Archive for the 'All articles' Category
E-mail: “But in reality, can it really work? Yes it can.”
July 23rd, 2007
Here’s a story from ‘89 about one of the first public demonstrations of the x.400 e-mail standard, which helped e-mail move across platforms. As with all old tech articles, the beauty is in the enthusiastic descriptions of what the new technology will bring.
[I]n a series of tests between Hughes Aircraft Company in Los Angeles, […]
The many faces of evil…
June 4th, 2007This one is for the aviation psych geeks: The famous approach into Runway 16 at Portsmouth. Yes, this is a real chart, and there are many more like it.
If you don’t get the joke, click here and read the catch phrases in the box on the right side.
PS. The arbitrary nature […]
Clever design = International intrigue
May 8th, 2007The Associated Press reported a story today that reminded me of the challenges one can face when introducing radically new designs to a naive user group.
A few years ago, the Canadian mint used a new technique to create a 25 cent coin featuring a red poppy inlay. The poppy flower is Canada’s symbol of Remembrance […]
ISAP 2007 Panel
April 24th, 2007I just finished chairing a panel on Designing, Evaluating and Training Flight Decks of the Future at the International Symposium on Aviation Psychology in Dayton, Ohio. The title, although expansive, was meant to link together recent research on new flight deck designs, and address the training issues that have traditionally prevented innovation in aviation.
(Lately, […]
Backhanded Compliments
April 19th, 2007Those of us in experimental psychology often feel misunderstood. Witness the backhanded compliment paid to psychologists in an otherwise fascinating article by Bill Mckibben in the March issue of Mother Jones.
“Reversal of Fortune” is an article about the importance of creating more realistic models of human behavior in economics–about how too many material goods […]
The Adaptive Digital Dashboard
November 29th, 2006
A year after the iDrive redesign, Carl Smith, Mohammad Rahman and I reunited for another automotive project. This one was a contest entry in the 2006 International Award in Design, Engineering and Innovation in the field of Automotive Human Factors.
The competition was sponsored by some prety big names, including the International Council of […]
Driving Design: Redesigning the iDrive
October 20th, 2006This was a project I completed with Carl Smith, Mohammad Rahman, and Nicholas Prada, to redesign BMW’s first automotive computer interface, the iDrive.
Evaluating Boeing’s Flight Deck of the Future
October 20th, 2006Most people don’t know that modern airliners run on autopilot almost all the time. In fact, newer planes are technically capable of completing an entire flight with almost no input from humans.
Sadly, the interfaces that control these incredibly complicated automated flight computers date back to the 1970’s, and many important human factors studies have uncovered […]
I’m in Seattle
October 19th, 2006The nifty flight deck engineering team at Boeing has agreed to allow me to collect dissertation data on their new Flight Deck of the Future autoflight interface. I’ve worked with them before on the first evaluation of the FDF, and the time has come to create a more rigorous test, with more sophisticated […]
Welcome to Leap Gap
July 6th, 2006My name is Luis Ricardo Prada. Most people call me Ricardo.
LeapGap.com is where I store my ideas and experience in the world of Human Factors, Applied Psychology, Cognitive Engineering, and Human Computer Interaction design.