Notes from my UXWeek session are online (not sure how helpful they are without hearing me talk through the issues, (Update: you can hear me talk through the issues here) but if you want to, check out Dan Saffer’s notes or the notes from the wiki.
Hawai’i makai/mauka signs
different orientation toward navigation: toward mountain, toward ocean
difference in how we move through spaceso what?
mundane observations reveal differences in cultural needs or drivers
Tokyo Times points us to a car that wears its kawaii on its er um tires. Benny the Cab, anyone?
A uniquely horrible part of our trip to Kauai was stopping here for a shave ice. This place was staffed by a gaggle of poorly trained, incompetent, aggressive, rude teenage girls. They stood behind their window and acted as if the people on the other side were not human, but merely objects. One stood there talking loudly about her social plans for that evening, ignoring the long line. Another complained about the line, and how much work she had. “I hope this fucking line goes away soon! I’m so sick of people!” she yelled to her friends, not 18 inches from the fucking people who were waiting to give her money. Everyone was made to feel as if they were inconveniencing these girls’ lives. One man received his shave ice in a foam cup with a leak; he went back up to return it or get a new cup and they were horrible to him; he shouldn’t expect anything from them since he only spent a few bucks!
This place is in the Hanalei Center on the north side of the island. Do not go there.
We only saw one other shave ice place on the whole island, Jo-Jo’s Shave Ice in Waimea. The experience there was great. This place here sucks.
Hawaii, especially Kauai is a tourist economy; people were appropriately awesome in most places we went to. This place was off the scale in the other direction. Please stay away.
Michael gave one of the keynotes today at UXWeek. He is a great storyteller with a wonderful self-deprecating style (that somehow combines with an amusing cynicism about some of those around him; but yet he’s genuine in it all). His talk essentially focused on his learning moment(s) as a designer around being user-centered.
He took on a pro-bono project to rename/rebrand/create a logo/etc. for a project to redo decrepit libraries in NYC schools. In a post-modern fashion, he presented his deliverables for that client in a dry and critical tone, mocking his own “big ideas” in a way that made it clear he no longer sees them as big ideas any longer. It was an interesting line to skate, there is always bullshit and performance in trying to convince someone that a new idea (or a trite idea, brought in for the first time, etc.) is a valid one, and it’s easy to present the same idea as genius or crap depending on the tone of voice. Listen to some old Bob Newhart recordings for a concrete example (Tob-acco… er, what’s tob-acco, Walt? It’s a kind of leaf, huh?… and you bought eighty tonnes of it?!!… Let me get this straight, Walt… you’ve bought eighty tonnes of leaves?… This may come as a kind of a surprise to you Walt but… come fall in England, we’re kinda up to our…).
Bierut’s ideas were completely inappropriate and indicated how poorly he understood the problem. The client took him out to see the libraries, and he got it. Instantly, and hugely. And the design work that he and many others collaborated one was wonderful. Framed as a story about his own failures, it’s actually a story about success. But the framing is what makes the telling of the story so genius.
Bierut gave his client a new treatment for the library. In a funny PowerPoint build he went from
Library
to
Library!
to
L!brary
to
L!brary
He planned to deliver a full specification document indicating fonts and treatment and all the rest, but in the interim, the client took control over the logo and started using it whatever way they wanted. He realized that this was okay, and that the cultural (and indeed design) benefits outweighed any super-specification desire he might have projected on them.
One awesome and obvious (in hindsight) example of this dawning user-centered perspective was in how Michael and his team referred to these different libraries being designed. Before meeting the librarians, he referred to them by the architect (i.e., the Peter Arkle (sp!) library) but afterwards he learned that it was referred to as “Vince’s library” – a classic user research insight – different groups call things by different names, revealing their underlying use model!
Five things he learned
1. Innovation is overrated*
2. You get power by giving away power
3. The real opportunity may be outside your scope of work
4. Consistency does not equal sameness
5. Take care of the experience and the brand will take care of itself
The “innovation” comment was challenging and Ryan Freitas
asked about it. Bierut added that “innovation has never been a profound motivator for me…design has to work within conventions to work.” Seems like we’re approaching the I-word with some different things in mind. Bierut felt he started off being too “clever” – which I hear as new for new’s sake – and that wasn’t the right thing to do. I don’t think innovative means shocking, obviously new, different, and all that. I think innovation can be invisible and brilliant and seamless to adapt to, with that whiff of exhaled “ooh!” that happens afterwards. To a graphic designer, the word may mean something else.
Despite all the training, the swanky Palomar Hotel, site of UX Week, isn’t able to get basic things like room reservations (ObSeinfeld: “See, you know how to take the reservation, you just don’t know how to *hold* the reservation”) sorted out. I wasn’t the only one it seems that arrived (hot and dusty from a long long voyage) to find some polite confusion at the front desk. And today (after friendly but pungent maintenance men visited my room during the well-communicated fire alarm test) a polite person knocked on my door to see if my room was indeed occupied.
Anyway, more content stuff to come (great keynote by Michael Bierut). Surreal moment of zen last night when the very “guy” bartenders at the billiards bar where Google hosted a (recruiting) party poured out pitchers of shots (of what they referred to as a concoction and had us all toast – like patrons of wet-t-shirt-nite – to GOOOOOOOOOOGLE!!!!!!!!!! It was a viral-video/co-creation opportunity waiting to happen.
Refreshing piece in the NYT (since it omits the usual players and the jokes about anthropology) about the importance of getting out of the office and getting to where your customers are.
Once a year, though, he organizes a different kind of hunt – which he calls a “branch hunt.” In it, the entire organization turns its attention from the suite to the street – and, by scrutinizing the fine details of how banks interact with their customers, sees the market from a new perspective.
“The most thoughtful and articulate strategies tend to come from the big banks,” Mr. Brown explained. “But their actual results seldom bear that out. When you walk the streets and look at what’s happening, the gap between strategy and execution becomes obvious. We can’t just listen to what executives say. We have to see with our own eyes what customers are experiencing.”
The dress code for a branch hunt is casual, but the approach is rigorous. For its fourth annual hunt, Second Curve pinpointed the location of every branch of every bank on the East Side of Manhattan, from 25th to 86th Streets.
All the firm’s employees – the analysts, the compliance officer, the computer geek, the receptionist – divided into teams, were assigned specific avenues and streets and set out with digital cameras, audio recorders and four crisp $100 bills for each team. They spent time at the branches, chatted up bank employees, opened checking accounts with the company-issued cash, snapped photographs – not a popular practice with bank security – and captured the flesh-and-blood experience of being a customer.
After the hunt, the teams returned to headquarters and described what they saw, from stories about horrible or remarkable service, to reports on flat-screen televisions that were meant for customers’ viewing but were occasionally found in truly bizarre places where the public could not see them.
On the front cover of today’s issue of Parade magazine (Parade magazine!!!)
the Inside Story of
Snakes On A Plane
We were on Kauai for only a few hours when we saw this young woman in a cafe in an extremely small town. I got a kick out of how universal the behavior is, no matter where you go, you’ll see someone hanging in a coffee shop with their laptop.
A couple of years ago I started a local Freecycle group for my community. The basic concept of freecycle is a local email list to offer unwanted items. There’s no discussion, very few rules (keep it free, keep it legal, keep it local). We set up some basic formatting rules for postings and eventually most people would follow those rules most of the time.
But Freecycle quickly became like some high school club, more focused on its own operations than its original goals. Special mailing lists for moderators (those who run local lists) were formed, and then regional lists for moderators in a certain area appeared. Strong personalities emerged (as with any online forum) and they began to dictate more rules, many of which percolated up to freecycle central.
I managed to ignore most of this; I interacted only with the local list. Whenever I would check in with the various moderation forums, I was stunned at the complexity and drama that had emerged. Various scandals within certain regions around breakaway groups, rogue moderators, scammers, people posting under multiple identities.
A few months ago I learned that Freecycle was trying to establish a trademark, in order to maintain some sort of organizational status. I received a vaguely threatening note urging me to comply with a variety of new policies. The logo on my Yahoogroups page had to be revised, and I was to encourage (somehow) various uses of the term Freecycle. We were not to refer to Freecycling or Freecyclers but “using Freecycle (TM)” and “members of the Freecycle (TM) Network.” There was a lot of ridiculous and barn-door-too-late instructions. I made a few changes, but decided not to make this the problem of the list members.
After a slow start, however, the list at this point was thriving. Plenty of activity, plenty of members, no conflict. All the usual list-admin problems of people needing extra help or not understanding rules, etc. But that was par for the course.
When I got back from vacation recently I got an officious message from a member who urged me to clarify various policies
and passed along the FAQ from a San Francisco Freecycle. This wasn’t so terrible, but it was really the tipping point for me, personally.
I built the community, and now it’s time for someone else to run it. Last week I turned the operations over to a small committee who will deal with whatever they want, however they want. I did some full disclosure on the drama that swirls around us, and they went for it. I’m sure it will be fine, but my time was up.
I’ve started a number of online communities over the years, but this was the first one I’ve let go of responsibility for. It feels good, not to walk away from it, but to leave it in a healthy and stable position.
Anyway, this recent New Yorker article about Wikipedia reminded me of the Freecycle stuff and human nature around forums such as this.
Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B. Viégas, two researchers at I.B.M. who have studied the site using computerized visual models called “history flows,” found that the talk pages and “meta pages”-those dealing with co??rdination and administration-have experienced the greatest growth. Whereas articles once made up about eighty-five per cent of the site’s content, as of last October they represented seventy per cent. As Wattenberg put it, “People are talking about governance, not working on content.”
For more on the bitter silliness that threatens to overwhelm if not wreck Freecycling, check out this article from Grist.
At the interactive cities summit
, I noticed a frequent reference to people working on projects. Many of the people who gave presentations or shared their examples seemed to be involved in projects, and in many cases, projects of their own choosing. They had an idea for something that would further the dialogue of technology and urbanism, and they built it, and set it up. This idea of project seemed to come from the world of art more than the world of work.
Projects were not something that were awarded or assigned, they were chosen.
This was a refreshing perspective for me. Of course, my time is spent on “projects” all the time (i.e., move my blog to a new host, put my India pictures up on flickr, etc.) but those are ancillary projects. My thing is my business, my gigs. Others, I’m sure, think about their job and their company. At some point, we think about our career. But do some of us ever think about these projects? Do we want to? Is it a choice, or a tendency?
It really challenged my whole notion of work and took me out of my comfort zone.