Noise Between Stations

Category: Design

  • Copywriting

    When I worked in advertising, I witnessed the magic of great copywriting. Copy can make an ad or ruin it. I was reminded of this on a recent SAS flight where the sugar packets read only, ‘As sugar dissolves, it spreads happiness,’ and the salt, ‘The color of snow, the taste of tears, the enormity of oceans.’

    In our haste to dis the (correctly perceived) superficial and purely-commercial advertising industry, we miss the opportunity to learn from its decades of experience. Sites powered by great copy, in the right situation, can be wonderful.

  • Italy as Color Palette

    This poster is cheesy, still I think those old Italian houses make a wonderful color palette.

  • Basics

  • Companies

  • Interaction Metaphor

  • Research at IDEO

    Alex Wright reviews The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO



    IDEO blurs disciplinary boundaries wherever possible. That’s especially true when it comes to research, a cornerstone of IDEO’s design process. Many design firms still treat research as a stand-alone discipline practiced by Researchers (with a capital R). At IDEO, research is everyone’s job.


  • Tools vs. Agents

    New Architect’s By Design: Wisdom from the Industry gives off lots of sparks, especially this one from Henry Lieberman, Agents Research Lead at MIT Media Lab:



    Applications and menu operations are like hammers and screwdrivers. Each is specialized to do a particular task. There’s nothing wrong with tools, but having a different tool for each task means that if you want to do too many things, you get too many tools, and it takes too many steps to do anything.

    The alternative is to cast the computer in the role of an assistant or agent, like a travel agent, a secretary, or a real estate agent. Computer agents don’t have to be as smart as a person, but they do have to be proactive. They do have to learn from interaction with the user, and they do have to be sensitive to context.


    I think another advantage might be in the form of directly replacing tools with agents, even if the number of tasks doesn’t decrease, the amount of repetitive effort will via automation. As Lieberman says, agents can be like ‘macros on steriods‘.

  • Philosophy

  • Complexity and Cars

    Go read Haughey and come back.

    No really, go ‘head. It’ll just take a sec.

    Back? Interesting, right? That Niklaus Wirth quote is how I feel about ideas like emergence. It’s interesting, but trying to replicate them in a product isn’t necessarily desirable design practice. It’s just, interesting.

    Regarding the BMW, I used to drive one (though my hopelessly middle-class mindset cringes every time I admit it) and I generally like them. Still, I’m hoping we get to a point where there’s a backlash and the demand for a simpler car arises. But building something to the tune of late-60’s simplicity is impossible because of laws necessitating specific technology. I don’t even think you’re allowed to put a carburetor in a new car, even if you invented a clean design.

  • Alex Wright

    Just discovered Alex Wright’s site, agwright.com, I didn’t realize he kept a blog.

  • Reaching Out

    I recently worked with a Fortune 200 company spec’ing work on an application for an important group of internal users. Not too long ago they had converted some of their mainframe/green screen applications to browser-based apps, but not for the right reasons and without much success. No one inside the company has interface design expertise. In fact, they barely know such an expertise exists.

    I don’t say this to ridicule them, up to now they haven’t needed such expertise or may not even be unusual among their corporate peers. But it woke me to the reality of how separate our design community is from the people who would benefit most from our services (not to mention having the money to pay for it).

    While efforts like Boxes and Arrows and the IAWiki have attracted top notch ideas and attempt to avoid or explain jargon, they don’t go far enough for those who as yet have no exposure at all to our field.

    From that perspective I feel like all our blogs and community building amounts to navel gazing. We’d have a higher profile and grow larger in numbers if more of the unconverted were converted. We need to infiltrate these groups and educate them.

    This will be difficult. And it won’t pump up our egos like receiving kudos from peers in our smaller community. But delving into unfamiliar territory – territory filled with terms like ERP, proximity badges, and storage area networks – could give us a feel for how it feels for them to hear wireframe, controlled vocabulary, and persona. They are our users, and this is how we begin to understand them.

    Communicating could be as easy as getting published in their journals. Information Week, eWeek, CIO, Baseline. Lou Rosenfeld has done it, but we need more. Hell, it might be easy to write introductory articles for this audience, and make you a few bucks too.

  • Business of Design

  • Visual and Speech Memory

    From a report on Ben Shneiderman’s visual interface work: ‘when you tell your computer to “page down” or “italicize that word” by speaking aloud, you’re gobbling up precious chunks of memory — leaving you with little brainpower to focus on the task at hand. It’s easier to type or click a mouse while thinking about something else because hand-eye coordination uses a different part of the brain, the researchers concluded.’

    Link via Peter.

  • Psychology

  • Customer Service Organization


    Dear Mr. Lombardi,

    I will forward your comments to our E-commerce department to see if this information can be added to the error screen. Please let me know if I may be of any further assistance.

    Thank you,


    Member Service Officer




    An email from my bank, this is the same problem as when I was designing a bank site…the poor saps handling the customer support are not the same poor saps designing the system, so there’s no direct connection in the feedback loop between designers and the public. Of course the designers need some time to design, but they sure as hell would make the site more friendly if it meant cutting down the amount of support they had to field.

    It gets even worse when you factor in the rest of the experience. Tonight I was lulled in by the wonderfully egalitarian ads for The Neighorhood thinking this was the revolutionary phone service that was finally customer-driven (turns out it’s MCI’s local phone service, but that’s irrelevant). By listening to their radio ads, I thought it was mobile service, not landline. What are the chances that my feedback on their advertising will go through MCI’s centralized customer support down to The Neighborhood department and back to their ad agency? Maybe like, never.

    It seems like a problem of scale, that after a certain size the communication just doesn’t happen. But it’s improbably a small company could offer phone or banking services and compete with the big companies. Where’s the sweet spot between the two, and is it possible to stay there without getting too big or too small?