Object I Love:
I love the Ozeri electric wine opener. It demonstrates the principle of Flexibility as it offers 2 primary features: it removes the foil at the top of a wine bottle (using a detachable foil cutter that twists off the top of the device), in addition to removing the cork.
The hourglass shape of the device demonstrates Anthropomorphism, and makes the wine opener attractively stand out among the cold, stainless steel, straight angled devices in a kitchen. Drinking wine is a relaxing social activity and the aesthetics help to promote this mood too. The hourglass shape also demonstrates the Affordance of grasping, particularly grasping in the middle section of the device. The 2-directional button demonstrates good Mapping, however the user may have to adjust his Conceptual Model of what he thinks the direction buttons corresponds to during the process: First when positioning the drill on the wine cork pressing the Down button (while gently pushing the device Downward), twists the drill Down into the cork. Second removing the cork out of the bottle requires pressing the Up button, which can be mapped to the movement of the cork itself (the cork is coming Up and out of the bottle). Third and lastly, pushing the Down button twists the drill to move the cork Down and out of the clear plastic section of the device.
The wine opener demonstrates the principle of Feedback in the blue LED light that shines through the plastic when the drill is twisting. This is particularly useful if one is in a loud environment where the person can’t hear the motor working, or if one is opening the bottle in a dimly environment, having that little light can help a person position the drill correctly over the bottle. Lastly the clear plastic casing acts as a Physical Constraint against the drill point touching something it’s not supposed (the plastic acts as a barrier that can prevent a physical injury).
Object I Hate:
I hate my TI-36X Pro scientific calculator. The designers of this calculator were smart in grouping together related buttons using the Gestalt principle of Similarity. Numeric buttons are colored light grey, function buttons are dark grey, and the operator buttons are reflective silver. But this is where the problems start. Reflective silver in low light or very bright light environments makes these buttons hard to see, it’s literally a Visibility problem. I don’t have all the operator button locations memorized so sometimes as I enter in numbers for calculations I have to twist and turn the calculator to see the operators so I can press the right one. All the buttons give audible and tactile Feedback when pressed, there is a good click sound from each press. However, the designers probably didn’t think of testing this calculator in a quiet classroom during a math test. I’ve used this calculator during tests for a statistics class and the sound of the clicks was so loud I was worried I was disturbing other students.
A demonstration of bad Feedback is the lack useful of descriptive information when displaying an error. For example I could double press ‘+’ by accident and continue entering numbers. The calculator happily allows it but doesn’t say anything until I hit enter and all it tells me is “SYNTAX Error”.
Demonstrating the Mapping principle, there is a 4-direction button pad that can be used to navigate a cursor around the 4 line display. However, the mapping between the cursor and directional pad can break down, there is an alternate cursor mode that I frequently accidentally trigger which causes the cursor to cycle between previous answers (at the current cursor location) instead of moving around the screen. One good design principle I can point out is the Physical constraint next to the on/off button. There is a raised plastic notch in the bottom left corner of the calculator that prevents accidental presses (only for this one button).