Articles by Tema Frank
Tema Frank has done customer and user experience-related work for over three decades. In 2001 she launched Web Mystery Shoppers, one of the world’s first companies to do large sample size, remote usability website testing of websites. Clients included major financial institutions, governments, and retailers. She now runs the customer experience and usability consultancy Frank Reactions and hosts the Frank Reactions podcast. Twitter: @temafrank
Giving UX Advice: Getting Buy-In
Experience-based tips for convincing co-workers and clients to accept the idea of user testing and to implement the results. [Read More]
What’s News: Mommy, Can I Play with Your iPhone?
The Woogie, a stuffed animal into which you can insert your iPhone, helps childproof your phone, however parents must monitor the content their children view. [Read More]
What’s News: Automating Baggage Handling
Using feedback from ground handling staff, RampMate was created, increasing efficiency and airport baggage tracking capabilities while decreasing handler injury rates. [Read More]
What’s News: No More Goofy Glasses
Three-dimensional (3-D) movies may soon become more mainstream thanks to technologies that are making 3-D viewing more user-friendly. [Read More]
Superphone to the Rescue!
Cell phones with kid finders and one button emergency calls. Music on a memory stick. [Read More]
What’s News: Blio Software: E-reader = Easy to Read?
Blio, designed to make e-books accessible to the visually impaired, allows users to read, or have read to them, e-books on regular computers or handheld devices. [Read More]
What’s News: New Computer Technologies to Be Rolled Out
Flexible, organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display technology is about to revolutionize the world of portable computing, making mobile phones lighter and more durable. [Read More]
What’s News: Simplifying Web Design and Management
Platformic is making breakthroughs in web management usability, thanks to its ability to develop CSS without needing a programmer or web design software. [Read More]
What’s News: Hey Good Lookin’
The marketing campaign for TriSpecs™ is focused on user experience as the key selling feature, however the website itself is not a great model of usability. [Read More]
What’s News: Thoughts as Art
The latest iteration of a colorful web-based computer program illustrates the “thought process” of a computer faced with making a move in a chess game. The Thinking Machine 4 (http://www.turbulence.org/spotlight/thinking/method.html) lets you see how it analyzes each possible move before it decides how to respond to yours. Using threads of green for your moves and […] [Read More]
What’s News: Helping Seniors Helps Everybody
With the aging of the baby boomers, product developers are realizing that there’s money to be made by making products more user-friendly to older people. [Read More]
What’s News: Can We Talk? Conversing with Your Car
Cursing the driver who swerved in front of you is one thing, but cursing at your own car is quite another. It may become increasingly common as cars take on an ever-expanding role of keeping those in the driver’s seat driving safely. [Read More]
What’s News: Lassoing the Web
A product called Twine, currently in beta testing, aims to help users keep track of online information and make them available for easy retrieval and sharing. [Read More]
What’s News: I Think, Therefore I Can
We’ve known for a long time that brain function involves sending electrical impulses, but it is only in recent years that researchers are finding effective ways to harness that energy without having to implant electrodes into the brain. One of the most exciting developments is a wired cap that lets people who cannot control any […] [Read More]
What’s News: Demonstrating Usability of Medical Records
Medical Records Institute launched EMRCompare, a website that compares electronic medical records programs on usability, costs and functionalities. [Read More]
What’s News: A Bevy of Good Ideas
Mass collaboration in the development process can lead to simple to produce, inexpensive, and user-friendly devices [Read More]
What’s News: Function Fatigue and Feature Frustration
Manufacturers are starting to realize that usability, rather than more features, can be a successful way to differentiate their products. [Read More]
What’s News: Wii Usability Woos Non-Gamers
Nintendo broke a usability barrier with its Wii gaming system by creating an interface that could be easily learned by users less experienced with gaming. [Read More]
What’s News: Up, Up and Away
Airbus’s new A380 super-jumbo employees volunteered to do “ethnographic” usability testing; the first in-air test with a full-size passenger load on board. [Read More]
What’s News: Make it Easy
The Arthritis Foundation’s Ease of Use Commendation program seeks to identify products that are easy to use by people with arthritis. [Read More]
What’s News: Speck-tacular Computers
A group of computer science, electronic engineering, and physics professors is developing a system of tiny programmable semiconductor specks that can work together to sense, compute, and network wirelessly. [Read More]
