Notes from the SXSW Tuesday Keynote: Jane McGonigal presentation
Instead of making more powerful AI, Jane McGonigal focusses on making reality more like gaming.
But let's start with happiness. There is an increasing large body of research into the science of happiness. This new focus will shift the focus of businesses to design for happiness.
Predictions
- Quality of life becomes a primary metric for evaluating interactive experiences
- Positive psychology is be an increasingly explicit tool in design
- Communities form around different visions of real worth living
- Value will be defined as a measurable increase in real happiness, or well being
Happiness has changed
It isn't a warm fuzzy thing any more. It is instead a complicated set of qualities. It is about having meaningful things to do that make you feel successful. It is about being a part of something bigger.
Multiplayer games, in this view, are the ultimate happiness engine.
In games we can be good at things that we can't be good at in real life. In World of Warcraft there are legions of people there who want to collaborate with you. The system gives constant feedback about your improvement. Game worlds are designed to make you feel good at something. The real world isn't set up this way.
- Games have better instructions
- Games give constant feedback
- Games have better community
A global mass exodus
It started in North America but its spreading. There is a global mass exodus to virtual worlds from the real world. This isn't bad, per se, but it is happening.
- See economist Edward Castronova
We can create the same values that exist in the virtual world in the real world. People who shift to virtual worlds are making rational choices. The calculus would shift if the real world were designed with the same values in mind. The real world can be made more adventurous. People can be made to feel that they are as good at real life as they are at games.
But there's some bad news. Games are great but they are too narrow. Its as if we invented the written word and decided only to write books. Words outside of books are transformative. Games could have the same impact.
- See Chore Wars
- See Zyked
- See Seriosity
To imagine the future, always look back at least twice as far as you are looking forward.
Looking backward to see an analogy for the situation is to look back at soap in 1931. The headline reads "Soap Kills Germs." Soap had been around for thousands of years but it took a long time for it to become ubiquitous. Similarly, "Games Kill Boredom." Games kill alienation, they kill anxiety, they kill lack of confidence, and they can kill depression by giving purpose and community.
Alternate reality game designers are trying to embed these happiness engines into everyday life.
The concept "alternate reality" comes from science fiction. Alternate, not alternative. This terms comes from the community and it is called Alternate because it is an alternate way of experiencing this reality, not an alternative to this reality.
World without oil
It was a global simulation of an oil shock. Players lived their real lives as if this were their reality. They were given fictional parameters for their geography and documented experiences in this context.
The alternate reality lasted for thirty days.
A soldier in Iraq wrote a live journal about what it would be like to fight war without oil. People made videos of themselves actually changing their trucks to biodiesel. People did man-on-the-street interviews with non-players to get people thinking about what it would be like if the world ran out of oil.
Research
When you match the strengths of alternate reality games with the science of happiness you see some very interesting overlaps.
- Mobbability: good at coordinating groups quickly
- Cooperation radar: able to know who would be good collaborators for particular missions
- Ping quotient: ability to reach out to others in a network and likelihood to respond
- Influencing: how easily you can persuade people of something in specific contexts, a fluid sense of getting people to band together and work with you
- Multi-capitalism: an understanding of the different value systems that people trade in; social capital, environmental capital, etc. As large groups band together, understanding this is very important.
- Protovation: rapid fearless innovation, the feeling that failure is fun because it means that you're learning. Quick frequent failure is the point because you're constantly trying new things.
- Open authorship: comfort with giving content away and knowing that it will be changed. A design skill for creating things that won't be broken with changes.
- Signal/noise management: an ability to handle a high volume of noise and know which bit of information is relevant right at this moment.
- Longbroading: the ability to think in bigger systems; longer time systems or big communities
- Emergensight: the ability to spot patterns as they bubble up, comfort with the messy complexity of new things at large scales
These ten things amplify our natural tendency to the optimal human experience.
Where do we go next?
What is the infrastructure for this? Twitter is a natural interface. The Nike iPod is a useful tool for this. Trackstick is a way to map your location to a map with GPS. The console in the Prius is a video game. Virgin is putting really interesting communication systems on the plane. This is an opportunity for social games that will improve reality.
Look at places like dog parks. You can make that environment into a virtual game.
The lost ring
This is an alternate reality game for the 2008 olympics. It is a way for people to discover old olympic sports that nobody knows how to play any more. This is a way for people to participate in something that they could be the best at in the world.
Takeaways
- soon enough, most of us will be in the happiness business so look at the books about the science of happiness
- game designers have a huge head start because they've been doing this for twenty years so look to games for inspiration and research
- alternate realities signal the desire, need and opportunity for all of us to redesign reality for real quality of life
Q&A
Q: The military has been very aggressive in using video games and politicians have used videogame language. What is the impact of games on these big issues?
A: It is important to differentiate between different kinds of games and different components of games. The military has been using games to make it easier for soldiers to go to war. This isn't the "best" use of games but it is significant because it points to the same trend toward gaming. It is important for game developers to work toward benevolent causes.
Q: To what extent are things like gaming substitutes for absences in life or building on top of life?
A: Blogs work better for conversations for people and the same is true with games. Not all bloggers or gamers have lives that need fixing but some gamers are replacing their broken realities with games. It is important to have a real conversation about this. Game makers need to take this seriously and work to build games that make reality more survivable.
Q: Most ARGs seem to be more narrative driven. What is the direction?
A: Much of the press around this has focussed on the web but there is a rich history of these things happening in the world real.
- See SF0
Q: The best ARGs seem to be big productions but they are also temporary. How do we get these things to keep going?
A: This is a business model problem. Right now people see these games as part of a marketing strategy which will end. The pay-to-play model offers an interesting model for ongoing games but this is still being sorted out.
Q: One sponsor of The Lost Ring is McDonalds. How do reconcile this?
A: It could be a way to change McDonalds but it is also a chance to make this biggest best thing possible. The designers aren't thinking about the sponsor, the sponsor is enabling the project to happen.
Business model questions are always tricky. You need money to make things but it is moving in the direction of TV. We understand that TV is funded by sponsors but still engage with the content.
Q: Games change how we see our physical spaces.
A: Yes. Once you've had an ARG somewhere it changes the way you interact with a space. The idea that you can overlay a sense of confidence and adventure in a real space is a wonderful thing.
Q: How do you balance individual creativity and rules?
A: It is important to have top-down structure to start but then can open up as the game evolves. If you are trying to solve a problem with a game you need to do plenty of research and use that to push the gamers in a direction.
Q: What about things like "The Game" which encourages men to game women?
A: It is important to define the kind of game you're playing. Games need to be collaborative. This behavior is a game that isn't apparent to everyone involved. As games become more situated in real life it might help this by making it more apparent that this isn't fair or fun for everyone. It is important to separate real games from metaphorical games. We should realize what games we are playing and play them fairly to create engagement where there used to be disengagement.
Q: Given the reaction of states to older forms of happiness seeking do you suspect that there will be a crack-down?
A: The state will either crack down or co-opt. It is important to explain games to people who are in power so they are not scared of them. We need to make game powerful media for good and game developers need to be involved in the conversation.
Q: What about gender?
A: This gets into interesting issues about subject matter and the media itself (2d vs 3d). Guys tend to be more into dwarves and stuff. ARGs offer more diverse subject matter and modes of play.
Notes from the Ten Tips for Managing a Creative Environment presentation at SXSW
Thesis: Looking at how other groups that make creative work effectively can teach us lessons for managing design.
Hard deadlines
Repetition
Trying to do something different with the creative process
Organizations sampled
- Neo-Futurists: Every sunday they have the audience roll dice and that determines what the performance contains. They spend from Sunday to Tuesday writing, editing, and rehearsing. They effectively and effectively create new content on a schedule year-round.
- Aqua Restaurant: Michelin rated restaurant in San Francisco
- Orchestras: Large organizations with long tenure that stay creative
- The Job Factory: screenwriting collective
- Steppenwolf Theater: Select group of actors who have tremendous creative freedom.
- Avenue Q: Broadway musical starring profane puppets.
- Web Techniques/ New Architects: magazine from the first internet boom.
The tips
Cross-train the entire team
Give all members of the team experience with the tasks performed by other members of the team.
In the neo-futurists, they explicitly select for people who can play multiple roles. Each member is a director, actor, tech, critic, etc. All have empathy for the experiences of other members of the team. This helps everyone understand what is possible.
Rotate creative leadership
Leadership depends on where the ideas come from. This changes person-to-person, day-to-day, etc. Each neo-futurists is a writer/performer who has ownership of their performance. This gives a sense of security because everyone knows that they will have a sense of ownership. They also have a voluntary conductor role. This individual facilitates the rehearsal process.
Actively turning the corner
In any organization there is a period of divergence and a period of convergence. The divergent period is the creative period, where new spaces are being explored. This is typified by a sense of possibility and unlocking ways of thinking. The vocabulary for this phase is always different but it is always present.
All groups also moved from this phase to the phase of production where convergence results in editing and making it happen.
Problems occur when people are in one phase but think they are in another. This can go both directions with shutting down brainstorming in divergence and moving targets in convergence.
But how do you know where you actually are? The neo-futurists organize it by having a hard physical break. They rehearse in an open fashion, take a smoke break, and come back to converge.
Orchestras do this by moving from early rehearsals to later rehearsals.
Know your roles
Successful teams know what they are supposed to do, they turn into hierarchical systems when it is time to converge. They trust each-other to make the right decisions.
Restaurant kitchens are the perfect example of this. When a restaurant is in service, every movement is precise and succinct.
Avenue Q is an interesting example because the writer said that once they went into production his job was to shut up.
In orchestras, each section leader is responsible for coordinating with each-other and the director to determine bowing patterns and to communicate that back to each performer. Once they are in rehearsal it is about becoming a unit.
Practice, practice, practice
This is not abut just improving individual skills but also about improving team skills as a unit. You need to have confidence in the people around you.
The neo-futurists do this by repeating their process again and again. When a group of people work together every week for a long time the process is different than in an organization that is always brining in new people. You deal with this by looking for opportunities to practice to gradually bring in new people or to try new methods.
At Adaptive Path they experiment with the idea of a design sprint. You set up a repeated schedule where you decide what you'll work on, start working on it, go into a room with the client and keep sketching and evolving the ideas with the client in the room. The design thus evolves in different ways than when you all go separately and come up with solutions.
Make your mission explicit to the whole team
Avenue Q took over two years to create. This resulted in a massive amount of material. They made a choice to have the lead character find his life purpose. This gave them a rubric by which to evaluate content and helped the team make editing choices.
As designers communication is critical to the success or failure of a project. The tricky part is that in the course of a conversation people can talk past each-other. There is an enormous amount of work out there about this. Having an explicit actionable mission helps to avoid this problem.
The neo-futurists have a clear set of artistic values that define the organization and the individual within the organization. This set up rules sets the boundaries for their creativity.
Clear constraints are essential to effective creative production.
Killing your darlings
You need reliable systemic ways for getting results out that are respectful and responsive. This means saying no to something in a way that treats each individual with respect.
In design we talk about "phase 2" or in the "parking lot."
The neo-futurists do this by starting with 30 plays and then cut down to 12. They used to have longwinded debates about this but realized that this risked creating a hostile environment. They switched to a system where they read out titles and if someone says "keep" to a title it goes in. If nobody says anything it doesn't go in.
Leadership is a service
Leadership is successful when it is seen as the ultimate support position. Avenue Q hired a director to run the show. They started by having each person go through and list everything they did, all of their investment in the project. This made everyone feel listened to and helped later when cuts needed to be made.
In publishing this happens when an editor helps the author make their words better.
By viewing yourself not as a dictator but as a facilitator you can be more effective. The goal is to give people the space to do their best work.
A good conductor bring an orchestra together as a unit and connects to the music in a way that makes for a better performance. A leader looks for people who are unhappy and wants to understand why before making a decision.
See a book called The Art of Possibility.
Generate projects around the groups creative interests
At Steppenwolf the members can propose plays and choose to work together. The same is true at Adaptive Path. When they get new projects they think about what the project contains and connect it to people who are interested in that subject.
If you pick projects for money or to get a client on your portfolio you won't do as well as picking projects because they are what your team wants to do.
Remember your audience
Make sure that you do something that actually is great for your audience. Creative work is for other people and you should never forget that while you are working.
Restaurants segment the audience between regulars and new diners. Regulars must be kept happy because they are the bread and butter of the restaurant. The chef cares about making new people happy and being new and different. This can be adversarial or complimentary but good organization work to represent both well.
The neo-futurists work hard to create a complete audience experience. They open the bar early, create a situation where the audience can interact before the show, and bring people up or involve them in the performance. This keeps the idea that they are both in service of the audience and their own creative vision.
Find ways to celebrate failure
Failure is an essential byproduct of creative activity. It should be ok to fail, to really fail.
At the end of a project take a moment to review what went well. Adaptive Path calls these "after-parties." Look for learning opportunities and learn those lessons. Ask what worked, what didn't, and what you learned. This sets you up to find constructive ways to resolve these issues.
If you don't take risks you'll just do the same thing again and again.
Q&A
Q: What if you all know the disciplines but have to do them all on the same project?
A: That goes to the issue of knowing your role. When it gets bendy. If you do a little of everything it can get fuzzy. Role definition conversation should happen more often. As you get to know them better you don't need to talk as much but you need to know what's happening.
Q: How do people who aren't managers make this happen?
A: Use guerilla techniques. Find like minds at your level and projects that let you make progress. If you're in a creative environment that won't let you try new things you should quit.
Q: How changing leadership mid-project can work?
A: Each project should have someone who clearly leads but everyone can work on different projects in different capacities. Let people step up and take the lead on a phase or for a whole project. Once you have a shared vision you can trust people to lead. This needs a comfortable egoless leader but is very healthy for organizations. You have to have someone who is the decider because that role adds important clarity. This is a fine line and should be treated delicately.
Q: How do you keep a project from becoming stagnant?
A: Avoid always talking about the same unsolvable problems. Having someone strong in the room is important because their role is to say what isn't working and that something needs to change. Pass out stickies and have everyone write their answer to the question without talking and use that to step back, resort, and readdress the approach to the problem. The goal is to fundamentally change the dynamic of the conversation. Go to a second location, bring someone from the outside in, or anything that will work.
Also avoid projects that are defined by moving away and do projects that are about moving toward something.
Q: When you practice music the goal is to do it without thinking. In the design world the equivalent is doing something in photoshop or code automatically. But we don't typically make time to develop this mastery with throw-away tasks.
A: Prototyping is a way to do that. Try to force time into your day to practice. Try to figure out how to build that play time into projects. Sketch, iterate, prototype, whatever. Cyclical iterative approaches can make it easier to take a number of stabs at a problem.
Notes from the A Critical Look At OpenID at SXSW.
SSO with single authority betrays the core principles of the web. OpenID is a shared standard that uses URLs as identifiers. The OpenID protocol lets you prove that you own a URL. This means that OpenID can be used an authentication token.
Overview
When logging into to a new third party site with OpenID you are bounced to the authority for your URL. That URL then can remember that you trust this other application and bounce you past if you are still cookied into that other site when you come back later.
This can also be used for registration using the Simple Registration functionality of OpenID. This allows users to select attributes that will be exchanged with the third party site.
In OpenID 2.0 users can enter the address of a provider instead of a provider. The provider will then ask for your username and password or allow you to choose between multiple identities.
OpenID is very similar to Email
- Pick a provider to trust
- Users of different providers can interoperate
- Can be used for SSO (email is used for remember password communication)
- user@URL.com means that user is associated with URL.com
Although these are similar in this metaphor, OpenID is both a better user experience and much more secure than email if SSL is used for OpenID authentication.
One critique of OpenID is that it allows a single point of failure. This is no different than the current situation because your email address is a de facto SSO if the same address is associated with all of your accounts.
Security
Providers are now beginning to compete on anti-phishing and security features. Users can be protected by second factor strong authentication
The OpenID community can also whitelist providers which will help manage the business risk.
Yahoo Example
Yahoo is an OpenID proverider but does not support OpenID for Yahoo properties. Yahoo only supports OpenID 2 and will not suport OpenID 1.
OpenID 2 is supported by Drupal, Plone, and Wordpress.
Ingestion
37Signals support is significant because thir support of the spec has encouraged support in an ecosystem.
Q&A
Q: Identity Theft
A: Fail over to other systems helps with identities dissapearing. The theft issue is harder and OpenID is, at least, not worse than the current system.
Q: Future of attribute exchange
A: Getting better but not widely supported yet. Simple Registration has been around a while but only supports a fixed set of nine fields.
Q: Barriers to use
A: Usability, security, and technology are the key issues. To solve usability issue, one method is to connect the service their using with specific other providers. Providers can also work hard to educate users that they have a highly portable ID.
Notes from Magic and Mental Models: Using Illusion to Simplify Designs with Jared Spool at SXSW.
Our field is now deeply into a stage known as Experience Design. To do this work we need our teams to possess a number of skills but the one we're going to talk about today is "Magic."
The idea here is that magic brings a level of delight that we don't see in other places. So what we're going to do here is go through a few magic tricks, deconstruct them, and talk about how this can apply to design.
Jared is doing magic tricks. Awesome.
Magic creates experiences that are different from what is actually occurring physically. Illusion separates the user's model from the designer's model.
This is different than most design. Typically we try to make these models be as similar as possible. In an illusion we don't want to communicate what is actually happening.
When magicians talk about tricks they talk about the effect. Think about the Haunted House at Disneyland. You leave the Haunted House having seen ghosts and floating candelabras and all the other amazing sighs and sounds. The designers have a completely different perspective. They are focussing on how the effects are created. The sounds designer doesn't want you to know that he or she is even there. They are designing for full immersion, for an experience that isn't designed because it is real.
Think about deleting a file and the crunching noise that Apple makes when you delete. There aren't "files" and there isn't deletion. The disk has data all over it where "files" are split up all over the place. Moving, copying, and deleting are all illusions and its been that way for years. Its just how it works.
When we build things like this we have to understand that users only know what to do when they believe that there is a file. All kinds of things fall into this category.
Spool plays audio of Marissa Mayer talking about how Google Search works.
The point here is the balance between simplicity and complexity. What happens when you hit search is amazingly complex but for the user the search is amazingly simple and fast.
The user doesn't need to know what's actually happening to accomplish their goal. They hit search, get results, and that's the end of it.
At flickr the same magic happens. The URL of everyone's homepage is www.flickr.com and as you navigate the site you get nice pretty URLs that include your name. This has nothing to do with their actual data storage system.
The Netflix recommendation system works in a similar way. They don't really know what movies you like, they're just doing data analysis and showing a guess. The problem is that people don't realize how magical the system is, users dismiss it as simple when it is actually very refined.
Designers can suggest a mental model that is different from actual implementation. When done well it can simplify but when there are holes the user will not believe and intuit something else.
Perception is the most important piece of illusion.
Excellent trick where you see a rotating spiral and then switch to looking at someone's head. The effect is that the head first shrinks and then enlarges as your eye muscles react
Perceived performance is how users interpret the length of time that an activity takes. In a study, users across a number of interests agreed about the perceived performance of sites. Amazon, the slowest site in the study, was consistently perceived as the fastest in the study.
When they mapped perceived performance against task completion they saw the cause of the perception. When users are able to complete their task quickly on a slow site they will perceive the experience as fast. Time passes quickly when you are accomplishing your goals.
At YouTube they take advantage of this by autostarting the video while it is still loading. You get pieces of the film before you can watch the whole thing. This creates the illusion that it is faster than it would otherwise be.
How far apart can you separate elements before they no longer appear to be related?
When Facebook changes the News Feed they initially confused users. People started seeing names that they didn't recognized and misunderstood what was happening.
Designers must understand how users perceive designs. Simple tricks can make a design feel more responsive than it is.
Look up the Kano Model, a two-by-two measuring user satisfaction and quality.
In the Performance Payoff, as you add more features and quality you get more satisfaction from users. But there is also a scenario where you add more things but can never improve satisfaction. The third area is called Excitement Generation where you are able to combine the right features in a way that creates genuine delight.
One way to create delight is to be whimsical. Twitter, for example, has had error messages involving cats fixing servers. Flickr has a dialog that reads "Embiggen small photos to fill screen."
Another way to get delight is through attention. When you plug a pink iPod into a Mac, iTunes shows a little pink iPod. At Best Western's website, they let you type in a city and then it autocompletes the other fields for state and country even if they don't have an hotel in that city.
The last way to add delight is through functionality. ProFlowers.com works not only because the site is nice but because the flowers are amazing. Farecast also does this by showing you data and occasionally tells you to wait to purchase. You can even buy a guarantee.
The idea of delight is really quite important but you need to get the basic expectations in place. No matter how great the sound is, a clock radio needs to keep time.
Things that are delightful today before basics over time.
The important point is that designing for magic involves creating a mental model for users that is different than what is actually happening in the background.
Notes from Everyone's A Design Critic with Jason Santa Maria and Rob Weychert at SXSW.
When designing a solution it is important to show the client options to evaluate the direction. You need a process that gets to the right answer and avoids Frankenstein's monster.
Think holistically when designing and talk holistically to the client about the vision for each solution.
Pre-crit
- Do your homework; Make sure that you incorporate everything you've already heard and presenting clear options.
- Gather as much information as you can in advance
- Make sure everyone has what they need
- Know the purpose of the crit
In crit
- Don't take it personally
- Stay positive
- Avoid jargon
- Find common ground, speak in a language that everyone there understands
Top 5 client requests
- My unqualified fried has different ideas; talk about how the idea fits into the vision you've worked with the client to map out
- Purple is my favorite color; talk about this in terms of personas and what they need and expect. Come back to your research and their branding.
- We need more stuff above the fold; We all know that the fold mentality is outmoded but it is important to let people know that scrolling isn't the problem it used to be.
- There's so much empty space, can't you fill it?; Whitespace contributes to the overall hierarchy of the page making the design more comfortable. Jamming stuff into empty space confuses the structure.
- Can't you make the logo bigger; No. The logo isn't the content, the content is the brand.
Post-crit
- Evaluate: Make sure that you know everything that was discussed and needs to be changed.
- Document: Do this for yourself and for the client.
*Follow-up: Actually do what you said you would and connect it to your documentations. - Wash-Rinse-Repeat
This is an ideal framework but is a helpful baseline. Use this on your projects to make sure that you get the feedback you want and make the best decision you can.
Q&A
Q: What if the client keeps pointing to other sites?
A: Try to focus on how they are different and a solution that is right for their needs. Talk about what they like in other sites but the goal is to get them to something right for them.
Q: How do solve the bigger logo problem?
A: Try to find out in advance and do user research to test how people respond differently.
Q: How much do you show in advance?
A: Show in the meeting and not before. Set it up so you get the first impression and let that drive the conversation. You also want to make sure to direct the crit. Make sure that your points are heard and that the client isn't distracted.
Notes from The Contextual Web with Nick Finck
Context is important to design. As an example of environment, technology, and other principles let's look at the iPhone
Scenario: Shopping for tea but can't find it so trying to find a store that carries it while on the road.
Load up the Whole Foods website. This site is non-mobile. Some sites are smart enough to know that you are on a mobile device. Exploring the site on the iPhone is very difficult because it is not designed for this experience. The site is slow and it takes too much time to find out that they don't list the brands they carry. This site doesn't work well in a mobile context.
Fitt's Law matters in mobile. The size of the target and the distance to it is essential to connecting users t information on small screens.
Loading time also matters here. You want to send the user markup optimized for their device and context. The interface should also adapt itself to the medium.
So let's do a deep dive into mobile.
Content is one of the most problematic areas in mobile. Readability and page width are the biggest problems in this space. Interaction is another big area for improvement in mobile design. Navigation on NYTimes Mobile, for example, is a big list. The hotspots are close together and it is hard to hit the right item.
Pagination is also very difficult on mobile devices. In the case of facebook, Ajax is used in combination with a big hot spot to add more content to the current list. Search is also difficult because typing is expensive. Search ahead display is helpful because it makes it easier for a user to go back and fix a typo before submitting their search.
Lastly, screen size is a major issue. Although we've been talking about the iPhone, there are many devices coming that require us to take the issue of screen size seriously. Know the context in which your product will be used and design for it.
Resources
Books: Contextual Design and Observing the User Experience
Download the slides for more links.
Q&A
Q: What about showing photos that are very large?
A: Use thumbnails intelligently and pare down your content to what makes sense for this environment.
Q: What about technologies like Flex and other emerging development tools?
A: The iPhone represents the new direction for these services. The primary interaction online is clicking on things and ingesting content. You'd have to talk to the developers of these other technologies for how they fit into mobile but HTML, CSS, and Javascript are very powerful tools for creating rich interfaces for mobile.
SXSW 2008: Notes from Design is in the Details with Naz Hamid. The slides are very descriptive so be sure to find them if Naz posts them.
This panel isn't about tips and techniques, it is about an approach.
- Critical thinking
- methods
- concepts
- ideas
for doing detailed design.
Tips and techniques fortify the toolkit but critical thinking is most important.
God is in the details and Design is in the details
The small parts make up the whole
You, the designer, are the sum of all parts and so is your design.
Less is more
Editing and being critical about not putting too much in are essential to good design.
This isn't MS Word with all the toolbars on or the cover of a magazine like Details. It is a product like "PINCH" by Craig Berman. Good design is highly functional. The beauty emerges from the functionality.
Examples in food with photos from Alinea, a Halloween costume that Naz designed, and other images of detailed design.
So what about interactive designers? We sit at meetings with the comps on the screen and decision makers start noticing the things that aren't there. People start nit-picking and focussing on the small details that the designer should have taken care of. You go into a meeting thinking that you're 60 or 70% done but that isn't enough. Take it all the way.
So how do you get to this? Here's a handy checklist.
Experiment
Mix and match your ideas to let new things emerge. Don't commit to early. Explore different directions to see what happens. Avoid falling back on what you've done before, on solutions you've seen, by playing.
Princeton example.
Choices
We make choices all the time in design. Pick the simple solution. Pick things that you can defend and explain. Go with what works and what is functional.
Stay consistent
But once you make your choices, stay consistent. Be transparent in your design by holding everything together. Don't give you client an in to critique things you already know how to solve.
Completeness
In a similar vein, make sure that your work is done to the best you can do. Take pride in your work. Your first draft should contain all the details up front and carry that through to the end.
Kellog School of Management example.
Step in, step out step back, balance
Give yourself a break from your work so you can come back and see your work for the first time. Take a few days off and forget about it. Learn to look critically at your own work. Note what stands out and fix the things that look odd. Come back and pay attention to your first impressions because your client will see the flaws too. See your mistakes, your shortcomings, and do something about them.
Take your work all the way but be willing to change it up.
Be your own critic
If you're familiar with the client, the team, and the problem, you have what it takes to see the problem yourself. Take these insights as far as you can. Trust yourself to anticipate questions and come up with answers. Know what people will get hung up on and take that into account.
My note: It seems to me that you want to do this so that showing your work to others involves getting the most from their feedback as possible. If they only tell you things you already know then you are wasting everyone's time and not improving the design.
Yale Library example
Complexity in simplicity; Less is more
This isn't just about stripping things down, this is about leaving in only what is needed. You are delivering a final product not just trying to make yourself happy. Don't use Ajax if you don't have to. Don't just throw in widgets because they are cool, use things that solve the problem.
Showed an early comp for Humanized as an example.
Obsession is healthy
Be willing to look at something for an hour or two. Take the time to do the best you can. Let the problem seep into your mind and carry it with you. Make time to focus on the details.
Q&A
Q. How do you balance this with having a limited number of billable hours?
A. If I'm at the computer, I bill. If I seriously think about if for half an hour or more, I'll bill for that. However, some projects do have limited budgets. If I want to take it the rest of the way, I don't bill the extra time.
Q. What kind of activities do you do to get inspiration?
A. Spend a lot of time on the bike. Cycling is a source of inspiration. It helps with mental clarity. But really you want to look at anything you're interested in. Look for the details in everything you do.
Q: How do you defend the details to a client?
A: If you meet one-to-one its much easier. If it is a large organization there are more people to convince and having everything in place makes the conversation easier. Know why you are doing what you are doing and stand by it.
Q: How do you know when to stop waiting for inspiration?
A: Set a deadline and goal for yourself. Wait for it to come but be ready to go when it hits.
Q: What if you don't have good photos?
A: Make it clear that you need certain things to make it work. Insist that you can't start working of you don't the source material you need.
From Apple's shiny promotional material to MoveOn's minimalist calls to action, we receive and respond to HTML email every day. If you look beyond the surface to the code, you'll see that HTML email is in much the same place that the web was back in 2000. The markup is primitive and the wide range of email clients makes it nearly impossible to achieve accessibility and consistency.
If you've had to code an HTML email you know what I'm talking about. This is the only medium in which I still use the old methods that abuse semantic markup for presentation purposes. Inline styles are de rigueur to make those table tags come out right [shudder].
Fortunately, a new groups has emerged to raise awareness of the problem. The Email Standards Project has a simple goal:
[T]o help designers understand why web standards are so important for email, while working with email client developers to ensure that emails render consistently.
Following in the footsteps of the successful Web Standards Project, this new group's aim is both simple and ambitious.
To give you a sense of how bad the current state of affairs actually is, I suggest looking at their reports on how the most popular email clients respond to the acid test.
So here's to the success of the Email Standards Project. We are not living in a world where the current version of MS Internet Explorer actually support web standards, let's hope that we can do as well with email.
In the meantime, I highly recommend MailBuild for all your HTML email needs. My clients love it and their templates provide a great foundation for learning the voodoo of HTML for email.
I am completely in love with some new NPR shows and I've never heard them on a radio.
If you've not heard the Bryant Park Project or Radio Lab podcasts, you are missing out on the new sound of public radio.
What distinguishes these programs from the new tenor of Morning Edition and All Things Considered is that their hosts come off, to my ears, as sincere. Give them a listen and let me know what you think or if you have a good podcast to recommend.
As an extra bonus: Here is a new page I've created to list my favorite podcasts.
I've been on the phone with Orbitz customer services for almost an hour now. This isn't the largest amount of my time that has ever been wasted by a big company but it is without a doubt one of the most unpleasant.
Anticipating that I might need to cancel my ticket, I took advantage of the Orbitz Airline Ticket Protector. This is a service that they promote heavily as a benefit of shopping with Orbitz, as a way that they are different from the competition.
But today, when I called to cancel my ticket, I was directed to call an insurance company that I'd never heard of. I was a little confused but did what they said. I then learned that the Airline Ticket Protector is only good if there is a disaster, death, etc.
I called Orbitz back to complain that they don't make this very clear on their web site.
A quick note about calling Orbitz. Like many automated customer services systems, getting to talk to a real person is a little game. My first strategy is to repeatedly press 0. Sometimes this works. In this case it doesn't. The Orbitz system is voice activated and interprets 0 as needing help with your password. I tried saying "Help" but that didn't work. I tried "Operator." No luck. Then I tried "Customer Service" and that did the trick.
As soon as someone got on the line I asked to speak to a supervisor and from there the call degenerated. I explained that I understood that I failed to read the terms and conditions but that I felt that Orbitz promotes their fare protector in such a way that gave me the false impression that it could be used to cancel the ticket without a catastrophic emergency. I simply asked for some understanding and to talk to someone who could weigh my position and possibly grant a slight reduction in the cancellation fee.
Instead, I was condescended to repeatedly. After half an hour of being put on hold with interruptions of rudeness, each worse than the last, I asked to speak to a supervisor, not to seek the discount I originally hoped for but to complain about my treatment. Even this is not within the agent's power.
The man I spoke with from the other side of the world is not at fault here. He is a cog in a machine bent on squeezing every penny. A business structure that has lost site of why they exist: to give value to customers, to make great travel experiences possible.
It's at times like these that I wonder what possesses a service company like Orbitz to make decisions that makes me, the customer, feel small, stupid, and un-cared for. I don't call customer service very often but when I do it is with a problem. At those moments I am not in the best mood. This is normal and it isn't my fault. By not training their customer service representatives to deal effectively with me in this state they make me feel like it is my fault. This isn't nice. I don't like it when people aren't nice to me and thus I don't like Orbitz.
All this talk of emotion might seem odd first. I am, after all, talking about a big company. Why should they care about how I feel when I deal them? I'm just a small nothing, one of a hoard of customer. That attitude, the reluctance to treat me as an emotional creature and instead as a mere wallet carrier, is what makes people hate companies. When I feel hated I will hate back. I hate Orbitz right now. I hate them so much that I'm lashing out in a blog post. This is normal human behavior. These are predictable preventable reactions.
I would have thought that the least a company could do is apologize that I misunderstood the terms and offer a small token in sympathy. Apparently, that isn't the least they could do.
Who is this guy?
