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Jobs, Xerox PARC and the Creation Myth - Gladwell

Here’s a great long-form article about the role of Xerox PARC in the creation of the Macintosh by Malcolm Gladwell.

http://www.gladwell.com/2011/2011_05_16_a_creationmyth.html

What strikes me most is how it’s extremely rare for a company to be everything – a hotbed of research, a strong product commercializer, etc. And like the Everything’s a Remix videos say, well, everything’s a remix and we step forward, one idea to the next. It’s not copying (those that occurs in different places), it’s invention from the inspiration of what exists now.

http://www.everythingisaremix.info/

#innovation

Jeff Bezos & Presenting Jobs Style

It’s interesting to watch Jeff Bezos introducing the Kindle Fire (and other new Kindle models). It’s clearly very Steve Jobs / Apple Keynote inspired. The slide design in particular.

We’ve grown use to Steve Jobs’s style. He’s made it look easy. It’s actually useful to see someone else try it. And as media presentations go, it was quite good, but these subtle contrasts were interesting to me:

It comes across a bit boastful and arrogant. Not majorly. But where Steve Jobs would say “And we think our customers are really going to love this”, you have Bezos saying “And we’re going to sell millions of these”.

It lacked strong storytelling. It lacked strong, relatable connective tissue for the items. Watch the lead-up of the Kindle Fire reveal. Bezos lists all the Amazon building blocks they have been amassing over the years to make the Fire a compelling and logical end-to-end service solution. It’s impressive. And of course you know it’s leading to the Amazon tablet. But he’s really just listing his arsenal. There’s no story about why they’ve done this. There’s no relatable motivation. You miss Apple’s believing in something beyond just making money – a motivation about making the lives of their customers better and more creative/enjoyable.

#Writing&Communication

Signs and the Wrong Type of Persuasion

Confessions of an Efficiency Nazi: I hate it when people want to try flavors in ice cream, gelati and yoghurt stores before they buy. Especially when there are a lot of people waiting. It's a $5 purchase people. Wanna take a guess at what banana flavored ice cream tastes like?

My favorite gelato place decided to help this problem by explicitly stating that you could only try 2 flavors. They installed this sign.

Except, anecdotally, I think it backfired. It seemed to have created more tasting. It's given everyone permission to taste. When people see the sign, what they read is "Please taste 2 flavors before buying".

#PersuasiveDesign #Writing&Communication

Embrace the Constaints of Real World Influences

On the weekend I was fortunate enough to visit the National Museum in Canberra. Didn’t get to see any of the exhibits, I was too busy being bowled over by the building. It was a delight. Playful, imaginative, energetic. Downright funky. Melbourne’s ARM architects (the guys behind Storey Hall and the Shrine extension) have done us proud again. If you are in Canberra it’s well worth visiting.

One of the many features is the Garden of Australian Dreams – a central interpretative courtyard representing our multi-facited history and aspirations.

You can see in the picture the wading pool. The edge is actually the top end of Australia. Yep, layers of symbolism. And I’m sure the designers were really proud of how much they layered into this area.

But then this happens:

The design is built and launched and then sometime later someone either loses their nerve in the face of litigious fear or little Caleb falls into the water and a complaint is made. The result is this awful sign that detracts from the overall design, sticking out like a sore thumb.

It’s sad, but being realistic and pragmatic, we have to expect this sort of thing as designers. And design for it up-front. And sometimes that means compromising the integrity of the “design vision” to ensure it survives real life wear and tear. They could have just moved some of the “islands” a little closer to the mainland so they were within stepping distance. No need for a sign then. Sure, it wouldn’t have been technically correct. But it probably doesn’t matter. And it would certainly be less noticeable than the over-protective signs.

What’s are our over-spaced islands? We face them all the time. Great design will anticipate them and design the compromises rather than letting compromises just happen to the design once we step away.

#Design #OriginalContent

Seth Godin: The game theory of discovery and the birth of the free-gap

Digital makes free so much easier because it cuts out the distribution cost. But it also create an expectation that you shouldn’t have to pay for stuff, even stuff you value, like journalism.

In this article, Seth argues that digital is increasing the gap between free and paid, specific contrasting the old method where, say, free distribution of a song on the radio lead to sales.

“I’m certainly not arguing that content should be free, it’s clear that the argument on the either side isn’t absolute. My argument is that the line for using free as a discovery tool is shifting, and the best (and perhaps only) way to monetize in the future is for the idea to be encased in something that could never realistically be free. Products and services with a marginal cost of more than zero, for example.”

It’s a very good article and useful in our thinking about publishing business models.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/06/discovery-free-145.html

#Strategy

Writing Naked - Seth's Tips for Writing Honestly and Directly

Some simple things to focus on to write more effectively, based on Orwell:

Orwell: 1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. 2. Never use a long word where a short one will do. 3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. 4. Never use the passive where you can use the active. 5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. 6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Godin: 1. You don’t need cliches. 2. Avoid long words. 3. If it is possible to cut a word out, cut it out. 4. Write in the now. 5. When in doubt, say it clearly. 6. Better to be interesting than to follow these rules.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/06/writing-naked-nakeder-than-orwell.html

#Writing&Commmunication

Real Infographics: Ben Fry's TriTRACK Simplifies Triathlon Training

We’re in the days where the bar has been set very low on what an “infographic” is. Looking at the daily offerings, just stick some data in a table with a pretty font, make some of the numbers big, and bingo you have an “infographic”.

But really, our standard needs to be higher. For me, something’s an infographic when visual design is employed to make information easier to digest. The design push us to see the information in an intended way. It’s the direct hit of data into our understand vein. I can get meaning at a glance. The format of the information is part of the message – it tells us something.

Here’s a good example for tracking triathlon training progress: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1664045/infographic-of-the-day-ben-frys-tritrack-simplifies-triathlon-training

#VisualDesign

Enforcing Advertiser Relevance

We’ve known for a while one of the keys to advertising effectiveness and acceptance is relevance. Users actually don’t mind ads as long as they help them with the task they are doing.

But how do you enforce relevance? Aren’t you at the mercy of what advertisers place (and what ad placement agencies sell)?

Not necessarily! Google recognised that serving up ads with low relevance actually undermines the value of their core offering, so they’re now charging advertisers more for less relevant ads. How cool is that. Nothing like using money to enforce behaviour.

#Advertising

The Cost of Every Option

Every time we add a feature or an option to our designs there is a cost. The cognitive (plain-talk: thinking) load for the user goes up. Sometimes the benefits of that feature or option make it worth it. Often they don’t. And yes, as smart designers we know some of the best ways of representing those features so they have a minimal mental footprint, but it is still a trade-off we need to consciously make.

And unfortunately (or just realistically), we are often the only ones carrying the Let’s Keep It Simple can. Product people can just be myopically focussed on their particular feature and want it get it into the product at whatever cost to the overall user experience. But that’s partly their job and their perspective. What we bring to the table is that overall perspective for how best to arrange (or remove) the pieces to make the whole experience sing.

But it’s not just “evil” Product trying to load up our pages with all manner of things. We have to fight that inclination ourselves. One of the cold realities of design is that it is easier to add than subtract. It has to be our mantra to be always saying “how can we simplify, how can we simplify, how can we simplify…?” It takes huge discipline and a whole lot of thought.

And guess what? We don’t have to give users every option under the sun – something for every possible situation. Sometimes (and often) that just costs too much – too much time to develop, too much time to user test, too much time to specify, but definitely too much time to comprehend.

And interestingly, we are a lot better at seeing that in the real world than online. There is a point where there are more Chiodo shirts than can fit in my cupboard, no matter how much denial I want to wrap around that reality. The real world has a way of enforcing “what? are you crazy?” constraints. In the virtual world it is all too easy to just keep extending the page, adding another tab, designing another dialog, adding another level to the page structure.

37signals, defenders of simple, not surprisingly have some good things to say about this topic in their recent “Outsourcing Choice” post.

#Design #OriginalContent

User Experience Process for Excel 2007 Charts

Here’s a great post about the process a Microsoft user experience designer went through to come up with the Excel chart styling interface for Office 2007.

It tracks through these logical and sensible steps:

Understand the problem – what’s broken with chart styling in Excel at the moment (hint: they all come out looking boring)

Paper prototype – explore ideas quickly on paper – it’s cheap

Wireframe mock-ups in low-fidelity tool (eg. PowerPoint) – start to solidify the design and start testing it with users

Interactive prototype – what’s it really like to use?

Hi-fidelity mockup – how does the whole thing work together?

Not every design would need to go through each of these steps, but the overall process is important. And it’s also efficient. I think we really need to move from a business cultural where every early idea needs a hi-fidelity mock-up and that’s the only way business stakeholders can understand the design. It’s too costly. We spend more time polishing one earlier idea when we could be quickly exploring lots and lots, and then refining to one or two polished ones.

#Process&Techniques

The Sociology of Online Communities ( Forums)

The question of forum moderation is an interesting one. For commercial ventures, we probably can’t leave it open slather. Joel Spolsky has done some interesting work on this for this www.joelonsoftware.com forum. It’s very smart. Basically, the poster can always see his/her post, but if it is moderated and removed, no-one else can. The poster think it is always there from the moment they submit. They never know that it isn’t. They don’t get bummed that someone has censored them. But no-one ever sees their dubious posting.

#PersuasiveDesign

Avoiding Death by PowerPoint

Here are some links about great presentations and presentation styles that aren’t death by Powerpoint bullet point. Spare your audience. Present interesting. They’ll love you for it.

Lawrence Lessig’s classic presentation that started it all.

Dick Hardt’s Identity 2.0 presentation that borrows from Lessig, but is much funkier. I clapped spontaneously when I first saw it.

And the sequel.

The Presentation Zen blog, with some interesting posts from it: http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2005/10/thelessigmeth.html http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2005/11/itwasoneoft.html http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2005/11/thezenestheti.html http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2005/06/usingannotated.html http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2006/01/contrastsinpr.html http://presentationzen.blogs.com/presentationzen/2006/01/wherecanyouf.html

Then there is Al Gore’s speech on global warming that everyone is raving about.

And finally Beyond Bullets.

Enjoy! Blow their socks off. Be different.

#Writing&Communication

Dance of People in Public Spaces

One of the great things about design is how diverse the field is. Yes, in our online design world, we think directly about interaction design and visual design, with bits of information architecture thrown in at times, but our influences can be so varied. Things like industrial design, architecture, fashion, set and lighting design. The stimulating common thread is there is creativity and expertise being thrown at tricky problems to find deeply satisfying solutions.

So its exciting to see the intersection of various design professions that allow us fresh insights into how best to solve problems. Take the design for the JetBlue passenger terminal at JKF Airport in the US. In designing the “interior experience”, architect and set designer (David Rockwell) hired a choreographer (Jerry Mitchell) to arrive at new ways of understand the movement of people to ensure the design did in fact produce a satisfying experience.

What was also interesting was the way they analysed public spaces in New York to determine exactly what did and didn’t work. It’s something we can always be mindful of. Often people come to us and say “let’s build one of these exciting thingies, just like ”. Rather than taking that at face value, what we can bring to this is the abstracted analysis to draws out the elements that work, why they work in that context and the principles that could be applied to the design challenges we face.

Here’s the article and look for the “audio slide show” link, which gives you the story with pictures.

#Design

Death to Print-Friendly Version Links/Buttons

I’ve never been a big fan of the Print-Friendly version link or button. They clutter the page. You get another version in another window and guess what? You have to select your browser print function anyhow.

Better to cut out the middle step and just let users press the print button. Do the “hard” work for them. Have a print-specific style sheet for the page that does it all for them.

I’ve been printing from Basecamp recently (ToDo lists specifically) and that’s the approach taken there. Super simple. Great format.

#Design

Peta 404 – Making the Most of Every Opportunity

Peta – the animal rights organisation – like to make the most of every opportunity on their website. Even their 404 “File not found” error page. It’s cheeky, it’s fun, it’s great writing to support the voice of the site.

#Writing&Communication

The Business of Design

Here’s an article that starts a thoughtful exploration of something I’ve been pondering over the last few months: that great design and particularly providing design solutions to Sensis cannot be done without participating in a full discussion about business factors (eg. revenue and business models) that will play a big part of a site’s (and the design’s) success.

There is a tension between what designers can affect and what we have no control over. Because we can’t always change the ultimate success or failure of a project, we often dismiss the success or failure as completely outside the work we’ve done. I think this is a short-sighted, dangerous way to approach design. If we consider our role as designers outside of the success of the project, then we’ve discounted the value that we could potentially bring to the table.

We can’t just offer up a beautiful design and think our job’s done. This article ponders such designer conundrums as:

Designers have a tough time dealing with ugly design that works well…They say things like “MySpace succeeds despite its design“. (same thing happens with Google). However, this doesn’t address the success of the project: nobody can argue that MySpace isn’t an all-out success. Same with Amazon. Same with Google. [BC: Not to mention eBay] These sites don’t even write valid HTML, for gosh sake. But they’re wildly successful…the most profitable and beloved sites on the Web. I added that “beloved” part because it is absolutely critical. You can’t talk about Google and Amazon (and probably MySpace) without people saying they love them. How can we then go on and say they’re not well-designed? I think being beloved might be the very definition of great design…at least that’s what I aspire to.

#Design

The Long Road to Simple

I liked this blow-by-blow about how to explain the different ways to enter a date and time in Backpack.

It may look like a long and laborious process. Expensive even. Sure, it is when you writing it out in full like this. But it doesn’t have to be if it is just part of how you think. If everything has some thought behind it and a reason for being, then it is just part of the design process. You notice when the words look too loud and noisy on the page. And as this example shows, so often there’s a real balance between clarity and brevity. Cracking it and judging it are the key.

And my theory is when all those elements are well thought-out and just right, the interface sings. Users glide through their task. You hit the illusive “intuitive”. It feel just right in your hand.

#Design

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