Author: Victor

Zooming

Some terse notes from the free bits of Seth Godin’s Survival Is Not Enough. I find his prose a bit wordy, but I think he’s trying not only to communicate the ideas but also to inspire.

  • Evolution in business is a theme…‘Extinction is part of the process of creation. Failure is the cornerstone of evolution’ and ‘[Kinko’s] had a posture about change that treated innovations and chaos as good things, not threats’ and ‘Sooner or later, every winning strategy stops working. The competition catches up. Technology changes.’
  • Small, quick, cheap feedback loops allow for low-risk experimentation. Ask: ‘How much will it cost to find out if it works, how long will it take and how much damage will be done if we’re wrong?‘
  • Factories – any kind of large, long-term investment – make it hard for companies to change. Lease, don’t buy.
  • Echoing the broken windows theory, he cites the stupid little things big companies do to piss off customers, reminding us that small customer interactions matter
  • ‘Discovering your winning strategy and saying it aloud is critically important in getting ready to change it. The easiest way I can describe for finding your strategy is to do this: Figure out what changes in the outside world would be the worst possible things that could happen to your company. (No fair picking something that affects every business . . . it’s got to be something that is specific to your industry.)’
  • ‘Competent people resist change. Why? Because [giving up what they do well] threatens to make them less competent.’
  • ‘Knowing when to pile on (as AOL did once ICQ started to succeed) or when to abandon ship (as Amazon did with their Junglee shopping service) is an art.’
  • And yet, sending signals that you are a robust company (an expensive lobby) affects – as in sexual signals – a client’s perception: ‘The companies that can waste the time and money to send these signals are the ones that we believe are more likely to have the resources to provide good customer support, more likely to be in business years from now…Signals aren’t right or wrong. Instead, they either work or they don’t.’
  • On assholes that don’t work well in groups: ‘A bully gets what she wants at the expense of the group’s well-being. And because bullies operate from a zone of fear, they’re the most likely to effectively oppose change of any kind…Firing people is dramatically underrated as a management strategy.’
  • And last but not least, and one big reason I left SBI/Razorfish: ‘Choose Your Customers, Choose Your Future…Every time you interact with clients, you swap memes with them. They affect the work you do, the prices you charge, the rate at which you change and the kind of person you hire.’

Behavior vs. Opinion

This Usability.gov page succinctly captures the qualities of different testing methods. I keep encountering people who want to run surveys (to keep the customer at arms length?) instead of one-to-one usability studies. The mnemonic I’ll keep in my head to remember this difference in meetings is behavior vs. opinion, qualitative vs. quantitative.

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Blogging Heads

Mark comments, ‘This is one of the sad things about the computer world right now: everybody knows better, and hardly anybody seems willing to do the work.’

and yet…

‘This is one of the great things about computer science right now: you can walk in off the street, roll up your sleeves, and with a little hard work and fortitude you can be right at the research frontier.’

I’m finding this to be true, having turned my attention to what academia has to say about navigation and forging through the literature. But for practitioners it’s not easy; one must find time, access journals, decode researcher-speak, and still have energy left to build on what’s been learned.

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Multiple Concurrent Releases

‘ About five years ago, Farmers moved from this ad-hoc approach to projects to the implementation of a release methodology that ensures monthly delivery of one of three concurrent releases on a 90-day software development lifecycle, for a total of 12 throughout the year. According to Fridenberg, the business and IT arrive at defined deliverables, which are then prioritized and scheduled through an in-house-built capacity model that tracks the disposition of development resources. ‘

Interesting approach to evolving rather than redesigning (like Amazon), from an article in Insurance & Technology that’s not worth reading otherwise.

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Light Cycle

The pyrotechnic birthday celebration by and for Central Park, Light Cycle, was awesome. What it lacked in size and shape it made up for in experience as thousands of New Yorkers huddled together in the rain around the reservoir to witness the show. It was wonderful to see fireworks in a new composition, different than the usual July 4th progression.

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The Brides of Central Park

Walking through the park today, we saw four or five wedding parties taking photos in one area. I started snapping photos of them, and walking on each corner we turned produced more brides .

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Breadcrumbs as Outline

Reading about breadcrumbs and wondering if people don’t use them that much because they’re trying too hard to establish a new convention, or pushing a new mental model of going back that’s different than how we think about going back.

Maybe instead of HOME > CATEGORY > PAGE we should try to leverage a sub-genre people already find familiar, like the outline…

HOME
  CATEGORY
    PAGE

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The Blackout of 2003

Michael has the best blackout story I’ve heard yet.

The best blackout idea I’ve heard yet was from a waiter who said, ‘We should do this every year.’ Yes, every Earth Day. If we could plan for it, there’d be no commuters trapped on trains, and we’d keep power going to essential places. But all residential power would go for one day. That would be good.

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My Website Doesn’t Smell Good

“Hey Kathryn. Hello? What’s wrong?”
“My website doesn’t smell good.”
Brad had stopped by for his morning cup to go (large, French roast, black). I thinks he likes me, but he never asks me out. “Oh, come now. I’m sure your website smells fine.”
“That’s not what Mr. Nahzah says. He looked at the home page and couldn’t smell where to find the French Roast. I almost gave the poor guy a heart attack. Here,” I swivel the screen towards him, “is it really that bad? Can you find the French Roast?”
“Let’s see, Home, Blends, Grinds, Beans…” A pause. A really long pause. I know he’s confused, and he knows I know this. He pinches his nose, “Damn girl, that website stinks!”
I slap him, laughing.
Brad grins, “Seriously, the labels don’t really help me find what I’m looking for. Maybe if they were longer, or you could put a picture there.”
“How am I going to fit a picture in there?”
“Well, why do you need to use this nav bar?”
“What’s a nav bar?”
“This thing on the side. Why do you need it? Isn’t it just boxing you in?”
“Uh, yeah, I guess. But a lot of websites do that.”
“Come now. Do you run your cafe like other cafes?”
“Of course not. Most cafes are totally lame.”
“Right. So stop being lame.” He shoots me his best mock-intense eyes, gently challenging me.
“I hate you. This is a lot harder than I thought it would be.”
He drew out his words in a mocking tone. “‘This sooooo hard.’ C’mon. It’s not like you’re curing cancer, you’re moving stuff around on the screen. Have fun with it.”
I stared at him and let out a heavy sigh. I feigned vulnerability and tried to create a moment, give him an opportunity, but he didn’t pick up on it.

Krug Report

Steve Krug last night was his usual humble, humorous self with more than enough advanced common sense to please everyone. He spoke of kayaks (unexpected user behavior that’s not all that bad, like rolling over in a kayak), boxfish, and a missing chapter from the book: Why Your Website Should Be a Mensch. Indeed.

The one revelatory idea I remember was that, regarding accessibility, screen readers need to improve. It can be uncomfortable to think about not accepting full responsibility for improving accessibility, but he has a point: better screen readers will remove a huge burden from everyone else involved.

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The Real Origin of Personas

Alan Cooper, in his new column The Origin of Personas, claims to have developed personas as an original idea. While he qualifies his words (“introduced the use of personas as a practical interaction design tool”, ” the history of Cooper personas” (stress mine)), he cites the first published mention of them was 1998’s The Inmates Are Running the Asylum.

I learned them from Tog, who discusses their use in his 1992 book Tog on Interfacecuses on the scenario aspect of personas, but the same technique of selecting a small set of prototypical users is there. He in turn cites Laurie Vertelney‘s 1989 CHI paper on Drama and Personality in User Interface Design which Jakob Nielson summarizes for us.

Update: Laurie found this post and writes in:

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 80s. It just seemed obvious to me that in order to invent future user interfaces-you have to envision specific “types” of people engaged with the technology you are creating. I’ve been using this technique literally for decades.

So perhaps there were parallel efforts, or maybe some cross-fertilization took place in the Bay Area interaction design scene. In any case, it seems there are still the unwashed masses fiddling with personas and real persona creation has become the domain of the Jedi masters… Interaction designers at Cooper spend weeks of study and months of practice before we consider them to be capable of creating and using personas at a professional level. Many practicing designers have used the brief 25-page description of personas in Inmates as a "Persona How-to" manual, but a complete "How-to" on personas has yet to be written.

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