Noise Between Stations – Page 18

Noise Between Stations

A Tiny, Giant Shift to Design Thinking

If someone were to ask me to sum up in a tiny nutshell what I thought would be the single most useful change to make to start using design thinking, I’d recommend reducing the frequency of the times we ask, “Can we do this?” and increasing the frequency of the times we ask, “How can we do this?” It seems a small change, but in practice it involves changing how people communicate and make decisions, and therefore into culture. And cultures don’t change easily.

But — except for a few dozen very passionate people — no one is asking this question, which is perhaps another challenge.

4/10/2007
Do Publishers Underestimate Techies?

Headline: Killing Page View is Suicide Publishing experts have proclaimed that the death of the ‘page view’ is near. This consensus is heated by the adoption of a new Web development technique called AJAX, but AJAX holds hidden dangers for publishers.

Or, we could just use mod_rewrite to create unique URLs for each AJAX page. Problem solved. (Or, we could focus on possibly more useful metrics, like unique visitors, revenue generated, ads viewed…)

If Google has taught us anything, it’s that throwing a bunch of PhDs and engineers at hard technical problems can yield great results. The technical problems aren’t the hard ones, it’s the human problems that are hard.

4/2/2007
IA Summit 2007
I was in Las Vegas last weekend for the Information Architecture Summit. It’s a great balance of intellectual stimulation and after-hours fun, and the only problem with the record attendance is not spending time with all the wonderful people there.

I’ve gone the past several years, and it’s interesting to see the community maturing both personally and professionally. For example, I led a workshop on Internet business strategy and feared this audience might not want to stray far from the tactics of business, but I was happily surprised by the rich discussion.

Here’s the materials from a few sessions I found most useful…
- Chris Fahey’s Interaction Design Style
- Alex Kirtland’s Introduction to Prediction Markets
- Jess McMullin’s Project Touchstones
- Rashmi Sinha’s story of moving from designer to CEO
And a couple I missed but everyone was talking about…
- Stephen Anderson’s Creating the Adaptive Interface
- Andrew Hinton’s Architectures for Conversation
4/1/2007
Blogosphere Question: Time-Based Search?

If I wanted to see what people were writing about on Internet industry blogs during a certain time frame, say the first two weeks of November, 2005, how might I do that?

3/20/2007
coitusvision

If you could filter twittervision by activity, you could re-create the scene in Amelie where you see everyone in Paris having sex at that exact moment.

3/20/2007
Seeing the Real Difference Between Art and Design

The Sartorialist blog has been a big hit, with each post getting dozens of comments. Why? On the surface it’s the usual blogger story: an individual with insight on a particular topic publishes quickly and honestly sans organizational overhead.

To me, the Sartorialist does something else important. He delineates the difference between art and design. Many publications aimed at the fashion consumer, whether it be men’s magazines or even the New York Times, present clothes as art. I imagine the editors are fashionistas, and publish for (the taste and budgets of) other fashionistas. The Sartorialist on the other hand covers what people actually wear and so has something of agile in it, quickly revealing what people are and do. It’s field research with a point of view.

3/13/2007
Happy Birthday NBS

This blog turned 8-years old on Saturday, which in person years is about 61.

3/12/2007
Search Conversation from the Future

Dick: Did you run that 37Signals SearchSniffr tool against the site? What does that thing do anyway?”
Jane: It takes terms from our logs and related sites’ logs and uses them in search queries, and then generates a report. I have it here somewhere… here it is. The Sniffr Sensitivity is 87, which is too high. We’re still getting too many empty results and not enough best bets.
Dick: So what do we do?
Jane: We use the Synonym Makr and Zipfr to fine tune things until we get that Sensitivity score down below 60.”
Dick: Nice.

Yahoo and Google have made search the dominant finding paradigm out there, but once you arrive at a particular website the search is usually much less useful. It’s time we had better tools to make search great everywhere. Lou and Richard are addressing the ideas behind this and opening up a rich area for innovation.

3/11/2007
Want to Be An Expert? Practice for Ten Years

In Daniel Coyle’s article on Russian tennis players we receive another interesting tidbit from the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. We already knew about the need for feedback, but this is the first I’ve heard of the Ten-Year Rule: “an intriguing finding dating to 1899, which shows that even the most talented individual requires a decade of committed practice before reaching world-class level.”

That makes me feel better about all the skills I’m still struggling with.

And if you’re looking to turn your child into a super athlete, the U.S. Olympic committee leverages the ten-year rule to provide advice on windows of optimal trainability.

3/6/2007
Need Help Providing Internet Education to the Disadvantaged

The skinny here is that I’d like to work on correcting the uneven access to Internet jobs (great jobs, btw) by providing education to the disadvantaged. By disadvantaged I mean — here in New York City — mainly blacks and Hispanics, but generally those with lower income. I’m not sure how organizations who provide such services identify customers in this segment. I’ve already got some plans in the works for an educational service, and a small but important component of it is figuring out how to make the education available more widely.

Lately this has become a hotter topic in the blogosphere — with Kottke sparking a thread and Zeldman, Nick, Mike, and Anil supporting this point of view.

Someone asked, Where are the barriers then? Here’s a few:
(more…)

2/26/2007
No-Knead Product Design

Lou dropped off a loaf of this amazing no-knead bread that’s all the rage among home cooks these days (recipe). It was and continues to be delicious, and as I munched through the crunchy exterior into the large crumb I pondered Lou’s search for a no-knead information architecture. My brain loves reducing complex processes to heuristics to make life simpler, so I’ve been looking for the equivalent for my job: no-knead product design. After chatting with some Overlappers tonight, here’s my first pass:
(more…)

2/25/2007
Ken Bain’s Research on College Teachers

Ken Bain came to Pratt last night to discuss his amazing research on teaching. Twenty years ago he and his colleagues worked to identify the best college teachers in America. They then examined how those teachers did research, planned courses, and taught classes. It’s all summed up in his excellent book, What the Best College Teachers Do.

They found that all of these teachers thought of their work as paradigm-building, breaking down old models inside students’ minds and building up new ones. The importance of this is illustrated by a story in the book about physics students who, after they had taken the introductory course, still held an Aristotelian and not a Newtonian understanding of the world, much to the teachers’ dismay.

Bain described three conditions for paradigm-building:

(more…)

2/23/2007
How To Talk to Your Kids

While this research says talking more and more encouragingly to your kids increases their IQ, this research says (I believe) when kids get to be about 5 years old then focused praise is better.

2/23/2007
Welcome Fast Company Readers!

Noise Between Stations is an official FC Read. A big welcome to first timers. Feel free to leave a comment and let me know what kind of design-innovation-internet topics interest you.

2/22/2007
Web 2.0 & Web 1.5

Have you ever upgraded software and then wish you hadn’t?

That’s the feeling I get sometimes when using the new generation of rich user interface websites. Many are great, though some seem to be going over-the-top in a play for attention. We made some great strides with Web 1.5, simplifying the UI and increasing text size and amount of white space. And these apps sometimes still perform better than their Web 2.0 contenders. I tried Yahoo’s beta mail for a while then switched back to the less finicky classic version. Renkoo seems to have so much potential as an Evite-killer, but the slick interface made it harder and more error-prone to create an invite, so I’m sticking with Goovite.

Until our design skills catch up with our technology, will we need to return to GOMS analysis?

2/22/2007