Hmmmm, I wonder if Christopher Alexander would like What’s Better? Isn’t this the sort of thing he was talking about to test something’s ‘wholeness’, simply comparing two things to see which people liked more?
I’m not kidding.
Category: Design
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Design By Numbers
I had heard of DBN a while ago, but didn’t realize you could download it. What’s this, the MIT Media Lab actually releasing something that will benefit the real world? Link via Andrew.
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Great Product Name
I wish I could come up with product names like the Eureka 4885AT Whirlwind Omega Upright True Hepa Bagless Cyclonic Vacuum Cleaner.
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Testing Second-Order Effects of Branding
Jared Spool offers some interesting advice when it comes to testing an institution’s branding:
Under the direction of Walt, Disney built the brand quality that they are ‘magical’. Adults interacting going to a Disney resort see the ‘magic’ in the design of their products, both in the direct interaction with the elements of the resort and with their children’s response to the elements.
Would a child ever tell you that Disney’s main quality is ‘magic’? Would an adult for that fact? Not without a lot of coaching or pressure.
To measure whether Disney’s site is ‘magical’, we’d need to measure the second-order effects of being magical. We’d need to talk about how a ‘magical’ site manifests itself — what happens when it is magical and when is it not magical?
For these types of qualities, first-order effects are often difficult to measure while second-order effects are easy. The only problem is: do you know what the second-order effects are?
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Monday
Introducing Monday.
I can hear it now: ‘Monday we’ll meet with Monday…’
That PWC could pull a MarchFirst says to me either the management has as much taste in names as Accenture or that they’re really embracing new economy ways. Suddenly Razorfish doesn’t sound so ground-breaking anymore. We’ll have to push further out. Maybe Emmanuel, Shine, or Intestine.
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Audi Case Study
Jim Kalbach published his case study of the Audi.com and Audi.de sites. Highlights: GoLive for schematics, dynamic layout changing with browser width, and heavy usability testing of the non-conventional navigation.
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Web Design Books, Summer 2002
I just strolled through my local gigantic Barnes & Noble. I think I saw more computer books in one place than ever before. Some observations:
There are a surprising number of books on designing with usability in mind, which is reasuring.
There are plenty of general web design books, so many it must be hard for novices to choose among them.
The polar bear book was the only IA book on the shelves :( .
There are intermediate topics that aren’t addressed well. For example, Web Navigation was probably great when it came out, addressing a need of early web designers. But it’s out of print and, frankly (despite all the good things it has to say about my employer :), outdated. It sprung from a pre-Flash, pre-DHTML world and doesn’t do interaction design, much less all the innovations of Amazon, Google, and social networks. I’ve seen navigation done from a tech perspective, but I haven’t seen the ‘Interaction Design for the Web’ book, with a Shneiderman-like attention to human factors combined with a balanced look at navigation on the web.
I finally paged though Don’t Make Me Think. It’s awesome. Great thinking, great book design. I think I already know most of the lessons, but I might buy it anyway.
An aside: I keep expecting B&N to bridge their website and their stores by offering some sort of in-store kiosks. If I’m looking for a specific book, I’d like to do a quick search and find out if they have it and what section it’s in.
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Design Patterns for Capturing Knowledge
John Thomas and his colleagues at IBM are working on a design pattern language for Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). Of it, he emails:
My colleagues and I are working on a different but related topic: a socio-technical pattern language…we don’t expect every software developer to familiarize themselves with a couple decades of CSCW and social science literature before building a system. So, the socio-technical pattern language is meant to encapsulate what “works” in terms of social systems and help the developer build something that makes sense pragmatically and semantically as well as syntactically.
I like that he isn’t selling the pattern language as a design solution. Instead, it’s a documentation solution. Unfortunately design patterns became oversold before they could be used to design anything, and ideas like John’s get me excited about their potential again, if only for documenting knowledge well.
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Internet R&D
Mr Patent: ‘There’s an endless series of problems, things that the company needs us to solve, and we go and do that.’
I wonder if any Internet companies have dedicated R&D departments for finding solutions to problems (as opposed to developing new products), or if we all keep fixing the same things repeatedly in different situations?
Another quote from that article: ‘But you know what? Universities are slow! They’re collections of individuals doing their own research. I missed working for a big organization with smart colleagues who were all in it together, working toward a single goal. But it took me a few years to figure that out.’
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Lockheed Project Management
Fast Company has an interesting article on the management approach at Lockheed Martin that led to winning the U.S. Joint Strike Fighter contract. One important point is the willingness of the Pentagon to prove out the technology during the bidding process: ‘The defense department gave both Boeing and Lockheed $1.1 billion in funding to develop prototypes for the head-to-head fly off, and it set up a fire wall on the amount that each company could spend directly on the JSF.’
Another point is their approach to doing a premortem:
The team’s best hope for staying on schedule is to anticipate problems and fix them before they occur. To do that, managers from Lockheed and its partner companies, Northrop and BAE, undertook an ambitious postmortem: They compiled an exhaustive database of setbacks and lessons learned on virtually all of the world’s modern tactical-aircraft development programs. Then they did a premortem: They plotted their lessons-learned analysis on a graph that runs from 2001 to 2011. The graph enabled them to identify 10 future inflection points — dates when the risk of a setback runs high.
I’ve done postmortem’s to learn the mistakes of a project, and premortems to guess what may go wrong on a new project, but to plot the potential pitfalls over time extends the benefits of this planning process further than the initial meetings.
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Things that act differently should look differently
Speaking of ripping off Don Norman, I’m reminded of this faucet I saw recently:
Instead of hot on the left and cold on the right, the knob on the left controls the temperature and the knob on the right controls the pressure. I noticed the temperature markings on the left knob, so I understood this. U. pointed out to me that this could be handy over time, just set the temperature to your favorite setting instead of having to balance the hot/cold mix every time. But this faucet looks like other faucets, and situations that could involve scolding hot water aren’t times to play with conventions. Especially in this case, which was in a public restroom.
In my kitchen I have a faucet like this, which accomplishes the temperature setting feature while retaining the left and right convention and does so using only one control. But something about how the lever floats in two dimensions feels clumsy to me.
