from an immature technology can quash what could have been an inspired vision. If done to validate an academic prototype, it may incorrectly suggest a design’s scientific worthiness rather than offer a meaningful critique of how it would be adopted and used in everyday practice. If done without regard to how cultures adopt technology over time, then today’s reluctant reactions by users will forestall tomorrow’s eager acceptance. The choice of evaluation methodology – if any – must arise from and be appropriate for the actual problem or research question under consideration.

Alternative methods
As alternatives to usability evaluation the authors suggest design rationale, scenarios of use, case studies, and participatory critiques. I would add user experience sampling, observational research, and in-depth interviews to that. Greenberg and Buxton do a very good job at pointing out that the evaluation of innovative interaction concepts should be formative, not summative, and that usability is just one of the product properties to evaluate a product by.

Read the paper: it's a mind-changer.

See also
> Greenberg's slideshare set of the CHI presentation of the article

Reference
*Greenberg, S. and Buxton, B. 2008. Usability evaluation considered harmful (some of the time). In Proceeding of the Twenty-Sixth Annual SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Florence, Italy, April 05 - 10, 2008). CHI '08. ACM, New York, NY, 111-120.

[Illustration: MIT Aurora project]

The many definitions of human factors and ergonomics

2009-05-11T18:15:00.008+02:00

So, what is human factors (or ergonomics)? You would have thought that a domain that busies itself with creating a fit between people and their tools and surroundings would have chosen a name that fits people's knowledge and preconceptions. But alas. So often human factors professionals find themselves explaining what human factors is. People who call themselves ergonomists have the added difficulty that people find the name hard to pronounce, or plain silly. Oddly enough, you hardly ever see business people having to explain what 'business' is (up until recently at least). In addition to that, as any self-respecting profession, human factors and ergonomics professionals are self-obsessed and feel a need to define themselves.

Those might be some causes for the interesting array of definitions of human factors and ergonomics that Eric Shaver of the Human Factors Blog found in literature. He provides a good overview (including literature references), and, ironically, adds a definition of his own.

By the way, my favorite let's-look-up-this-word tool (visualthesaurus) did not know what human factors is (see image above), but it does know ergonomics. As usual, wikipedia knows them both: human factors, ergonomics.

Top 10 of lamest mobile phones

2009-05-07T14:21:00.006+02:00

If someone is out and about trashing mobile phone designs I can't resist, I just have to read. And in this case justifiably so, because it's plain fun: PC world reviews the 10 ugliest and lamest mobile phones. Of course usability plays a role in some of the reviews, as for example for Nokia's lipstick-like 7380.

If you owned the Nokia 7380 and had to send a quick text message to save your life, you’d be dead by now. This handset, which looks like a fancy pencil box, has to go down as one of the most unusable phones ever made. Critics commented that the only thing you could do fast with this phone is answer an incoming call.

You've got to admit that it takes guts though: removing almost all controls from a phone. About almost as gutsy as placing the controls over the screen so that your hand blocks the screen while operating the phone, as on the B&O Serenata.

[Picture from PC World]