baskaran

• La pelle dell'orso, di Joy Sorman, Alter ego editore
• Accabadora, di Michela Murgia, Einaudi editore
• Corpi maledetti, di Lucia Baskaran, Cento Autori editore
• Lontananza, di Vigdis Hjorth, Fazi editore

We return to the Garmin Nuvi 2598LMTH to try Garmin's companion application for it, BaseCamp. Aravindh Baskaran is back to help Tim Keirnan try to create a customized commute route in to the office and upload the route to the GPS unit. This is a very informal usability test and Tim wanted Aravindh around because the first time Tim tried to do this, he was not successful. Aravindh has used Base Camp to create car club routes on back roads with the Windows version of BaseCamp, so he is acting as informal usability test moderator.

The initial use usability problems Tim encountered were nothing compared to the design failure he found transferring the route to the Garmin GPS unit and using it. If you would like to follow along, you can download a Windows or Macintosh version of BaseCamp at Garmin's website:
www.garmin.com

Listener Costan Boiangiu's excellent email about the UX of GPS devices kicks off this episode, and the informal usability test critique of BaseCamp starts about 15 minutes in.

Aravindh Baskaran joins Tim Keirnan for a critique of the Garmin Nuvi 2598LMTHD.
We follow our usual critique structure that includes the following:
Encounter
Decision
Purchase
Out of the Box
Initial Use
Longitudinal Use

The Garmin 2598 is an interesting mixture of excellence and frustration. On the positive side, we found that
* The map screens, both day and night versions, are very well designed.
* The voice sounds terrific because it is both pleasant stylistically and cuts through the noise of the car sonically.
* The device is fairly quick in its operation, including finding satellites (unless you are indoors, but why are you driving indoors?)

On the negative side, we found that
* The vaunted voice interface doesn't work well at all. Very frustrating.
* The un-changeable and incessant alarm for school zones within a half mile of the car is extremely frustrating and can make us ignore alarms in general.
* The unit occasionally freezes and no amount of pressing or tapping the screen will bring it back, forcing the user to unplug power from the unit and restart it.
* Inexplicable routing can ignore oft-travelled commutes and actually send us the long way around. And sometimes Tim got a different route home if his address was in the Home saved location rather than his address being in the Recent list.
* The settings don't encourage quickly finding what you want to adjust.

Finally, email from listener Katie was a wonderful compliment to starting a new year of episodes. Thank you for listening, Katie.

Time for a mobile episode! Aravindh Baskaran, UX researcher and designer, joins Tim Keirnan to look at the user experience of Android Lollipop. What did we like about it and what do we think could be better? With Android Marshmallow on the way, it's time to reflect on Lollipop's effectiveness.

Android is used, in one form or another, by more customers around the world than any other mobile OS (stats we found on this were so inconsistent that we gave up looking, but Android was clearly in the lead in all mobile OS usage stats). We used Aravindh's Nexus 5 phone for this episode because Tim's Nexus 4 now has Ubuntu Touch on it. The blog post image is Lollipop's list design that you'll hear us discuss when we refer to Google's "Material Design".

Note when critiquing Android UIs: Aravindh and Tim are critiquing pure Android as designed by Google and used on their Nexus devices and (for the most part) on Motorola's smart phones. Other manufacturers can and do take advantage of Android's open source nature to create their own Android UI that can be grossly inferior to pure Android or innovative, depending on one's point of view. So the UX of Android is not one thing as with iOS and Windows Phone, but a fragmented mix of competing interpretations of Google's Android reference design.

Email from Jan Jursa and Costan Boiangiu concludes this episode. Head over to Jan's wonderful Information Architecture Television and take advantage of all the great material there:
http://iatelevision.blogspot.com/