Noise Between Stations

Category: Design

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Wider is better

    Someday in the not-too-distant future I will start pestering you all with urges to start leveraging auditory interfaces. But first I’ll pester you with the potential for horizontal scrolling. It seems quite useful on-screen, and those who are doing it now benefit from the novelty factor. One example is the current version of Ftrain.com, as if Paul’s writing wasn’t compelling enough, and another is Kottke’s portfolio, as if his work samples weren’t compelling enough. Seen others that rock? Lemme know at victor (at) victorlombardi.com.

    Update: Owen deflates the novelty element, with good reason, and Nick sends us Shutterbug’s tour of the Sydney International Airport, a wonderful way to tell a story in pictures. As I scroll it feels like turning contiguous pages. If this could snap into detents the way we want the backslider to it could do wonders for children’s “books”.

  • Joy Mountford Interview

    I’m happy to see a new interview with Joy Mountford, as I entered this whole field after hearing her lecture at New York University (during her tenure at Apple) over 10 years ago. The idea that someone with a psychology background was making computers easier to use was revolutionary for me. This is only a chat, but she includes some good points…

    I think that every five years there has been a shift of the interface paradigm that I have worked within, which also paralleled technology industry waves. Defense business interests shifted into the AI knowledge worker space, then from the specialized AI work into personal computing (Apple), and then consumer electronics (Interval). Now my interests are in ubiquitous computing or the advent of “smart everyday objects.” …Businesses ask me to offer insights on the future of “computing”. That’s obviously a gigantic subject, so I usually talk to them about those user interface paradigms transitions…

    I invited some film people to come and work in my group (at Apple) and create new uses and directions for it. They helped create Navigable Movies, which was the precursor to QuickTime VR… I think this was a really good illustration of what happens when you put technology in the hands of people who think of doing different things with it. I believe interface people should foster such creativity and experiments by encouraging some different things to happen.

    I’m actually obsessed right now about why everything’s so miniature. People are not getting smaller, yet the displays and control surfaces are. I want the biggest buttons. I don’t care what it costs.

    There’s a big difference between industrial design and interface design. …experience design takes place over time… A solution may be found quickly but experience occurs over time — belonging to a bigger space.

    I miss the purity of products. I like to know that when I buy a phone it just makes phone calls and is optimally designed for that.

  • YWCA Identity

    The power and effectiveness of the new YWCA logo is worth reading about, in Speak Up, Design Observer, and Landor.

  • Everyone’s punk rock band

    The nice people at Amazon recently delivered a book on design history along with all-time quarterback from Death Cab for Cutie songwriter/frontman Ben Gibbard, a lo-fi homemade recording. Reading one while listening to the other is oddly complementary. Gibbard, playing simple and melancholy pop songs, self-reflexively sings of his relationship to his punk rock influences…

    And if we could break the rules that were already
    Broken before we were born,
    Then we could hold them to their guns
    Cause we’d be a punk rock band too

    In the book, they recount the design trends of the past. Art Nouveau, in UX terms, emphasized esthetics while the Bauhaus emphasized usability. The Modernists did away with all decoration, having the form follow the function, and so on. And of course the effects of all this on people and society was argued through essays as well as artifacts as passionately as we do today.

    So now when I see gurus come along with something like expectation design it looks like they’re treading on well-worn ground. Yes, the intracacies of digital design are new and different, but the higher level of how design affects people has been addressed for a hundred years. I start to understand why the traditional design press doesn’t always take UX design seriously. When it comes to design theory we’re green.

    I didn’t know about design history because I hadn’t lived through it, and had never read it. I’m now feeling more sympathetic to all those LIS folks who feel like they’ve been doing information architecture for decades. When you look at their artifacts it seems they haven’t, and yet in conceptual ways they sometimes have.

    Given the variety of our backgrounds (my education was in the liberal arts, and training was first in IT), a lot of us probably haven’t read the design history. We all want to invent punk rock, and it’s a little humbling when we realize we’re just repeating what Thonet did 140 years ago. As Mr. Gibbard would say,

    What could they possibly do next to shock the crowd?
    “We’re gonna rock rock rock you, make you scream out loud”
    Bad boys whatcha gonna?

    Learn more:

  • Razorfish acquired, again

    This time for $160 million, by aQuantive, who owns Avenue A. SBI had picked up Razorfish for $8.2 million less than two years ago, but also added MarchFirst, iXL, Scient, Lante, etc. to the mix. Would be interesting to do the math and see how much SBI actually made on the flip (sorry to put it in cold financial terms, but I think that’s all there is to it).

    It’s an amazing brand story as well. Consider the strength of the Razorfish name:

    • In the early days Razorfish acquired several other companies but always kept the Razorfish name.
    • After SBI aquired the companies mentioned above, it only rebranded after acquiring Razorfish.
    • And now it lives on as Avenue A/Razorfish.

    That name is probably a temporary combination to educate the market, it’ll be interesting to see what the final name becomes. Certainly a lesson in building a brand reputation, even an infamous one.

    Contrast with how Semaphore — along with some others — was recently folded into Arc, part of the Publicis group. I’m kinda sad to see the old Semaphore site go away, they had a niche that made sense.

  • What do markets buy?

    ‘Markets don’t buy products, customers do.‘ —Tom Peters

    A great argument for complementing marketing with design.

  • Side Chair No. 14

    I’m getting over my prejudice of chair-happy designers (why must every designer do a chair?). Niels Diffrient, designer of Humanscale’s Freedom and the new Liberty, describes the chair, in the new Metropolis, as ‘a psychological challenge: all architects and designers of note have chosen the chair as their ultimate note. it’s gotten to be hallowed ground.‘ We spend an enormous amount of time sitting, and so the chair has universal appeal.

    A wonderful example of innovation-via-chair is Thonet’s No. 14 which was made with only six pieces of steam-bent wood, ten screws and two nuts. It addressed an exploding need for cafe-style side chairs and used highly available (in Europe) Beechwood. In 1859 it bridged the gap between craftwork and industrial production with a beautiful product.

  • Customer Loyalty and Experience Design in eBusiness

    Karl Long posted his new DMI article, Customer Loyalty and Experience Design in eBusiness: ‘I’ve tried to take the approach of connecting experience design to a business imperative, in this case customer loyalty…. This means some issues need to be addressed by the design early on before you start trying to collect more information or value, like usability and trust.‘

    A great example of an article we need more of, from someone who groks design and can connect it with business issues.