Posts tagged “seattle”

Out and About: Steve in Portland/San Diego/Denver

Last week I hit three cities, doing workshops and fieldwork; in hotel rooms, airports, homes, restaurants and the like. Here are some of my photos from a very busy trip.

help
Hotel restaurant point-of-sale user interface. So many amazingly awful things here. The help button is labeled “HELP!!!!!”; Cobb Salad (I’m sorry, Fiesta Cobb) is $12.00?

raisins
Without raisins? Now with extra raisins!

kiosk
There used to be a baggage kiosk. Now there’s just a sign.

dancing
I found Jonathan Borofsky’s “The Dancers” in downtown Denver to be vaguely unsettling.

wall
Controls removed for your convenience.

Discomfort, reframed (almost)

Two examples of hotels in noisy environments, where they each acknowledge (and try to reframe) the situation in order to provide the solution (earplugs).


Seattle’s Edgewater Hotel

Railroad Development in the Puget Sound Area is much more than just steel tracks and cars, but rather the network that helped lay the foundation for Seattle, the modern trading metropolis you see today. The lights, the tunnels, the tracks and cars are quintessential reminders of Seattle’s charm and history. Enjoy your stay where it all began…

Should the sounds of the passing trains disturb your sleep, please take a pair of earplugs, on the house.


Austin’s Hilton Garden Inn

Thank you for choosing the Hilton Garden Inn when staying in Austin the “Live Music Capital of the World.”

While we cannot control the music we would like to provide you with this complimentary amenity to help ensure a good nights rest.

We hope this will make your stay more comfortable.

This is a design challenge we often encounter: in order to present a solution, you have to raise the possibility of the problem. Perhaps you wouldn’t even know about the problem if we didn’t tell you about it! In Seattle, I never heard the trains. In Austin, I did hear the music late late into the night.

I’m pretty sure I couldn’t sleep with earplugs in, so the actual solution is limited, but the gesture towards the solution is definitely interesting. The four-star-ish Edgewater hits the history hard as if somehow you – with all the supposed noise – are connected with that. The Hilton Garden Inn, bad punctuation aside, takes a straightforward, three-star approach, but still reminds you that the reason you even need the earplugs is because of the experience you are part of. Hilton does better for relevance, but Edgewater weaves more of a story.

What you don’t see here is the presentation at the Edgewater. The card and the little box of earplugs were tucked away on a bit of molding such that I thought for at least a day that it was some sort of item left behind by a construction worker doing room maintenance.

The earplug packaging can be kinda ugly and both hotels are ceding total control of their presentation to their supplier. See Method on Virgin here for a related exmaple.

Steve to lead “Interviewing Users” workshop 9/28 in Seattle

As part of the Rosenfeld Media UX Workshops Fall 2011 Tour, I’ll be leading a full-day workshop – Interviewing Users: Spinning Data into Gold.

You can choose up to 3 workshops, including ones from Lou Rosenfeld and Steve Krug. Early registration (with a decent discount) ends September 9.

Bonus: the event will held at the amazing Seattle Central Library!

I hope to see you there!

Come on out to the Seattle UIE Web App Masters Tour!

I’ll be presenting Design Fieldwork: Uncovering Innovation From The Outside In as part of the two-day UIE Web App Masters Tour, in Seattle on May 23/24. The whole agenda (which is jam packed with some smart folks talking about interesting things) is here.

Register now and use speaker code SPKSEATTLE to get $100 off the price. If you register by May 6 you’ll get the recordings of last year’s event for free.

ChittahChattah Quickies

  • American Made Utility Kilts for Everyday Wear – Their FAQ is clever/amusing, too.
    It is often suggested that Utilikilts* are not “real kilts.” This is 100% TRUE! “Real Kilts” are defined as: “A knee-length skirt with deep pleats, usually of a tartan wool, worn as part of the dress for men in the Scottish Highlands.” Utilikilts*, on the other hand, are manskirts (as are Scottish traditional kilts, and, for that matter, any M.U.G (Men’s Unbifurcated Garment). That being said, Utilikilts* are not Real Kilts, as in “I don’t need a Utilikilt*, I have a real kilt at home” And so the conversation begins; “Then why aren’t you wearing your real kilt on a gorgeous day like today?”

This will be good for my hotel soap collection

I’ll be on the road a fair amount over the next few weeks:
Colorado Springs
Kansas City
Seattle
Richmond, VA

I’m not sure I’ve done so many trips back-to-back before. It’ll be an interesting challenge keeping my brain alert, my clothes clean, myself rested and healthily fed.

These trips also inaugurate a new collaborative relationship and I’m very excited about the other players and the work and seeing where it all goes!

Mono-doh!

9f10.gif
The Seattle Monorail is no longer the dream it once represented

Repairing the monorail is not always easy. Some parts are unique. After the collision last fall, the scene shop of the Seattle Opera was hired to build new monorail doors.

Wow – I guess that’s the get ‘er done attitude I wrote about before, but also the challenges of non-standard designs that seem common in transit infrastructure that I also wrote about earlier.

Experience Music Project

While in Seattle we went to the Experience Music Project.
exp.jpg

It was $20 to enter, so we didn’t bother. What a weird building! We took a monorail over there, a 3 minute ride, at least you got to sort of enter the structure on the train in an interesting way, but then you get out to see this gross monstrosity, like some kind of huge scale model of your internal organs for learning purposes. There’s a midway and rides and the Space Needle, and this thing. And it’s $20. So we wandered around uncomfortably, trying to make sense out of things like “SkyChurch” and other weird labels for features of the museum that were just too hard to figure out but you knew they had musical relevance because they were “cool” names. We hit the gift shop which was one of the most depressing things ever. Jimi Hendrix water bottles! Jerry Garcia fuzzy stuffed toys. Gah! The whole thing just was so incredibly sold out, I mean, I guess rock and roll is totally over, I certainly felt it that day.

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