ux-portfolio-Wataru-Oshima-Tokyo

Journal 03: Revision of Journal entry 01 and 02

Journal 01

MacBook pro touch bar

Touch bar keys

Function keys

I would like to focus on the Touch bar of the MacBook pro in this Journal. Apple has already decided to remove this feature from the latest version of the MacBook pro. Apple cites a variety of reasons for this, including cost and production line issues. So let’s take a closer look at whether this is really an unnecessary feature. First of all, the touch bar is an LCD, and the alignment can be changed according to the user’s preference, and it can also be changed to function keys. This is a very effective and useful feature. And since each key is displayed as an icon, it is memorable and learnable. However, because it is a liquid crystal display, it is undeniably very fragile in terms of safety, for example, it may break due to bugs caused by software errors or impact. I personally feel that physical buttons are much easier to use than LCD. First of all, the touch bar is very prone to mis-pressing, and I have experienced many times when the key I wanted to press was not the one that I intended to press. Also, because it is an LCD, it is easy to get dirty and you have to be careful about damage to the LCD. Therefore, in terms of satisfaction, I cannot say it is fulfilled. Although it looks cool and futuristic, which means it’s not all bad, I personally think that this part would benefit more from having physical keys than LCDs. Therefore, I personally think that Apple’s decision is the right one.
Then let me talk about the actual task to do that a user potentially does step by step. I set the task that is to change the brightness of the screen. As you can see in the touch bar, there are some possibilities that a user gets confused. For example, the second and third buttons seem like they are the buttons to change the brightness of the screen but also the sixth and seventh buttons seem like a user can change some brightness. so a user might mistakenly touch the seventh button to try to change the brightness of the screen but actually, that is the button to change the brightness of the background light of the keyboard but since there is no indication of the buttons, there is no way to choose the correct one at a glance. The user’s potential behavior could be like below.
1) take a look at the touch bar and see the alignment
2) since the user wants to change the brightness of the screen so search for the button
3) there are some possibilities to choose it so a little confused
4) the user chooses the seventh from the right since the user is not sure the difference.
5) the user accidentally changes the brightness of the background light of the keyboard
6) then the user realizes he/she chose the wrong one.
7) And the user pushes the right one.

Journal 02

Macbook pro Japanese keyboard version

Japanese keyboard

If you look at the keyboard on my laptop, you will see that it is slightly different from a regular keyboard. This is a Japanese-style keyboard with the same alphabetical arrangement, but symbols and other special characters are placed in different places. This is not limited to Japan but is optimized for those who use them in each language area. Now, then, if you look closely at the keyboard, you will see that Japanese characters are arranged in addition to the English alphabet. This is useful for us Japanese to efficiently write sentences in our own language. But it is not memorable for us because the alignment of Japanese and English is way different so most Japanese people use the English alphabet and convert it to Japanese. But it could be learnable and also very “efficient” since the Japanese keyboard should be optimized for Japanese people so learning how to type Japanese with Japanese would be the same amount of work as learning to type in English. Generally speaking, the alignment of this keyboard is said that it is optimized for human beings to be able to type quickly and effectively. And having some special characters are also useful when we need to type, for example, email addresses or arithmetic equation. If I made a scenario, it would be like that a Japanese man named “Kenjiro” wants to learn about touch-typing in English and Japanese so he bought a MacBook pro with a Japanese keyboard. He thought it is convenient to learn the alignment for both languages. All the alignment is common to others, which is very useful so once he got the alignment, he would use any keyboard very efficiently. However, he realized that it is good enough to memorize the alignment of the English alphabet because he can convert to Japanese, so it is not necessarily memorable. But he still has a will to memorize the Japanese alignment because he can type Japanese very effectively.
Considering the above scenario, the steps Kenjiro would do could be like this.
1) He sees the alignment of the keyboard and realizes there are Japanese letters
2) he tries to memorize the alignment of Japanese because he already memorized the alignment of English letters.
3) He somehow has memorized the alignment of Japanese letters and tried touch-typing in Japanese.
4) But when he needs to type in English, he notices that he forgot the alignment of some English letters since English and Japanese are so irrelevant.
5) He may think this could be harmful to remember both of them since one side affects the other side badly.