IBM Keyboard Usability
I have started paying attention to everyday things in my life and see how they work to make me better at what I do. Are there ways to optimize them, tweak them in simple or complex ways so that some small quirk of mine can be addressed.
So I found this extra IBM USB enhanced keyboard in my colleague’s cube and asked her if she was using it or was it just lying around. Fortunately, she wasn’t and I thought I would like to try it out as I was bored of using the one I had for a year now. One of the reasons I liked it was the number of shortcut buttons it had and they were preprogrammed to open specific folders/applications. So I download the drivers for this guy from IBM and install it. I expected to find the drivers package to contain some software which would allow me to reprogram the keyboard buttons to applications I prefer rather than the defaults.
(Click to enlarge)
However, what really impressed me was the label printing feature in the software. Once I had programmed each button, it allowed me to print of a label indicating what each button was for and then slide it into the label slot. I have seen keyboards which come with programmable keys but this one went just one step further in helping me not having to remember which one was for what. It simply prints it in a right size with the instructions to tear the appropriate section and stick it into the slot.
Now that’s what you call designing with the user in mind.
