Author: Victor

Drive + Mouse

IOGEAR put 64MB of RAM into a mouse. Now that’s smart convergence: take two devices that already plug into the same port and that you have to carry around with your laptop, and combine them, taking advantage of all that hollow space inside the mouse.

There’s still a challenge to help customers form a mental model of it: “You see, it’s a mouse, but you can also save your files on it.” The name helps: “Memory Mouse”. You could go further and make something about the form factor resemble a drive (do people even have a concept of what a drive looks like?).

(And if you start to think too hard, it just gets too weird: “You use the mouse to control the cursor to drag and drop files onto a desktop-mounted drive, the effect of which copies files onto the drive that is inside the mouse…”)

It’s a similar problem with the similarly convergent AirPort Express with AirTunes (sans the elegant name). It took me about 15 minutes to understand what it does, and it only really clicked when I saw the “living room” diagram on page 24 of the Tech Overview (PDF). “You see, it’s a wireless base station like the AirPort, but it can also relay music from your computer into your stereo. Oh, and it’ll let you share your USB printer…” I understand what is inside the thing, but even that would’ve made me raise an eyebrow: “It’s a wireless router, audio digital to analog converter, and USB interface in a little device that plugs into your wall.”

As stuff gets smaller, we’re only going to get more devices like this, and we’ll need to work harder to help people understand them.

The High Line Redesign

There’s a vestigal bit of elevated railray called the High Line that runs through about 20 blocks of the far west side of Manhattan. A contest to turn it into a park has resulted in the selection of Field Operations and Diller, Scofidio & Renfro who proposed a mixture of concrete paths and gardens. I’ve been psyched to have a new walking spot, as I live about 75 meters from it. Supposedly, when I walk out my front door and turn left I’ll see this. That spot on the left where the kids are dancing presently borders a gas station/Subway/Dunkin Donuts combo, the corner presently looking like this. So this is quite a change in feel, if we’re to believe the proposal.

I have the usual Jane Jacobs-influenced reaction, which is you’re messin’ with the character of my neighborhood with your modernist crap. On the right in these pictures is my local, the Half King, one of the best pubs in the city, and I fear it overrun by the club kids moving north from the meat packing district (which has gone from stimulated to overbearing in about a year). I wished that, instead of spending 20 million dollars, they would just clean it up, plant vigorously, provide access, and let us use it, as Paris did.

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Categorized as Community

Better invoices

Kevin Potts has a short and sweet article about Better Invoices in the new ALA. Highlights of the doc format:

  • The word Invoice
  • Tax ID #
  • All names and addresses
  • Date the invoice was sent
  • List of services with dates
  • Terms (he has a good example showing carrots and sticks for timing, to which I would add dates to be more clear)
  • Mailing is better than emailing
  • Include a thank you note
  • Send within 48 hours after, never before, the milestone
  • Don’t time it to arrive on a Friday
  • Accounts Payable needs a nice, big number at the bottom

There’s some good tips in the comments too…’If you have become ‘friends’ (I use the word very loosely) with your clients they will feel obligated to pay you on time. Try joking with them or getting just a little personal. I find sending links to pictures of a recent addition to my home helps out greatly.‘

The School Bag

After reading about Cory’s Prague-style bag I started to drool with lust at a beautiful, earthy, practical bag at such prices. Alas, they were out of the one I wanted and weren’t sure when the Czechs would be sending more. By chance I was walking down Greenwich St. and passed Joseph Hanna’s store. It’s one of those very New York places I’m so happy to discover.

The slick website doesn’t accurately represent the shop, see the Services page for a pic of what is really looks like: part showroom, part shop where they make all the leather goods (and the prices are lower in the store). The owner, Joseph, greeted us on the sidewalk, ushered us in, rushed around showing us everything, and while his son made us complimentary keychains he told us the story of how he left everything he had in Syria as a young man to come to America where he learned his craft. I paid more than Cory did for his bag, but after Joseph made me promise I’d come back every three months for polish and to check the stitching I felt I’d found something better.

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Categorized as Products

Exposing Company-Customer Tension

Not long ago I wrote about balanced design, design that benefits both the company and the customer. There’s an evident tension between company and customer: companies want to do less, make more money, gather more information, etc. Customers want better products and services, spend less money, retain more privacy, etc. The two parties meet somewhere in-between, hopefully in a solution that balances both sets of wants and needs.

Jess McMullin has introduced the idea of value-centered design (.ppt), where value is generated from “…the intersection of business goals and context, individual goals and context, a product offering, and a delivery channel.” It’s easier said than done, but with all the work already done on business management and on user-centered design, a way of balancing these two goals deserves more attention.

Actually creating balance can take a number of forms, but before this can happen a company needs to acknowledge that the tension exists (many people in corporations have no interaction whatsoever with their customers). So the process of creating balance could start by exposing the tension between company and customer. Imagine you are designing a new product and have a meeting to discuss what form it should take. Imagine inviting these people to the same meeting:

  • The CFO and the product manager
  • Marketing and interface design
  • Sales and information architecture

By simply bringing diverse points of view together we can expose and start to resolve the company-customer tension. The particular people will be different in each organization. For example, in insurance companies it’s the underwriting and sales departments. Underwriting wants customers to fill out long forms (the data from which, btw, can help with product development) and sales wants easier, faster ways for customers to buy policies.

So this tension can be exposed even before the customer has been brought in, simply by putting two people in the same room, describing the potential product, and having them to fight it out. Sometimes convincing people through negotiation can be more powerful than by showing them reams of customer data.

More on the Origin of Personas

Laurie Vertelney writes in after seeing my take on the Origin of Personas. …It seems like we’d been using scenarios for ages to do design work at Apple and at HP Labs before that. (mid-late 80s) I was personally inspired by some of the work at MITs Architecture Machine Group back in the early 80’s…

I’ve added more of her comments to that post.

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Categorized as Process

Good Design → Use → Data → Innovation

Recently I read a project brief that nicely summarized the problems with a web-based ordering system. They were able to see the connection — which is often indirect — between good design and innovation. The brief admitted the product both looked esthetically poor and was hard to use. As a result potential customers were lost to competitors (in this case, the product was poor enough that the delta between it and the competition was brutally clear).

Often the design argument would end there: the product wasn’t designed well and was resulting in poor sales, so design work is needed, period. But here’s where they were able to see deeper into their business, connecting quality with operations and even strategy. Because the product wasn’t being used, they weren’t able to gather valuable data about what their customers do, and so they didn’t have the data they needed to inform product innovation efforts. Qualities that were previously perceived as unimportant such as navigation and visual design were ultimately hindering their ability to develop one product into a product line, and to place development emphasis on the products customers really wanted.

Given this connection, we could (and, arguably, should) approach the problem from the other direction. If a company is getting beaten up by competitor’s products, we need to know why. In other words we need to gather data about the situation. In product strategy the challenge is not knowing which of the possible alternatives is the best, and the best data to inform this decision is only gathered after the product is in the marketplace. But if, as in our example, the product is already in the marketplace, it can be less expensive to improve it and get the needed feedback rather than costly experiments with new products. This is, of course, subject to relative development costs of each approach as well as opportunity costs.

Another Banner Year for IA

More tools, more translations, more learning resources, more jobs, more features, more seminars, and more hanging out with good, smart people. All this at cheaper prices than last year, in some cases it’s even free. It’s the second year of the Asilomar Institute. Yay for us!

We’re also holding elections for the Board of Directors, and to continue the goodness we need to the best leaders we can find. Is that you?

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Categorized as AIfIA

Edmonton UX Job

If I was just starting out and living anywhere near Edmonton, I’d jump at the chance to work with Jess and Gene. They’re smart guys, and they pretty much rule the Alberta UX market.

I love that companies with a clue are now hiring “User Experience Consultants” rather than mere designers or whatever, it really speaks to the level of work being done.

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Categorized as Companies

Tucker Carlson

Tucker Carlson is a conservative/liberterian I’m actually able to listen to and enjoy. He’s got interesting, intelligent guests and manages to focus on conversation without boring the audience. He’s also the rare young man who looks good in a bow tie.

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Categorized as Politics

Running on Empty

Peter G. Peterson was recently on Charlie Rose discussing his new book, Running On Empty : How The Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It (here’s an excerpt). Here’s two paragraphs that sum up his argument:

The theological war between Republicans and Democrats is bankrupting our future. Our two parties have organized themselves around two lopsided and mutually exclusive world views: Democrats believe every American is “entitled” to government largesse, while Republicans see only the ball and chain of punitive taxation. Each of these views has a set of self-justifying “myths.” But their consequences go well beyond making our political process seem foolish. While federal deficit projections soar to dangerous heights, threatening our kids with unconscionable tax hikes, these myths have polarized the two parties and ruled out the sort of bipartisan consensus Americans need to avert fiscal catastrophe.

During the early years of both Social Security and Medicare, Congress kept tax rates unrealistically low and awarded ever-higher benefits to new retirees who had contributed only for a year or two. That meant that the children of the World War II generation (including the boomers) would have to contribute at much higher tax rates over their entire working lives just to keep benefits flowing to their parents. It’s even worse news for today’s young Americans, whose payroll tax rate will have to double to fund the demographic tsunami of retiring boomers unless the system is reformed.

Peterson points out that 1/3 of Americans go into retirement with no savings, relying entirely on social security, meaning it is not only crucial but more susceptible to a crash when the baby boomers retire than many people think.

He also criticizes the Republicans for wanting to extend their tax cuts and make them permanent, despite the goal being short-term economic stimulation.

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Categorized as Politics

The cost of war

From now until November I’ll probably be blogging more on American politics, both to refine my views and because this here is my little soapbox. You’ve been warned.

The Bush campaign’s assertion that “The world is a better place without Saddam” is absolutely true. Saddam is an evil man. But this statement looks only at the benefit of the Iraqi war and not the costs. We started a war to remove Saddam and find his weapons (the latter based on circumstantial evidence). We did remove Saddam and there were collateral benefits like scaring Syria into giving up it’s arms program. Both good things.

What is this worth to us? It’s hard to say, but the line has to be drawn somewhere. When I look at how much the war cost I think we crossed way over any reasonable person’s line.

First we should look at the cost in human life. The coalition fatalities number over 1,000. The estimates of Iraqi civilian fatalities range from 7,000 to between 21,700 and 55,000. Around 5000 Iraqi soldiers died. The “lucrative” contracts resulted in at least 111 contractors missing or dead. And at least 30 journalists are dead.

We might remember how utterly stunned we were at the nearly 3,000 deaths on September 11, 2001. If we multiply that number by four it still isn’t the at least 13,000 people killed in Iraq.

The Cost of War site has a great financial analysis (summary: $122 billion and counting). The figure of $1,700 cost per U.S. household is particulularly interesting when you compare it to the few hundred Bush gave each household in tax savings.

The Institute for Policy Studies’ costs of the war is a more complete list, including indirect costs on the economy, health, and international relations.

Update: Thinking more about this, I have to remember how evil Saddam was, and quantify it likewise. It’s thought that he has killed a million Iraqis, both through war and in terror, in a country of 22 million people. Comparing the numbers — as cold as that is — it seems worth it.

John Z. points out that we spent four times the gross national income of Iraq during the war, raising the idea of how we could’ve given that money to Iraqis to fix the problem instead. Technically it’s against international law to put a price on a national leader (not that international law has stopped the Bush administration), but some economic incentives to the Iraqi army might have done wonders to avoid any war at all. After all, we’re the capitalists, we should know how to spend this money better than anyone.