• IxDA SF presents Interaction09 Redux – Saturday, March 14th – I'll be leading a condensed version of my IXDA workshop from Vancouver (Well we did all this research…now what), looking at a framework for transforming questions into answers, answers into insights, and insights into actions.
• Steve's photos from Vancouver, Feb 2009 – I was in Vancouver to run a workshop at the IXDA conference and to visit family. Some of the photos will make their way into dedicated blog posts but meanwhile here's the whole set.
• Juice is in the details – Tropicana's redesign is being heralded for the caps that look like oranges. We've got a carton in the fridge and it's as plain as plain can be, so I'm not sure where these great caps are lurking. Meanwhile, back in 2006 we were seeing orange-looking caps on Florida's Natural packaging.
• Tropicana reverts to "classic" packaging after their crappy redesign is met with broad scorn – Mea pulpa: "Asked if he was chagrined that consumers rejected the changes he believed they wanted, Mr. Campbell replied: “I feel it’s the right thing to do, to innovate as a company. I wouldn’t want to stop innovating as a result of this. At the same time, if consumers are speaking, you have to listen.”"

My workshop at interaction ’09 (with the chatty title of Well, we did all this research – now what?) is almost sold out. It’s happening very soon, February 5, in Vancouver. I’m really looking forward to the workshop (attendees are already off doing their pre-conference homework assignment) and the conference and being in Vancouver as well.

Many designers and other people who “make stuff” agree that talking to people is essential at many points throughout the process. But even with that agreement it's not always clear what to do with the “data” that comes from those conversations.

Through exercises, examples, and discussion, Steve will share some best practices before going out in the field, while out in the field, and after being in the field that help transform questions into answers, answers into insights, and insights into actions.

If you’re interested in attending the workshop, you should sign up quickly for one of the last few spots. Hope to see you there!

The way things used to be

As I’ve already blogged, I was the victim of a phishing scam and my flickr account was deleted.

According to some flickr forum discussions (where others are reporting similar occurrences) Yahoo/flickr has known about this particular culprit for a year or so. And they’ve failed to implement sufficient countermeasures, technical or otherwise.

Phishing typically targets banking and PayPal information, obviously for financial gain. In my case, someone left a comment on a photo, with a link. And clicking on that link led me to this sad situation. Why did Yahoo let someone post a link that was harmful?

Sure, the forums are also filled with smug posts (not from the flickr staff; they have been instructed to use a soothing tone, while not providing any resolution) from people who insist that the victims of these scams are to blame for not knowing better. I would have thought I did know better, actually.

This miscreant deleted my account, just for fun. And Yahoo can’t restore it. We all know there are backup copies all over the place, but they can only recreate my account, blank.

That means that my 5000 photos are gone. Those I can upload. But all the people I’ve linked to are gone (I’ve spent a few hours trying to reconnect with those I can remember). Anyone who watched my photos via their contacts has lost me (and I’ve lost much of my audience). All the photos that were marked by others are gone. All the groups which I participated in by contributing illustrative images are gone. All the titles, tags, geotags, view counts and comments are gone. All the descriptions and stories and dialog with others is gone.

My document, my story, my part of the community, is gone.

But the whole social media movement that we can’t ever stop hearing about is asking us to contribute content to their websites; we’re building the value for them. YouTube wouldn’t sell for $1.65 billion without our videos. Flickr has our photos. LiveJournal has our stories and pictures.

But is it ours? Do we know who owns it? If the data is on our hard drive, we know where it is, we may even take the trouble to back it up (I’ve got an external backup at work, at home, and online). But if the data is on someone else’s site, how can I keep a copy of it? It may be against the site rules for you to do that, in fact, as the high profile Scoble story demonstrated.

flickrbackup is a tool that lets you save the photos, but how does one download all the metadata? Flickr should have an export feature that creates a .flk file on your PC with all the good stuff. LinkedIn lets you export all your contacts in a variety of standard formats (and if you are nervous, maybe you should go do that right now: LinkedIn->My Contacts tab->Export Connections button near bottom), Google Reader (and any of the other RSS readers I know of) exports an OPML file (Google Reader->Manage Subscriptions ->Import/Export).

DataPortability is a movement to create these tools where they don’t exist. I hope someone creates something for flickr soon.

As for me, I don’t know how to proceed. I was just beginning my Tokyo story, which reached about 1500 pictures (not all worth posting, of course). I’ve got several hundred from Taipei (November/December) and I had a lot of Bali pictures and stories – the cool cultural stuff, the signs, all that great stuff – still unposted. But I’ve also use flickr as a storage for images that I’ve referenced in bios, conference presentations, this blog, other blogs, etc. It’s overwhelming and I don’t know what to do first. Or if I should even do anything. I can’t imagine going to the trouble of writing stuff only to have it disappear again. Maybe one should see it as ephemeral, but I am not there yet.

I stumbled on a new upgrade to my backup software (they never let me know that it’s been updated; when I actually open the app from time-to-time, sometimes there’s a new button or widget). Isn’t this an interface widget that has been designed a million times? Why not leverage someone else’s solution rather than invent your own ugly and confusing alternative? Isn’t this what pattern libraries are about?

A couple of weeks ago there was some concern over the SF Indian Consulate getting rid of old visa applications in a very insecure manner:

Thousands of visa applications and other sensitive documents, including paperwork submitted by top executives and political figures, sat for more than a month in the open yard of a San Francisco recycling center after they were dumped there by the city’s Indian Consulate.

The documents, which security experts say represented a potential treasure trove for identity thieves or terrorists, finally were hauled away Wednesday after The Chronicle inspected the site and questioned officials at the consulate and the recycling facility.

The article goes on to detail what data about what types of people they found in their examination of the site and the expected quotes from security experts about what type of risk this creates.

Having gone through the visa application process ourselves for our trip to India last January, it’s a little disturbing to read that

a sampling of documents obtained by The Chronicle indicate that the boxes contained confidential paperwork for virtually everyone in California and other Western states who applied for visas to travel to India between 2002 and 2005.

But I was sadly amused by the response from the consulate

Consul General Prakash said there may be a cultural dimension to the level of outrage related to the incident among Western visa applicants.

“In India, I would not be alarmed,” he said. “We have grown up giving such information in many, many places. We would not be so worried if someone had our passport number.”

Deputy Consul General Sircar said that in other countries, Indian officials are able to go to the roofs of their offices and burn documents they’re no longer able to store.

“In America, you cannot do that,” he said.

You can just hear the bristling bureaucratic response, colored with that cliched “no-problem”!

Pretty nice surprise to find this message from Data Deposit Box

Data Deposit Box™ is pleased to announce that effective November 15th 2006 backing up your computer online will cost just $2 per gigabyte per month. This represents a savings of up to 80 per cent for DDB customers.

Now $2 per month is all it takes to protect up to 1GB of your valuable computer data – there is no limit to how much data you can back up. You simply pay $2/GB for the storage you use.
…
Previously, a typical DDB customer storing 1GB of data would have received a bill for about $10 per month. Under this new plan, the same amount of storage will cost only $2.

A service is going to get cheaper. Not worse in quality, or more restricted, or more expensive. Cheaper. Great job!

Backup-Pal seems like a reasonably good idea, but points to a larger problem. Here’s a device that connects to your cell phone and lets you backup your phone book, etc. If the phone dies you’ve still got your data. That’s a problem, and this device solves it. But why aren’t these things interoperable? If I’m already pulling SD cards out of my camera to put in my laptop, why can’t I do that with my cellphone?

Is the future converged formats where we can back everything up easily, or is it a series of special function devices to keep track of that backup everything else? A special third-party TiVo backup, a backup for my microwave, my car, my GPS unit, my XM radio?

I’ve got nothing against this solution, but it speaks to a larger problem that could continue to get worse.

We’ve got some quality control problems with Froogle. Maybe this is nothing new. I searched for “bluetooth mouse” and clicked on one listing to see the two results in detail. Here they are listed. The name of the product and the merchant, together.

I tried the first one and the product page they link to is actually for a screen protector, not a mouse.

I tried the second one and it prompted me for login and password, and then of course denied me access.

Don’t be evil, sure. But don’t be lame, either.

Virtual Anthropology is the mini-meme of the moment, I guess – a post from Trendwatching that highlights all the ways you can, from the comfort of your desk, learn about what people around the world are doing, photographing, wearing, buying, etc.

As usual, when you read about a shortcut to actual research written by someone who really has no clue about doing real research, they omit the valuable part – asking questions. Asking why! What is the meaning of the clothing you wear? Tell me a story about why you’ve got those items in your fridge?

It takes skill to unearth the insights – you can’t start and finish with self-reported data. Otherwise, you’re just a step above a mood board or something artifact-based. Insights come from people – from interacting with people, dynamically. Not simply observing their shit.

I feel like a broken record on this one, but whatever.

BusinessWeek describes a curious design research initiative. A UK home builder has a family living in a sensor-filled concept house, where the people are all RFID-tagged. They’ll collect usage data for six months and then use the resulting who/where/when/how-long data to improve the home’s design. Just like using weblogs to redesign a website – you know what people have been doing, but you have no idea why. Unless you ask. And the families in this project will be extensively interviewed by a “consumer researcher” so we figure they’ll get that piece of the puzzle too.

In a previous post I told a story about receiving mistaken invoices from my online backup service. It was a LOT of money and I made the mistake of reading my email during a bit of insomnia, and of course, my adrenalin surged unhappily even though I convinced myself it was probably a mistake (but it was tricky; the first review I read about this service, Data Deposit Box, explained how if your software creates temp files in the target directory, you may find yourself uploading HUGE HUGE files to their system and being charged for it – and at least once in that previous month I found that my DVD software had put some several gigabyte file down without telling me, etc. etc. so I had some rational basis for concern), and eventually they let us all know that they had sent these three invoices out by mistake.

So I blogged the story, because, hey, I’ve got a blog and I’m going to use it.

But the company I blogged about wasn’t too happy.

From: “Peter Carroll”
To:
Subject: The Data Deposit Box problem
Date: Mon, 13 Jun 2005 09:43:07 -0400

Steve,

We are again very sorry for the error that caused you to receive those emails. It was an embarrassing mistake that will never happen again.

I read your blog on the topic with horror this morning. We have all worked hard to communicate with our customers and clean up the mess this caused. These were only internal reminder emails for our accounting people to manually bill a couple of our very large clients. No customers were billed.

Clearly this was a dark day in our history that we would all like to put behind us. Unfortunately, with your blog showing up in Google I fear we will be reliving it over and over for months or years to come.

Would you consider removing your post in exchange for 3 months of free Data Deposit Box service? I assume you are otherwise happy with our service. This gesture would be greatly appreciated by everyone at Data Deposit Box.

Sincerely

Peter Carroll, CTO

This really threw me for a loop. I’m supposed to feel bad for them? I guess I do, but what about me? My monthly bill is about $20.00, so they’re asking me to basically censor myself in support of their corporate goals, for about $60.00. I don’t want to go off on a major integrity high-horse type of deal, but really? $60? Maybe they should offer me the three free months as a gesture of good will in apology for the upset. But not make it contigent upon me zipping my mouth.

Further, there’s an element of quiet coercion here, and really, isn’t a backup company’s core offering involving trust? I don’t feel they are behaving in a trustworthy fashion. And what if I refuse to take the posting down? Will that mean that maybe my data might (oops! We are SOOOO sorry) go away? Probably not, but even the fact that this exchange has raised the spectre of data loss suggests their approach to me was a wrong one.

I’m not out to change the world with this blog, and I’m still getting used to the fact (after nearly 4 years) that this blog can have some impact, but I stand by what I wrote.

I didn’t bother to share with people, by the way, my “icon” experience. Here’s a support request I sent in

Admittedly, this is a low-priority request, but I wanted at least to request it…

Every once in a while the icon in the system tray disappears and then reappears. This causes all the task bar entries to shift rapidly back and forth – in other words, it’s a fair amount of motion along the bottom of the screen. It’s VERY distracting. It’d be great if that didn’t happen, if it just stayed live all the time, or I’d be willing to disable the icon if that meant I could avoid this problem. I’ve seen this happen with other programs (I think PopFile had it with a recent version) and it cosmetic, but it’s also impacting concentration and productivity, so it is important in that way.

They responded nicely, and quickly

We had a problem with our icon in that it would disappear and we were unable to determine why it was happening. We decided to destroy and recreate the icon periodically to stop this from happening.

I will add a registry setting to the client application to allow you to disable this. The option will not appear in our options program, but will be only available via registry changes.

I will let you know once this is ready and send you instructions on the name of the key.

I’m no programmer, but a tech friend of mine was aghast at the problem and also the kludgey solution. Didn’t give him faith in their technical chops. Anyway, shortly thereafter they sent the registry key instructions. Playing with the Windows registry is sort of a dangerous manipulation of the secret guts of how things work. One typo can ruin stuff. Anyway, they told me what kind of key to create and what to put in it. And there was a typo in their instructions.

Under Software/Acpana/Backup/username please add a ERG_SZ value with the name DoIconRefresh and set the value to 0

ERG_SZ should be REG_SZ. I didn’t know that, but I figured it out. Still doesn’t give you the best confidence in them.

Anyway, back to the issue at hand – the blog entry. I wrote them back

Peter, I’m awfully surprised that you’d ask a customer to delete a posting they made about your product! And further that you’d offer me roughly $60 to do so!

Moreover, this sort of thing really impacts the feeling of trust between me and Data Deposit Box – if I refuse, what will happen to my data? For a service that provides backup, I would suggest that the trust is pretty important and this exchange kind of threatens that trust.

Steve

and heard back

If you refuse, nothing will happen to your data. I only ask that you please consider removing your post because of the ongoing negative impact it will have on our company.

As you point out, trust is a very fragile thing. Nobody understands that more than we do. There was nothing malicious in our action. It was an honest mistake and we have worked very hard to repair the damage it caused. My fear is that your post will continue to show up in Google and new damage will continue to happen.

Expression of individual opinion is very important right. But please consider what the effect is when they are amplified by Google. IÔø?m sure you do not intend to cause us ongoing damage to our reputation. If you did, I am sure you would no longer be a customer. But negative comments are may times more powerful than positive.

I offered you some free service only as a gesture of good faith. I had no other intentions. If you are not comfortable with that I understand. Was our response to our customers not sufficient or appropriate in you mind? Is there anything more you feel we should do?

I truly hope you can forgive us for this mishap. If not, I apologize again and wish you all the best.

I don’t want to be a villain, or hurt this poor company. Discussions of forgiveness and malice and all this seem very emotional and very personal. Perhaps I need to be more judicious of my stories of bad service or bad experiences. I don’t think I’m using this a bully pulpit, though. Even though they won’t be happy to see their exchange with me also blogged, I feel it’s important. Look, this isn’t Disney sending a cease-and-desist letter or anything dramatic like that, but it’s a request to stop saying something bad about a company, because an honest experience (and really, that was NOT a screed, I’ve written screeds, that was mostly sharing an experience and sharing my own horror at it) is just that. What happened to me. My truth.

I’m still a customer of Data Deposit Box. They offer a unique pricing advantage (you pay what you backup, not by choosing from a variety of sizes that you think you need to store) and a unique backup process (you backup files pretty much all the time not on a schedule). They claim to offer multiple copies of files (versions 1 2 and 3) that change over time, but I haven’t figured that out. It may be working, or may not. I don’t know yet.

And, I’ve had a frightening billing mistake with them, and I’ve had a somewhat slapdash if effective and rapid support for something very cosmetic. I’m laying it out there for you to decide for yourself.

I’ve been using this online backup service called Data Deposit Box for a couple of months now. It’s a piece of software that watches the folders you specify and pretty much is running all the time to upload the latest version of your documents. You get billed based on how much you store. Last week I got my first bill (the first month was free) for $19.17, for a month.

And then last night I got three emails from them

To: Steve Portigal
Subject: System – Partner Billing

Name: Interbaun
Systems: 39
Storage: 40.33 GB
Start: 2005-05-01
End: 2005-05-31
Total: 186.82

and

To: Steve Portigal
Subject: System – Partner Billing

Name: Magma
Systems: 193
Storage: 414.33 GB
Start: 2005-05-01
End: 2005-05-31
Total: 1094.02

and

To: Steve Portigal
Subject: System – Partner Billing

Name: Primus Resi
Systems: 2
Storage: 38.54 MB
Start: 2005-05-01
End: 2005-05-31
Total: 4.44

Argh, nearly $1300 was billed to me overnight? I just about flipped. I googled the Magma and Primus names and saw them listed as ISP customers of DDB, and was relieved. I sent in an urgent support request and did receive this back

I?m very sorry you received the other 3 emails. You recieved them in error. I can assure you that your credit card was not charge for these amounts and never will be.

A small problem with our email server caused these emails to go to the wrong list. The problem has been fixed and will not happen again.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

and then this broadcast email

To: Steve Portigal
Subject: Important Information regarding incorrect Invoice Emails

Dear Data Deposit Box Subscriber,

Due to an error in our system last evening you may have received three Data Deposit Box invoice emails by mistake.

Please disregard these emails as they were not intended for you.

This error was due to a mistake on our part and was not a result of any security breach.

Your credit card has not been charged.

We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

Now THAT is an email error you don’t want to make? They sent all their individual customers the bills from some big clients? Oops!

You may have heard that google has unleashed the USENET archives back to 1981. Here’s one of the earliest posts from me that I found. Another is here and one more here.

Groups I was active in during the 1990 to 1993 period include:

alt.folklore.urban
rec.arts.movies
alt.sex
alt.rock-n-roll
alt.tv.muppets
talk.bizarre (though for some reason, those posts aren’t showing up in Google. Although I did win #25 most frequent poster of the week in the USENET stats post, including 76% of those posts to talk.bizarre – so I’ve got “proof” just no evidence)

I found some early (and tame) flame wars, some morally indignant posts by me, many smart-ass posts, quite a few questions about who sang this or acted in that (and my own share of answers), and some real newbi-ism. And, the .signatures from back then – oy! Star Trek references abound…