Neil Wehrle

In the 15 or so years I’ve been designing interactive products, I have always tried to involve the intended audience (users) in the course of product development. A recent article by Jared Spool on UIE.com articulates something different that I’ve felt but rarely had the data to support: involve the rest of the team in [...]

…the screens in jets can be so packed with data that some pilots call them “drool buckets” because, they say, they can get lost staring into them.
It appears the military is bumping up against the limits of peoples ability to absorb and make sense of the streams of data they encounter in their rapidly digitizing [...]

What do OXO Good Grips kitchenwares and the Apple iPad have in common? It may be hard to think of how chunky-handled potato-peelers and cutting-edge tablet computers may be related, but I think both are really “Trojan horses” of product design.
When I read the reviews, look at the UI, and play with it (admittedly, I [...]

A key usability heuristic termed the “Match between the system and real world“, says that software systems should mirror real-world scenarios, nomenclature, and procedures. In the real world, of course, things (especially social) tend to be messy, non-hierarchical, redundant, ambiguous, and often contradictory. A recent post from a designer observed that in his many years [...]

I’ve been an Amazon user for almost 14 years now, starting with books and moving on to just about everything else they sell. For the last couple of years I’ve downloaded MP3s (initially just to avoid Apple’s DRM, but now because I can find music much more easily). Every time, though I have had to [...]

I saw this on the AirTran site and thought it was a pretty effective way of communicating – in a positive light – what type of seat you can choose for your flight. I can’t say that I’ve ever seen an airline illustrate what seats actually look like, and frankly most seat selection tools seem [...]

Not to pile on, but recent personal experiences with the AA.com (American Airlines) site underscore just how dreadful the user experience on the site is, no matter what the excuses are. I’ve been using – with some success – the aa.com site for some time now, ever since I worked at Yahoo and AA was [...]

Wired Science has a short discussion about how humans recognize and process facial characteristics and why we sometimes stare at people with facial deformities. An evolutionary response causes our brain to momentarily stumble when we see people that don’t have symmetrical features:
To decide, your eyes sweep over the person’s face, retrieving only parts, mainly just [...]

For the last few weeks I’ve admired these new parking signs in the Chelsea, New York neighborhood that my office is in. I’m surprised the city used what appear to be high-quality materials and a clean design for both the form and the typography. It looks like something out of Northern Europe. I checked around [...]

I’ve always been a proponent of leveraging usability test artifacts (video, transcripts, quotes) to help communicate to decision makers the impact of design decisions. I always do this with great care, since I don’t want to overstate issues I’ve uncovered, while at the same time making clear the human effects of software usability.
Recently, Microsoft partnered [...]