Noise Between Stations

Author: Victor

  • A coffee education

  • The challenge of the 21st century

    Forty-nine countries have agreed to participate in a 10-year project to collect and share thousands of measurements of the Earth, ranging from weather to streamflow to ground tremors to air pollution with anticipated benefits ranging from weather forecasts to energy consumption estimates to predictions of disease outbreaks. As usual, it’s not the design of the system that’s the big challenge:

    “We have been able to make computers work together. The challenge of the 21st century is to get people to work together… It will not be the technology that limits it, it will be the sociology,” Leavitt [head of the U.S. EPA] added, noting that the problem will be overcoming bureaucracy, politics, turf.

    Link courtesy of Brett.

  • How do we actually achieve great design?

    Organizations that have hired talented designers don’t always produce good designs. For those of us who are designers, there are many, sometimes frustrating reasons. For organizations, there is a complex interworking of goals, communications, organizations, processes, tools, and relationships that may or may not positively influence the quality of design.

    In the past ten years I’ve designed well over 30 digital products. Reflecting on all the people and companies I’ve worked with, the design work was only a fraction of what I actually did. For example, recently I’ve written about how I’ve been helping companies refine their goals, sharing the lessons of established disciplines, and approaching design from the business perspective.

    So I’ve decided to deliberately do all of this, beyond designing products, to help organizations improve their design capabilities. I’ve resigned my full-time position and will soon start consulting with this new focus. It’s about achieving the innovation that comes from integrating design practices on the strategic level, managing products, and building the right teams and processes to reach business goals. If you head an organization and would like to improve how you manage design, email me: victor at victorlombardi.com.

    These are wicked problems that can’t be solved by applying someone else’s best practices or installing yet another software package. They get to the core of how people work together to make great design possible. And I’m pretty damn excited to do it.

  • Applying for an IA job

    Michael lays out the advice very nicely.

  • 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.

  • That Swatch commercial

    Does anyone know which musician created the music for the new Swatch commercial? It’s gets me all dancy and stuff.

    Found it: It’s Five for Fighting’s Something About You (.wav) (iTunes). Whew.

  • 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.

  • Elevators demand poems

    The The Paris Review Book for Planes, Trains, Elevators, and Waiting Rooms is a compilation from the journal that asserts “reading is the last refuge from the real-time epidemic. To that end, the selections gathered here are grouped by how long they offer escape from real time: waiting rooms need long stories, for example, while elevators demand poems.”

    Brilliant user experience-oriented organization.

  • 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.‘

  • Interactionary

    Jess has a new blog to share his big thoughts, bless his heart.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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?