Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited a common Sense Approach to Web Usability Steve Krug

Proof of concept: My Brundleyfly
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 camera
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Brundlefly is the word Jeff Goldblum’s character (Seth Brundle) in
The Fly 
uses to describe
himself after his experiment with a teleportation device accidentally merges his DNA with that of
a fly.

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Out of curiosity, I built myself a camera rig by merging a clip from a book
light with a Webcam. It weighs almost nothing and captures the audio with
its built-in microphone. Mine cost about $30 in parts and took about an hour
to make. I’m sure somebody will manufacture something similar—only
much better—before long. I’ll put instructions for building one yourself
online at 
rocketsurgerymadeeasy.com
.
Lightweight webcam + Lightweight clamp and Gooseneck = Brundlefly
Attaching a camera to the device creates a very easy-to-follow view. The
observers get a stable view of the screen even if the participant is waving it
around.
I think it solves most of the objections to other mounted-camera solutions:
They’re heavy and awkward.
It weighs almost nothing and barely
changes the way the phone feels in your hand.
They’re distracting.
It’s very small (smaller than it looks in the
photo) and is positioned out of the participant’s line of sight, which is
focused on the phone.
Nobody wants to attach anything to their phone.
Sleds are usually
attached to phones with Velcro or double-sided tape. This uses a
padded clamp that can’t scratch or mar anything but still grips the
device firmly.
One limitation of this kind of solution is that it is tethered: It requires a
USB extension cable running from the camera to your laptop. But you
can buy a long extension inexpensively.
The rest of the setup is very straightforward:
Connect the Brundlefly to the facilitator’s laptop via USB.
Open something like AmCap (on a PC) or QuickTime Player (on a
Mac) to display the view from the Brundlefly. The facilitator will
watch this view.

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 Share the laptop screen with the observers using screen sharing
(GoToMeeting, WebEx, etc.)
Run a screen recorder (e.g., Camtasia) on the computer in the
observation room. This reduces the burden on the facilitator’s laptop.
That’s it.
Finally...
In one form or another, it seems clear that mobile is where we’re going to
live in the future, and it provides enormous opportunities to create great user
experiences and usable things. New technologies and form factors are going
to be introduced all the time, some of them involving dramatically different
ways of interacting.
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Personally, I think talking to your computer is going to be one of the next big things. Recognition
accuracy is already amazing; we just need to find ways for people to talk to their devices without
looking, sounding, and feeling foolish. Someone who’s seriously working on the problems should
give me a call; I’ve been using speech recognition software for 15 years, and I have a lot of
thoughts about why it hasn’t caught on.
Just make sure that usability isn’t being lost in the shuffle. And the best way
to do this is by testing.

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