A Product I love –
Amazon’s Voice-bot Alexa
One of my favorite products that I cannot live without (Ok, that’s an exaggeration, to only express my appreciation for the brilliant design.), Amazon’s voice-control system, Alexa. It lets you speak your wishes to an Echo smart speaker and see them fulfilled. Using nothing but the sound of your voice, you can play music, search the Web, create to-do and shopping lists, shop online, get instant weather reports, and control popular smart-home products—all while your smartphone stays in your pocket. The product well applied several great design principles and puts the users’ needs into a deeply thoughtful consideration.
Let’s go over some of the explicit design reflections in Alexa.
1. User Intuitive and harmonious
The Alexa app provides simple and easy steps for a user to set up the voice-control system with his/her phone. The design of the product provides 4 buttons and a succinct instruction to minimize any confusion for an average person to interact with the product without requiring the extensive learning. The natural setting of the interaction between the system and the users provides a seamless and pleasant user experience.
2. Consistency
The only requirement of saying the word “Alexa” before sending out voice demands creates a consistently interactive process.
3. Accessible to all users
With only one single requirement of speaking to the device, the system provides access to a variety of users including people with certain disabilities.
4. Reversible
It is ok to say the wrong thing or giving the wrong requests, just shout out “Alexa, stop,” the smart voice AI is capable receive any updated requests.
5. Many more
Above is only a list of a few general features of Amazon’s Voice AI, Alexa can provide to its users. In reality, Amazon has developed multiple versions of their echo products to serve their target users groups for their specific needs.
A product I hate – Google’s Chromebook
My first impression of Google’s Chromebook is simply great: its sharp sleek look. It is fast enough for tab-heavy browser work. It provides a full workday of battery life; it supports Android apps, and it has a small, light body, and a bright screen. Most importantly, its very affordable price provides people with the pleasure of owning a laptop.
Not until after using it I was extremely frustrated by its missing Cap lock. The Cap key was oddly replaced by another function, “Search” in all Google’s Chromebook keyboards. Instead of locking caps, this key calls up Chrome OS’s search window. You can still do cap lock by having to hit the Search key while holding down the Alt key. The fact of those two keys being far away from each other has disabled the handling of the keys by the user’s left hand without constantly repositioning. This missing function of locking Cap has violated so many areas in the principles of the basic design and user interactions. It takes away the consistency in the typing experience of the users and violates the fundamentals of the typing rules the users have adopted for years, which in my opinion makes the product unusable. This random update by Google is a violation of these two design principles: Design consistency, habituation.