Blogs

Aaron Marcus

Aaron Marcus is principal at Aaron Marcus and Associates (AM+A) in Berkeley, California.



My Apple was a Lemon

Posted: Thu, October 24, 2013 - 12:04:00

In August 2011, I bought an Apple MacBook Pro. No surprise; we’ve been a devoted Apple customer since January 1985, as well as a vendor to Apple, and even a legal expert-witness defender of Apple in U.S. Patent Office matters. What did surprise me was the horrendous experience of moving from OS 10.6 to 10.8, and the terrible service I…

HCI/UX in China: A trip report

Posted: Fri, June 14, 2013 - 12:04:13

How are product/service human-computer interaction design and user-experience design doing in China, you ask? Well, as they say, we live in interesting times. I shall give you a personal update based on recent experiences. I have just spent a week in China in three cities, Yangzhou, Shanghai, and Beijing, attending two design conferences in the first and third cities and…

CHI grows up

Posted: Thu, May 16, 2013 - 11:12:26

CHI 2013 took place from April 27 through May 2 in Paris’s Palais des Congrès, not far from the Arc de Triomphe on the western edge of the city center. Besides being notable as the first CHI conference ever to be forced to turn away eager participants because they simply could not take on more visitors (I was told they…

The end of civilization as we knew it

Posted: Fri, April 19, 2013 - 10:17:34

Is it just me? I don’t think so. I do not think that I am being singled out by sinister forces whose objective is to end usability, usefulness, and enjoyment of user experiences as I knew them and hoped would continue. However, I am becoming increasingly worried about the future of civilization. Consider these cautionary tales. Apple In August 2011,…

Color my UX readable

Posted: Fri, March 15, 2013 - 3:00:44

The challenge of achieving good legibility and readability of color displays in all computer graphics (including all imagery and typography) is a constant one. Especially when computer-based displays show up in more and more unexpected places, like your eyeglasses, on t-shirts, and on vehicle windshields, not just on desktop computer screens and mobile device displays. Just because user-experience (UX) design/human-computer…

HCI/CHI/UX and science fiction: A progress report

Posted: Tue, February 19, 2013 - 2:04:55

Since 1992 (at CHI 1992’s panel session at which I invited cyberpunk authors to talk about their ideas of the future), I have proposed that human-computer interaction (HCI) professionals would benefit from studying science fiction and its description of HCI and computer-mediated communication. In 1999, at the request of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI)—because, their representative…

In the land of extreme social media

Posted: Thu, January 24, 2013 - 4:04:08

In past decades, we were drowning in a sea of undigested data. Today, we are drowning in a deluge of extreme, untamed social media growth. A half-decade ago, intrigued by the appearance of social networks and wishing to investigate these new media for communication, I signed up for just about everything that came my way: Facebook, LinkedIn, Naymes, H5, and…