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.

I love the automatic checkouts at Home Depot. There’s usually no line for them, so I can start my transaction right away. Even if it’s slow and inefficient, I’m actually doing something, rather than waiting behind another customer. I like being in control!

There’s a balance of design goals at work in these monsters – standalone/simplicity (and by that I do not mean ease-of-use), theft prevention, staff reduction. Those goals are not all met very well, and they are sometimes at odds with each other.

After using this for a couple of years, I’ve figured out that to start to check out, you must place all your items on a tray to the left of the screen (this isn’t so obvious). You pick your items, one at a time, pass them over the scanner, and then place them in a bag on the tray to the right of the screen.

The trays on either side contain scales. Your items are being weighed, with the left and right being compared. You can only have one in the air (i.e., not in the bag and not on the to-be-bought tray) at a time. And you must stow it in the bag before picking up the next one. This is not beep-beep-beep rapid scanning. It feels very silly and slow, but that’s what the system wants you to do.

If you try to go too fast, the system warms you. “Please re-place item in bagging area.” It’s far from foolproof (not that the users are fools, but the users can fool it!); it often goes out of sync. The item it wants to be put in the bagging area is already in the bagging area. Often we have to flag down the cashier at the master station who is “supervising” the four self-check devices (usually trying to help poor first-timers, or calling out instructions from her station).

Anyway, I was plodding away with my purchase of 4 $0.69 switchplates the other day, and of course, we got out of sync. Everything was either in a bag or waiting to be scanned and I was being given instructions about what to return to where, even though there was nothing that could be returned. In my attempt to mollify the system, I picked up one of my to-be-rung-up items and put it in the bag. That seemed to satisfy it. That left one remaining. I picked it up, scanned it, and put it in the bag. All four of the items were now in the bag. But I had only scanned three.

Screw this. I clicked “finish and pay” and ran through the payment swipe interaction (this takes place on another interface, about 5 feet from the first interface).

The machine, which represents Home Depot and its interests, didn’t want my $0.69 for my fourth item. It insisted that I put it in the bag without swiping it. Did I alert the supervising cashier so she could come over and rejigger the whatsit and charge me the right amount? I did not.

I was able to somehow justify this because it was the will of the machine; the error was not like an ATM that gives you two $20.00 bills stuck together; it was a richly interactive error – “put this in the bag, Steve” it told me… (but I never…) NO – PUT IT IN THE BAG NOW PLEASE. (okay, sir). The machine is the boss, but I’m responsible for knowing more than it about what is right and what is accurate?

Please don’t read this as some sort of attempt to rationalize something that is obviously wrong. We can get the Ethicist in here if we need to, but we all know what he’d say. I guess I’m more interest in the attributes of the exchange and how it influenced my own decision.

Of course, the fact that was $0.69 also is a factor. Do we want to call this stealing? If so, then the dollar amount shouldn’t matter? Although we’ve got a recent story where Wal-Mart is ignoring some sub-$25 shoplifting, so maybe there’s a sense that the amount does matter.

Presumably, I was doing a calculation of time, cost of goods, aggravation, and wrapping that up in a bit of self-justification and walking out with my extra (free!) switchplate because of that. These decisions are complex, with a lot of factors mixed in, in an organic (rather than linear) fashion.

The ID Magazine Annual Design Review page shows last year’s cover while the Current Issue page show’s last month’s cover.

Old media acting very very old. Is it any wonder that the Business Week/IDSA IDEA awards have been all over the blogosphere for a couple of weeks and I’ve seen nothing about these? I thought at one point the two awards were equally prestigious, but I dunno about ID mag. They aren’t online, so they’re hard to blog about. Is that the only reason?

But let’s look a little at some of the content. The jurors (and editors) did a good job at pointing out good and bad things about selected items. Although I began to wonder at what point do these negative aspects of a design become absolute deal-breakers?

Veneerware Disposable Plates – Design Distinction

Conceived as an alternative to paper or Styrofoam…made from bamboo taken right from the cane. They’re meant to be tossed away but at $11 for a set of eight, “That’s some costly disposability,”…the plates raised a larger discussion about garbage. “They are biodegradable but that doesn’t mean they’l find their way to a place where they can actually biodegrade.”

Z-Series Ironing Board – Design Distinction

Polder’s new ironing board has thin, flat legs, made of two sheet-metal panels sandwiching a polypropylene core, which end in protective nonskid bumpers…But as much as the jurors liked the product, they raised aneyebrow at the price. At $130, “it feels a little untenable,”

American Red Cross Preparedness Start Kit – Honorable Mention

Chan unfortunately injured his finger trying to open it.

What the hell is wrong with this picture? These are award winners? More expensive disposable plates, a first aid kit that injured a juror, and an “untenable” ironing board?

Elsewhere, the Sony Handycam HDR-HC1 Video Camera gets an Honorable Mention, “Granted, it’s only 3 megapixels,” as if that’s insufficient for most uses? The Birkis Pro Clog received an Honorable Mention even though they only had a photograph, saying “Maybe it’s more comfortable on the foot.” They gave a design award to a shoe that they couldn’t experience?

I appreciate the skepticism of the jurors – the Nike Considered shoe that they don’t believe is actually purchasable, the W Line tennis racquet that offers a bigger sweet spot, a claim that the jurors saw as something that every manufacturer makes – but why do those ones win?

The furniture jurors decided that they would consider price in their judging. But they selected a $9450 couch, and a felt material assemblage that “at these prices – $850 per yard for rugs, $1,680 per yard for cushions – the pieces are more likely to become heirlooms than landfill.” Doesn’t seem like they stuck to their guns.

Meanwhile, the equipment jurors (specifically Ted Selker) sneer “All of these things have a real purpose and solve a real problem. These aren’t consumer products that some people are buying because of some ad. These things have to be reliable, honest, and serve a serious function.” How ID could publish that line when elsewhere in the same issue they are judging award-winning consumer products is beyond me. Where Selker gets his contempt for “consumers” who just watch ads and do whatever the fuck they want, I guess, is another question.

Being cynical about design awards (or hell, any form of awards) isn’t novel. My concern is not so much with what things deserved to win, I honestly don’t care, but the hypocrisy of the decision making process, which they reveal in some lame attempt at transparency.

It’s hard to have much interst in this magazine from this point on.

Todd writes, over at the adaptive path blog

Focusing exclusively on tasks and goals means that you tend to ignore or de-emphasize all of the activities that people engage in that are specifically not goal-oriented. It also means that you will often ignore the messy jumble of activities that take place around but are not oriented toward your system. This is not always problematic but it quickly becomes so when you are designing for multiple contexts and mediums. When it comes to designing for the total experience, the activities that have little to do with the system you are designing are often just as important as those that are central to it. More than ever before, people switch from one context to another rapidly and often. They were in the outskirts of Cleveland mowing their lawn then the cell phone rang and suddenly they’re planning a trip to Thailand.

The thesis of the piece, as I read it, is not simply to shift methodologies (do ethnography and forget usability) but to change the fundamental way that we structure and act on the information we gather about the people we are designing for.

It’s a great challenge for organizations, and for consultants, because there’s powerful cultural infrastructure that drives what is an acceptable piece of new knowledge, and of course, what isn’t. In order to see how you might act on something – what do we DO with this information – requires a shift in perspective. And those don’t happen overnight, when they do happen.

Wabi-sabi

Japanese aesthetic based on the acceptance of transience, described as one of beauty that is “imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete”

Andrew Juniper claims, “if an object or expression can bring about, within us, a sense of serene melancholy and a spiritual longing, then that object could be said to be wabi-sabi.” Richard R. Powell summarizes by saying “It (wabi-sabi) nurtures all that is authentic by acknowledging three simple realities: nothing lasts, nothing is finished, and nothing is perfect.”

(edited from Wikipedia link above)
Little light on examples, one can imagine things we find in nature, or maybe antique furniture or maybe the undesigned and Beta-y software/web of Google and MySpace?

The New York Times takes a quick look at how companies manage pricing of equivalent goods and services, and how people perceive value.

Although some people care a great deal about cutting-edge hardware and software, others would happily settle for simpler machines if that meant lower prices. Offering discounts to buyers of traditional white machines enables Apple to expand its market. And this reduces its cost per unit sold, freeing resources to develop even more sophisticated machines.

I’m quoted in today’s Boston Globe

NEW YORK – To those who dwell in the design universe, Apple Computer has accomplished the near-impossible: making nerdy computing products seem hip and friendly.Sleek, ergonomic, and accessible, first their computers and now their iPods have gained raves and a cult following, and they have brought terms like ‘nano’ out of geekdom and into everyday use. ‘I think every designer in the world has been in a meeting where someone announces that their printer, toaster, telephone, breakfast cereal should become the iPod of its category,’ says Steve Portigal of Portigal Consulting, a California firm specializing in design and business strategy.

Now, with the opening of an architecturally audacious retail store in Manhattan, Apple has crossed another design threshold. The Apple Store Fifth Avenue a mammoth underground docking station for Macs, iPods, and accessories has made the ultimate statement of design and product packaging by morphing the design of Apple products with the design of the building that houses them.

‘It’s difficult to think of other companies that have such design coherence,’ says Paul Thompson, director of New York’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. ‘Everything comes together under one design vision. Anyway you cut the apple, design is driving it.’

Article also quoted here.

A product I worked on a few years ago has launched! I worked with IDEO on what became the Avaya one-X Deskphone. I helped out a team of designers in doing some upfront research on how knowledge workers were using their various communication platforms (email, phone, cell phone, IM, and beyond). (Of course IDEO has tons of people that do this stuff, but they were all busy doing other projects at the time). They designed what seems like a pretty nice form (a significant upgrade from their previous phones) and a smart interface, at least from the demo on Avaya’s site.

It’s always cool when some work hits the market!

Yesterday I received my copy of the new Swedish translation of Design: A Very Short Introduction (Design – en introduktion) by John Heskett. I can’t read Swedish, but this edition features two of my photographs from Hong Kong. Hooray!

I flipped through the book and found a photo captioned Amerikansk “strip mall” but is obviously taken in Canada, showing the Canadian McDonald’s logo, Tim Horton’s, Mark’s Work Wearhouse, and Canadian Tire. Hmm.

From its inception, I’ve been an active participant and support of the about, with & for

conference. I’m entirely not thrilled with this year’s topic

AWF 2006 – Responsible Design | The Value of Good Intention

Design can have the best of intentions but sometimes is trumped by business agendas. Does it have to be a balancing act, or can good intention fuel real innovation? From organic foods to the future of urban spaces, what role does responsibility play in how companies approach innovation and design?

The 2006 About, With and For conference will explore how user-centered design research can unveil the potential of responsible design.

I know this is hot stuff these days, but at least as of this writing (I can always change my mind, right?) I’m fed up with this whole save-the-world thing. I’m into the power of design (and many other tools of innovation, business, makin’ stuff, etc.) to cause big changes, but I’m not into the liberaller-than-thou imperative that seems to be issued to designers upon their entry to design school.