< return to modestspectacle.com, resume, work
Themepark
Rant: The Kindle, Part 2, Wet matches
Yes, the industrial design is strange. But that is actually the smallest part of the business play. What Amazon is really betting on is the revenue model of the content. This attempts to piggyback on the Ipod model, but with some deeply flawed differences.
The Ipod built a community through it’s sensitivity to the excesses of peer to peer copyright abuse. Itunes software allows you to both buy music from the music industry and rip your own off your existing cd’s. Unlike any media before it, the user does not need to replace their media. In the context of the music industry in 2001 this was a move that recognized the effect of internet community values in an unprecedented way. We should note that Itunes store sales have been disappointing to Apple and crushing to the music industry, so this is hardly a perfect solution. However, it has created a robust model for Ipod sales and won the acceptance of most users. This is a significant achievement in the face of free competition.
And it creates enough funding to improve the software and refine the business model, so it is self funding to Apple while it supports the now stratospheric [over 110 million] sales of the hardware. Fanatical open source cultists gripe that that it is a closed system, but the Ipod also supports playing non-proprietary mp3 music as well as Apple’s sonically advanced ACC format. The 12 to 26 year olds driving the bulk of these sales could care less what a bunch of wizened old geeks have to say.
The Kindle sets it’s standard by the existing competition - the Sony E-reader. The E-reader charges $14.99 for a book while the same text is $9.99 from Amazon. This seems like an obvious idea, except that nobody bought E-readers so the comparison is an academic business case. The E-reader also supports uploads, so you can go here [insert manybooks link] and get a fairly extensive selection for free.
Amazon requires that you purchase almost every piece of content that you put on it, or pay a ten cent tax every time you email something to it, which must happen through Amazon for word, rtf or excel documents you might want to read. The most egregious omission is the lack of ability to view a pdf. I suspect either an inability to negotiate a royalty deal with Adobe or too many books exist in pdf form already, thus eating into their proprietary scheme. The latter seems more likely than the former, but whatever, this is goofy.
What Amazon fails to recognize is the shift in values on the internet. Right or wrong, people assume that the content is free, and savvy content sellers have found ways to mix free with cheap to play to those expectations. Calibrating their business model to an irrelevant standard is unlikely to be successful.
A couple of notes...
Extensive comparison of Ipod managers. Most people see the Ipod & Itunes as a proprietary platform combination, but it can be seen as a hard drive with nice controls as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_iPod_managers
Here is a great discussion of NBC’s issues with Itunes
http://www.tuaw.com/2007/10/29/nbc-exec-slams-itunes-revenues-business-model/
The Ipod built a community through it’s sensitivity to the excesses of peer to peer copyright abuse. Itunes software allows you to both buy music from the music industry and rip your own off your existing cd’s. Unlike any media before it, the user does not need to replace their media. In the context of the music industry in 2001 this was a move that recognized the effect of internet community values in an unprecedented way. We should note that Itunes store sales have been disappointing to Apple and crushing to the music industry, so this is hardly a perfect solution. However, it has created a robust model for Ipod sales and won the acceptance of most users. This is a significant achievement in the face of free competition.
And it creates enough funding to improve the software and refine the business model, so it is self funding to Apple while it supports the now stratospheric [over 110 million] sales of the hardware. Fanatical open source cultists gripe that that it is a closed system, but the Ipod also supports playing non-proprietary mp3 music as well as Apple’s sonically advanced ACC format. The 12 to 26 year olds driving the bulk of these sales could care less what a bunch of wizened old geeks have to say.
The Kindle sets it’s standard by the existing competition - the Sony E-reader. The E-reader charges $14.99 for a book while the same text is $9.99 from Amazon. This seems like an obvious idea, except that nobody bought E-readers so the comparison is an academic business case. The E-reader also supports uploads, so you can go here [insert manybooks link] and get a fairly extensive selection for free.
Amazon requires that you purchase almost every piece of content that you put on it, or pay a ten cent tax every time you email something to it, which must happen through Amazon for word, rtf or excel documents you might want to read. The most egregious omission is the lack of ability to view a pdf. I suspect either an inability to negotiate a royalty deal with Adobe or too many books exist in pdf form already, thus eating into their proprietary scheme. The latter seems more likely than the former, but whatever, this is goofy.
What Amazon fails to recognize is the shift in values on the internet. Right or wrong, people assume that the content is free, and savvy content sellers have found ways to mix free with cheap to play to those expectations. Calibrating their business model to an irrelevant standard is unlikely to be successful.
A couple of notes...
Extensive comparison of Ipod managers. Most people see the Ipod & Itunes as a proprietary platform combination, but it can be seen as a hard drive with nice controls as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_iPod_managers
Here is a great discussion of NBC’s issues with Itunes
http://www.tuaw.com/2007/10/29/nbc-exec-slams-itunes-revenues-business-model/
Rant: The Kindle: Lacking spark
Some smart guy shows up at the office where I was working last week with one of these things. Now this is primarily a product design shop so these guys talking about a Kindle is a bit like artists talk about public sculpture. Not a very giving crowd, but precise.
We won’t dwell on the odd form of the thing, which tends to induce a slight list to one side. For some unknown reason the body is a wedge, as if referring to the emphasis of a spine. But not a spine of a book, as these lead to parallel surfaces. More like a coil binder that all the pages fell out of. The reference has left the building.
What is especially strange about the Kindle are the controls. The page turning buttons are tall vertical tabs that dominate both sides, which demand you use both hands. But you cannot pick it up without unintentionally turning a page. To quote Phillipe Stark from a video taken at a recent conference “Immediately when you take it [he picks it up with his left hand and grips it] and you push the button here. Oh shit! I do that [unintentionally turning the page, he passes it to his right hand] and you make the same mistake on the right.”
Here is the clip & it is pretty scathing: gadgets.boingboing.net/2007/12/14/video-philippe-starc.html
The product designers looked at the keyboard and remarked “Well, it must be intentional” Inferring that there is no way it could have been a casting error. So is it meant for thumb operation or ten finger typing? It has a full qwerty keyboard, but it radiuses away from your thumbs like a typesetter who got sleepy. This is novel in a way that even Beatrice Ward would have mercilessly derided - perhaps as “stunt industrial design”.
The conflicts are with the controls and the shape. It assumes that you are holding it, but has no resting place for your thumbs, save for the stunt keyboard. Except that to reach the keys, you would have to have hands the size of Andre the Giant. So you set it down on a table, lean to the right, and type with both hands on what is now the stupidest keyboard in the world.
The problem is the same as a Peter Opsvik’s 1979 Balans kneeling chair. It would be a great idea if we only sat one way. But we are actually very dynamic when we sit and the Balans chair forces you into single position. Opsvik was quick to recognize these issues & by the late eighties had designed chairs that incorporated more sitting positions than anything else on the market [Oposit Balans]. This gives me hope.
The Kindle’s controls, in fact, are not even as good as Opsvik’s initial effort which, however flawed, became iconic. Supporting one mode of use well would be an improvement. The Kindle infers modes of use of which few are possible & none comfortable.
As Phillipe Stark & one of the product designers pointed out, you want to touch the screen to turn the page. The fundamental problem stems from the limitations of the e-screen. The matte surface and high resolution comes at the price of touch. Unfortunately, in the world of early adopters, the bar jumped up to the height of an Ipod last year. Physical controls are now archaic, especially on a device that shouldn’t have them in the first place. The final impulse is to quietly set it down or put it safely in a drawer.
We won’t dwell on the odd form of the thing, which tends to induce a slight list to one side. For some unknown reason the body is a wedge, as if referring to the emphasis of a spine. But not a spine of a book, as these lead to parallel surfaces. More like a coil binder that all the pages fell out of. The reference has left the building.
What is especially strange about the Kindle are the controls. The page turning buttons are tall vertical tabs that dominate both sides, which demand you use both hands. But you cannot pick it up without unintentionally turning a page. To quote Phillipe Stark from a video taken at a recent conference “Immediately when you take it [he picks it up with his left hand and grips it] and you push the button here. Oh shit! I do that [unintentionally turning the page, he passes it to his right hand] and you make the same mistake on the right.”
Here is the clip & it is pretty scathing: gadgets.boingboing.net/2007/12/14/video-philippe-starc.html
The product designers looked at the keyboard and remarked “Well, it must be intentional” Inferring that there is no way it could have been a casting error. So is it meant for thumb operation or ten finger typing? It has a full qwerty keyboard, but it radiuses away from your thumbs like a typesetter who got sleepy. This is novel in a way that even Beatrice Ward would have mercilessly derided - perhaps as “stunt industrial design”.
The conflicts are with the controls and the shape. It assumes that you are holding it, but has no resting place for your thumbs, save for the stunt keyboard. Except that to reach the keys, you would have to have hands the size of Andre the Giant. So you set it down on a table, lean to the right, and type with both hands on what is now the stupidest keyboard in the world.
The problem is the same as a Peter Opsvik’s 1979 Balans kneeling chair. It would be a great idea if we only sat one way. But we are actually very dynamic when we sit and the Balans chair forces you into single position. Opsvik was quick to recognize these issues & by the late eighties had designed chairs that incorporated more sitting positions than anything else on the market [Oposit Balans]. This gives me hope.
The Kindle’s controls, in fact, are not even as good as Opsvik’s initial effort which, however flawed, became iconic. Supporting one mode of use well would be an improvement. The Kindle infers modes of use of which few are possible & none comfortable.
As Phillipe Stark & one of the product designers pointed out, you want to touch the screen to turn the page. The fundamental problem stems from the limitations of the e-screen. The matte surface and high resolution comes at the price of touch. Unfortunately, in the world of early adopters, the bar jumped up to the height of an Ipod last year. Physical controls are now archaic, especially on a device that shouldn’t have them in the first place. The final impulse is to quietly set it down or put it safely in a drawer.
Use Cases, Scenarios & User Stories: Decoding the differences. Part 1
User Experience Designers [UxD], Business Analysts [B/A] and Agile developers to often find themselves misunderstanding each other while talking about very similar ideas. These forms of recording baseline user needs have much in common so we will take a stab at sorting them out. This will be necessarily concise as a full study of these issues could fill multiple thesis books. You would be very bored.
Use cases
Use cases gained popularity as a development tool through the Rational Rose project at the corporation of the same name, led by James Rumbaugh, Grady Booch & Ivar Jacobson. Each brought their own methodology to the corporation and then attempted to reconcile them into the so-called Unified Method in 1996/97. The semantic aspect of the notation Unified Modeling Language [UML] are Use Cases, a precise description of a single user action.
In the classic Cox/Aurum/Jeffery words which are cited so often as dominate definition: “A use case is a specific way of using a system using some part of functionality.” This is a bit cold as a description and it exposes some of the issues with writing them; well formed use cases need to be just specific enough; too detailed and you end with an ocean of them, too general and the developers don’t know what to build. The reality is that the generalizations allow the developers to synthesize a contextually appropriate solution.
Alistair Cockburn has a very usable explication of how to write a use case here. But these are the main parts and any User Experience Designer will see many linguistic overlaps with our notion of a scenario - they are named as a sub component of his template. Perhaps the best comment he makes is to construct it in several passes, which invites the Agile notion of iteration:
Description
Use Case: Number and verb phrase
Goal in Context: Short paragraph
Scope: & Level: Which part of which system are we working with?
Primary Actor: This would be primary persona in UxD
Priority:
Frequency:
Trigger:
Narrative
Main Success Scenario - Sunny Day Path
Context
Extensions
Goals
Performance Target:
Business Goal
System Goal
Error paths
Due date
There are definite pros & cons to using Use Cases. Personally I find them a very powerful starting point for describing a project if they are written as concisely as possible. Why? Because the primary flaw of Use Cases is one that you discover. They tend to multiply in complexity and create a maintenance nightmare. Which is precisely the Agile XP argument against them. And why Rational Rose uses a database to flag the effects of changing any case.
Looking at the description above, most I/A’s can do a taskflow in about 15 minutes. A taskflow which respects the other contexts in the application or website, reduces the number of steps and elegantly synthesizes actions in ways that create cumulative knowledge may take a bit longer.
This leads us to the primary UxD tool for planning actions, a scenario. If Use Cases are specific to an action, Scenarios are cognizant of the big picture.
Scenarios
Scenarios have multiple roots and the collision of histories can lead to confusion. They have origins in narrative literature and the human tendency to remember things through using stories. They have been used by market strategists as proxy ethnographic mnemonics. Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay “As We May Think” is written as a scenario of the future, a not unknown storytelling device - Jules Verne comes to mind. Alan Cooper Thomas Erickson & John Carroll, among others have popularized their use in software design in conjunction with personas and this is how we will consider them.
In this light they are broader than Use Cases, and the focus is on the users actions & goals rather than the system or business goals. Typically UxD will only consider the user goals & leave the system functions to a B/A.
Scenarios are aligned with the primary or secondary personas & act as walkthroughs to uncover the requirements of any given set of tasks. One of the advantages of this tool is that it is general in use, allowing the designer to nudge it into a complex context. The rough boundaries also facilitate synthesis through iteration by not eliminating the discover of solutions. These are not trivial advantages.
Here is a typical if clearly fictional one:
1] Stephanie arrives at a west end station at about 8:20, parks in the smallest snowbank & walks through 3 inches of fresh powder to get to the door. Once inside the station, she turns up the heat & pulls out her laptop.
2] She fires up the Zippidy Connecto software and opens the group for the station she will be working on. She then opens the repository pane. Using standard windows navigational metaphors, she locates the current corporate template for the new relay.
3] She drags the template from the repository directly into her workspace. She is prompted to enter device specific information.
4] Stephanie selects the new device , shift clicks the Nimbus 3000 & clicks the data line connection. The two devices are connected.
5] The points that get passed to the Nimbus 3000 are all standard and set in the corporate IED template. She is done with the relay.
6] Stephanie saves the revised configuration and the configuration parameters have now been added to the Nimbus 3000 client in her station diagram. At this point she’s smiling as to how easy this was. She cleans the snow off of her car and heads back to the office.
From the basic story arc we extrapolate system functionality, rather than trying to determine a list of features based on the teams comfort level & kludging in contextual alignment. The focus is on aligning the experience with the task, which is obviously a user centric method.
In Part 2 we will look at User stories & see if we can find the similarities & differences between these three methodological baselines.
Use cases
Use cases gained popularity as a development tool through the Rational Rose project at the corporation of the same name, led by James Rumbaugh, Grady Booch & Ivar Jacobson. Each brought their own methodology to the corporation and then attempted to reconcile them into the so-called Unified Method in 1996/97. The semantic aspect of the notation Unified Modeling Language [UML] are Use Cases, a precise description of a single user action.
In the classic Cox/Aurum/Jeffery words which are cited so often as dominate definition: “A use case is a specific way of using a system using some part of functionality.” This is a bit cold as a description and it exposes some of the issues with writing them; well formed use cases need to be just specific enough; too detailed and you end with an ocean of them, too general and the developers don’t know what to build. The reality is that the generalizations allow the developers to synthesize a contextually appropriate solution.
Alistair Cockburn has a very usable explication of how to write a use case here. But these are the main parts and any User Experience Designer will see many linguistic overlaps with our notion of a scenario - they are named as a sub component of his template. Perhaps the best comment he makes is to construct it in several passes, which invites the Agile notion of iteration:
Description
Use Case: Number and verb phrase
Goal in Context: Short paragraph
Scope: & Level: Which part of which system are we working with?
Primary Actor: This would be primary persona in UxD
Priority:
Frequency:
Trigger:
Narrative
Main Success Scenario - Sunny Day Path
Context
Extensions
Goals
Performance Target:
Business Goal
System Goal
Error paths
Due date
There are definite pros & cons to using Use Cases. Personally I find them a very powerful starting point for describing a project if they are written as concisely as possible. Why? Because the primary flaw of Use Cases is one that you discover. They tend to multiply in complexity and create a maintenance nightmare. Which is precisely the Agile XP argument against them. And why Rational Rose uses a database to flag the effects of changing any case.
Looking at the description above, most I/A’s can do a taskflow in about 15 minutes. A taskflow which respects the other contexts in the application or website, reduces the number of steps and elegantly synthesizes actions in ways that create cumulative knowledge may take a bit longer.
This leads us to the primary UxD tool for planning actions, a scenario. If Use Cases are specific to an action, Scenarios are cognizant of the big picture.
Scenarios
Scenarios have multiple roots and the collision of histories can lead to confusion. They have origins in narrative literature and the human tendency to remember things through using stories. They have been used by market strategists as proxy ethnographic mnemonics. Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay “As We May Think” is written as a scenario of the future, a not unknown storytelling device - Jules Verne comes to mind. Alan Cooper Thomas Erickson & John Carroll, among others have popularized their use in software design in conjunction with personas and this is how we will consider them.
In this light they are broader than Use Cases, and the focus is on the users actions & goals rather than the system or business goals. Typically UxD will only consider the user goals & leave the system functions to a B/A.
Scenarios are aligned with the primary or secondary personas & act as walkthroughs to uncover the requirements of any given set of tasks. One of the advantages of this tool is that it is general in use, allowing the designer to nudge it into a complex context. The rough boundaries also facilitate synthesis through iteration by not eliminating the discover of solutions. These are not trivial advantages.
Here is a typical if clearly fictional one:
1] Stephanie arrives at a west end station at about 8:20, parks in the smallest snowbank & walks through 3 inches of fresh powder to get to the door. Once inside the station, she turns up the heat & pulls out her laptop.
2] She fires up the Zippidy Connecto software and opens the group for the station she will be working on. She then opens the repository pane. Using standard windows navigational metaphors, she locates the current corporate template for the new relay.
3] She drags the template from the repository directly into her workspace. She is prompted to enter device specific information.
4] Stephanie selects the new device , shift clicks the Nimbus 3000 & clicks the data line connection. The two devices are connected.
5] The points that get passed to the Nimbus 3000 are all standard and set in the corporate IED template. She is done with the relay.
6] Stephanie saves the revised configuration and the configuration parameters have now been added to the Nimbus 3000 client in her station diagram. At this point she’s smiling as to how easy this was. She cleans the snow off of her car and heads back to the office.
From the basic story arc we extrapolate system functionality, rather than trying to determine a list of features based on the teams comfort level & kludging in contextual alignment. The focus is on aligning the experience with the task, which is obviously a user centric method.
In Part 2 we will look at User stories & see if we can find the similarities & differences between these three methodological baselines.
Wanted: Catalogs Dead or Alive
I have had a few interesting conversations with people over that last few months, and some interesting ideas happened because of them. Just thought I would share them because I would love to see them happen and am not in a spot where they apply right now. I will relate another one next week.
I was talking to a major Chicago retailer north of here on February 6 who has a truly elegant catalog site. A site which holds down about a fifth of their business. Which adds up to a couple of ducats. Assets are largely assembled in other departments, so the team is miniscule that produces this site. It is a very sophisticated site, most of the functionality of Targets’ very savvy site, but significantly better typography and use of space.
And that is great, it is a fine example of it’s kind, but the whole thing is basically pre-millennial. Lands End did this in 1997, minus a history of things browsed. So pretty in a cold dead way.
So I said what if... What if you could get people involved with the site? What if they could contribute to it in some way that would build a small bit of brand commitment? They don’t work for you; it has to be just above trivial to leave some record of your presence. If you ask them to write an operetta to your product you will get little response.
But this is a product based play. The artifacts are objects and this makes things much easier. What if users of the site and buyers of their products could upload pictures with a short caption of the objects in their homes. It is personal, it invests them, it shows individuality. Nuff said.
I was talking to a major Chicago retailer north of here on February 6 who has a truly elegant catalog site. A site which holds down about a fifth of their business. Which adds up to a couple of ducats. Assets are largely assembled in other departments, so the team is miniscule that produces this site. It is a very sophisticated site, most of the functionality of Targets’ very savvy site, but significantly better typography and use of space.
And that is great, it is a fine example of it’s kind, but the whole thing is basically pre-millennial. Lands End did this in 1997, minus a history of things browsed. So pretty in a cold dead way.
So I said what if... What if you could get people involved with the site? What if they could contribute to it in some way that would build a small bit of brand commitment? They don’t work for you; it has to be just above trivial to leave some record of your presence. If you ask them to write an operetta to your product you will get little response.
But this is a product based play. The artifacts are objects and this makes things much easier. What if users of the site and buyers of their products could upload pictures with a short caption of the objects in their homes. It is personal, it invests them, it shows individuality. Nuff said.
Selling with community feedback: baby carriers, Harley-Davidson & web 2.0
I heard an interesting story today that illustrates how some companies are failing to understand building community around their brand. This story was about Ergo baby carriers, but the business principles are just as applicable to companies like Harley-Davidson.
The Ergo baby carrier is an evolution of a Baby Bjorn in that it transfers the weight of the baby to your hips from your shoulders, a difference that everyone feels after about a half hour. Now this is not really a new concept, people have been carrying babies around in various slings pieces of cloth and homemade gizmos for, well, a few thousand years at least. Maybe more. The Ergo is pretty well made with clasps in the right places. Clasps that are cheap imitations of your standard Fastex models - certainly of better quality than the even cheaper rip-offs that Maclaren uses on their strollers.
The price point is pretty good, the aesthetics are not seductive. But the idea is right, and the carrier passes the vacuuming-with-baby challenge. Not a trivial hurdle.
However they are a bit challenged in the Brand management department. One of their retailers, Laura Hamilton of The Portable Baby in San Jose, found the aesthetics lacking and started hand dying them to her own colors. This is not so different from a Harley devotee repainting the gas tank. Admittedly probably a milder form of the obsession, but clearly related.
Ms. Hamilton is very savvy: she has a commerce enabled website and a blog which she uses to connect with her customers. Ergo saw that she was offering these modified carriers and immediately threatened a lawsuit and demanded the return of all their product. To a small retailer the threat of a lawsuit is not a minor matter. Profits from these kinds of businesses tend to be pretty modest. But the real issue is the ripple this kind of response has on the brand.
To return to the Harley analogy: people customize Harleys’ because they believe in the product. This is an act of commitment, money & time. Nobody would bother if they didn’t think it was worth it. And while it is a statement that the product may not be perfect, manufacturers’ need to recognize that consumers look to novelty for identification.
And these days we publicize the results if a company shuts that down. Ms Hamilton has the freedom of speech and a platform to launch a critique, which she has done effectively. The effect on the Ergo brand is both bad and out of their control. What could they have done to prevent this?
_ Step one would be to listen to their customers. If people are customizing it, then they should meet that need or celebrate the ingenuity of their retailers.
_ Step two is to realize that the commercial landscape is now a three way street. The company, the customer and an active public forum are all shareholders in whatever enterprise you have on offer. The heavy-handed tactics of legal bullying tend to backfire in this landscape.
Harley recognizes these realities and has incorporated them into their model. It hasn’t always been comfortable with it, but in doing so they have built a brand that has a kind of loyalty that other companies can only dream of. Ergo would do well to grab a page out of their book.
The Ergo baby carrier is an evolution of a Baby Bjorn in that it transfers the weight of the baby to your hips from your shoulders, a difference that everyone feels after about a half hour. Now this is not really a new concept, people have been carrying babies around in various slings pieces of cloth and homemade gizmos for, well, a few thousand years at least. Maybe more. The Ergo is pretty well made with clasps in the right places. Clasps that are cheap imitations of your standard Fastex models - certainly of better quality than the even cheaper rip-offs that Maclaren uses on their strollers.
The price point is pretty good, the aesthetics are not seductive. But the idea is right, and the carrier passes the vacuuming-with-baby challenge. Not a trivial hurdle.
However they are a bit challenged in the Brand management department. One of their retailers, Laura Hamilton of The Portable Baby in San Jose, found the aesthetics lacking and started hand dying them to her own colors. This is not so different from a Harley devotee repainting the gas tank. Admittedly probably a milder form of the obsession, but clearly related.
Ms. Hamilton is very savvy: she has a commerce enabled website and a blog which she uses to connect with her customers. Ergo saw that she was offering these modified carriers and immediately threatened a lawsuit and demanded the return of all their product. To a small retailer the threat of a lawsuit is not a minor matter. Profits from these kinds of businesses tend to be pretty modest. But the real issue is the ripple this kind of response has on the brand.
To return to the Harley analogy: people customize Harleys’ because they believe in the product. This is an act of commitment, money & time. Nobody would bother if they didn’t think it was worth it. And while it is a statement that the product may not be perfect, manufacturers’ need to recognize that consumers look to novelty for identification.
And these days we publicize the results if a company shuts that down. Ms Hamilton has the freedom of speech and a platform to launch a critique, which she has done effectively. The effect on the Ergo brand is both bad and out of their control. What could they have done to prevent this?
_ Step one would be to listen to their customers. If people are customizing it, then they should meet that need or celebrate the ingenuity of their retailers.
_ Step two is to realize that the commercial landscape is now a three way street. The company, the customer and an active public forum are all shareholders in whatever enterprise you have on offer. The heavy-handed tactics of legal bullying tend to backfire in this landscape.
Harley recognizes these realities and has incorporated them into their model. It hasn’t always been comfortable with it, but in doing so they have built a brand that has a kind of loyalty that other companies can only dream of. Ergo would do well to grab a page out of their book.
Yahoo! Fire Sale
The inimitable Khoi Vinh * just wrote a blog talking about Microsoft’s attempt to buy Yahoo! A few days later, Microsoft has been rebuffed and Rupert Murdoch’s News corp. is being courted. Either way, it means that things are not going as planned down at the plant. Khoi suggests that Design [the D is always capitalized for people like us] could not help Yahoo!. That is not quite right.
It misses the history of the Yahoo! vs. Google wars. When Yahoo started, and established it’s brand, it was a long scroll of hyperlinks that was one of the first up-to-date directories on the internet. At the time - say 1997 - there were few enough sites that the mental model worked at least part of the time, but the great tsunami of sites soon overwhelmed this taxonomy. It quickly became useless as a tool, creating the association that Yahoo! was a stupidly long page of unsorted stuff. Sure, there was a search box all the time, but that was not your first impression when you went there. Search boxes are small, and lists are long. People get stuck on those visual scale things.
Google’s approach was a slap in the face to the whole notion of browsing as a starting point. Their minimalism forces you to create your own taxonomy through your search terms. It is a librarian’s version of Do It Yourself; refreshing after the face-packing psuedo portals of Yahoo! and Excite [remember them?].
After Google had established themselves as the great cleanser of Search, Yahoo! started hiring designers and some very good ones too. A bunch of friends of mine found shelter there during the bust. And in the margins of the company some spectacular work was done that benefits the internet design community still. But nobody beyond the hard core geeks knew it because they never effectively restated their brand.
Yahoo!’s advertising has always been misaligned with the utility of the tool, never exposing how they redefined themselves but always hammering on the same visual & auditory tropes that were irrelevant to their business. They mistook habit for talking about what they were doing. [dot cahlmmmmm!]
Thus we have Khoi’s perception that Design does not help. Not conclusive by any means. Design without brand strategy beyond your insider tribe does not help, that we can make a case for. That this reinforces our essential nature as creatures of habit should be noted. Yahoo could not have missed the rise of Google, but failed to understand why it was happening until it was too late.
Rant: Ikea‘s near miss
I was surprised to see Ikea’s most recent site, and not in a good way. Except for the first page, the top half of each index page is a huge movie - which is why it takes so long to load - that tries to cross-sell me. All Marketers seek this holy grail, and the result, should you wait for it, is a clickable image which suggests interaction. The problem is that someone just could not resist putting a billboard along the journey, and it all takes too long to load. This is a great idea on someone’s desktop that gets killed in the real world - it could all work well if it loaded in a third the time.
So the designers however have decided to flash a message at me before allowing the interaction. Perhaps this is some theme that informed the selection of objects for the photograph. Great, but unfortunately I don’t care. If the photo is good, it will describe the idea. If not, no text will cure it. I would guess that most users perceive it as a big ad and click away quickly; before they realize that the surface becomes a clickable portal to more information. Because of this lack of judgement on Ikea’s part, they damage their brand.
Let’s assume a typical scenario. A customer appears looking for the cheapest Billy bookshelf which will hold the books they still keep in boxes from the last time they moved [just a completely random hypothesis].
The brand building approach is to allow the user to find things on the site while offering related options in one area and even very lateral things in another. As well, these sites tend to contain extraordinary numbers of goods so some evidence as to what you looked at recently would be handy. And even better if it you could choose to expand it.
The less appealing approach is to stand in your users way like a barker in a hot dog suit. I have seen more annoying transpositions from other media - most notably when print magazines kludge together a page turning metaphor to shovel the magazine online. The issue is the lack of understanding as to why the user came there.
What motivates the impulse to force these messages down your throat? Certainly any Marketing Exec is going to look at their page views versus buys and want a higher response. The gap between lookers & buyers is vast on the internet, but people viewing this from the POV of a spreadsheet rarely realize the complexity of the psychology involved. Moving someone who is dreaming of stuff they could buy to buying takes either a delicate push or an extremely compelling offer. Both strategies have utility in different contexts. But they share the reality of user impatience. We just don’t want to wait. When I see a progress bar, the words that appear in my head are “Skip Intro”.
As a brand do you want to help your customers or get in their way? People having positive feelings about your Brand is like catching lightning in a bottle; there are many factors that contribute to it and if only a couple are off you can wreck the feeling. In a ‘delicate push’ context, standing in my way waving a flag may not help, or worse, may help your numbers temporarily while eroding brand confidence.
A better idea would be to invite your users to participate in your experience, which allowing them to choose does on the most elementary level. There is an emerging group of tools to do this in a much more sophisticated way; finding the right juncture between risk exposure, interaction & the amount of investment from the user is the challenging balance.
Not to get too geeky, but the best part of the site is actually the HTML & Javascript coding which are beautifully commented and well structured. It is unfortunate that the visible site does not show the same forethought and consideration.
So the designers however have decided to flash a message at me before allowing the interaction. Perhaps this is some theme that informed the selection of objects for the photograph. Great, but unfortunately I don’t care. If the photo is good, it will describe the idea. If not, no text will cure it. I would guess that most users perceive it as a big ad and click away quickly; before they realize that the surface becomes a clickable portal to more information. Because of this lack of judgement on Ikea’s part, they damage their brand.
Let’s assume a typical scenario. A customer appears looking for the cheapest Billy bookshelf which will hold the books they still keep in boxes from the last time they moved [just a completely random hypothesis].
The brand building approach is to allow the user to find things on the site while offering related options in one area and even very lateral things in another. As well, these sites tend to contain extraordinary numbers of goods so some evidence as to what you looked at recently would be handy. And even better if it you could choose to expand it.
The less appealing approach is to stand in your users way like a barker in a hot dog suit. I have seen more annoying transpositions from other media - most notably when print magazines kludge together a page turning metaphor to shovel the magazine online. The issue is the lack of understanding as to why the user came there.
What motivates the impulse to force these messages down your throat? Certainly any Marketing Exec is going to look at their page views versus buys and want a higher response. The gap between lookers & buyers is vast on the internet, but people viewing this from the POV of a spreadsheet rarely realize the complexity of the psychology involved. Moving someone who is dreaming of stuff they could buy to buying takes either a delicate push or an extremely compelling offer. Both strategies have utility in different contexts. But they share the reality of user impatience. We just don’t want to wait. When I see a progress bar, the words that appear in my head are “Skip Intro”.
As a brand do you want to help your customers or get in their way? People having positive feelings about your Brand is like catching lightning in a bottle; there are many factors that contribute to it and if only a couple are off you can wreck the feeling. In a ‘delicate push’ context, standing in my way waving a flag may not help, or worse, may help your numbers temporarily while eroding brand confidence.
A better idea would be to invite your users to participate in your experience, which allowing them to choose does on the most elementary level. There is an emerging group of tools to do this in a much more sophisticated way; finding the right juncture between risk exposure, interaction & the amount of investment from the user is the challenging balance.
Not to get too geeky, but the best part of the site is actually the HTML & Javascript coding which are beautifully commented and well structured. It is unfortunate that the visible site does not show the same forethought and consideration.
Community rules rule communities: Part 3
Who ya gonna call?
On exclusive community sites, like the Well and Facebook, the community polices itself. With AOL chatrooms, Friendster & MySpace, you need a visible police force. As well, the consequences of bad behavior have different ramifications according to the level of investment in the community. A recent New York Times Sunday Magazine article tells the story a young teen in Missouri who committed suicide, apparently because of falling into a false romance set by the Mother of another girl in the neighborhood. Yet more proof that Junior High is stranger than fiction. While I hope this is an extreme case, it shows the emotional dependence that these sites can engender.
But is there any way that the site could have monitored or prevented this without alienating the users it sought to attract? The jury is still out on this, and is currently waffling about going in. The states attorney in St. Louis refused to prosecute citing lack of evidence but Los Angeles County prosecutor is now rumored to be looking into the case. The appalling reality is the lack of repercussions to these kinds of harassment.
One of many issues here is that different mindsets are drawn to each community. In my experience teaching at art schools, the bad kids are stars on MySpace and the somewhat cleaner young adults post to Facebook. However, the basic motivations of communicating with their friends, establishing some cultural reference points in their profiles and making smarmy comments are always durable pleasures. In the case mentioned above the peer pressure to be seen in the community was a strong motivation, fairly obvious in a thirteen year old but obviously suspect in the Mother.
Can’t Buy an Avatar
So different users desire different things, even different identities from communities and we see evidence of this in the professional communities like LinkedIn and Arrows & Boxes. These communities have expectations of accountability far beyond the social networking sites. LinkedIn is a series of social yardsticks in a very concise form. Professional discourse sites, like Boxes & Arrows, are platforms to express ideas to the community and gain discourse & reputation points in return. Both of these rest on named participation.
Facebook establishes you in a community, but allows a great deal of construction in terms of history, alliances, interactive mechanisms and image selection to create a very personal view within those boundaries. MySpace allows & almost provokes the invention of identity; all you need is some kind of name and email address & a birth date of your own invention. A good tattoo goes much further than a list of likes or pet peeves. It allows, in a way similar to Ebay, people to capitalize on their idiosyncrasies.
MySpace tends to capture people with stronger musical interests because of the ability to embed music in your page; to the point where it has become a crucial viral marketing medium for bands & the tattered remains of the music industry. In contrast, Boxes & Arrows is not known for it’s playful qualities though many of members may have tattoos.
In sum, humans have an uncanny ability to create and desire complexity. Therefore the best rulesets are the most concise. These rules & the effects they will have must be carefully thought through & tested before launching the community; any revisions to the original rulesets will feel like censorship, which damages the impulse to cluster.
On an emotional level, the users are motivated by either collaboration, self promotion or rebellion, which is why attempts to commodify these activities usually fail. Sensitivity to the community is paramount here. They only become viral & successful if their designers recognize that they will be out of control in the specifics, but contained in the general shape by the initial rules. All of these sites attempt to invest you in growing your participation; in order for this growth to be manageable, the premises of behavior need to be straightforward.
Addenda:
While this was intended to be a two part piece it quickly grew to three and the issues raised will be revised & revisited for some time to come. There are only partial solutions to social sites and many people are working very hard to figure out another move in this game. We will talk about those as they appear.
On exclusive community sites, like the Well and Facebook, the community polices itself. With AOL chatrooms, Friendster & MySpace, you need a visible police force. As well, the consequences of bad behavior have different ramifications according to the level of investment in the community. A recent New York Times Sunday Magazine article tells the story a young teen in Missouri who committed suicide, apparently because of falling into a false romance set by the Mother of another girl in the neighborhood. Yet more proof that Junior High is stranger than fiction. While I hope this is an extreme case, it shows the emotional dependence that these sites can engender.
But is there any way that the site could have monitored or prevented this without alienating the users it sought to attract? The jury is still out on this, and is currently waffling about going in. The states attorney in St. Louis refused to prosecute citing lack of evidence but Los Angeles County prosecutor is now rumored to be looking into the case. The appalling reality is the lack of repercussions to these kinds of harassment.
One of many issues here is that different mindsets are drawn to each community. In my experience teaching at art schools, the bad kids are stars on MySpace and the somewhat cleaner young adults post to Facebook. However, the basic motivations of communicating with their friends, establishing some cultural reference points in their profiles and making smarmy comments are always durable pleasures. In the case mentioned above the peer pressure to be seen in the community was a strong motivation, fairly obvious in a thirteen year old but obviously suspect in the Mother.
Can’t Buy an Avatar
So different users desire different things, even different identities from communities and we see evidence of this in the professional communities like LinkedIn and Arrows & Boxes. These communities have expectations of accountability far beyond the social networking sites. LinkedIn is a series of social yardsticks in a very concise form. Professional discourse sites, like Boxes & Arrows, are platforms to express ideas to the community and gain discourse & reputation points in return. Both of these rest on named participation.
Facebook establishes you in a community, but allows a great deal of construction in terms of history, alliances, interactive mechanisms and image selection to create a very personal view within those boundaries. MySpace allows & almost provokes the invention of identity; all you need is some kind of name and email address & a birth date of your own invention. A good tattoo goes much further than a list of likes or pet peeves. It allows, in a way similar to Ebay, people to capitalize on their idiosyncrasies.
MySpace tends to capture people with stronger musical interests because of the ability to embed music in your page; to the point where it has become a crucial viral marketing medium for bands & the tattered remains of the music industry. In contrast, Boxes & Arrows is not known for it’s playful qualities though many of members may have tattoos.
In sum, humans have an uncanny ability to create and desire complexity. Therefore the best rulesets are the most concise. These rules & the effects they will have must be carefully thought through & tested before launching the community; any revisions to the original rulesets will feel like censorship, which damages the impulse to cluster.
On an emotional level, the users are motivated by either collaboration, self promotion or rebellion, which is why attempts to commodify these activities usually fail. Sensitivity to the community is paramount here. They only become viral & successful if their designers recognize that they will be out of control in the specifics, but contained in the general shape by the initial rules. All of these sites attempt to invest you in growing your participation; in order for this growth to be manageable, the premises of behavior need to be straightforward.
Addenda:
While this was intended to be a two part piece it quickly grew to three and the issues raised will be revised & revisited for some time to come. There are only partial solutions to social sites and many people are working very hard to figure out another move in this game. We will talk about those as they appear.
Rant: Apple’s New Laptop
Was it Wallis Simpson who said you can never be too rich or too thin? Being neither, I have no idea what the attraction could be.
Yet the revelation expressed in breathless hype and Huck Finn razzle dazzle by Steve Jobs last week at Macworld left me underwhelmed. Perhaps my expectations were led astray by the uncommon common sense of the Iphone. It was as if Apple said: what don’t you like about cellphones? Then made a list and solved for elegance.
The new laptop is a bit thinner at the front. This ain’t the future. I want the bubble car, thanks! The whole clamshell notebook is functional, but nothing new. How about a flexible screen and keyboard that roll out of a cpu container? Or unfold like a paper hat? Or roll up into a tube?
Let’s think out of the box here. You spill your coffee on any laptop in the world and it’s gone; sealed against moisture would be handy. And the whole mouse and click thing was a great idea when Doug Englebart figured it out in 1967, but it is time for gestural computing with a little more spatial specificity than in Minority Report. How about a tabloid sized touch screen with a keyboard that I can make appear with a double tap?
Well maybe next year. Although it would take Apple to successfully bring it to market, I am not holding my breath for Acer or Dell on that one.
Yet the revelation expressed in breathless hype and Huck Finn razzle dazzle by Steve Jobs last week at Macworld left me underwhelmed. Perhaps my expectations were led astray by the uncommon common sense of the Iphone. It was as if Apple said: what don’t you like about cellphones? Then made a list and solved for elegance.
The new laptop is a bit thinner at the front. This ain’t the future. I want the bubble car, thanks! The whole clamshell notebook is functional, but nothing new. How about a flexible screen and keyboard that roll out of a cpu container? Or unfold like a paper hat? Or roll up into a tube?
Let’s think out of the box here. You spill your coffee on any laptop in the world and it’s gone; sealed against moisture would be handy. And the whole mouse and click thing was a great idea when Doug Englebart figured it out in 1967, but it is time for gestural computing with a little more spatial specificity than in Minority Report. How about a tabloid sized touch screen with a keyboard that I can make appear with a double tap?
Well maybe next year. Although it would take Apple to successfully bring it to market, I am not holding my breath for Acer or Dell on that one.
Community rules rule communities: Part 2
Scrapbooking with feedback or the crochet of trivia?
Over the last 5 years we have seen the emergence of a new generation of community sites, the more formalized social networking site. The key structure that sets the tone of these sites are the short list of rules and premises that define entry and continued participation. Let’s compare some of the more notorious social networking sites and see how they approach it, and how that affects the tone, growth & kinds of participation.
In Friendster and MySpace, you can surf as many pages as you like. Leaving a message, chatting or looking at photos or videos requires a log in. Logging in requires registration. This means creating an account and stating your age without any meaningful verification, which is then secured by an email loop to the gmail account you created moments before... A very simple system, and one that has become a baseline for most social sites despite the obvious flaws. As a construction activity, it is the descendent of making your own web page on the internet, but with a simple Content Management System to make it easy and closed group browsing and searching.
Contained Loops
Facebook initially distinguished itself by allowing only people with .edu email addresses and limiting surfers ability to see participants details by school and region. This tiny change in the ruleset is fundamental to the kind of community that Facebook has created. Making access exclusive to students, it establishes a baseline credibility that leverages the brand loyalty mythologies constructed by the academic system. For instance, which school you attend usually creates a class structure and forms cliques of exclusion.
The general benefit is a level of comfort that is not felt on other sites, a dramatic difference from MySpace & Friendster.
This has a profound effect on how these sites grow. There are initial cultural triggers, but real growth appears when groups begin to cluster. If three of your friends have joined the site, then probably you and your other friends will join the same site. IM services work the same way.
The success of clustering is linked to how the sites are administered. Facebook devised an exclusionary context because of lessons it learned from Friendsters collapse. As with all online communities from AOL on, miscreants troll for innocence on the internet & these sites facilitate pedophiles. How the sites react to these behaviors and the threat of these behaviors sets a tone in the community.
Friendster became known for overreacting to this threat and damaged the impulse to join a cluster. The primary demographic for these sites are teens & young adults who are not fond of authority. In fact they are typically online to try and escape it, so Freindster seemed at worst a bully at best a pill.
MySpace capitalized on the disaffection with more robust servers and much less control. You could personalize your space more, add illegal music files and write pretty much anything you wanted. While there were still levels of access controlled by a log-in, the feeling that a participant could vandalize their own page through various hacks was a powerful loyalty builder. But both strategies leave questions unanswered and MySpace is currently being taken to court by both victims and alleged pedophiles.
Over the last 5 years we have seen the emergence of a new generation of community sites, the more formalized social networking site. The key structure that sets the tone of these sites are the short list of rules and premises that define entry and continued participation. Let’s compare some of the more notorious social networking sites and see how they approach it, and how that affects the tone, growth & kinds of participation.
In Friendster and MySpace, you can surf as many pages as you like. Leaving a message, chatting or looking at photos or videos requires a log in. Logging in requires registration. This means creating an account and stating your age without any meaningful verification, which is then secured by an email loop to the gmail account you created moments before... A very simple system, and one that has become a baseline for most social sites despite the obvious flaws. As a construction activity, it is the descendent of making your own web page on the internet, but with a simple Content Management System to make it easy and closed group browsing and searching.
Contained Loops
Facebook initially distinguished itself by allowing only people with .edu email addresses and limiting surfers ability to see participants details by school and region. This tiny change in the ruleset is fundamental to the kind of community that Facebook has created. Making access exclusive to students, it establishes a baseline credibility that leverages the brand loyalty mythologies constructed by the academic system. For instance, which school you attend usually creates a class structure and forms cliques of exclusion.
The general benefit is a level of comfort that is not felt on other sites, a dramatic difference from MySpace & Friendster.
This has a profound effect on how these sites grow. There are initial cultural triggers, but real growth appears when groups begin to cluster. If three of your friends have joined the site, then probably you and your other friends will join the same site. IM services work the same way.
The success of clustering is linked to how the sites are administered. Facebook devised an exclusionary context because of lessons it learned from Friendsters collapse. As with all online communities from AOL on, miscreants troll for innocence on the internet & these sites facilitate pedophiles. How the sites react to these behaviors and the threat of these behaviors sets a tone in the community.
Friendster became known for overreacting to this threat and damaged the impulse to join a cluster. The primary demographic for these sites are teens & young adults who are not fond of authority. In fact they are typically online to try and escape it, so Freindster seemed at worst a bully at best a pill.
MySpace capitalized on the disaffection with more robust servers and much less control. You could personalize your space more, add illegal music files and write pretty much anything you wanted. While there were still levels of access controlled by a log-in, the feeling that a participant could vandalize their own page through various hacks was a powerful loyalty builder. But both strategies leave questions unanswered and MySpace is currently being taken to court by both victims and alleged pedophiles.