February 2006 Archives
Be prepared for a bit of a rant about what really matters in design and what doesn't.
No matter what anyone says, it's my goal to make people believe that design is not something to be taken lightly.
At Sony, we assume all products of our compeititors will have basically the same technology, price, performance, and features. Design is the only thing that differentiates one product from another in the marketplace.
- Norio Ohga, Honorary Chairman, Sony (via Influx Insights Thought Pack Volume 1)
Look, this is not true in every category across the board, but it does speak to the overall importance of design. When people think of design they tend to think of over-design. When you talk about web 2.0 design, you think of rounded corners and gradients. But guess what? It's bullshit! That's not design, that's meaningless. Design doesn't have time to worry about rounded corner's it's got bigger fish to fry.
When I read the very popular Current style in web design, I cringed. Everything looks the same! (No offense to any of the mentioned sites, I happen to think the choices are all quite nice, however, they all fall in same category.) Where is the diversity in design? How about the experimentation?
Recently, in an entry discussing MakeUpAlley and why geeks need to get their heads out of their asses (which I agree with), Umair Haque wrote, "It doesn't have Ajax, it doesn't have gradients, it doesn't have a clever name, it doesn't even have anything resembling a design (the horror)." I was a little surprised by the contempt in Umair's voice when discussing design, although his bigger point is that those other things don't matter as much as MakeupAllley's "deep understanding of what consumers in it's vertical value, how to connect them into a coherent community, how to manage and regulate this community, and how to translate those connections into deep and shallow value creation."
On this point I'm right with Umair, and I think his point is a valuable one: You shouldn't be designing before you have an idea. You shouldn't have decided how something will look before you know what it does. You shouldn't know what language to script in before you decide what you need to code. Over at PingMag (a Tokyo-based magazine about "Design and Making Things" Jon writes that Web 2.0 is not about AJAX and visual effects, but rather "has much more to do with the human and social aspect of the internet. There is much more call for interaction between users and more importantly, much more willingness to interact."
With all this said, though, design is not something that should be forgotten. There's been some talk recently that design on the web doesn't matter. It uses Myspace, eBay, Google as examples. Recently Andy Rutledge called this idea out for what it is: BULLSHIT! "Bad design harms business, it does not help it," Andy writes. "Websites like Boingboing, Google and eBay are successful in spite of their poorly designed sites, not because of them." As I've mentioned numerous times in the past, though, design is more than just the look. Design is the information architecture and it's the copy too, amongst lots of other factors. One of the things that drives me nuts about blog design, beyond the fact that almost no one does anything interesting, is that the architecture sucks. Who thought it was a good idea to make the archives a giant list? How is that helpful to anyone? (Full disclosure: The archive architecture on this site sucks too.)
I guess my point is that when people discuss design it's important to separate the superficial from the important. I'm pretty sure this is what people mean when they compare design with Design (note capital versus lower case . . . something I've always found a bit bizarre). It all comes down to this: If you're using rounded corners for no reason, it's not design. If you're using rounded corners because you're trying to communicate a softness to your design which reflects your product, fine. In design, you need thought behind all your actions. Things don't just happen, nothing is just placed somewhere because that seemed like a good place for it.
Sorry if this seemed preachy, but I'm passionate about this stuff.
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That's right ladies and gentlement: Today is the day of my birth.
It's that time of year ladies and gentlemen. The one day that I get to call my own. That's right: today's my birthday. Now I'm not saying this to get birthday wishes or presents (though my Amazon wish list is always open). Rather, I'm telling all of you that my birthday is here to invite you to a party. My party. For my birthday. (Getting the theme?)
Here's the deal, straight from my birthday website (yeah I've got a birthday website -- and it's run by Whizspark at that!).
it's that time of year again. I am turning a year older and to celebrate I'm hoping everyone I know will show up and drink for a couple hours on the cheap. My name will be on the chalkboard, so I'm drinking free all night, but the rest of you can pony up $20 to drink all the beer and well drinks you want for two hours (starting around 9). If it's any added incentive, I can almost guarantee I'll embarrass myself, and you wouldn't want to miss that.
You can bring food or we can order some pizzas, or something else (they've got a ton of menus behind the bar). In addition they've got a jukebox and a pool table, just in case coming to see me three days after my day of birth wasn't a good enough reason to show up.
To all my blogging and non-blogging friends alike, I extend the invitation to you. Join me at Antarctica Bar (287 Hudson Street at Spring) around 8pm. The real festivities will get started at 9 (at least the open bar). Just pop over to http://www.heyitsnoah.com/birthday and RSVP. Look forward to seeing some of you there.
Also, a big shoutout to Pete Caputa for letting me test-drive Whizspark for the party invites, website, etc. I hope to have more of a writeup of the service in the near future.
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The media's changing quick. Here are a few examples of just what's going on.
Rather than just one of those random links entries, I've decided to go with a more focused one. Here are a few things from the last few weeks to think about as you consider the changing state of the media. (Come on, I know you spend all your time thinking about the changing state of the media . . . we all do.)
New Distribution
NBC has released the pilot for their new show Conviction as a free iTunes download. Now in the face of the Lazy Sunday hubub this looks pretty good, but does it go far enough? Why not put it out on your website as a free download? Let the world start sharing it as they'd like. Allow them to watch it in any way they want. Really get the word out. Don't get me wrong, this is a big step, and a good idea, but I just don't know that it goes quite far enough.
New Channels
I've wondered why more people aren't talking about the possibility of marketers owning media channels. Gary Stein recently wrote about it, but I think generally it's an untapped market. Rather than spending all the money on a media buy, why not create your own channel? Speak to consumers directly. I know it's easier said then done, but it's almost as if people just go with the advertising automatically and skip over the idea. I've though about this a lot in terms of branded blogs. If a company can't find a blog in their niche to advertise on, why not create it themselves? Yeah, it oversimplifies the problem, but owning the media channel is sure to be a hot topic in the near future.
New Programming
Bradley Horowitz is the head of the Technology Development Group at Yahoo! and he's just started a blog which is sure to be a must-read. In one of his first entries, he wrote about the value pyramid of social software. In the entry he wrote about the future of "programming":
In the new paradigm of “programming� where there are a million things on at any instant, we’re going to need some new and different models of directing our attention. In the transition from atoms-to-bits, scarcity-to-plenty, etc. instead of some cigar-puffing fat-cat at a studio or label “stoking the star-maker machinery behind the popular songs� we’re going to have the ability to create dynamic affinity based “channels�. Instead of NBC, ABC, CBS, HBO, etc. which control scarce distribution across a throttled pipe… we’re going to have WMFAWC, WMNAWC, TNYJLC and a whole lot more. (The what my friends are watching channel, The what my neighbors are watching channel, The New York Jewish Lesbian Channel, etc.) I expect we’ll also have QTC (the Quentin Tarantino channel) but this won’t be media he made (necessarily) but rather media he recommends or has watched / is watching. Everyone becomes a programmer without even trying, and that programming can be socialized, shared, distributed, etc.
In the old media world, programming was where a network added it's value. Today, thanks to new disruptive technologies, the definition of programming has changed. I want control over what I see, after all, I know what I like a whole lot better than some guys sitting in an office. Things have changed.
Take the olympics, for example. Yesterday while at the gym I was listening to Mike and the Maddog and they were talking about watching around noon as a commentator setup the next event while on in the background was ESPN News reporting that Shani Davis has won the gold medal. NBC waited until something like 9pm to show the race. It's a business and they need to try and try and get themselves as many eyeballs as possible, but when you can get the same information in all these other places, what's the point? Now the olympics happens to be an incredibly controlled event, and getting that video from any place but a recognized source is probably tough to impossible. But it's only a matter of time. Not to mention, if everyone else is talking about who's won doesn't it take away a bit of the excitement, and in turn the eyeballs?
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NBC is making a short-sighted mistake by forcing YouTube to remove an SNL video.
Just last week I talked about the popularity of short video clips and how they can contribute to the success of a television show. I quoted Matt Haughey who wrote:
Like Napster, there are positive sides to this kind of loose fair use/infringement. It's only because things are so lax that everyone and their brother saw the Chronicles of Narnia SNL spoof video, and SNL ratings definitely saw a spike in the shows that followed (and I noticed SNL tried to capitalize on this by putting Andy Samberg in more skits and letting cast members do funny little videos for the two following episodes).
Well, it seems as if NBC read my entry and did the exact opposite. I suggested that "Maybe unlike the music industry, television networks will think a little bit before they fight a battle they can't win. Don't just cry foul and whine about people stealing your content: do something about it! Think about how you can change with people, not fight against them." Well, thanks to Boing Boing I've learned that NBC has asked YouTube to remove the video. YouTube has since confirmed it on their blog (which has no permalinks by the way), stating, "We know how popular that video is but YouTube respects the rights of copyright holders."
Now of course the video has not completely disappeared, NBC still streams it on their site or you could buy it for $2 from iTunes. The thing is, the NBC site is for Windows users only and iTunes is not free and DRM-crippled (I believe), a serious downer. Now why would NBC do such a stupid thing when this video is the only reason I (and I'm sure many others) have tuned into Saturday Night Live again (only to be disappointed I might add)? It's because they don't get it. Plain and simple.
It's a perfect opportunity to bring up unbundling again. Media outlets that believe that they're going to survive on their current path are sorely mistaken. Things have changed, access to information is available anytime and anywhere. Your little television show, magazine or newspaper just isn't as valuable as it once was. A media outlet's value is no longer in its ability to bundle everything together. I can staple together my printouts myself, thank you! It's time to start considering what everyone championship sports team past its prime as to consider: Is it time to blow it up?
What needs to happen first is an inventory. What pieces are held and what value do they have. This is a general inventory, like ticking off TV station in New York, newspaper in Chicago. This is a specific inventory: Sports writer in Chicago, prime time show in New York. It's about finding the smallest pieces of value. After an inventory it's time to start assigning values and considering alternate forms of distribution. That's sports writer may hold value in more arenas than just his daily newspaper column. What other ways can you leverage his expertise to add revenue. Is it a text-message service for sports fans? A fantasy football consultation service? Media doesn't mean newspaper/magazine/television/radio anymore: It's any information/communication vehicle.
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I thought I had nothing to say when I started . . . turned out I was wrong.
I don't really have it in me this week to write for any length on any one subject. That, however, doesn't mean I haven't been reading lots of great stuff (which, by the way, you can keep up with via the RSS feed). So, since I don't have much of interest to add at the moment, how about others' interestingness (and who knows, a little might rub off on me).
1. First up is a little writing from Matt Haughey. Matt's hit the nail on the head with a recent article titled "Rambling and blogging and TV. In it, Matt compares the current TV downloading thing to blogging, suggesting that in the same way bloggers filter massive amounts of news, sites like YouTube filter massive amounts of television. The point he makes (and one that has some media 2.0 ramifications) is that sharing of clips helps TV, it doesn't hurt it. He explains:
Like Napster, there are positive sides to this kind of loose fair use/infringement. It's only because things are so lax that everyone and their brother saw the Chronicles of Narnia SNL spoof video, and SNL ratings definitely saw a spike in the shows that followed (and I noticed SNL tried to capitalize on this by putting Andy Samberg in more skits and letting cast members do funny little videos for the two following episodes).
[For those of you looking for a link to the SNL Chronicles of Narnia rap, aka Lazy Sunday, here it is on Google Video.]
Maybe unlike the music industry, television networks will think a little bit before they fight a battle they can't win. Don't just cry foul and whine about people stealing your content: do something about it! Think about how you can change with people, not fight against them. One incredibly simple idea that just came to mind is to help people share content. If SNL had posted a high-quality video of the Chronicles of Narnia rap and attached a short ad to the front or backend, it still would have been shared. Now I don't know that that's necessarily a great idea, but it took three seconds. Consider what media companies could come up with if you gave them a little more time (and some help from professionals).
2. I really like Jan Chipchase's site. Jan explores areas that may seem miniscule and inconsequential at first (like a morning commute) and by digging deep enough finds some valuable insights and thought fodder. It's a look at the user experience of everyday life. There's some great thinking going on over at the site and I highly recommend it. (Another interesting recent entry is this one about a cell phone targeted at the elderly, it's got a slider that people can write numbers on by hand if they're not comfortable with the phone's built in electronic phonebook.)
3. In other design-related news I've been loving the Japanese design magazine/blog PingMag lately. I have two favorite recent entries: The first is an interview with Oded Ezer an Israeli typographer who has done some absolutely amazing work. The second is a look at cigarette packaging in Japan. As a sidenote, typography's been a serious interest lately and I can't quite figure out why. I think it's just fascinating. Maybe because I see it as one of the most overlooked details of design. Every literate person deals with typography thousands of times a day and probably doesn't think twice about it. We read signs, books, license plates and websites, but how often do we stop to look at how the type is arranged. Bad typography's easy to spot because it's hard to read, but the great stuff often goes unnoticed. (Alright, enough of that tangent.)
4. Over at Whitespace the other day, a question was posed: "What's the one quality in a persona labeled as a leader you look for?" My answer is passion. Yeah, you can have a passionate leader without vision or integrity, but could you work for a visionary leader without any passion? Can you be a visionary without passion? Anyway, I'd like to leave everyone here with the same question. Whattdya think? What's the one quality in a person labeled as a leader you look for?
Update (2/19/06): Added a link to Lazy Sunday on Google Video.
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A few links that I hope will get the blood flowing back to the brain.
I think I'm going to make the new motto of this page "so much good stuff to write about, so little time to write it." In that spirit here's some links, quotes, doodads and heehaws.
Something Disturbing
Consumers spend a collective $100 billion every year on bottled water in the belief--often mistaken, as it happens--that this is better for us than what flows from our taps, according to environmental think tank the Earth Policy Institute (EPI).
For a fraction of that sum, everyone on the planet could have safe drinking water and proper sanitation, the Washington, D.C.-based organization said this week.
That comes from an article titled, Bottled Water: Nectar of the Frauds". Now, for my idea: Someone needs to start a charity where they sell empty bottles (or preferably something more environmentally friendly) and donate all the money to a charity to help clean the world's water. Each bottle could carry the story of how if everyone just gave up buying water the money could clean the world's water.
Something Thought-Provoking
So my question remains, as well as these layers of experience, how can we pull that sense of interesting evolution - of traces of other people and what they did - to the surface layer [of digital design]? What visual patterns could we develop to indicate that? These could lead towards a more sophisticated, meaningful judgement beyond that mere 1/20th second sense of 'polish', beyond that "finished, glossy, one-reading-only surface", based on enabling questions like "Do I want to do that too? Are they like me? Do I know them or these things?" and so on - the things which could truly begin to engender trust.
That quote comes from a cityofsound article titled "How can the design of digital surfaces help engender trust?" It's a really interesting question. His point is that in "real" design people can gain understanding and meaning by seeing the way other people have used something. The first example that pops to mind in the "real world" are "desire lines" (a name I learned Peter Merholz). Those are the unpaved paths that people wear down over time. Just from looking at them you can tell that many other people have taken that route and they can take a way all the social stigma of leaving the so-called beaten path. Merholz suggests, "A smart landscape designer will let wanderers create paths through use, and then pave the emerging walkways, ensuring optimal utility."
Something Inspiring
In the end, "Bid D" design success is not really centered on or around any one dimension, but rather needs to be distributed equally throughout all the interconnected dimensions of a product or system. One part cannot succeed at the expense of another. And it’s a misnomer that one dimension should lead or drive all the others. The real key to success is balance and integrity throughout. It has to be aesthetically pleasing (even stunningly so, if appropriate), easy to learn and use, efficient and utilitarian, cheap to produce, problem-free, popular and sought-after, beloved by its customers, designed to allow growth and evolution, and continue making boatloads of money as a return on investment.
Tall order? Certainly. Impossible? Not whatsoever! However, in order to accomplish broad, deep, and long-term success an organization requires one or more generalist integrators (which is what I think is really meant by successful "visionary"). This can be a leader (either at the top in the form of a visionary corporate office, or an empowered individual within an organization), or it can come from a small, empowered leadership group, Tiger Team, or Skunkworks. It can come in the form of a spontaneous initiative, or it can come in response to a stated corporate mission or goal. During my twenty-two year design career I’ve seen successful and unsuccessful examples of all of these.
That's a quote from Jim Leftwich in part 2 of Functioning Form's design vision series. He pretty much summed up what I want to do in that quote. Speaking of design vision, I highly recommend the New York Times profile of Robert Greenberg, owner of R/GA.
That's it for now, hopefully there's plenty to chew on in those links.
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Lots of people are talking about it, but what is all the attention hype really about?
The idea of attention seems to be at the center of most of my thinking at the
moment. The thing is, up to this point, even with all the talk, no one has
bothered to explain the whole thing very well. It's almost as if they've skipped
that step, assuming that everyone just gets it. With a deeper
understanding as a goal, I've been doing a bit of reading lately,
trying to uncover the deeper issues of attention. What I'm trying to do here is to
put in as plain terms as possible what attention is and why people should
care about it. I figure if I can come even close, I will have
a much better foundation for exploring the bigger impacts.
I hate to start anything in such a clichéd way , but the definition of the word attention seems like as good a place as any to jump off from.
According to my little OS X dictionary widget, the word attention
means "notice taken of someone or something; the regarding of someone
or something as interesting or important." (Hopefully using the widget
definition took away a little of the sting of the cliché .) I think it's safe to assume that attention has been an important part of human life for all time. After all, if no one had been paying attention throughout history we'd have no record of what the hell happened for all those years. So if attention has existed throughout the ages, why is it such a hot topic right now?
Because for the first time attention is a measurable commodity.
Before the internet there was no good way to measure the attention
people paid to things. Of course there were some general ways, but
beyond paying the entry fee to a movie or the cover price for a
magazine, the whole measurement thing was pretty fuzzy. Nielsen tried to do it for years and their numbers have been exposed on multiple occasions. Then all of a sudden digital technology comes and it brings along with it lots of wonderful recordability (my word). Suddenly there's a shift from a world where you struggle to measure where attention is being paid to one where
you're buried in data. Cell phone records, email inboxes and internet
cookies all contain the pieces that can eventually make up the
whole.
When we look back on the early internet, we might very well say that
the biggest shift it brought on was forcing the world to rethink
advertising. After all, why buy a spot in a magazine where you'll hope
that people will pay attention to your ad on page 63 when you can buy
an advertisement on a topic-specific website that guarantees 10,000 people who have made a conscious decision to visit the site will see your ad each day. Or further, why pay for that ad at all if it doesn't get clicked on? All of a sudden, the happy magazine publishers and television network producers are sweating about the fact that they can't guarantee people are going to pay attention. It's almost as if someone pulled away the curtain and revealed the big secret: When you buy an advertisement in traditional media all you can do is hope that people pay attention. When you add in the fact that people are increasingly fragmenting their attention amongst multiple media at once, you've got companies like NBC and CBS trying to convince advertisers that people really do care (and this isn't even to mention the disruptive technologies like Tivo and BitTorrent).
Let me go back for one second before it's too late, though. The
reason we're talking about attention here is because media is an
'attention exchange' platform. FOX creates The OC and airs it for free in exchange for my attention, they then sell my attention to advertisers. They can do this because one of the basic tenets of attention is that it can be passed from one person to another. To use Goldhaber's example, if I'm speaking at a conference, one can assume I've got the audience's attention. If during my speech I single out a single person in the audience, I am able to shift the attention of any number of people to that person. Now they've got the stage (not literally of course) and when they're done they can pass it back -- just like at the end of the commercial as the show fades back in from black.
There was nothing wrong with the way traditional media was shifting
people's attention around until the internet came along and exposed
them for frauds. By coming up with the hyperlink, they were able to
make the attention redirection process a whole lot more fluid. Goldhaber
explains, "The World Wide Web's key feature, the hyperlink, more
or less automates this redirection of the flow of attention making it
easy to pass attention further up the chain, helping to unify the
world wide flow of attention in one complex free standing system."
Boom! Everything else started to fall apart. You can't build an
economy on a currency that you can't measure. Before digital
technology came along there just wasn't a reliable way to measure
attention.
Not only is digital technology easy to measure, but the hyperlink
associated an action (clicking) to attention. It wasn't enough just to
look at a page, if you were really interested, you could click
through and read the underlying information. Seeing the huge
shift that the hyperlink brought, Google took on web behemoth Yahoo!,
betting on the intelligence of the masses instead of a select few. You
see, Yahoo! was building an internet directory/search engine where
everything was categorized by hand. It's easy to see now that this is
a near-impossible feat with the millions of new pages that pop up
daily. What Google figured out is that using the hyperlink as a
kind of vote of attention, you could start to organize the
world's information. Essentially what Google did was seize the
opportunity to build a smarter search engine by enlisting the
attention data of web-users in the form of hyperlinks.
When you get right down to it, Google is a giant recommendation
engine. Amongst other factors, it ranks search results based on
incoming links. The logic is that if a million people link to a
webpage, then it's probably pretty damn important. That webpage will
then get a pagerank of ten and rise to the top of search results.
(Warning: this is seriously over simplified and I'm aware of that.)
Pagerank is a measure of attention, the higher a site's rank, the more
attention they've been paid. It's actually pretty simple.
Now let's jump ahead a few years to today. Why is everyone talking
about attention all of a sudden? Well, for one thing, information is readily accessible. The world's information is at our fingertips and that means walls are falling. Who needs a newspaper when your favorite columnist has a blog? Secondly you've got unbundling:
why buy CDs if you can download your favorite track? Third you've got
fragmentation. This one's a little more complex. First there's the
fragmentation of our attention as new media channels sprout up daily.
Second there's the fragmentation of our identity. Sam Jacob
explains:
Whether its the information transcribed magnetically on
the back of credit cards, or cell phone sim cards, multiple email
accounts, electronic avatars, or customer profiles. While unidentified
companies sweep of our credit rating, and web browser cookies collate
our interests, we find our own identities and our contexts shifting.
Bill Gates says by clicking and looking we are going somewhere. David
Green thinks we become someone else. And they're both saying that when
we're looking, reading and watching, we're being: Experience makes
media part of us.
In other words, the lines between media, technology and identity are being erased . In a recent article I quoted Michael
Fergusson who explained, "I find very compelling the idea that we
[are] beginning to see a generation that has not grown up with the
idea of the internet as a separate 'cyberspace', but instead
experiences it as an aspect of the environment in which they live;
another channel alongside 'real space', only with different
characteristics." The inner workings of media are being exposed and
with that the inner and the outer are becoming one. As Michael Goldhaber explains:
The Web and other media aid this development by allowing
you to look behind the scenes as easily as at them. Gossip,
interviews, biographies of individuals involved in specific efforts,
photos, videos of rehearsals, documentaries of pre-performance steps,
all are visible or can be visible on the Web, taking equal status with
the final performances themselves. Documentaries about the production
of movies are common by now; a movie about a movie is just as
accessible as the first movie.
This transparency will even more be the case in the very near future,
and, as a result, organizations will diminish in importance at rapid
pace, relative to the importance of the individuals who are
temporarily in them. Even as stable and long-lasting an institution as
Harvard will be less its familiar buildings and more the people in the
buildings, and the networks of attention among them. And whether these
people are physically at Harvard or somewhere else will matter less
and less, until the institution loses all coherence, all distinctness
from other universities or from any one of hundreds of other
organizations which have audiences in common.
To summ arize, the balance of power has shifted from 'them' to us. We are becoming the media. We have the tools, we have the content and now we have the audience. What that means is that we're going to start understanding what the media has understood all
along: All you need is people's attention.
Updated (3/1/06): Cleaned this up a little bit to improve the flow.
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What separates good design from great design?
Joel Spolsky (of Joel on Software fame) hits on some points I've been meaning to write about for some time (and actually have written about before). He's working on a series of articles about great design. In his latest, "What Makes it Great" he asks the question: what allows the iPod, despite design flaws rise so far above the rest? There's a certain mystery to what makes a product rise to the top. Joel explains:
Getting every aspect of the design perfect, making a usable product, making the right tradeoffs between price and functionality, between flexibility and ease of use, between weight and battery life, etc., etc., etc., is all really important, but the most it can possibly get you is to #2.
In his series he's going to try and tackle the question of how to breakthrough to number one: how to create great design. It'll be fun to follow his thinking, as this is something I've been thinking about a fair amount lately. I was recently in a bathroom and couldn't help but notice how nice everything looked. It was clear that someone had thought about the aesthetics of the bathroom, not just thrown things together. But then, as I got further into the bathroom (like walking into a stall), design flaws started to become apparent.
First, there was a big column which made it difficult to close the door of the stall until you were fully on the other side. There just wasn't enough room to squeeze through. Then, when I went to wash my hands it wasn't a regular faucet, but rather one of these newfangled high design things. Rather than the regular hot and cold levers which you pull in opposite ways, it had one control which you could turn left or right for hot and cold. The thing was, when I tried to pull up the thing to turn it on nothing happened. Turned out you had to push down the lever to turn it on. Having used faucets for most of my life, I'd never run across a faucet like this. Just to prove I'm not crazy when I washed my hands later I again tried to pull up the lever before pushing it down, that was clearly my natural motion.
In the end, the aesthetics were nice, but it was not the full package. Someone had spent too much time deciding which fixtures would look nice and not enough thinking about what fixtures would work nice. That's not great design. Joel sums up his piece with an old quote of his about Jakob Nielsen, the usability guru. He writes:
"Every time I read Jakob Nielsen," I wrote in 2000, "I get this feeling that he really doesn't appreciate that usability is not the most important thing on earth. Sure, usability is important (I wrote a whole book about it). But it is simply not everyone's number one priority, nor should it be. You get the feeling that if Mr. Nielsen designed a singles bar, it would be well lit, clean, with giant menus printed in Arial 14 point, and you'd never have to wait to get a drink. But nobody would go there; they would all be at Coyote Ugly Saloon pouring beer on each other."
No one piece can complete the whole.
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You know what, sometimes you just need a little link love on a Tuesday morning. Don't you?
I've been working on a bigger piece all about attention, but it's not quite ready yet. So, to keep you satisfied in the meantime, here are some links for your enjoyment:
Design
Business
Finally, I end with a quote my Aunt sent me that I liked quite a bit from B.C. Forbes: "Opportunity can benefit no man who has not fitted himself to seize it and use it. Opportunity woos the worthy, shuns the unworthy. Prepare yourself to grasp opportunity, and opportunity is likely to come your way. It is not so fickle, capricious and unreasoning as some complain."
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Four things that have inspired me over the last four days.
I run into a lot of inspiring fodder on a day-to-day basis, it's one of the nice side effects of having 300+ feeds. Lately, for whatever reason, I seem to have been running into more than usual. So, here are four articles/quotes that have gotten my brain humming in the last few days.
1. Seth Goldstein wrote his /VAULTSTOCK followup (mine is here) and it includes some interesting thoughts and ideas. I especially appreciated he reprinted a quote he had shown in his presentation on the day of the event. From Richard Hamming:
If you read all the time what other people have done you will think the way they thought. If you want to think new thoughts that are different, then do what a lot of creative people do - get the problem reasonably clear and then refuse to look at any answers until you've thought the problem through carefully how you would do it, how you could slightly change the problem to be the correct one. So yes, you need to keep up. You need to keep up more to find out what the problems are than to read to find the solutions.
2. Since he first commented on my blog a few months ago, I've been keeping up with Michael Bayler over at The Rights Marketing Company blog. His Draft mandate for the Media 2.0 Workgroup is a well-written state of the media piece. It goes into unbundled, attention and every other hot-button media topic that you can think of in an incredibly approachable way. Lots of great thought fodder in there, especially relevant to me was this quote: ""Simply put, advertising needs to move from ‘interruption of experience’ to ‘enhancement of experience’. An unprecedented cultural, strategic and creative challenge."
3. The New York Times article on how Pixar is taking a different approach to the moviemaking business is another great read. Rather than go with the crew-for-hire approach, those who work on Pixar films are employees of the company. This means that they can learn from the past to improve future films. According to Randy Nelson, who is the dean of Pixar University (which offers classes to every employee of the company, from chef to CEO):
"The problem with the Hollywood model is that it's generally the day you wrap production that you realize you've finally figured out how to work together," Mr. Nelson said. "We've made the leap from an idea-centered business to a people-centered business. Instead of developing ideas, we develop people. Instead of investing in ideas, we invest in people. We're trying to create a culture of learning, filled with lifelong learners. It's no trick for talented people to be interesting, but it's a gift to be interested. We want an organization filled with interested people."
4. Not sure how I missed this the first time, but this What's Your Brand Mantra? post titled Blogging and the Singularity is so tapped into my brain it's scary. It explains how the way ideas spread in the "blogosphere" can be related to the way stuff moves around the brain (clearly much more eloquently than I just described). Here's a quick excerpt:
Now enter the blogosphere, where ideas are born, nurtured, transmitted and evolved -- all in a single day. Ideas have a life of their own; good ones seem to create their own connections. I may have a seed of an idea; you recognize it and spread it; someone on the other side of the world has complementary knowledge to expand and evolve it. In brain terminology, neurons that fire together, wire together. The same principle applies to the blogsphere: bloggers who think together, link together. And so the connections form, faster and faster. More pathways for an idea to spread, evolve, mature. This, I suppose, could be called hyper-meme theory: self-propagating ideas combined with exponential pathways that enable rapid evolution (see Thought Contagion for more on memes; it's a fascinating subject).
And I think that's it. Have a nice Thursday.
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