This package design created a nice frisson of anticipation. (Okay I just wanted to use the word frisson in a post).

• Halestorm Entertainment – Mormon-themed films
  Best trailer was for “The R.M” (The “Returned Missionary”doesn’t stand for anything but is a homophone for Orem, the city in Utah – think “The O.C.”). Nice example of the trailer trope (gentle indie whimsy) applied to a specific culture.
• John Safran vs. God
  Now on DVD, an Aussie show from 2004. Absolutely brilliant, reminds a bit of Louis Theroux, participatory, exploratory, a bit more prankish, but hilarious and informative. Safran will try almost anything and report back on it, it’s not reality-TV, it’s journo-ethno-tainment.

From today’s Dear Abby

DEAR ABBY: I am a professional costume wearer. By that, I mean I have been an elf, a giraffe, a moose, T-Rex and a character for a major hamburger chain. I am presently a character for a major cereal company. Once I am in costume, I am not allowed to speak.

Adults and older children think nothing of hitting me, kicking me, pulling at parts of my costume, and trying to knock me down. One 12-year-old even tried to “head butt” me while his father looked on and encouraged him!

I am in costume for about an hour or so before I can take breaks. It gets hot and sweaty inside these costumes. I have a limited field of vision and can’t see many of the oncoming attacks. Even if I saw each one, I would not be able to say anything to stop or deflect these random attacks. What I do is have a paid “helper” walk beside me. This is now discouraging such actions by adults and children.

I would ask parents to please remember that there are real people inside these costumes, which are not heavily padded. I feel each and every hit and kick as if I were wearing street clothes. Thanks for printing this. — H.S. IN COLORADO

DEAR H.S.: You have my sympathy, and I am seconding your request. That a parent would encourage such poor behavior incenses me. You should not have had to hire a “bodyguard” to protect you.

I find it interesting, however, that the children who are acting out against you do not regard you as another human being. It seems they have mistaken you for the same kind of cartoon character they see on television — probably too much television — against whom violence is committed with no repercussions. (I’m reminded of the “Mr. Bill” character that was once featured on “Saturday Night Live.”)

One of my assistants, who has occasionally dressed as a chimp in her work as a docent at the L.A. Zoo [Ahem?! I’d suggest that if you’re wearing a chimp costume, you can’t really call yourself a docent! – SP], tells me that this is one of the hazards in your line of work. Call me humorless, but to me, assault and battery are criminal behaviors — and if someone I cared about were subjected to it, I would be very concerned.

• Federal Express Zap Mail – a product failure
  Before fax went ubiquitous, FedEx put high performance fax machines in their local offices. They went big, but it failed bad.
• 1977 – Polaroid’s Polavision
  Late to market and didn’t perform as it needed to; led to massive financial problems and the resignation of the founder, Edwin Land.

click to enlarge

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?

Are we having fun yet?

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 . . .

• Microsoft building the second largest parking garage (underground, Western hemisphere)
  We seem to love these stories about unbelievably massive infrastructure, but are they good PR or bad PR for companies like MSFT or GOOG? How do we extend the story of their hugeness to our perception of their capability, desirability, or even inevitability?
• McCain Smiles – potato face snack
  Umm, why not?

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.

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?”