Archives / July 2007

Weightlifter Charles Staley points out a new way to create a new todo in Gootodo - by voice, over the phone, via Jott.com :

"...when you call in your personalized Jott 800-number, you'll hear 'Who do you want to Jott?'"

"You answer 'To Do.' Then you speak whatever it is you'd like to add to your to-do list, and within 2-3 minutes, it'll be there on your GooToDo to-do."

From the WSJ, Ten Things Your IT Department Won't Tell You. Security concerns inside the corporation often restrict employees' access to more efficient tools, so the WSJ supplies workarounds for employees who want to work more quickly (perhaps at the expense of corporate security, alas).

For any employee who wants to become more productive, I'd first recommend the tips that the IT department would tell you - like keeping an empty inbox, using a bit lever, installing one-touch access, learning how to name files, and so on - all covered in my book Bit Literacy. There's a lot to gain by learning skills that don't compromise the company's security.

If you're interested explore more of the WSJ article's tips, many can be found in two recent books:

1. Rule the Web: How to Do Anything and Everything on the Internet---Better, Faster, Easier , by Mark Frauenfelder, founder of Boing Boing. I have a small contribution in the book (p. 380) about delivr.net, my favorite e-card service. The book is full of Web-based tips and tricks, and no matter how advanced a techie you are, I guarantee you'll learn something - probably a lot - from reading the book.

Also, Mark interviewed me about Bit Literacy in a recent Rule the Web podcast.

2. Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day, by Gina Trapani, editor of Lifehacker.com. Much like her blog, the book gives many tips on squeezing out more productivity from your limited time. Gina also wrote a review of my book recently, saying, "Folks who find Getting Things Done too vague or complicated should check out Bit Literacy."

eBay redesigned within the past few weeks and has begun using this visual as a major branding element on the homepage:

My Gel conference has used this visual as a major element on its homepage for almost three years:

Am I imagining things, or do these look strikingly similar?

Update: Tango makes a good point in the comments... another similar design predates both eBay and Gel... the MIT Media Lab, where I spent some time in the mid-90s:

P.S. Here's eBay's vertical strip, running in their banner ads now:

Back at euroGel last fall I was lucky to have Ted Dewan, from the Roadwitch project in Oxford, England, give one of the best Gel talks I've ever heard. (Here's a video clip of Ted's presentation.)

Ted uses art, activism, and community events to slow down the dangerous high-speed car traffic in his residential area. He's helping to create a good experience for everyone in the area - a closer, more cohesive community with safer streets.

And now New York City is catching the bug. In the West Village, progressive urban planners will try a new traffic-calming scheme at two dangerous intersections. From the New York Times yesterday, Where Street, Sidewalk and Sanity Intersect:

Those plans, rooted as much in philosophy as in design, draw inspiration from an item with the unlikely name of woonerfs (Dutch for "living streets"). Woonerfs are traffic systems in the Netherlands that seek to sand away the sharp boundary between driver and pedestrian, and create space that makes streets more welcoming for walkers.

... To achieve this sense of equality, roadbeds would be raised so that drivers entering the area would meet an incline — a rise of six inches over a distance of a foot — and feel a jolt if they hit the incline at any real speed. This seemingly modest adjustment, together with the feeling of driving over cobblestones, would send drivers the instant and unmistakable message that they had entered a different realm. As Mr. Schwartz put it, it would signal that they were “intruders” and would do well to slow down.

“What happens is the car goes in and it has no choice,” Shirley Secunda, the chairwoman of Community Board 2’s Transportation Committee, said of such configurations. “It has to go two or three, or at the fastest, five miles an hour, because it has to maneuver around the different kinds of furniture and landscaping to get through. So it becomes a shared street.”

Emphasis above is mine. The phrase caught my eye because Ted Dewan first got press by placing an actual living room set - rug, furniture, coffee table, TV - in the middle of his street. That certainly slowed down traffic.

Once again, here's a video clip of Ted Dewan's euroGel presentation.

See also: Salon.com piece from May 2004 about traffic calming ("A new school of traffic design says we should get rid of stop signs and red lights and let cars, bikes and people mingle together. ") Registration may be required.

• NYT on the history of the emoticon. (You know, the :) and 8-) faces.)

• BusinessWeek ran a very similar story six years ago.

• And here's a good resource on Japanese emoticons.

The robotics work of Rodney Brooks, Gel speaker Gel '04, is in this NYT story today about robots. Notice his innovation of not following the lemmings:

Each time he faced a problem in artificial intelligence, he said, he looked for the implicit assumption that everyone else took for granted, and then he tried to negate it. In the 1980s, the implicit assumption was that abstract reasoning was the highest form of intelligence, the one that programmers should strive to imitate. This led to a focus on symbolic processing, on tough tasks like playing chess or solving problems in algebra or calculus. Tasks that, as Brooks slyly put it in "Flesh and Machines," "highly educated male scientists found challenging."

But Brooks wanted to build an artificial intelligence system that did the supposedly simple things, not mental acrobatics like chess but things that come naturally to any 4-year-old and that were eluding the symbolic processing capabilities of the computers. ...

Separately, in the same NYT magazine issue, Erin McKean :'06: writes about the OEC:

[I]f you look at the word spork in the Oxford English Corpus, a 1.8-billion-word database of written and spoken English, and see how people actually write and talk about sporks, you find that 24 percent of the uses of the word spork involve violence. (In fact, some of the most common things to be sporked, far ahead of coleslaw, are eyeballs.)

People don't walk much any more in the U.S. The car seems to mediate all our traveling now. So this is "where the sidewalk ends."

The Washington Post covered this a few years back in A Walk on the Wild Side:

I can remember when -- in a suburban Washington childhood in the '60s and '70s -- walking was common, routine even. We walked to the shopping center, walked to school...

But somewhere between then and now, walking as an option in suburban America seems to have virtually disappeared. The facts bear this out. Between 1980 and today, the number of children walking to school has fallen from 70 percent to less than 10 nationwide. Walking as a means of getting from here to there is 36 times more dangerous than driving, according to the Surface Transportation Policy Project, a research and advocacy group.

...Nationally, 78,000 pedestrians were struck and injured by cars in 2001, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration; 4,882 were killed.

This is one reason I live in Manhattan, where people can and do walk (and often in parks, where cars aren't allowed).

Applegate Farms makes turkey bacon with this wording on the back of the package:

"At Applegate Farms, we don't spend a fortune on marketing and advertising. We trust our products to speak for us. Most of our customers hear about us from our friends."

And that, in three sentences, is the premise of "good experience" in business. If you focus your efforts on making a great customer experience (from turkey bacon to techie websites - whatever it is you create), then you'll maximize your chances at success. Customers are connected enough now, thanks to the Internet, that they can handle some, or all, of your marketing and advertising.

But customers will only spread the word if they have a genuinely good experience. So - how does one make a great experience? Focus on quality; be authentic; respect the customer; and most importantly, get executive buy-in. The more all this comes from the top, the better it does.

Some companies really are doing this right. One example I think of right away, from this year's Gel 2007 conference, is John Williams at Frog's Leap (see his Gel video clip), which makes great wine with an all-organic, earth-friendly growing and production process.

I also like No-Ad sunblock, which claims (and I believe them) that they create a high-quality sunblock at reasonable prices because they don't pay for advertising. They rely on word-of-mouth to advertise the product.

This isn't to suggest that advertising and marketing have no future; the meteoric success of Google should put that theory to rest. But this does say that a true customer focus is what succeeds best.

What other companies or products can you name that follow this focus on good experience?

See also: Budgeting for Advertising and Customer Experience

For the Mac geeks reading this, The Good Easy on OS X. Giles Turnbull interviewed me on the Good Easy, our custom configuration of our Macs at Creative Good, all based on the principles of Bit Literacy.

Bonus, at the bottom of that page: the inevitable grumpy comments from geeks who trash my recommendations, thereby showing their superior intelligence :) "Thank goodness I don't work for Hurst," one writes. Amen to that.

Drew Bell read Bit Literacy, put it into practice, and wrote the following (with the accompanying screenshot):

You know, it only took a few chapters of the book to make me stop and change my e-mail habits... I realized that I don't have to have active messages in front of me.

Remember how the last day of school felt every year? How it was hard to believe there was no homework for the whole summer? That's how it felt to see a clear inbox. It's a great incentive to keep it clear, too. I can get back to that warily giddy feeling every morning.

See also: Ariel's empty inbox

The good folks at tochka.jp have released their Pika Pika 2007 video, a real visual treat. It's worth watching.

Download the movie here. (Right-click and choose Save As.)

How did they do it? They write:

This animation was created from a lighting doodle project through which we met various people in various places. The surprise and joy that brought life to the doodles linked one person with another. This communication naturally took form in the work. We would like to express our deepest gratitude to all the participants!

(thanks, bb)

Today I got a Nigerian scam (or "419") e-mail with an unusual theme:

Dear Valued customer,

This e-mail is coming to you on behalf of the author of the famous Harry Potter books (J.K. Rowling) that has sold millions of copies world-wide and still selling even as we speak. As we all know, the famous Harry Potter has come to an end with the release of the last book titled: HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS

J.K Rowling, the famous and award winning author would want to appreciate all her esteeming customers for their support and purchase of the series of Harry Potter books. You were chosen by random selection on behalf of J.K Rowling alongside 18 others to fly abroad with her to South African in an all expense paid trip to Africa for 3weeks. Along with her are the various actors and actresses of the Harry potter film including Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Ron Weasley, and Emma Watson. Please in acceptance of this offer, we would want you to supply us with your important information to signify that you have accepted this invitation.

Ahh, scammers. At least they're reading.

David McQuillen gave a great talk last September at euroGel 2006 in Copenhagen. He's VP, Customer Experience at Credit Suisse in Zurich, and he thinks a lot about bringing customer experience thinking into his organization.

Here's a video clip of his euroGel talk, and here's a Fast Company piece on his work at Credit Suisse.

Today David wrote a piece about bit literacy in meetings. Though it wasn't titled explicitly as such, the column gives some excellent advice about how, and why, to let the bits go during an in-person meeting, thereby raising productivity and lowering stress.

David writes...

- - -

You're not reading this while sitting in a meeting, are you?

The other day, I was at a conference and doing my best to listen to the presenter. A woman in front of me was typing furiously on her laptop. She had her head down, face in her screen and didn't once look up at the presenter. The tap-tap-tap of the keys was distracting and I could see by the agitated fiddling of the others around her that they, too, were a little frustrated. Eventually, it all got too much and I tapped her on the shoulder, asking her if she could stop typing. She looked at me with a wide, shocked expression that gave way to anger. "I'm taking notes for my boss. I've been doing this for two days and nobody has said anything so far! I'm not stopping."

Now, let's stop this right here. She wasn't taking notes, but chatting with someone on Yahoo messenger and checking her email. Although she was sitting in the conference, she was not in the conference. Of course, she wasn't alone. There were others in the conference doing the same thing. And this wasn't unique to that conference. In the past week alone, I've been in two meetings where members of the audience (nearly 25% in one group) had their laptops open and were busily doing something other than participating in the meeting. We even see this in our Experience Labs, where observers are supposed to be watching a client use a website, but rather are watching their own laptop screen. What are they doing? By and large, they're checking email or reading documents for some other meeting they have to attend. There may be a few who are really are taking notes, but I've yet to see it.

There are two ways to look at this trend:

• First, you can, I suppose, be impressed by the masterful multi-tasking of these folks: the ability to be in a meeting, read emails, passively listen to the speaker, respond to emails, make comments in the meeting from time to time (which they expect the others to pay full attention to) and read more emails.

• Or, you can think this is rude. It's distracting to the presenter and the audience, not to mention disrespectful. It is saying to the meeting organiser, the speaker and the audience: "I have more important people to communicate with and more important things to do than be in this meeting." It's also inefficient - if people aren't fully focused on the meeting, then things take longer. This creates a bad meeting experience which wastes time for everyone.

I'd like to humbly suggest a rather obvious statement about meetings: If you're in a meeting, you should be in the meeting - not in your inbox. (This means no laptops, no emails, no Crackberries). If you can't do this, it means one of the following:

• Whatever else you're doing really is more important than the meeting. If so, you shouldn't be in the meeting.

• The meeting is too long or too boring for you. If that's true, then give some feedback to the organiser.

• You are so busy that it is impossible for you to handle all your work and must multi-task like this. If that's true, talk to your boss.

The benefit? If everyone pays attention, it means we have the right people in the room, the meeting will be more focused, the discussion will be more concise and we can all get out of there faster...and back to our inbox.

- - -

...thanks again to David for sharing his thoughts with us.

And again, you might like the video clip of his euroGel talk.

P.S. If you're intrigued by Gel, watch other Gel videos or sign up for Gel 2008.

Gina Trapani at Lifehacker wrote a review of Bit Literacy today: Book Recommendation: Master information overload with Bit Literacy

My favorite line was this: "Folks who find Getting Things Done too vague or complicated should check out Bit Literacy."

Coincidentally, one of the ways I got the book done at all is described in another post today at Lifehacker. Jerry Seinfeld's productivity secret is more or less what I used to get the first draft done.

I wonder if that helped Gina write her book, Lifehacker: 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Day.

Lifehacker readers: If you're coming here from the interview, welcome! (See more bit literacy columns or get this via e-mail.)

Following up on Disbelief in information overload, two quick pointers on emptying the inbox:

• Lifehacker polled readers about whether "emptying your email inbox [is] worth it." 44% yes, 38% sometimes, 18% no. The yeas have it.

• And from the Microsoft Exchange team, suggestions on reducing inbox count in order to optimize the performance of the tool.

There's a Zen koan that tells of a hurried and stressed businessman who comes to a Zen master for guidance. The Zen master sits down and pours the visitor a cup of tea. But even after the tea fills the cup, the Zen master continues to pour, allowing the tea to spill all over the table. The businessman says, "Stop pouring the tea! The cup is full and can't hold any more." The Zen master replies, "So it is with you. You can't accept any guidance unless you make some empty space first."

I think about that koan a lot as I advocate for bit literacy - a set of skills that focus on letting the bits go, thus liberating people to be in charge of their lives, and not enslaved to their technology. (I just wrote a book about it.) People are generally receptive to the idea, but occasionally I meet (or read a review from) someone who dismisses the idea. "Why bother?" they say. "I have thousands of e-mails to reply to, todos to act on, blogs to read, and files to organize, and I feel fine. It would be a waste of time to make an empty space." Meanwhile the tea pours all over their desk.

More often than not this reaction comes from intelligent, well-meaning, good people who just happen not to believe in information overload. Such is the case with the review of Bit Literacy in Salon.com two weeks ago, in a piece called Empty thine in-box, by my friend Scott Rosenberg. He writes:

"Hurst's method is, at its heart, profoundly alien. ... [My e-mail inbox] contains 16,694 messages. Once, I suppose, [it] must have had a zero message count -- maybe back in 1991, when I got my first e-mail account. It has not seen zero since.

"Yet I do not struggle ... My inbox is not a desk that must be cleared. It is a river from which I can always easily fish whatever needs my attention. Why try to push the river? ... Do we really want the job of in-box attendant and e-mail folder file clerk?"

Scott, and most of the other vocal skeptics of the method, share one thing in common: they have never actually tried becoming bit-literate. They pass judgment on it from the outside. Imagine a movie reviewer holding forth on a movie he never saw, or a foodie evaluating an untasted dish. Funny.

There can be many reasons why people dismiss the idea out of hand. For starters, it can be hard to admit that one needs help, or needs to change at all. It's often more comfortable to stay up-to-date with the latest tools. Whatever the technology industry releases or upgrades, and whatever the technology press (and blogosphere) says is "hot," is what some people immediately flock to. (Nice techie, good techie, sit, stay, roll over.)

But often, at the heart of the argument - and I think this is the case with Scott's piece - is a philosophical difference. The first sentence in Bit Literacy is "Bits are heavy." That's the hook of the book - the lever upon which the entire argument rests - and I think some people disagree right away. They believe that bits are weightless, frictionless, and can only help us. The more information, the better.

Thus I was happy to come across a piece in The Economist, called Too much information (reg. required), that supports my case:

More information does not necessarily lead to better decisions. [One] study ... gave horse-racing handicappers varying amounts of information when ranking horses. The more information they received, the more confident they became about their answers. But the success of their predictions was actually worse when given 40 pieces of information, than when given five.

It only makes sense. Too much information, at some point, will begin to decrease one's effectiveness. That's what Barry Schwartz wrote about in The Paradox of Choice, after all. Why is it so hard for people to accept that idea when it comes to managing their information? (Because it requires admitting that you need to change.)

It's not a difficult concept to grasp. If information overload exists at all, it follows logically that, at some degree of overload, people should make some empty space. Let the bits go.

However, if you don't believe that bits are heavy, and you don't believe in information overload, or Barry's book, or my book, or The Economist piece, then by all means, continue pouring the tea. Far be it from me, or anyone else, to tell you that your cup is only so big.

- - -

See also:

• Bit Literacy, the book on these concepts

• Barry Schwartz interviewed in Good Experience (Jan. 20, 2005)

• My interview on TomPeters.com

• Speaking invites

Ariel just got her inbox to zero. She writes:

As a result of using Gootodo, I've actually become less scheduled. No more excel spreadsheet of life. I'm a lot more relaxed and available to my life as a result. Today I'm celebrating finally getting my inbox to ZERO.

... It feels awesome.

(Send in a screenshot of your empty inbox, and a description of how it feels, to mark at goodexperience.com!)

An unusually good cooking column in the NYT last week contains 101 recipes that take 10 minutes or less:

1. Make six-minute eggs: simmer gently, run under cold water until cool, then peel. Serve over steamed asparagus.

2. Toss a cup of chopped mixed herbs with a few tablespoons of olive oil in a hot pan. Serve over angel-hair pasta, diluting the sauce if necessary with pasta cooking water.

...and so on, with 99 other recipes.

I like the terseness. Many recipes fit into a single sentence. This is pure, direct helpful instruction - no messing around with overblown graphics or rarified ingredients. (This is much the spirit in which I dispense technology picks in Uncle Mark.) Here directness and efficiency make a good experience.

What expertise do you have that you can boil down into a sentence or two? (I'm interested to see - post a comment.)

P.S. Here's the article in bit-literate clip format. (See Chapter 6 of Bit Literacy for a description of clip format and why it's important.)

Some current talk online about designers-as-facilitators reminds me of a column I wrote four years ago, Usability Professionals Must Disappear. Excerpt:

In short, a good user experience practitioner is a facilitator - someone who quietly (having disappeared) guides the process, allowing knowledge to emerge, from users and the company alike. Instead of coming in with the answers, or the framework, or (my personal favorite) "the 200 rules of user experience design," they should come in with their auditory organs turned up to eleven. Listening.

As facilitators, truly caring about the organization and how it can best serve its customers, practitioners will then be more valued.

A lot of user-experience folk disliked the column, I think in part because of the title, but today the ideas might not be considered so radical. We're finally beginning to see a more strategic outlook in the field - focused on organizations, not tactical rules; and on business performance, not academic usability tactics. This benefits everyone.

At Creative Good we've told our clients for a long time that while we bring past learnings to our work, we're not coming in as gurus. Rather, we're facilitating a process for companies to learn what their customer experience is, and how to improve it.

Gloriously bad user experience from Microsoft. One part of the operating system (the Recycling Bin) can't handle file names created by another part of the operating system. (Bonus grammar error, too!)

Thanks to Sean Zhu - posted in the This Is Broken group on Flickr.

Is it me, or is there a trend among non-fiction books to use a single common word as the title? Take, for example, the chef expose Heat - not to be confused with the global-warming book Heat - or the new strategy books Unstoppable and Peak. I wonder if there will be a land-grab for good single-word titles, before they start repeating.

Perhaps I should have named Bit Literacy just "Bits"? Or "Bit"?

I'm happy to announce two improvements to Gootodo, our bit-literate todo list service:

• Attachment support: When you create a new todo by emailing your Gootodo list, you can attach a file (or files) and they'll appear with the todo in your Gootodo list.

• Redate improvement: The redate panel now shows two months, and it no longer requires a popup window (which created problems for some users, especially on mobile devices).

Both of the above were based on user requests, so thanks for everyone's feedback on how to improve the service. Please keep it up!

If you want to learn more about Gootodo, please read my book Bit Literacy: Productivity in the Age of Information and E-mail Overload. Chapter 5 says it all...

From the inside of a Target store, submitted by Deluxx at our This Is Broken group on Flickr.

This super-creative four-minute video, created in a single take, features a trampoline, some very good athletes, an unusual camera angle, and some thoughts on graphic design. Worth watching. (Don't miss the "status bar" on the bottom of the screen.)

(via)

This Comcast commercial was made by the original animator of the late great Ren & Stimpy. It's appropriately strange.

(And much better than the old "Comcastic" stuff.)

(thanks, bb)

made by moxie submitted this to our This Is Broken group on Flickr.

m.b.m. writes: "bad, bad, bad design. if you do not fold [the dollar bill] precisely, it will not fit in the hole."

Don't forget the key. And "violators subject to tow."

Good New York Times piece on constant, frenetic "innovation," even when it's unnecessary: I Love It, It's Perfect, Now It Changes. It also mentions my favorite digital watch - Casio G-Shock - some version of which I've worn for about twenty years now. It works. The design needs no innovation, no new or improved features... kudos to Casio for keeping it consistent for 25 years.

Some products (yes, the iPhone, iPod, etc. etc.) are big wins for consumers due to their innovative genius. However, many other products could use any number of improvements (see my Broken product archive). Many companies can't resist the temptation to jump into the game of hype, flavor-of-the-month, "what's hot," call it what you will, even when there's no need for it. From the article:

To judge by marketing hype and iPhone mania, most people live in perpetual anticipation of the next super product: a bigger plasma-screen TV, a sleeker BlackBerry, a more shock-absorbing running shoe. But the truth is, many consumers bemoan the incessant rush of innovation that pushes manufacturers to tamper with products the consumers feel are already perfect.

This is one of my favorite quotes I've read all year, because it's a truth so rarely stated in the media:

David Willey, the editor of Runner’s World magazine, said his publication contributes to feature creep by only reviewing new or improved models of shoes. “There’s this need to continue to evolve and have consumers feel like things are getting better, and that the needle is being moved even if it isn’t,” he said.

And that's a problem with traditional marketing, which often turns to advertising or hype-filled press pieces to create a perceived need, or a perceived competitive advantage, by not-totally-truthful means. (One reason I write the Uncle Mark guide every year is to cut through all that nonsense and give people actually good and legitimate product recommendations.)

See also: The acceleration of food trends

Two geek-humor videos for the weekend. (They have both made the rounds online, but they're must-see if you missed them.)

First, David Pogue sings about the iPhone (to the tune of "My Way")...

...and then we have this commentary on the new Microsoft Surface, a $10,000 touch-screen coffee table that will be interesting and attractive to dozens of people around the world.

Happy weekend!

Salon profiles game designer Jane McGonigal, who spoke at Gel :'06: (see Gel videos).

(thanks, Cat)

From akisenshi in the This Is Broken photo pool.