I hadn’t seen anything like this before, known as a dual-flush toilet. Nice interface; the oval flush button is divided in two; one button is twice the size of the other. You choose which flushing button to press based on what you’ve just done. Visually there’s a number one and a number two button. They could have had some awkward fun with color-coding, I suppose. If it’s yellow…etc.

Note: other pics from our trip to Banff are here

Last night’s BayCHI event was a good experience. A panel of champions of user research (Director, Manager, Lead, etc.) at key Silicon Valley companies (Google, Yahoo, Adobe, Intuit, and eBay) attracted a large and energetic crowd. The pre-meeting dinner was extremely well-attended. It felt like the discipline is having a good moment in the zeitgeist.

Each panelist gave a 10-minute summary of what’s going on at their firm. What types of methods they are using, how they are feeding design, strategy. How they might interface with market research and other areas of the business. Where they have been, historically, and what may have changed in how they are embraced (or not).

Rashmi Sinha moderated, and only spent a bit of time asking her own followup questions after the panelists finished; and then it was basically an hour (?) of audience questions. Although I stood up and asked a question, I would rather have had more questions from her and less from the audience (that’s my bias, I guess, as someone who’s played that role in the past); the audience questions are not usually about creating conversation, and the moderator is obviously in a role to do that. By the time we finished with questions people were asking about how to recruit participants for studies; a tactical question that had no place in this meeting, if we were there to discuss the practice and how it integrates into corporate America, then let’s not deal with newbie process questions. I’m not minimizing the importance of that question to the person who asked it, but it wasn’t on topic and kinda brought things down for me.

People mumbled afterwards about wanting to see some conflict between the panelists, who represented competitive firms (but maybe didn’t see themselves individually as competitors) and who sometimes expressed different points of view on how to use the tools of user research (it’s hard for me to be specific from memory, but there were several examples from Google about how user research wasn’t always necessary, but they were ridiculous examples, as in, “should we have told people not to build a search interface until they had done years of research” as the strawman questions, when I don’t think anyone was advocating years of research, more so the opposite). It wasn’t in panelists charge to debate what they heard from the others; they were there to tell their own story and they all did that very well.

Perhaps the comments about conflict are proxies for my desire for more conversation; something that (as user reseachers know) takes good questions, and frankly, audience members just aren’t going to ask good questions. This sounds terribly snobby and let me clarify – there are questions that are informational (what type of deliverables do you use? how do you recruit) and there are questions that provoke conversation and interaction.

There’s another panel phenomenon at work here – “question drift” – whoever answers the question first is the most on target; as other answers come from the panelists, we end up hearing about an entirely different question, and we’ve lost the thread. I don’t have a solution to this. Sometimes the drift is interesting, but often it’s just a bit frustrating.

So it was hard to take much specific away from the evening – there was a lot of info; a lot of bits of perspective and insight and jargon thrown out quickly, with something new on the heels, so I felt like it was an immersion more than an education.

But here’s what I took away:

• this is a mature field; you can see the newer practices (Google) presented as adolescent next to their more wizened counterparts
• I’ve lived as a consultant for a very long time; there’s a whole set of challenges and benefits that these corporate folks have that are almost alien to me – I felt very aware of how I can deal with some of their situations so much more easily, and how there’s so much more formalized and permanent processes being created that I’m not at all engaged with
• it’s just tradeoffs and contrast, one isn’t better than the other, we need to be in-house and out-of-house both
• it’s not clear to me how research is different from design (and I don’t mean Research and Design) – this was my question and I don’t know that I got an answer except a fallback to corporate structures (and one person pointed out that designers and researchers have very different skill sets, but that wasn’t my question – if this is collaborative work, can’t teams of people with complementary skills deliver ONE thing – “design” – rather than breaking it down so much) and formalized processes
• this is a bit of a hot topic among software/tech/design types right now
• MORE I REMEMBERED: Christian Rohrer from eBay defined success criteria for user research as impact (which I really liked), and he defined impact as
  1. credibility
  2. consumability
  3. relevance

I’m trying to comment on a couple of blog entries on BusinessWeek online. Hitting “post” just times out. So I searched the site for a means to contact them. First I found the Masthead for the online edition. But nothing there. Turns out I want “customer service” (even though I’m not a customer, I’m a user, yes?).

BusinessWeek Online: Customer Service says

Thank you for taking the time to contact us. Please provide as much information as possible to help us resolve the problem. We will respond if you include a valid BusinessWeek user name and email address below.
Name
Email Address
Address
Address 2
City
State/Province
Zip/Postal Code
Country

Of course, I have no idea what a BusinessWeek user name is. Nor do I see a place to enter that information! I put in my name and email and describe the problem. Nope. I need to provide an address. A City. A state or province, and a zip or postal code. To submit a problem report with their website. What?

Okay, I give them 1 nowhere st. Nowheresville, etc. etc. And submit it.

And it reloads the exact same page, with the fields still populated with what I typed.

There’s no acknowledgement that they’ve received my feedback, nor any indication that I need to do something else to get the info to them. I have no idea what has happened. Have they now received several copies of the same bug report (including the one I tried in IE in case this was a Firefox problem?) or have they received none?

Meanwhile, I have two composed but not-accepted blog comments.

Obviously something is broken, but how much is broken and how much is bad design? I expected better!

Probably everyone knew this but me, but Fossil Watches offers an impressive (at least in terms of number, if not actual appeal) array of themed watches. Themes (or shall we call them brands) include Ohio State, Universities of Illinois, Alabama, Michigan, Tennessee, Florida, as well as Starck, Gehry, Atari, and some other geeky options. Fossil is riding the same trends as everyone else – co-branding with entertainment properties, designers as brands, target = “_blank”Substance-of-Style-esque massive choice.

This type of thing seems disturbingly common nowadays: I am preparing to book a hotel for an upcoming conference. The hotel is part of a chain I’ve never stayed at before, so I decide to see if they’ve got some sort of affiliate program or bonus/loyalty/mileage thing, before I book.

I sign up for the program and get my number about 12 hours later. I tried to book online but because I was looking for a conference rate (without a code) I gave up and ended up calling.

And they don’t show my loyalty number.

I’m looking at the auto-generated email, with the number in bold text. And we try several times. They try my name, everything. And give up. Even though I have the “receipt” on hand. No dice.

So the convenience factor – not having to read out every single piece of contact info I’ve already entered, not having to specify room preferences that I’ve already entered, all gone.

They pointed me to the service number for the loyalty program, and the person I speak with explains it may take 7 to 10 days for a newly issued number to be available to the rest of the hotel systems (such as reservations). He was able to quickly put the number into my reservation for credit, and both people I spoke to were incredibly helpful and genuine (besides being forced to read some clunky scripts), so this isn’t really a complaint about bad service, but really an eyebrow-raised in amazement over bad design.

Shouldn’t a requirement of the system they design to create and issue the loyalty numbers be rapid integration with the reservation system? Isn’t a likely use scenario going to be booking of a reservation very quickly after creating a new account? IT systems in silos is scary for what it prevents.

I guess the band-aid would have been to explain this limitation in their “welcome” email but that might have been too big a peek behind the curtain. They did inform me it would take 48 hours to issue the new account at the beginning of all this (although that also seems silly, what are they doing, checking my references?)…

In general, poor interoperability is a major challenge to creating a good user experience. And this example seems highly typical.

Recently nytimes.com rolled out an integration of their home delivery accounts and web-content accounts (I think to help sell their premium access service), but they did it in a terribly clumsy and confusing way, leading to service calls to agents who had no information (I was told, after a lot of vague language like “when you go out of the system you have to come back and and when it asks for your account you enter your number” to wait 24 hours and try again) and no interest in helping (“this is all the information we have. We can only read this out to you; that’s all we can do.”)…a disaster, as far as I am concerned. Maybe it’ll be better now, but the NYT hurt their brand pretty badly, at least in my case.

I just got a brand-new elliptical trainer, the Lifefitness X1. It’s in the bedroom and although it’s the smallest model they make, it’s absolutely huge. There’s this giant metal techno design thing sitting next to the bed.

Every time I walk into the bedroom I’m reminded of some memorable sci-fi movie apparati.

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.

We’ve got BirdBGone spikes to keep the peeps away from gutters and roofs, Stakestoppers to keep the boarders off of guard rails and retaining walls, and now The Anti-Sit Archives documents many ways to keep our tushes from everyplace else. Signs of our (sub)urban times: brutal after-thought products intended to force a fix to an unintended or no-longer-desired usage for the original (often more elegant and integrated) design.

I’ve posted a mini-essay called Title Goes Here on CPH127, a blog about design and innovation

We live in a Google world. Information/answers/solutions await us. We want to search, and so other people want to label, categorize, classify. New (and horrific) words like folksonomy emerge to describe the schemes by which we can sort and label the world around us.

I’m a brand new guest blogger there; this was my first post.

click screenshot to enlarge

This is an interesting new feature from Google. At least, I’ve only noticed in the last few days, and I haven’t seen it mentioned on the usual blogs that hype every new thing that Google does (I guess this is just an improvement in searching and that’s just so – yawn – less interesting than other Google improvements or innovations).

Looks like the top result for a search (but only certain type of searches – it doesn’t work for portigal

or portigal.com – is it only for sponsored?) come up with not only the links to the site, but also a selection of links to other pages in that site. Interesting tradeoff between useful and clutter. I’m not sure yet what I think; I imagine I’d typically want to open the page anyway, and then use the context of that page to choose my subsequent links. But I guess if you knew you wanted to do something specific on that site, like check arrival times, if there is enough info in the link shown in the Google result, you might try that.

We’ll see what happens. Nice thing about the web – companies can try out new features easily and take them away or improve them easily (sure, it’s not easy exactly, but if you wanted to do this with a car feature, that’d be a lot harder).