International Appliance Manufacturing 2008 - (Page 43) spas or fitness equipment, the first encounter with the product is through the User Interface. In today’s market, it is vital that the user has a positive experience and connects with the product at this first encounter enough to purchase it over another brand. Why is creating this killer user experience and sought after look such a challenge for many embedded programmers? Usability expert, Bruce Tognazzini, discusses an informal study that he conducted while employed at Apple in the mid 1980’s in his book, “TOG On Interface.” The results of this study helped Bruce and Apple confirm why software engineers are not the best candidates for designing user interfaces that need to appeal to the general population. In his study, Bruce conducted a MeyersBriggs personality type test on all of Apple’s software and hardware engineers. When he compared the personality types to that of the general public, he learned that “Engineers are from Mars and Consumers are from Venus.”1 As indicated in Figure 3, Bruce found that engineers interact with the world “intuitively.” They are hardwired to see things differently than the average consumer. This gives them outstanding visualization skills that enable them to see deeply into the inner workings of products. Unfortunately this personality trait makes it difficult for them to understand why “sensory” types cannot see the same product inner workings. This is also why they have difficulty understanding what things attract consumers to one brand over another when both products work the same. On the other hand, the “sensory” types in the organization are more like the average consumer. These are the marketing people, industrial designers, and graphics artists. They rely heavily on sensory information to interact with people and products. This gives them the ability to understand what the average consumer wants. But, it also means that they lack the visualization skills required to assemble the 1’s and 0’s in a way that makes the digital device work. What Apple discovered is that the only way to make a product work well, and be amazing to work with, is through multidisciplinary team collaboration. The key is to find a solution that maximizes the collaboration between the embedded engineers that are concerned with making the product work, and the industrial designers that are concerned with making the product worthwhile to work with. If that isn’t enough, this collaboration must be enforced throughout the entire product design cycle. The Amulet design methodology was designed to enforce this concept of collaboration. Since the look and feel of the GUI is best authored by graphic designers and usability experts, Amulet’s tool chain embraces tools that these professionals are already familiar with – web authoring tools and Adobe® Photoshop ®. Thus, Art directors are not forced to become C-programmers. Likewise, the embedded programmer’s interface to the GUI is very simple and doesn’t force the embedded programmer to get involved with the GUI design if he doesn’t want to. He can simply control the device and manage the parametric data that is generated or presented by the GUI. One of the major benefits of using Amulet’s GUI silicon, which is based on Atmel’s CAP7 architecture, is it gives flexibility to both parties in parallel during the entire product design cycle. Graphic designers can create the advanced look and feel that customers demand and embedded programmers have the flexibility to integrate other peripherals that Figure 3: Meyers-Briggs Personality Types — Engineers Versus The General Population 1 Tognazzini, Bruce, Apple Computer Inc. TOG On Interface, Addision-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc. July 1993, pg. 96. International Appliance Manufacturing 2008 43
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