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To identify usability issues, all products are assessed from the customer's perspective to ensure that they are intuitive and easy to use.

To achieve its goal of providing products and services that can be used with confidence by as many people as possible, Olympus must ensure that every product can be used easily and intuitively. Before the commercialization stage, products are actually used by monitors to assess their usability and identify and rectify problems from the customer's perspective.

Assessing usability in a monitoring room

Live Guide Interface for Pen Series Digital Camera

Olympus developed the Live Guide interface for digital cameras to provide novice Pen series Digital Camera users with an easy and enjoyable way to capture photographs that would match their expectations without any knowledge of specialist photographic terminology. The concept is targeted specifically toward people who want a simple way to express their ideas in attractive photographs, but who find it difficult to achieve their photographic aims because of the complexity of camera controls and have hitherto been reluctant to use Pen series Digital Camera because of their unfamiliarity with arcane photographic terminology.

Starting at the development stage, we carried out usability assessments to verify the intuitiveness of the Live Guide interface for users, especially beginners. Monitors from within and outside of the Olympus organization operated simulations of actual control screens on computers in three phases: starting up the Live Guide interface, adjusting brightness, coloring, background blurring and other characteristics intuitively to match the photographer's image, and taking the photograph. The results of these tests were then used to ascertain whether the interface could be understood and operated naturally by beginners, and to identify and rectify any issues from this perspective.

The Live Guide interface was first used in the E-PL1 Pen series Digital Camera and has since been incorporated into other models of Pen series Digital Cameras and a part of compact cameras.

• A Live Guide simulator can be found at the following address. (Only in Japanese) 

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