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18 May 2002. Too often we hear predictions of the future with little follow through or reflection about the quality and character of what actually happened. Stewart Brand and company address this attention-sink with Here, the idea is to foster reflection on the future and create conditions of long-term accountability. A very neat idea, if only it were not so expensive to participate—the minimum bet is $2,000.00. An interesting bet: In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site. More ... I don't think this bet will win because society will increasingly be sensitive to the provenience of a piece of information. And, the New York Times will continue to have a tremendous reputation. 28 April 2002. In a design situation, that is, when predicting the future, it is very easy to fall into the trap of focussing on the surface of the problem rather than the underlying structure. It can be hard to accept was has been done and move from there. Consider, for example, the front page story in USA Today (23 April 2002), where we read of a mock scenario in which government officials are to examine how to react to a smallpox outbreak. In this article we read that the officials spent 40min discussing color: The Oklahomans weren't sure whether they should, or even could, have the U.S. government change the status of its new color-coded security alert system from yellow (which indicates there is a significant threat of a terrorist strike) to orange (which means there is a higher risk of attack). "It seems pretty basic, but they didn't know where to go with it," says Michael Forgy, a manager in the Justice Department's Office of Domestic Preparedness. He says the officials should have dealt with life and death issues more quickly. In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site. More ... I don't think this bet will win because society will increasingly be sensitive to the provenience of a piece of information. And, the New York Times will continue to have a tremendous reputation.
To move from surface to substance, is a certain sensibility required? If so, what is that sensibility and how to we teach it? 17 April 2002. A reader from Australia wrote of a collage technique called the Compatibility Communication System (CCS). With CCS, small and large groups organize a set of cards into a collage. CCS makes various claims about how the process of creating a collage and combining small group collages into a single, large collage promotes a shared vision. See www.ccscorporation.com.au. They have a gallery of sample collages, including
More ...
07 March 2002. Do you have experience using collages—or other vision materials—to represent user goals, wants, or motivations? Write me and send some pointers. I'd like to learn more.
- - - The New York Times contained an article about research being carried out by Gerald Zaltman at the Harvard Business School. He says: ...consumers can't tell you what they think because they just don't know. Their deepest thoughts, the ones that account for their behavior in the marketplace, are unconscious. Not only that, he insists, those thoughts are primarily visual as well. The article goes on to explain a technique where by asking people to create collages you can tap into their emotional attachments to products. Read the story. 04 March 2002. New research suggests that consumers view the Internet as a goal-oriented environment. The report, Getting Serious Online, from the Pew Internet & American Life (www.pewinternet.org) says: [Consumers] online habits become more directed and efficient, allowing them to get what they need in shorter order than before. Read the report. 24 Feb 2002. In a design family, individuals feel as if they belong to the same class. The class might be a company name, as in Yahoo, and the individuals might be sections of Yahoo, as in Yahoo Autos. To create feelings of interest, Google adorns its Logo with current, popular themes. For a gallery of examples, see Google logos.
This idea of specializations of top-level classes comes up in all sorts of design situations, from navigation devices, to reusable code, to urban landscape design. The book Creating Logo Families (Amazon) shows a huge range of examples where graphic design is used to create corporate identities.
20 Feb 2002. What makes work meaningful, impactful, and socially effective? In Good Work (Amazon), Howard Gardner, Mihaly Csikszentmihalya, and William Damon set out to answer this question. They consider the fields of Genetics and Journalism and through a relatively large number of in depth interviews root out a variety of factors. This book is great
reading for those looking to reposition one's self within a professional domain or even one's field in society. For more, see the
website, www.goodworkproject.org.
11 Feb 2002. Why are timelines so boring? There seems to be such potential yet when you get down to the details of actual lines they don't seem particularly engaging. Look at this interesting directory of timelines. 11 Feb 2002. FrontLine did a very interesting piece, The Merchants of Cool, on how media companies are going after the teen audience. Want an overview of relationships among the big media companies? Look at this diagram. The market research company, Look-Look at www.look-look.com, carries out research young influencers. Their methods of video documentation and note-taking and distributing work amongst a network of reporters is very intriguing. 30 Jan 2002. The NYT Consuming Rituals article seems to have generated a fair amount of dialog, most of it pointing out that there are good and bad ways to carry out field research. Jakob Nielsen picked up on the article and offers advice on carrying out site visits. Nielsen is right: You can learn a tremendous amount by conducting simple studies. The trick is to know how to ask the right questions and be an active listener and observer. While this is harder than you might think, especially if you have been working on your product 18hr/day for 6 months, you don't need specialized training. . Take Jakob's course! Watch your users and be totally amazed at what they do. See this Topica message board for a lively discussion. - - - - - 15 Jan 2002. You know what you do is relevant when you see your geeky professional interests in popular magazines such as The New York Times Magazine (January 13, 2002). There you will find an interesting article, Consuming Rituals of the Suburban Tribe. Focus groups have their problems. So marketers are mimicking anthropologists and studying consumers in their native habituate: at home. The best quote: "Quantitative marketing research, where you basically feed people static questionnaires, is increasingly regarded as stupid." That's perhaps a little strong. I would prefer to think of survey results as complementary to other forms of data collection. But, on the whole, I worry a lot about how the results of quantitative surveys are used, especially by executives, and how much the summary numbers can hide. A great book on observational field research is Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping by P. Underhill (Amazon). Underhill says: The obvious is not always apparent. Yes, indeed, and you cannot observe the obvious in surveys (nor from Web logs). Usability evaluations are little better, but to really see interesting things go into the field. 14 Jan 2002. Robert Glass (IEEE Software, Jan/Feb 2002), reports some failure rates in software projects (2000 data):
(This data comes from Standish. Information about how many organizations in the data set, how the data was collected, and so on are missing in the short piece.) On the basis of these improvements, Glass argues that software engineering is maturing and that the words chaos and crisis may no longer apply. Perhaps, these extreme words can be set aside for now. Nevertheless, there seems to be a way to go. 2 Jan 2002. When I participate in discussions of the virtues of a Web page, these kinds of questions often arise: How much information is above the fold? How is the page real estate divided into such buckets as graphics, white space, navigation elements, content, and so on? What elements stand out the most and the least? All of these questions are focussed on what can be called the static, surface features of the page. Some more questions: Where will users look first? How will users' eyes track across the page? Will users recognize page elements for what they are intended to be? How will users scroll, or not scroll, the page? These questions touch upon the dynamic interaction between the user and a single page. Now, another kind of question is the role that the page plays in sequence of page views. It is a rare case that a page stands alone in splendid isolation. Like a single frame in a film, it can be helpful to think of a page as bead on an evolving thread. From this perspective, many interesting questions lie in understanding the dynamics of how people move between pages and the roles that individual pages play in a continuing sequence of short, and sometimes long, page exposures. Alas, it can be frustratingly difficult to discuss the merits of movement through a site. The first problem, of course, is one of representation. How do you represent the threads of interaction though a site? What abstractions do you introduce so relevant information is available and unnecessary detail is suppressed? I conjecture that because these are tricky questions, we spend too much time talking about page real estate! Part of the answer may lie with comics, what Scott McCloud* calls juxtaposed static images in deliberate sequence. McCloud's very interesting book discusses the various visual and rhetorical techniques that comic book creators employ. *McCloud, S. (1994). Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperPerennial. Amazon 2 Dec 2001. The Stedelijk, Museum of Modern Art, Amsterdam (www.stedelijk.nl) is running an exhibition of streamlined design. One of the goals of this Art Deco movement of 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s was to cultivate consumer wants by designing consumer products, such as radios and toasters, to appear streamlined. This look-and-feel was influenced by developments in engineering on making vehicles flow through water and air efficiently. The exhibit highlighted the movement by citing various tag lines, including: education desire, brokers of beauty, color is a business asset, and extravagant waste. The similarity of these evidently shallow slogans and the slogans of many of the players in the dot.com movement is striking. For more examples, try this flash exploration. 25 Oct 2001. I've listened to users describe a variety of techniques for controlling their exposure to unwanted e-mail. Some examples: a) Deleting e-mail from the subject line; b) Setting up secondary e-mail accounts; c) Setting up spam filters within e-mail programs; d) Entering fake information into registration forms; e) Avoiding the use of e-mail redirect dialogs so friends' e-mail addresses do not make it on a spammer's list; and f) Using human readable, but machine unreadable, e-mail addresses, such as dave AT dhendry DOT com. I have yet to hear anyone mention the Direct Marketing Assoication. This professional organization maintains a variety of do-not-send lists that direct marketers can refer to. Indeed, direct marketers are required by law to check some lists. What's limiting about these lists, however, is that you are either on the list or off the list -- there is no way to post an interest profile so that you can receive e-mail on certain topics only. Simon Garfinkel*, however, claims that these opt-out lists do not work because a) Few people know about them; b) People are reluctant to opt-out because the lists are all or nothing -- who wants to miss the BIG deal; c) Names on the list expire every 5 years; and d) Each time you move, you have to re-opt-out. Nevertheless, the size of the lists are growing: 988,000 (1989), 3.2 million (1995), and 3.9 million (1999). By the way, Direct Marketing is big business. In 2001, by DMA estimates, consumer sales will be around 1 trillion dollars ($1 000 000 000 000.00) in the USA. Many people, though perhaps not you dear reader, take advantage of DM offers. And finally, according to Garfinkel, you can buy lists of names for about $80.00 per thousand names or about $0.08 a person. To opt-out, try 6 October 2001. On 4 September 2001, the front page of the New York Times had a story about the invention of cookies. In 1994 Lou Montulli, the 9th employee at Netscape, needed a way to give memory to the transactions between a Web browser and the Web server. In a five page document, he specified how browsers should store information locally and transmit it to the server. Cookies made the Web much more powerful because with them every connection to a Web server did not have to appear to be the first. No longer did Websites necessarily suffer from permanent amnesia. The problem with cookies, of course, is that they can impinge on privacy. Today, if you refuse to accept a cookie for the sake of privacy you loose functionality—not a comfortable tradeoff. In the 1850s, during the age of the telegraph, people were very concerned with privacy and invented a variety of ciphers to prevent operators from reading messages. Indeed, coded messages were published in the personals section of newspapers so that lovers could exchange messages in private. The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage Amazon. An academic paper traces the implementation of cookies in Netscape and Microsoft browsers from 1995 to 2000.* A central part of the paper is a conceptual model for cookies. The idea is that users should be allowed to express informed consent, which consists of these elements: disclosure, comprehension, voluntariness, competence, and agreement. What the authors don't assess is the extent to which this conceptual model maps into the models held by Web users. My bet is the users have extraordinarily fuzzy models about the roles and rules of cookies. Thus, trying to teach us all, we see primers about underlying technical details on the front page of the New York Times. . For more on cookies and privacy on the Web see www.cookiecentral.com. * Millett, L., Friedman, B.
and Felten, E. (2001). Cookies and Web Browser Design: Toward Realizing
Informed Consent Online (Trust) Worthy Web Design. In Proceedings
of ACM CHI 2001 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems,
p.46-52. 3 October 2001. Distributed file sharing receives unwanted attention from the lawyers. Read news article. 3 September 2001. In reading Bowling Alone (Amazon) by Robert Putnam, I've learned a little about what sociologists call social disengagement. Putnam says: Thin, single-stranded, surf-by interactions are gradually replacing dense, multistranded, well-exercised bonds. More of our social connectedness is one shot, special purpose, and self-oriented (p 184). Want an example? Go no further than Gnutella, a radically distributed person-to-person file sharing protocol. In contrast, Napster is less peer-to-peer because there is a central broker that lists and indexes filenames. Because Napster has a central broker it is relatively easy to turn it off. Gnutella, however, does not have a central point of control; thus, it is considerably more difficult to turn it off. To get a client running, a perquisite to joining the Gnutella community, it took me 2hr, five different clients, several system crashes, scandisks, and uninstalls. Once I installed the client, I noticed a search box and typed "Neil Young". (If details interest you, see Install Steps below.) After waiting
a few seconds, I
was rewarded with a list of filenames ending in '.MP3', but I had
no idea where they came from, who made them available, why they made them
available, what reliability and download speed I could expect, and so
on. The closest I got to downloading a file was
Olde Man by Neil Young at 13% complete.
While I waited for the Olde Man to download, I explored the
pornographic potential of this technology by typing two three-letter
words. I was soon presented with a long list of
provocative filenames, and managed to download a small JPEG without
difficulty. Wow - a community that fosters social
disengagement. After about 10min, I gave up on the
Olde Man
. INSTALL
STEPS 8 August 2001. Provenience 1. the place of origin or history, esp. of a work of art etc. 2. origin. (Concise Oxford) Provenience is one of concepts of our age. The New York Times Magazine (15 July'01) tells the story of Marcus, a 15 year-old who became known as a top rated lawyer by answering legal questions on the AskMe.com message boards. Marcus answered legal questions and people rated the answers highly. Little did anyone know that Marcus was fifteen and had no legal training, yet "in a one-week stretch he received 943 legal questions and answered 939." Much of law is information, and Marcus was able to convey information in a personal, authoritative manner. The AskMe.com system, and the Web in general, does not convey the informal, side-channel information that is often so important for assigning a value or judgement on a piece of information. The difficulty of coding provenience underlies many of the new rules for filtering and consuming information.
27 July 2001. I received notice that the New York Academy of Sciences has ceased publication of the The Sciences. The Sciences never failed to combine very fine writing with the visual arts. The Academy says "After careful evaluation of its mission in a era of rapid change... [it needs] to reallocate resources to its primary programs and other publications". What a shame! I say that in a era of rapid change we need magazines that take a long view.
See LongNow July 25, 2001. The kid market is comprised of three components: the $115 billion North American market of kids with their own discretionary income, the $600 billion market they influence and the limitless market they will become in the future (Sutherland & Thompson, 2001, Kidfluence).
Kidfluence (Amazon) describes how companies market to
kids. If you are designing for kids -- or for adults through kids --
this book is for you. There's a wealth to concrete market research
and ways for thinking about the motivations and attitudes of today's
kids. July 23, 2001. I'm always amazed by how much I learn about technology and people by scanning the New York Times. In the 1960s did computer scientists learn about breakthroughs in their field by reading the popular press? I somehow doubt it. Just yesterday the front page of the New York Times informed me that while Napster is dead, several new upstarts are about to take over. A key feature of these new tools for peer-to-peer communication is ease-of-use. Hmmmm: First you need access, then you need ease-of-use. file sharing, Open Directory 2 Dec 2001. The Stedelijk, Museum of Modern Art, Amsterdam (www.stedelijk.nl) is running an exhibition of streamlined design. One of the goals of this Art Deco movement of 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s was to cultivate consumer wants by designing consumer products, such as radios and toasters, to appear streamlined. This look-and-feel was influenced by developments in engineering on making vehicles flow through water and air efficiently. The exhibit highlighted the movement by citing various tag lines, including: education desire, brokers of beauty, color is a business asset, and extravagant waste. The similarity of these evidently shallow slogans and the slogans of many of the players in the dot.com movement is striking. For more examples, try this flash exploration..Long Bets. |
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Copyright © 2001 David Hendry. All rights reserved. | |
