Pandora

Check out www.pandora.com. Internet radio as it should be.

Now I just need it to play over my Airport Express...

Webcasts

There is something great about webcasts of talks and presentations - they give someone like me the opportunity to see/hear people speak I otherwise wouldn't. For free! A few interesting examples:

• Bruce Sterling


• Bill Buxton


• More Bill Buxton


• Interview with Skype founder Niklas Zennström and VC Tim Draper (from AO2005 - requires registration): "always delight the user ... pop-ups don't make any sense to us" - nice


• More webcasts from AO2005 if you've registered for the one above

I started watching Bruce Sterling's presentation last night, and although I really enjoy his books, the presentation didn't have quite the same flow. I broke off in the middle, and plan to watch the rest tonight. At the time of the talk he was about to start a new job teaching Industrial Design in California, and I want to hear more about that.

i-mode

Came across this recently:

"Thirty percent (30%) of Japan’s population use mobile data and multi-media services at least 10 times a day."

It's funny how i-mode has been going for over five years, and no one seems to have figured out how to compete with them.

And I just have to rant:

How difficult can it be? Read "Birth of i-mode" by Mari Matsunaga about how the founding team created i-mode with a focus on user experience, as a consumer product, not a technology. The book is available in English, I bought my copy from Chuang Yi in Singapore.

It's not just about chosing the right technology ("i-mode is popular because they use cHTML rather than WAP", yeah, right!), but what kind of thinking that makes you select a certain technology, ie. you know you need to attract developers to create an ecosystem of content developers, and cHTML sounds more attractive than WAP. Not to the engineers, but to the people who want to create products, and hire engineers to make it happen. This thinking has to extend to every single part of the organisation that has anything to do with the product, because their actions and decisions will ultimately affect the product. That includes the pimply gel-haired kid in the mobile phone shop who gets a kick out of knowing more about phones than his customers, and sells what he likes. Well there are people like him at every level of the corporation.

It's ultimately a cultural thing, not a process, not a technology, not a metric, not anything that will get you status in a modern corporate environment. It doesn't matter if you spend money on some glamourous User Experience team, when you have other parts of the company run by marketing ARPU-monkeys and technology worshippers. Your User Experience people will just be a vanity department, a fashion statement. If you want status, buy a stable of Ferraris instead and spare us the trouble.

Taxonomy, hierarchy, folksonomy, whatever...

Came across the following while doing some research for a project:

But classification is really about something much simpler and more practical: people finding shit.

In that context, it's hard to understand this religious fervour around tags. The litmus test for good classification is not "does it use tags?" but "does it help people find shit?" There's much more to it than that, but that's the simplest formulation.

From atomiq.org

UPDATE after thinking a bit about this: I totally agree on the focus on what people need, but is "finding" the only activity that classification should support? For example, in a collection of recipes, classifying a dish as Canadian only helps me find it if I already know it's Canadian, or if I'm looking for Canadian dishes in general (for whatever reason). But it also captures some knowledge about the recipe, or maybe even about the whole collection ("aha, 1% of these recipes are Canadian") which people can use to figure out what to do next. So a good classification not only helps people "find shit" but also "find out shit".

Is Amazon doing an alta vista?

The US version of Amazon just gets more and more crowded. Here is a typical page for a music CD as rendered on a laptop screen (1024x768, with some indication of paging) - now, how do I find out whether I want to buy this album? Turns out I have to scroll down three or more pages to see anything resembling a description or review:

First page: album and artist, image, price, and "buy now" button (inside the ugly green line). The rest is other stuff Amazon suggests I should buy, things I've looked at in the past, lots of links to other stores, etc.
Second page: other stuff Amazon thinks I should buy.
Third page: rating (stars out of five), tracklist, editorial review.
Fourth page: user reviews.

The customer experience is about the whole customer journey from how users end up at the site, how they find and researching stuff of interest, to making a purchasing decision, etc. Success requires an "unbroken chain" of interactions. The current design has too many places where the user can fall off.

I personally buy more books from Indigo/Chapters these days, it's cheaper and I think it arrives faster - so (for me at least) Amazon are failing at the purchase decision point (do they even realize that checking prices on other sites has become part of my customer journey?). Now they are also starting to fail at the research stage (the "I want it" point) - there is too much stuff to distract me.

It reminds me of how alta vista, from being the most successful search engine, turned into a bloated advertisement/portal with a search box, followed by extinction once Google turned up. Altavista now looks like a google clone, or maybe the advertisers just left? (OK, they do still have advertising - sponsored links take up the first page of search results)

UPDATE: Oh damn, Jacob Nielsen said all of this already.

When your data outlives you

File under (hmm.... how do I turn on categories in Blogger) Memory, The World is Flat, Tags

Back to thoughts about storage with a quote from The World is Flat:

On November 13, 2004, Lance Cpl. ___ was killed by a roadside bomb during a foot patrol in Iraq [...] his family was demanding that Yahoo! gave them the password for their deceased son's e-mail [...] Yahoo! denied the Ellsworth family their son's password, citing the fact that [...] all Yahoo! users agree at sign-up that rights to member's ID or account contents terminate upon death [...]

As we get rid of more and more paper and communicate through more and more digitized formats, you better sort out before you die, and include in your will, to whom, if anyone, you want to leave your bits [...] Somebody, please, sort all this out.

(Regarding "The World is Flat": it turns out that Bill Gates has read it too.)

Reading list update

Finished Blink without much enthusiasm and was left with no clear message. There were a few good points about basing decisions on key factors rather than being overwhelmed/misled by less relevant factors, and avoiding panic since it makes you unable to think straight. There were also some interesting stories including one about consumer testing of softdrinks (evaluating the product in context can give entirely different results than your first impression - and both are overridden by brand impression anyway).

And I started reading The World is Flat, which is much more fun, and underlines again how easy it has become to start doing business online, but framed in a much broader context which will affect us all. ESSENTIAL READING!

Friedman may be underestimating the complexity of computerizing cooperative work flows (if it was easy, what are all those CSCW people researching?) - or maybe work flows will simply become standardized once the supporting software is in place?

...round the hosting carousel

I didn't like the stats my previous hosting company showed, and they wanted double the $ to enable PHP and a single MySQL database, so I moved to bluehost.com. It's a pretty good deal, as it allows me to deploy (fool around with) several domains, and now with different databases for each of them.

Bluehost is also great if you want to try out/use Drupal or a number of other open source CMS/blog tools. Just click on one of the software packages available in the Fantastico section, and it's automatically installed (along with database setup, etc.).

Fireworks in Vancouver

Awesome. And right in front of my balcony! My feeble cameraphone snapshot bears no resemblance to the real thing (check Flickr for better photos)

Four nights of spectacular fireworks set to music, in a competition between Canada, Sweden, and China - the grand finale took place this Saturday. Sweden won, which makes me feel quite (semi) patriotic: technically they were superior, and had some amazing pyrotechnic effects. But they had the most uninspired choice of music (Abba-medley?), poor composition, and created no emotional response at all. They deserve better artistic direction (or whatever it's called for fireworks).

Designing for more than ease of use

I agree with Tom Moran [1] on the following criteria of design: usefulness, reliability, usability, and delight (listed in what I think is the order of importance). This is one reason I'm unhappy when the term Usability is used to cover all aspects of interactive product design. It misses out on the other factors - and constrains the designer's role.

As a designer I want to create successful products - so I want to understand what makes products successful, and how design can influence these factors. One obvious example which is rarely mentioned is price - products should be designed to be manufactured/distributed/maintained cheaply.

For IKEA this means designing furniture that packs flat - other industrial designers work under different constraints, but only in rare cases can they ignore manufacturing costs. On software projects, a good designer can limit implementation costs by being very selective about which features are included in the product, or by defining/documenting the functionality well enough to prevent misunderstanding (which can lead to endless cycles of reworking and retesting). Design management (ie. how design as a resource is applied to a project) becomes an important tool on larger projects, where the design may be done by a changing group of designers. Earlier design decisions may be overturned as new project members with an alternative (and still evolving) understanding of the problems come on board, eager to make an impact. This usually leads to unforeseen consequences, design inconsistencies that then need to be fixed, re-implementation, and re-testing (and eventually lack of trust in the design team). All of these have direct impact on price (and shipping schedule).

I want to explore other aspects of this in later posts, including designing for technology adoption - how and why users become regular users of a product, and how it is integrated into their lives. Other topics will surely arise.

[1] For more inspired design wisdom from Tom Moran, I recommend reading his Keynote Presentation from DIS 2002.