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Tracked down a resume from the mid-80s when I was in high school. Check out that education and work experience! I liked to write computer programs and play video games!
Cool artwork at 111 Minna makes for an exciting backdrop for presentations
Steve and I recently attended an event hosted by Microsoft, called Express Yourself. It was a party/networking gathering focused around a “design contest” in which four prominent Bay Area software design firms presented the work they had done to “solve a real-world design problem” that Microsoft had posed a few days beforehand. As they promoted it:
Are you a User Experience Rockstar? Are you a Master UI Coder? Do you know how to work together? Want to network, drink and learn with 100 of your finest peers in San Francisco?
Please join Microsoft and four leading software design firms in the Bay Area as they compete head to head to solve a real-world design problem… Contestants will receive their design problem three days ahead, and the day of the party will compete to finish and present their solutions using Microsoft’s new Silverlight technology and Expression Suite of design tools. Attendees watch the solutions come to life, comment and party until the awards ceremony.
To begin with, it was a great party–a beautiful venue in downtown San Francisco, open bar, excellent food. Balancing a Martini glass in one hand and a half-spherical bowl of Pho and chopsticks in the other, I contemplated the usability of flatware.
The design problem Microsoft had posed to the firms was to create a “safe” social networking environment for a teenage girl. Microsoft had supplied the firms with personas representing the girl, her mother, and her “quasi-bad-ass” friend.
Update: the contest’s problem statement, rules, and evaluation criteria are now posted here.
The presentations all shared what seemed to us (and to many of the people in the audience around us, judging by an almost non-stop flow of derisive commentary) as a common and almost complete lack of thought or even lay-knowledge about the culture of users for whom this environment was being designed.
Update: details (including screenshots) of the different submissions, and the winner are posted on organizer Will Tschumy’s blog (7/2/07 and 7/3/07).
This apparent lack of consideration for the consumer/end user’s culture and needs/wants stirred a reaction and raised some questions for us.
Dan: None of these (contest entries) look like they’re for teenagers. I mean, it seems so obvious to me that the place you would start would be figuring out what the person you’re designing this thing for would find exciting.
Steve: The most exciting moment (leading to spontaneous applause) was for a interface widget that created this very Web2.0 mosaic of media, kind of like a tag cloud of images and movies. Completely unusable since you couldn’t see what was in the teeny pictures, and very adult in its visual. The audience applauded for something they would like.
In the presentations, I really wanted to see one of the teams consider a definition of what it meant to be safe. That is a very loaded word and it needed to be unpacked. Until you know what safe is, you can’t design for it.
Dan: If I was a kid, the last thing I would want would be any kind of web thing that my parents were involved in.
Steve: If any of these designs get published, I’d like to see someone compare them with Imbee, an actual site that that just launched, aiming to address this same need. Will those appeal to teens? Have they found a way to navigate the tension between “safe” and “parental involvement”?
I’m not being a research snob here. I understand the timeline didn’t support the teams doing their own research. But Microsoft supplied personas. Aren’t personas proxies for research? Or, are they, (as I’ve said before) simply user-centered bullshit. For all the power they are supposed to have with design teams to keep them focused on designing for the user, they didn’t help at all in this case.
Dan: People have all these tools, but they have no idea what needs to be built.
Steve: And maybe the focus of the event was purely on the building. But then Microsoft should have framed it differently. Distributing personas and judging solutions would suggest that it was about building the right thing. But Microsoft’s tool is to help you build better; perhaps their assumption was that the designers would bring the process and MSFT would bring the tool?
Dan: I wonder what Microsoft wanted to find out from doing this, and whether they found it out?
Steve: That’s a good question. I assume they were doing it more as a way to create a splash and be seen as a real player in the design community.
Dan: Then they should have done a challenge that was geared to the strength of the people they had competing. Plus, this was about using their software, right? So why focus on research results as the way to get people into the task? I think they went too far towards the front end of the “project.” They should have given more of a creative brief, and let people go at it.
To me, this whole thing really shows how a lot of people still don’t acknowledge (or don’t fully get) how much work has to be done to actually turn research into design decisions. I think this bodes really well for the work we do.
Steve: I’m relieved you think that. I felt the opposite, actually. I felt depressed about the opportunities for our approach. It’s kind of depressing that in 2007 the “top” software design firms are so locked into distinguishing themselves with shiny shiny and no thinky thinky. [Assuming these were in fact the top players in their firms and not the B Ark].
If making use of real tangible understandings of real users isn’t even on the table for a lot of these folks, then where do we find people to play with? To inform or collaborate with? Maybe that’s not even the point though. Maybe those designers should be working for us rather than the frequent reversal.
Dan: I totally agree—the needs and desires determine what will really work for people and be successful. Then the design should be executed within those constraints. Context, not content, is king, right?
Tags: design, express yourself, expression, ey07, failure, msft, safe, teens
Friday night in San Francisco, I heard the following conversation (reported here verbatim) as I walked by the wondrous doorway pictured above:
Guy: (walking a few steps into entryway)
Look at how cool this place is.
Girl: (standing on sidewalk outside entryway) There’s no one in there. What you need to understand is it doesn’t matter how cool it is if there’s no one there.
A few years back in Osaka, I was talking to some Japanese friends about the phenomenally busy “Yogrian Tabby” frozen yogurt shop that had just opened up in the Umeda underground shopping area. They told me that sometimes in Japan, new shops will hire people to show up en masse, creating lines, which attract customers, who then attract other customers, and so on . . .
Tags: conversation, osaka, San Francisco
CatCam was making the rounds recently. It’s nice to see this finally realized as a product, even with a good measure of humor. At my old firm, we delivered a concept that was very similar to this. It seemed like a “good” idea but in hindsight it’s not clear how it really connected to any of our research or was appropriate for the client. Ah, youth.
The pet-mounted camera would randomly snap pics throughout the day, when you got to the images, you’d see what s/he had been up to while you were at work. We called it Dog Day Afternoon and we were quite proud of that.
I’ve been holding this post til I dug up the drawing I did (something I was quite proud of, with my lack of training in illustration) but it’s not in my archives. But seeing that Nicolas Nova blogged about another pet camera (Wonderful Shot) I guess this will have to do.
Tags: camera, cat, dog, ideation, images, pet, photos, pictures, product concept, realization
A while back, Steve posted regarding the oddness of the Ask.com Algorithm ad campaign. Last night, I finally had the camera handy and snapped this shot of the company’s latest TV ad:
For anyone who hasn’t seen it, the spot features a William Hurt-esque everyman doing a Busby Berkeley number, as he celebrates the success of a search he has just done for “Chicks With Swords.”
Does this seem like a really odd choice of content to anyone else? The ad has me wondering: how would you parse the factors that separate “offbeat and interesting” from just plain “out there?”
Tags: ad, ask.com, offbeat, parse, tv
A new commercial for Trojan condoms depicts
women in a bar are surrounded by anthropomorphized, cellphone-toting pigs. One shuffles to the men’s room, where, after procuring a condom from a vending machine, he is transformed into a head-turner in his 20s. When he returns to the bar, a fetching blond who had been indifferent now smiles at him invitingly.
CBS and Fox rejected the ad.
A 2001 report about condom advertising by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation found that, “Some networks draw a strong line between messages about disease prevention — which may be allowed — and those about pregnancy prevention, which may be considered controversial for religious and moral reasons.”
Good example of cultural construction. A product provides a basic set of functionality, but the meaning associated with that functionality rests outside the product itself. The users, and to a large part, society in general, construct that meaning. And so the stories we are allowed to tell about the product are determined along those lines.
I also liked this part of the story:
“With a 75 percent share of the market, we can prioritize growing the category and increasing overall condom usage,” Mr. Daniels said. “Right now in the U.S. only one in four sex acts involves using a condom. That’s dramatically below usage rates in other developed countries. Our goal is to dramatically increase use.”
We know what stomach share is, but what do the marketers at Trojan call their version?
Tags: advertising, condom, culture, meaning, share, usage
As diners, an online reservation service like OpenTable has obvious conveniences. But as the NYT explains, “The other end, however, is where the service has real benefit.”
The reservations that pop up on the restaurants’ computer screens, especially those made by regulars, are accompanied by an important tidbit or two.
Doug Washington, a co-owner of Town Hall, said the notes were not just helpful, they are occasionally indispensable. Next to the name of one regular, who has a habit of bringing in women he is not married to, is an instruction to make sure the man’s wife has not booked a separate table for the same day.
Another frequent guest asks the restaurant to send over dessert compliments of the chef but to put the charge on the guest’s bill. Of another, who takes many of his first dates to Town Hall, the instructions read, “Do not treat like a regular!”
Cool to think about the other interfaces into a system and the other tasks being supported.
Tags: crm, customer service, dining, opentable.com, reservations, restaurant
I’ve used this image before to talk about Unconsumption. This semi-space between the formerly binary states of garbage and non-garbage is an interesting cultural innovation. And now it’s been formalized as a movement called replate – a way to prevent unwanted leftovers from going to waste by placing them on top of a trash can.
Very cool.
Tags: food, garbage, hunger, movement, overt behavior, replate, social activism, unconsumption, waste
Seen in the window of a jewelry store in a very respectable normal mall in downtown Seattle. What a collision of imagery and meaning here! Glamor meets rebellion meets underground meets punk meets opulence meets bling.
Not to mention, that necklace/pendant is huge. Look at the size of the skull ring for a bit of scale.
Tags: alternative, bling, jewlery, mainstream, necklace, pendant, ring, skull
Alter Ego: Avatars and Their Creators is a recent book that presents photos of (online role playing) gamers alongside their online representations (or avatars). The NYT has excerpted images here and the BBC features smaller images (some overlap) but more narrative info here.
Tags: alter ego, avatar, gamer, MMPORPG, representation, robbie cooper, self
Man, am I late to the party. I only just read “Blink” but it was more than 2 years ago when PeterMe wrote Everything You Need to Know About “Blink” Boiled Down Into 9 Words.
Snap judgments are valuable. Except when they are not.
I’d add 6 qualifying words: Hindsight is 20-20 in determining which.
Tags: blink, book, malcolm gladwell, peterme, summary
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