Archives / November 2007

Kotkke is right: "The design of the iPhone is such that all other mobile phones, including those released after the iPhone, look not only old but antiquated and even defective."

That's why I give a strong recommendation for the iPhone in my new Uncle Mark 2008 guide.

NYT slideshow on enormous stereos carried on bicycles. There are some pretty amazing designs.

Also see the article.

Overloaded workers today are dealing with too much information, too much data, too much technology.

In Bit Literacy I write about how the technology industry will inevitably rush to create, and sell, a solution: yet more technology.

Users who spend a couple of hours reading the book and putting the method into practice can solve much of their overload right away; but how much cooler is it to install another shiny app to play with?

This Wall Street Journal article (reg. required) describes the problem/solution:

Email overload is now considered a much bigger workplace problem than traditional email spam. Inboxes are bulging today partly because of what some are calling "colleague spam" -- that is, too many people are indiscriminately hitting the "reply to all" button or copying too many people on trivial messages, like inviting 100 colleagues to partake of brownies in the kitchen. A good chunk of today's emails are also coming from brand new sources, like social- and business-networking sites like Facebook Inc. and LinkedIn Corp., or text messages forwarded from cellphones.

Unlike previous email-technology companies that only addressed problems like external email spam or offered narrow products that screened messages for certain content, new companies are now springing up to deal with the email-overload problem and help sort the deluge.

These products are filters on users' incoming bitstreams, such as the one "which uses algorithms to quickly analyze a user's email to determine which contacts and messages are the most important."

While I think it's ultimately up to the user to decide what's important - that's their job in this information-saturated world - it's of course handy to have some good filters on hand.

So the tools are fine - I wish these companies well - but users still need, first, to become bit literate. If you're overloaded, read the book.

Heads-up about a new game on my Good Experience Games list: OrbBlaster, an outstanding new shootemup. Definitely worth a play or three.

(Thanks to Le Ha Nguyen for creating this good experience!)

Worth a scan: two different approaches to refueling the same small plane... the "Japanese way" and the "Chinese way."

Kevin Kelly quotes a Metafilter post describing perfectly, imho, how to discern that you really know a subject:

Read books, google around, check wikipedia. When you start, it will look like most of what is said is reasonable. You are in good shape when you think that 90% of the stuff you read is BS.

Exactly. I do feel like I know user experience pretty well...

Also: Kevin Kelly's blog is one of the very few in my media diet, by the way. Recommended: read it here. (Stuff like Pakistan's decorated vehicles is hard to find elsewhere.)

I recently noticed that Barneys New York, the high-end retailer, has some new slogans for the season: "Have a Green Holiday." "Join the green revolution, we have!" "Give good green."

Barneys' current offerings include organic cotton T-shirts, scarves handknit from "free range alpaca yarn," and various jewelry that promise "a portion of the proceeds" for deserving nonprofits.

I found out about all this from the Barneys print catalog, with 93 full-color pages (and adhesive binding). To Barneys' credit, the catalog uses "soybean-based inks" and "30% post-consumer waste material"; on the other hand, it arrived unsolicited, which means many of these catalogs, green as they are, will go straight to the landfill, unread.

My main reaction, though, came from page 5, which advertises the Goyard St. Louis Shopper Tote, a "100% recyclable" canvas bag "made from natural materials." Presumably, carrying this bag up Madison Avenue shows the world how committed one is to environmental causes; all at the mere cost of $1,065.

When canvas totes sell for over a thousand bucks, and Barneys colors its slogan green, you know we've turned a corner somewhere. Being good, doing good, creating good become not so much a mission as just another trend to watch in the consumer market - as it appears, gains cachet, then inevitably falls out of favor. That's the thing with fashionable trends: they always come to an end.

Back in the 7th century BC, the Greek poet Archilochus offered this wisdom: "The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one great thing." (Isaiah Berlin later drew on that thought in his famous essay The Hedgehog and the Fox.) The pattern continues to play out today, even in the business of green luxury catalogs.

Foxes are agile and clever enough to jump onto any passing opportunity - and, of course, jump off when the time is right. Hedgehogs hold fast to one central belief, through ups and downs, through all seasons. Foxes are more attractive - they're "foxy," after all, and who would want to be called "hedgehoggy"? But hedgehogs are more loyal, reliable, authentic, and I'd guess longer-lived. I sure hope so, anyway, since I'm a hedgehog myself. (My "one thing" is a belief in authentic good experience.)

So where does this leave the "green revolution"? For the moment the foxes and hedgehogs are united in spreading the word, selling the idea. But when, not if but when, the fashionable green trend fizzles, and companies like Barneys move on to the next brand image, only the hedgehogs will remain to carry the work forward.

Thus goes the life of a hedgehog in any trendy environment... like, for example, an industry in dire need of customer-centric thinking.

I can't figure out car doors any more. They all seem to have this little icon printed on the doorlock, shown at left.

On top there's a slanted thing signifying nothing; on the bottom is a key. If you had to guess, what does the key do? Yes: what a key usually does at a door - it unlocks it.

But that's not how car doors work today. Pressing the key actually locks the door, and the slanted thing unlocks it. Whenever I use a car (rarely, since I don't own one) I always wonder who came up with such a backward scheme.

I remember a simpler design from years back, when door locks had two labels: UNLOCK on top, and LOCK on bottom. It worked great. How did we standardize on this broken design?

In the year 2007 there's no reason for websites to wonder whether one or more events just occurred, and so there's never a reason to use paren(s). For example,...

Your payment(s) have been accepted. You may view your payment(s) in your Recent Payment history.

...as though it's too difficult to figure out whether there was one payment, or multiple payments. Can the webserver not count that high?

The text above is from American Express, a company that really can afford to do better. (See original screenshot.)

See also: Things that need to STOP

With the (American) celebration of Thanksgiving coming up this week, let's take a moment to acknowledge some genuinely good websites available to users everywhere.

1. Free Rice

This is a brilliant example of good experience. It's a simple and fun game: just click on the right definition of a given word. Every correct answer gets ten grains of rice donated via the United Nations. A-list advertisers like Apple, Macy's, and Reader's Digest are happy to pay for the exposure they get, pageview after pageview, on such a noble site.

This is a good experience because everyone wins: users get a fun game, companies get good exposure, Web expenses get paid, and most importantly, people in need get help.

The site is by the same guy who made The Hunger Site - which got a lot of Net buzz a few years back. Here's an article with more info on Free Rice.

2. Catalog Choice

Another outstanding site, their mission is "to reduce the number of repeat and unsolicited catalog mailings, and to promote the adoption of sustainable industry best practices." In other words, if you live in the US and (like me) get unwanted catalogs in the postal mail day after day, you can use this delightful site to opt out of them. Just fill out your name, address, and the customer number on the catalog label, and they'll contact the company to take you off the list.

I realize that some retailers may not like this idea, but I support it. There's no need for full-color, 300-page catalogs to go out to thousands of people who don't want them. The paper, the ink and chemicals, the energy to transport the catalogs - all a complete waste. Besides, with people opting out, the retailer is left with a much higher conversion rate, with lower costs, since the catalog (ideally) will only go out to people who actually do want it.

3. Daily Good newsletter

As online users we can access innumerable sources of tragic and depressing news every day, but this is one source of consistently good news. Every day the newsletter points out one case study, one story, one person who's working to make things better for someone else. I also appreciate that DailyGood pulls it off without being cheesy or maudlin. Just a straightforward piece of good news every day - helping us be thankful on days before and after Thanksgiving!

For years now I've written in Uncle Mark about how the most popular videogame systems differ. The Microsoft XBox and Sony PlayStation offer high-tech complexity, while Nintendo products focus on being fun to play.

The president of Nintendo of America describes Nintendo's path to success (emphasis mine):

"Our key fundamental difference is we drive our business through the eyes of the consumer. We are consumer-driven and we are insight-driven and as part of that, our objective is to create joy, wonder and a sense of enrichment. That drives everything we do. ...

"We took a different path [from the other videogame makers], one we call the path of disruption, of really doing things differently, focusing on games and hardware that consumers could immediately pick up and play like the DS and Wii. ... It really is recognizing the world is changing with the rise of the Web, the rise of even more power on the part of the consumer. These consumers today, they don't just consume media, they want to get inside it."

A CNET interview describes his philosophy in this way...

Provide a new product that actually underperforms on an established industry metric for "progress," and substitute an alternative that typically is smaller, less expensive and easier to use. Initially, the "core" of any industry will scoff. But if the product is right, enough new users will be attracted to form an alternative definition for progress.

See also:

• Microsoft and the videogamer's experience

• Nintendo Wii and the customer experience

For years I've been writing about, and running an annual conference about, "authentic good experience"... but what makes something authentic?

Young radio host Jesse Thorn answered for the twentysomething generation in a Gothamist interview awhile back.

[Gothamist]: What is The New Sincerity?

[Jesse Thorn]: At its core, it’s a rejection of what we called The Old Irony, which ruled the cultural roost, or at least the hipster part of the cultural roost, for the past fifteen years or so. It's not the same as the Old Sincerity in the sense that it is bigger and better. ... Part of what the New Sincerity is is being larger than life and the acknowledgment that the coolest stuff comes from being completely unafraid of being seen as uncool. It encompasses everything from small things like high-fiving and flying a kite to bigger things like being Evil Knievel. ... It's entirely possible to intend to create something that's New Sincerity and it's possible to create something that's New Sincerity through the Old Sincerity.

Seems complicated. Back in my day, sonny, we were authentic - without all the post-ironic cultural baggage... and we liked it!

MetaFilter post on all the todo lists out there:

Nowadays, if you're of a mood to be all Web 2.0 about it, to-do lists have gone past the paper and pen with web applications such as Remember the Milk, Hiveminder, Toodledoo, Todoist, Ta-Da Lists, do.Oh, Nozbe, Treedoolist, Vitalist, Web To Do, SimpleGTD, Sandy, Tracks, gootodo, Zirrus, OnMyList, TaskToy, Gubb, Nutshell, Joe's Goals, Tedium, MyTickerFile, voo2do, and 30boxes — even plain old text files have gotten spiffied up with Unix shell scripts to generate graphs and reports and projects.

How to find the right one? Just remember the four requirements of a bit-literate todo list:

1. Each todo is associated with a particular day.

2. Users can create new todos via e-mail, either for today or a day in the future.

3. Each todo has a priority ranking within its day.

4. Each todo can contain a detail field as well as a summary, much the same way an e-mail can contain a message body as well as a Subject line.

...and of course all of this should be accomplished within a user interface that's as simple as possible.

I know that Gootodo satisfies all four (but I'm biased, of course) - anyone know any others that do?

Lululemon has made lots of money selling expensive clothing with unusual "organic" materials, like seaweed. From the NYT story below:

One of its lines is called VitaSea, and the company says it is made with seaweed. The fabric, according to product tags, "releases marine amino acids, minerals and vitamins into the skin upon contact with moisture."

Unfortunately, the Times reports, "Seaweed" Clothing Has None, Tests Show. Two independent lab reports showed no trace of seaweed in the fabric. What does Lululemon say?

When told about the findings, Lululemon's founder said he could not dispute them.

"If you actually put it on and wear it, it is different from cotton," said Dennis Wilson, Lululemon's founder, chief product designer and board chairman. "That's my only test of it," said Mr. Wilson, known as Chip.

Once again, I ask: if the suck- I mean, customers - think they're buying something good, and they feel good about it, is it still a good experience if they don't know they're being deceived?

See also: Wine, charlatans, and good experience

Every website loads fast in an ASCII browser.

(Thanks, Carlos)

Speaking of retail trends, take a look at an unusual and interesting e-commerce operation based in Australia, the REMO General Store.

Brookstone could learn from this site: instead of making silly 3-D investments, REMO does simple and effective things like featuring a random customer - and their picture - on every product page.

The "CustOMER Network" is posted in the upper-left of every page, at last count showing 116 countries in the customer database.

It's not hard to see that there's a friendly and, as I said, unusual focus on the customer here. And now the quirky product selection, I'm happy to say, includes my book Bit Literacy, via this page.

(Also note that the store's founder, Remo himself, says that any Good Experience reader who buys a T-shirt via that link will get the second one gratis.)

Three retail-oriented pieces today caught my eye:

1. The NYT reports that Borders will add TVs to its bookstores:

A new strategy at Borders will reinforce the message that its stores are not just about books: the company has been installing 37-inch flat-screen televisions to show original programming, advertisements, news and weather.

...Emphasis on advertisements. Much like the ubiquitous TVs in airports today, blaring commercials between CNN spots, I doubt that TVs in bookstores are primarily meant to enhance the customers' experience of the place.

2. Separately, over at Brookstone, they're trying to "recreate the in-store experience" on the website, something I haven't heard so much about since the last bubble:

As in Second Life, Brookstone’s 3-D store lets users move freely through an animated world. ... According to Greg Sweeney, a Brookstone vice president, the new service is purely experimental at this stage. He acknowledged some hurdles could give shoppers pause, like the fact that they must download an application before trying the service.

The VP speaks the truth. Customers will indeed "pause" before downloading an application, going through an installation wizard, learning the navigation interface, and flying around trying to read the labels on small 3-D boxes (see screenshot here). In fact many customers will pause permanently - and may never return.

3. Finally, David Byrne writes a fun piece describing (accurately enough) that a visit to IKEA is like a video game:

Who lives here? What do they do? Why is that book on the table? Is that significant? Could it be some kind of clue to the occupant’s identity? Why does everything have weird names?

...One soon realizes that one of the goals of this “game” is to decide which cabinets, in which wood or wood-like material, would, could or should be combined with which counter materials, and then to match them to a particular style sofa and upholstery, and finally, to select the color and texture of floor material that would coordinate best with all the above.

Welcome to the bright shining future of retail: you'll sit at home to fly through a virtual store, which (to recreate the in-store experience) must contain a virtual TV, blaring ads and perhaps a few clips of people sitting at home playing the video game version of a shopping trip. So what if no one actually sells any product; it sure gets the headlines!

See also: IKEA walkthrough by Matthew Baldwin (thanks, Henry)

Chris Jordan, Gel 2007 speaker (see video clips), appeared recently on The Colbert Report:

I thought I had heard most of the user-hostile schemes out there in consumer technology, but this one was new to me.

David Pogue's readers answered some nagging technology questions, including this one:

[David Pogue] How come cellphone signal-strength bars are so often wrong?

[Reader response] "Like the battery indicator, the signal strength on a cell phone is deliberately weighted toward the high end. I worked on a phone development project several years ago. When the first units went to the carrier for approval, their first request was to toss the perfectly calibrated battery indicator in favor of one that sat at 4 bars for around 75 percent of the charge."

Let me get this straight. Cell phone manufacturers fib about battery strength, to make it look (initially) like the phone holds charge better??

Should auto makers design a car's fuel gauge so that it stays on "full" until a gallon or so away from empty? After all, customers will think - initially - that the car is getting great mileage.

Why not just tell the truth?

Over at the 37signals blog, Jason Fried (Gel 2006 speaker) explains why he doesn't use personas:

I’ve never been a big believer in personas. They’re artificial, abstract, and fictitious. I don’t think you can build a great product for a person that doesn’t exist. And I definitely don’t think you can build a great product based on a composite sketch of 10 different people all rolled into one (or two or three).

Personas don’t talk back. Personas can’t answer questions. Personas don’t have opinions. Personas can’t tell you when something just doesn’t feel right. Personas can’t tell you when a sentence doesn’t make sense. Personas don’t get frustrated. Personas aren’t pressed for time. Personas aren’t moody. Personas can’t click things. Personas can’t make mistakes. Personas can’t make value judgements. Personas don’t use products. Personas aren’t real.

That's hard to argue with.

See also: Tips on product management and research

Rating the "fan experience" at various football stadiums: fan-owned Green Bay Packers are #1, and the family-owned Pittsburgh Steelers are #2. Slicker, more corporate brands (Cowboys, Redskins, 49ers) tend to the bottom of the list.

(Thanks, Jared!)

NYT's Frank Bruni on "restaurantspeak," an unnecessary addition to the dining experience:

I pause halfway through an entree, and a server with an itch to clear plates asks if I’m “done enjoying that,” a question that’s more a presumption. Maybe I was done enjoying it after the first bite. Maybe the unconsumed half is a testament to my limited enjoyment.

Would I “enjoy coffee with dessert?” I don’t know; it depends how good the coffee is. I’ll have some, yes, then we’ll see.

Enjoy, enjoy, enjoy. Egads. It’s a semantic pox, either getting worse by the moment or simply less bearable upon the thousandth exposure to it. And it’s a fine example of restaurantspeak, an oddly stilted language that has somehow survived the shift toward casual dining and that sounds even odder and more stilted in light of the new informality.

I'm happy to announce the new Uncle Mark 2008 Gift Guide and Almanac available for download, right now: download it here.

If you have read Uncle Mark in the past (this is the fifth year!), you'll still find new material in this year's guide:

• my new digital camera pick
• my new cell phone pick (hint: same as the camera pick)
• an unsung hero of consumer technology
• new kitchen tool
• a new (and very old) wristwatch pick
• and items for parents

The "expecting and new parents" section is all new, and it represents some of the most important purchases I've made since becoming Daddy Mark a few months back. If my wife and I had had "Uncle Mark 2008" as a resource, we would have saved a LOT of time in researching baby gear.

If you know anyone who is a new or expecting parent, just send them the guide - they'll almost certainly find a nugget or two to thank you for.

Please do share the guide: print it, e-mail it, forward it, and pass it along. If you have a coworker, friend, or loved one who needs a clue about today's technology choices, just hand them Uncle Mark 2008.

Download it here.

For new readers:

If you're not familiar with Uncle Mark, here's the deal: I review all the major consumer technology products and give my ONE favorite pick in each category... not the "17 top digital cameras", but the ONE camera that you should buy. The guide concludes with an Almanac section where I say whatever comes to mind, mostly tips and tricks that I can't fit anywhere else.

Get it here:
http://unclemark.org/unclemark2008.pdf

Let me know what you think.
-mark

I don't know much about this developing story, but it's interesting on its face... M.I.T. Sues Architect Frank Gehry - New York Times (and here's a longer piece in the NYT):

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is suing renowned architect Frank Gehry, alleging serious design flaws in the Stata Center, a building celebrated for its unconventional walls and radical angles.

The school asserts that the center, completed in spring 2004, has persistent leaks, drainage problems and mold growing on its brick exterior. It says accumulations of snow and ice have fallen dangerously from window boxes and other areas of its roofs, blocking emergency exits and causing damage.

One interpretation: award-winning "radical" designs aren't great if they can't keep snow off the emergency exit.

Update: This seems to be supported by this Boston Globe article (emphasis mine):

After learning of the lawsuit yesterday, Silber said Gehry "thinks of himself as an artist, as a sculptor. But the trouble is you don't live in a sculpture and users have to live in this building."

Update: Rodney Brooks, Gel '04 speaker, supports the building:

“It is a joy to work in this building,” said Rodney Brooks, a professor of robotics, “and I know that many of its occupants feel the same as I do about it. We asked Frank to give us a building that fostered communication, and he delivered.”

Jerry Seinfeld appeared on The Daily Show a few nights ago and, in the middle of what presumably was a promotion for Bee Movie, Seinfeld said this:

Is that the worst new word of the culture, "blog"? It's so unattractive. It’s like something that you spit up and it's, it has like, it congeals, and is, you know, and you kick dirt on it.

Seinfeld is good - maybe the best - at saying what everyone is already thinking, or experiencing, in broad cultural trends. And he hits it exactly right here. "Blog." Ugh.

I've always thought that blog sounded like the combination of "blah" and "bog." In other words, a boring swamp. Appropriately enough, in many cases.

Now, I don't pretend for a minute that this is going to change; the word, like the trend, is here to stay. But it's just unfortunate that we didn't get something nicer sounding.

Here's the Seinfeld clip, by the way:

First we had "Get Rich 2.0" and now we have "Food 2.0," in the New York Times.

On the bright side, through, they do describe what gel is:

A colloid is a suspension of particles within some substance. A hydrocolloid is a suspension of particles in water where the particles are molecules that bind to water and to one another. The particles slow the flow of the liquid or stop it entirely, solidifying into a gel.

Speaking of which, the next Gel conference is coming up in April...

...at the 2008 Uncle Mark guide, for those early-bird readers. Just launched.

For the weekend, three links on design:

• A tribute film to Paul Rand, one of the most famous (and, I'd say, best) American designers ever. He designed the logos of IBM and UPS, among others - see his bio.

• An infomercial for Make My Logo Bigger Cream, which just proves that the world doesn't even need overpriced designers. Just apply the cream directly to the logo.

• Finally, a great design for hosting trick-or-treaters. Video link.

(thanks, bb)

Facebook and MySpace, as popular as they are, aren't the only popular social networking services out there. Google runs a service called Orkut, though relatively few people use it in the US.

Here's why Orkut is more popular than Facebook in India and Brazil:

...many [Indian users] get online at access speeds as slow as 15 kilobits per second. (About what AOL members in the U.S. were at in 1990.) His own dialup line is an only slightly-less-pokey 28K.

Nayak says "Orkut is much lighter than Facebook," meaning it is better designed to be used on a slow dialup line. While getting onto Orkut takes about a minute and a half for him, Facebook takes a minute longer. And getting on MySpace takes him five minutes.

For years, many Web designers have resisted the common-sense suggestion to go easy on the bells and whistles. Maybe there's an urge to express one's artistic vision, but is it worth losing a market of several hundred million users?

P.S. Another popular service in Brazil is fotolog.net. It's for sharing photos, but the simple design makes the page load quickly.