"We used to bring a piece of furniture we were working on home to look at it, because at the office everything was out of scale." – Ray Eames
[You’ve got to get out and see how your offerings work in context. Needs are verbs, and your end users probably don’t speak the same language you do. Get out and see, hear, listen.]
What’s that sound? Oh, it’s just my hand patting myself on the back.
But seriously, folks, I just voted, and what I saw, heard and experienced scared the bejeezus out of me. I’m talking about the electronic, touchscreen voting booth which I just used to decide the fate of the planet. So many aspects of the design sucked, it’s hard to know where to start. Here are the problems I had:
1) I was issued a magnetic card “key” to allow me to use the voting machine. It fit into a slot on the front of the voting machine. I expected the machine to grab the card upon insertion and pull it in, much like an ATM machine would (as a society, we’ve been trained to have cards sucked in). But it didn’t. My card just sat there, limp and inert. Finally, my inner mechanical engineer spoke up and I rammed the card home. Bling bling! The touch screen awoke and I could now do my civic duty.
2) Each screen had two or more votable items displayed at a time, which a big yellow “next screen” arrow in the lower right. Thing is, I was able to press the yellow arrow and skip a votable item without the system giving me any feedback that I had skipped an item. Folks, the self-serve kiosks at United Airlines work better than this. Lucky for me I’m a software industry veteran and was able to go back a page. But what if I was an “analog”, part of the population who has never used a computer, let alone a web browser-style interface? What if, for example, I was an 80+ year-old woman wearing those big wraparound sunglasses and trying to vote with this damned thing?
And there she was: next to me an elderly woman sat there trying to stick her card in for about 45 seconds. She muttered and cursed and finally called an attendant for help.
Then there was the elderly gentleman on the other side of me. He stood there motionless the entire time I was voting, and then asked the attendant for help. Seems he couldn’t find his candidate on the touchscreen (video monitors are hard to read — we read better on paper). It took a while for the local “IT department” to sort of his problem. The answer? The poor guy was trying to vote for “Laura Magenta”, one of the sample candidates from the paper instructions he had in his hand. It wasn’t his fault. Just a stupid, poorly-conceived and implemented voting process.
God help this country of mine. Or better yet, get Steve Jobs and crew to design a simple, effective voting process for us.
1964 Ferrari 250LM
Keen shoes have tipped. In a repeat of the Doc Martens phenomenon of the late 80’s, we’re going to start seeing them everywhere, on everyone. The thing about a pair of Keen shoes is that you can’t help but notice them when they stroll by — their designers took a risk and added a big old ugly toe-protecting bumper to the front of the tried-and-true Teva, and came up with something which screams "Look! I’m different and kind of cool." That toe bumper may be ugly, but it represents Keen’s entire "brand", and no amount of money thrown away on awareness building could come even close to the word of mouth (message of foot?) buzz generated by this aesthetic oddity. Now, I’m a TiVo guy, so I don’t watch many commercials, but to the best of my knowledge Keen doesn’t spend anything on advertising. I saw my first pair at REI, then I saw another set on the toes of a friend… and… and I had to have a pair.
The lesson here is to build your marketing into your offering. Make something great, something interesting, and make sure that you design that offering such that private usage is made unavoidably public.
Keen. All the cool kids are wearing them.
In this brief essay on the 1939 Mercury, Donald Norman shows how powerful his Visceral, Behavioral, Reflective model is as a tool to understand designed objects (especially cool ones).
“Research should be defined as doing something where half of the people think it’s impossible – impossible! And half of them think hmmmmm, maybe that will work, right? When there’s ever a breakthrough, a true breakthrough, you can go back and find a time period when the consensus was, ‘Well, that’s nonsense.’ So what that means is that a true, creative researcher has to have confidence in nonsense.”
– Burt Rutan
© Valentin Sama (taken with a 1936 Leica)
Photographer, teacher, writer, and raconteur extraordinaire Valentin Sama has a cool new blog. It’s concerned with all aspects of photography, from tools to techniques to philosophy.
It’s also full of beautiful photos like the one above (“My Batman Shoes”).
CYA Notice No. 658 from the metacool legal team: Sama is my uncle
CYA Notice No. 659 from the metacool legal team: Your experience may vary, but Sama’s blog works best if you read it in Spanish.
"We try to evolve and evolve a product until the inevitability of it almost appears undesigned."
– Jonathan Ive
Seth Godin has a nice post about foodie, a perfect example of doing things to the hilt. Joe DeSalazar’s foodie is to a fancy dinner what Steve Moal’s Zausner Torpedo is to a standard luxury car: same fundamental offering, but implemented with a point of view obsessed with total quality and epicurean delight.
Granted, you’re not going to get to the mass market by doing stuff to the hilt, but there is an audience out there. And they’re hungry.
Why not do it to the hilt?
