“The past” is filled with far more examples of products, innovative thinking, and success stories based on activity-centered research, magic, genius design, and just plain luck than UCD can claim even on its best day.
What’s cheap and easy is the idea that we can dissect a chef’s work and call it a recipe. That we can simply analyze genius and come out with a one-size-fits-all plan for success.
Ouch. Definitely a hit to the old UCD ego, but I couldn’t agree more.
Brand Tags asks people to describe a brand with a single word. The results are aggregated, painting a picture of how various brands are perceived.
I was struck by how unaware most people are of some of the most popular internet sites and services. Look for the giant ? symbol:
It’s a great reminder to any web designer that you are not the user, meaning the patterns, conventions, and brands we’re most familiar with online are still foreign to many people, your users included.
(Thanks to Scott for the tip.)
Two quick—and only tangentially related—reads for Wednesday morning:
On imagining Steve Ballmer embracing Firefox 3:
But it’s also a nice little “thought exercise.” It is impossible to imagine Ballmer acting with this kind of initiative, imaginative or vision. (I’m not suggesting that what Briggs proposes is a good idea. Only that it is hard to imagine Ballmer ever acting with this scale and dynamism.) It is impossible to imagine Ballmer advocating a position that would make consumers “the big winners.”
That Microsoft bull in the china shop (This Blog Sits at the)
I remember reading about Apple engaging in a similar process before they opened their first brick and mortar Apple store. I like competitive analyses that go outside the domain for inspiration:
The airline studied theme parks, hospitals, and retailers to see how they handled similar situations. Then, the team built mock-ups in a warehouse using cardboard boxes for podiums, kiosks, and belts in order to find ways to increase efficiency.
Alaska Airlines saves millions by rethinking check-in flow (37signals, makers of Packcamp)
Our minds are quick to convert new optical experiences into familiar stories, favored viewpoints, comforting metaphors. No wonder, for how else can we manage optical data flows of 10 MB per second without familiar categories for filing, without the rage for wanting to conclude?
An excerpt called "See Now… Words Later," from the Edward Tufte’s upcoming Seeing Around. Here’s a related link to Tufte’s sculptural work.
I’ve been reading A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction
But unless the building is oriented toward the outside, which surrounds it, as carefully and positively as toward its inside, the space around the building will be useless and blank—with the direct effect, in the long run, that the building will be socially isolated, because you have to cross a no-man’s land to get to it.
Look, for example, at this machine age slab of steel and glass. You cannot approach it anywhere except at its entrance—because the space around it is not made for people.
I couldn’t help but think of the “Skip Intro” splash page as the realization of a building’s edge on the web.
I Love Typography featured some of Maggie’s letterpress work in the “Sunday Type” post for April 21. We’re always excited when her work is recognized, but to be noticed by one of our favorite blogs is truly very flattering.
You can check out more of Maggie’s letterpress work on her blog and at her Etsy store.
I’ve mentioned political typography here before, and the Times blog piece linked below is just an extension of that discussion. What I want to draw your attention to is what I think might be the first ever appearance of Comic Sans in the gray lady:
Change you better believe in.
Thanks for the link, Maggie!
To the Letter Born – Campaign Stops – 2008 Elections – Opinion – New York Times Blog
He brought his own frustrated consumer experiences to bear in creating the business model, and eliminated many of the usual array of motor-oil choices—startup, high-mileage, various blends—from his inventory. “You get the shit out of the ground,” he said, referring to standard Castrol GTX, “or the shit made in the laboratory that’s the perfect lubricant” (Syntec). “Meaning, it’s either A or B. It’s not about the oil. It’s about the people. They got confused.” He stocked the places with baseball memorabilia and flat-screen TVs, and served free coffee (“the good kind”), so that customers would associate the experience with luxury rather than with cumbersome chores. Although he recently divested, owing in part to a rise in the minimum wage, he gave me directions to the Team Dykstra Automotive Center in Simi Valley, so that I could see for myself. “It’s the Taj Mahal of car washes,” he said. “Ask for Carlos.”
The Sporting Scene: Nails Never Fails: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker
I found myself riveted to this scathing writeup of the MTA’s Hudson Yards plans, announced today.
(For those outside of NYC, the Hudson Yards is a large piece of undeveloped property in Hell’s Kitchen (or “Midtown West”), basically the last large piece of undeveloped property in Manhattan. As you might guess, it’s valuable. The Metropolitan Transit Authority owns the property and has been shopping around the development rights for some time.)
From the article:
Equally unsettling is how the project fits into the surrounding urban fabric. The towers loom over the High Line, forming a colossal barrier against the Chelsea neighborhood to the south. (Allowing 11th Avenue to run through the site will lessen the effect slightly, but not much.) Arranging the towers along an east-west axis — a break from the traditional Manhattan grid — is only apt to reinforce the site’s image as an introverted corporate enclave.
This seems to suit the transportation authority’s agenda just fine: it always has been more interested in how much money it could make off the site than in the impact that the development would have on New York. The city could build at much lower density without spending a penny of taxpayer money.
I’m surprised at the indignation here. It can’t possibly come as a surprise to an architecture critic that a developer would sell to the highest bidder. I honestly have no idea whether the MTA–a quasi-governmental agency, I guess?–has any responsibility to be publicly beneficent with the land it owns.
Let’s assume for a moment, though, that the MTA is responsible for championing the public good as Ouroussoff suggests. Surely physical architecture is not the only criteria by which we judge an organization’s contribution to the public good. Many G train riders would happily trade several acres of “miserably depressing” architecture in the already miserably depressing midtown Manhattan if it meant the MTA provided more frequent service and full-time connections to working class neighborhoods in Queens.
I am over-simplifying, to be sure, but so is Ouroussoff. The breathless article about the conflict between private profit and public good has been written before. Only a fool would believe that New York City landowners have a cut-and-dried choice between the public good and “hustling for money.”
Inspired by a new article on A List Apart:
Sites that use tagging systems like Magnolia, Flickr, and Digg also provide insight into search behaviors, as each user defined tag illuminates the way in which users label content for retrieval. Simply search for a term you think people might use to find your site, then check out the tags that are associated with the items returned. It’s like peering inside your users’ heads!
These keywords are useful for lots of things: copy writing, designing AdWords campaigns, and basic SEO insights about <meta> tags. Be sure not to place too much stock in these keywords, though, especially if you have a small sample of tags generated from del.icio.us. Keep in mind that those keywords are generated by del.icio.us users, who may constitute only a small segment of your site’s total audience. Their needs and motivations – and how they think about and tag your site – may be very different from other segments of your audience.
This method is simply a cheap, fast way to find out how some of your users think about your site.
A List Apart: Articles: Findability, Orphan of the Web Design Industry
Sans Comic Sans is written by Matt Raw in Brooklyn, NY.