The Daily Interface

turning over a new leaf

2012-01-04T10:39:00.000-08:00

I love calendars. Even though I do all my scheduling digitally, I still print out month calendars for planning and sketch calendars on index cards to figure out everything from workouts to projects.

So I was delighted to pick up this calendar from the San Francisco Environment Department (formerly known as the water department). They were free for visitors to the Conservatory of Flowers.

As you may know, I'm an unwilling environmentalist. Conservation bores me--but I do it and love the results. My first car got 60 mpg on the highway. Since we started curbside composting, I have barely any garbage. I've successfully persuaded the NY Times I don't need 365 blue bags a year.

What a brilliant idea, to include environmental education in a free gift and fill the pages with flowers. Not to mention information about mercury and polluting the bay, and where to take batteries and motor oil to recycle them. There's a whole section on not flushing prescription drugs down the toilet.

And it includes a survey postcard, which being a good researcher, I enthusiastically filled out. (As a colleague once noted, surveys are disproportionately populated by people who like to be surveyed. Like researchers.)

Maybe environmental education can be engaging after all. If you pair it with enough pretty pictures, even I'll pay attention.

***

I got home to find another calendar in the mail, this one from the Blood Centers at the Pacific. How could I throw this one away? Especially after realizing it was signed by people with life threatening diseases who received blood donations.

I am a terrible donor. I probably should not be giving blood. They have to get the supervisor to even find a vein. It takes forever because my hands are so cold. Sometimes I faint.

But the customer experience at the Blood Centers of the Pacific is an exception to the rest of the world: at every step, you are greeted and thanked and given juice and cookies. (And if you faint, cold compresses, and a pillow.)

The calendar is filled with personalized thank yous and biographies of people like Travis the hockey player and Angel the cheerleader. Almost makes you forget about yourself for a while. Also they upgraded me to gold status.

For profit companies could learn a lot from these non-profits and local government agencies about making customers feel like they matter. The Iowa caucus last night was just decided by a handful of votes.

This year, make your participation count. Day by day. Resolutions are really about changing behaviors in small, consistent steps.

And be sure to tell the people close to you--or those you hope to see again--that they matter. That validation is all most of us are looking for.

recent publications

2011-12-06T16:10:00.000-08:00

"Ariel Sharon's Brain" at Pure Slush

"Why I Occupy"

"Sopa Azteca"

"Passing" part of the travel junket at Pure Slush

"Road Trip" featured in the Festival of Trees

"Courgettes and Aubergines" part of the Language + Place Blog Carnival

"A Seat at the Table" about NaNoWriMo and Thanksgiving

"Kaiten-zushi" in the BluePrint Review.

“Famous Jewish Criminals” in storySouth

“Dostoevsky & The Idiots” in the Mississippi Review issue, Partly True Tales

“Ísland” in the BluePrint Review

“Meetings of the Mind” and “View Finder” in the BluePrint Review mo(nu)ment issue, available in print or as a download from Lulu

“Photos I didn't take in Mazatlan” Cautionary Tale, also available from Lulu.com in the Best of Cautionary Tale

“Why do you think they call it 'submission'?” Reflection's Edge

“The Ballad of Curly_Sue” Exquisite Corpse

“Unattached on the Road” The New York Times

“Top 10 (Bad) Excuses for Not Voting” Christian Science Monitor

“What I was Watching” and “Flowers in Her Hair” The Noe Valley Voice

“Fossils,” “Swing State Summer,” and "Pro-Choice Virgin" The Raw Story

“The Shrimp Tax” Hostelworld

“Baked Alaska” Subside.zine

customer service hell #463

2011-12-01T16:18:00.001-08:00

I sat on my hands for Do Nothing Day (aka Black Friday) and snagged an iPhone car charger for half price from RadioShack.com on Saturday.

No need to pay for shipping. I'd pick it up in store and test out that online-offline user experience.

I chose the store nearest my house, paid with a credit card, and went to sleep.

Imagine my surprise when I took the receipt to the store two days later and discovered it had burned down. Two months ago!

Another branch did give me the product after a little coaxing. The manager first wanted to track where the shipment had gone.

I don't care where you shipped it, I said, kind of miffed. Why did your website let me ship it an outpost that doesn't exist?

Update: two days after picking up my charger at another store, I received an email from Radio Shack that it had shipped--to the store that burned down. Glad I didn't buy an HD tv.

unboxing detox

2011-11-08T16:33:00.000-08:00

As a gift to myself, I decided to take a healthy break from cooking and eating in restaurants. Sadly, the vegetarian spa in Mexico closed this year. My next thought was a vegetarian meal delivery service. I found a few, but most meal delivery caters to extreme dieters or juice fasts (kale smoothies? I'd rather have a bowl of vegetables).

detoxing with Juicey Lucy aka the smoothie psychic

The best looking services are cooked to order and often prohibitively expensive. Others cater to busy families. Their meals serve four; but I hate leftovers, and I don't need anyone to make buttery mac and cheese for me. Others were just unappetizing, like fancy Lean Cuisine. Besides, I gave Sean my microwave.

Then I found Evolution Catering, which runs a monthly detox workweek for $135 per person. This includes all meals and snacks from Monday dinner through Friday dinner. All you have to do is warm each course. The box felt like Christmas. I love presents.

The food promised to be healthy without red meat, dairy, or added sugar, focusing on whole grains but not counting calories. The only complaints I found on Yelp were that portions were small. It sounded perfect.

As I prepared this week, I cleared out some of the junk food in my kitchen by eating it. Wouldn't want a chocolate bar or marshmallows around to tempt me, right?

Then I began to feel deprived in advance. Aside from not preparing any meals, it also meant I couldn't go out for dinner or happy hour with friends this week. Which cuts out most of my social life. And email.

I bought a few teas as a treat from Tea Time in Palo Alto: Yunnan gold, Moroccan Mint, Masala chai, and oolong would be my friends this week. And I began to wonder: could I have a glass of wine or was that cheating? How about an extra piece of fruit? (More important: cheating on whom?)

It's a sweet package. (The piggy bank is extra.) Each meal is labeled based on how fast it will perish with instructions for reheating. Lunches are bigger than dinners. Dinners are...small. And it's November, that harsh week when we've suddenly shifted from warm summer breezes with lots of daylight to shivering in the dark and damp.

Will detox week help me reduce portion size from the gargantuan plates served in restaurants to the sizes we grew up eating? Will I become a slender hermit, or merely drown in pots of tea and coffee, and whatever I forgot to clean out of the fridge? I'm supposed to start weight training. Will I have enough energy?

Meanwhile I'm sitting down to a meal at my table for the first dinner in a long time. So that's progress. No computer. No newspaper. No phone. Thanks to Renee, I remember to chew.

Of course it's 6:28 pm, and I've finished everything for tonight. Every last caper. Gulp. (When was the last time you saw me finish anything?)

Anyone want to go out for cheese on Saturday?

***

If you're curious, here's this week's menu:

Monday 11/7

* Dinner: Greek stuffed cod: Wild cod, artichokes, capers, olives, lemon zest, olive oil. 583 calories

Tuesday 11/8

* Breakfast: spinach fritatta: Eggs, spinach, potatoes. 309 calories
* Snack: apple w/ almond butter: 166 calories
* Lunch: health nut salad: lettuce, avocado, bell pepper, kale, almonds, lemon vinaigrette, turkey. 485calories
* Dinner: Chicken Stew: chicken, tomatoes, onion, garlic, oregano, kale. 241 calories

Wednesday 11/9
* breakfast: turkey scramble: ground turkey, eggs, bell peppers, onions 462 calories
* snack: almonds. 98 calories
* lunch: mandarin salad: lettuce, mandarin oranges, sesame seeds, shredded carrot. 131 calories
* dinner: pumpkin curry: pumpkin, potatoes, green beans, coconut milk, curry powder. 343 calories

Thursday 11/10
* breakfast: veggie frittata: eggs, potatoes, squash, bell peppers. 323 calories
* snack: orange. 81 calories
* lunch: tuna salad with a side of mixed greens. 326 calories
* Dinner: turkey chili stuffed peppers: bell pepper, turkey, tomatoes, beans, spices. 337 calories

Friday 11/11
* breakfast: hard-boiled egg with guacamole, slice of turkey and tomato. 319 calories
* snack: trail mix. 98 calories
* lunch: carrot ginger soup. carrots, ginger, vegetable broth, onion. 80 calories
* Dinner: sesame chicken with veggies. 275

More info from Evolution Catering.

Want to try Evolution Catering? You don't have to do detox week. They have regular meals too. Here's a 20% discount off your first order. (Full disclosure: If you use it, I get a 20% discount too.) Meals come in paper or metal containers, designed for an oven or stovetop rather than a microwave.

I'm also looking forward to trying Jane Peal's well-regarded vegetarian meal deliveries, if only to find out what a cuisinaire is. They're $35 for a 3-course vegan meal for 2, less than a restaurant dinner. They're offered twice a week, and the menu is published in advance, so you can eat whatever you want the rest of the week.

***
Results:
I broke down the first night after three cups of tea. And had...a bowl of dino kale in yuzu-sesame dressing. Not bad for a late-night snack. I was still full when I woke up, to start preparing spinach fritatta and tea.

I ended up staying home most of the week to avoid walking by bakeries or cookie shops or any kind of groceries. This meant the extra snacks I had were leftover cabbage and an old pear in the back of the fridge. And they tasted really good, even the raw kale that was meant for garnish with breakfast. I missed snacking, even healthy snacking. But the portion control was great, and it wouldn't hurt any of us to remember what's it like to be hungry.

The scale says I lost 2-3 pounds, which is technically not possible in 4 days unless I ran a marathon. But I'll take it. Looking forward to doing this again in December, with some extra veggies and fruit stashed in the house. I did miss grains a lot--more than sugar, red meat, or dairy.

ranked choice voting put to the test

2011-11-07T16:06:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow's election in San Francisco is the first in which ranked choice voting will be used citywide. I'm predicting a lot of confusion and spoiled ballots.

To be fair, ranked choice was introduced because we had a problem with expensive runoff elections. Typically, San Francisco has good turnout in November. No one wins a clear majority, so the top two had a December runoff with low turnout, at great expense to the city.

Unfortunately this instant runoff approach is confusing too. If voters select the same name more than once, ballots are discarded. Here's the description from the SF Chronicle:

Clear as mud. It's like a poker game; each losing candidate's chips are reallocated to the next round's choices.

This year, it's made worse by a large mayoral pool with more than 10 viable candidates. Leading to ads and endorsements like: "Mayor: Avalos Herrera Chiu."

In Oakland, Jean Quan who was apparently no one's first choice won.

Does it favor the appointed incumbent, Ed Lee? No one knows.

In races like Sheriff with fewer candidates, ranking all the candidates surely brings them closer together than just choosing one.

This is what democracy looks like? Haven't we learned anything from the hanging chads of 2000?

More on ranked choice from the good folks at Bay Citizen.

why Americans hate financial institutions

2011-10-12T12:51:00.000-07:00

I got this adorable Visa gift card recently. How exciting! Free money! It even came in a cute package. I put it right in my wallet.

But product design's not just skin deep. The devil is in the details, also known as the fine print.

There's a $4.95 card fee for buying the card. Good thing this was a $100 card, because that's only 5%. You know, when the bank is offering interest rates of 1/20th of 5%. On a $25 gift card, that would be 20%.

It gets worse if you read the back. Maintenance fees of $2.50 a month if you don't use the card quickly enough! $5 card replacement fees. And of course Visa charges the merchant to redeem it, even though Visa has had the money upfront since purchase.

Makes you want to occupy Wall Street. But don't just blame the banks when credit card companies are extorting fees on this scale. Next time, send a check.

if not for Steve...

2011-10-05T19:07:00.000-07:00

who would I be?

Not a software designer or producer at Farallon or Macromedia. Not a documentary filmmaker, working on Macs with digital video editing tools. Not a traveler clutching a camera/portable music library/translator in my fist, playing games of Words with Friends and posting from remote corners of the globe.

The internet would still exist. My touch typing would still come in handy. But the web would be the domain of developers, not artists. Accountants, not musicians. Rule makers, not rule breakers.

We would express ourselves in spreadsheets. Our computers would be functional--but ugly. Our ideas would be constrained by the tools used to create them.

We would still be paying $16 a CD to the record industry! There would be no self-publishing or print or demand. No personal computers. No Macworld.

Who would I be, had there been no Steve Jobs? Who would you be?

That world is unimaginable. Uninhabitable, in a Brazil sort of way. Unthinkable, for those of us who thought different(ly).

the luxury collection

2011-09-12T23:36:00.000-07:00

Spent a divine weekend at The Nines in Portland, part of Starwood's "luxury collection." The whole place looks like a Tiffany box.

Too bad their exclusive bottled spring water turns out to be tap water.

unclear on the concept

2011-08-30T11:06:00.000-07:00

American Airlines is running a mobile photo contest, and giving away a digital SLR and round-trip tickets!

My ears perked up immediately. Click-through.

Too bad the first week's theme is "Where do you want to go?"

Because if I could take a picture with my iPhone of where I want to go, that would mean I was already there...

standing at the corner of walk & don't walk

2011-08-15T09:31:00.000-07:00

Fortunately in the East Bay, pedestrians still have right of way in a crosswalk.

easy as 1-2-3

2011-08-10T15:48:00.000-07:00

I was shopping for eye shadow and noticed Maybelline had literally baked the documentation right into the product.

The instructions are stenciled onto the cakes. Ever in search of a write-off, I bought it.

Plus who can resist a color named Chocolate Mousse?

*

parklet

2011-08-01T11:51:00.000-07:00

the dangers of error messages

2010-10-17T10:38:00.000-07:00

moo!

2010-05-13T21:50:00.000-07:00

My new business cards arrived today. It was like opening a Christmas present.

(You can tell this when you covet and save the box. Like, you know, this one:)

Moo is a company that really gets customer experience. From the website to the end product, these people really understand the pleasure principle.

I almost hate to give them away. Almost.

everyday taxonomies

2010-05-03T23:04:00.000-07:00

for your convenience

2010-04-28T18:18:00.000-07:00

a “Greeked” restaurant in Paris

2010-04-24T10:27:00.000-07:00

Or maybe they just serve Latin food? Au Fil des Saisons

Despite the placeholder website, it is a real restaurant, and apparently quite a good one.

Zappos’ star system

2010-04-23T13:58:00.000-07:00

Are these bar charts or just a distraction from the real numbers?

It's hard to tell that 2 customers loved this product but one thought it was mediocre.

cacess? aces?

2010-03-29T22:17:00.000-07:00

The cover story is entitled "Why Access Matters." Maybe it should be called "Why Usability Matters."

meter maid

2010-03-16T22:39:00.000-07:00

Even better, solar powered :)

the mystery box

2009-09-02T11:10:00.000-07:00

I'm famous for never cooking. I live in a city with great restaurants, have no children, and would rather eat a BBQ pork bun than leftover chicken.

But this week, I was inspired by the constraints imposed by a local farm's mystery box. For $25, they'll meet you at a nearby restaurant and hand over a huge box of whatever's fresh. Mariquita is famous for its basil and delicate chard, and I'd had their wonderful pimientos de padron at Incanto. They have a CSA, but I don't cook enough to plan around regular mystery deliveries.

So I got my guerrilla box and picked up a huge bag of basil for my friend Arrigo to make pesto (and I hope, give some to me). The basil took up half my back seat.

The box contained potatoes, heirloom tomatoes as big as your head, purple, orange, and bright red peppers, erbette chard, two kinds of carrots, padrones, lovage, dino kale, eggplant, parsnips, and basil. Enough for a family of ten. I spent the next 48 hours slicing and simmering. I even got The Joy of Cooking down from the shelf. (Parsnips?)

Lessons from cooking that are applicable to software development:

* If you have good ingredients, you don't need to do much to them. Padrones need a quick flash with olive oil and salt in a pan. Tomatoes and basil need washing and slicing.

* While improvising is fun, basic technique and recipes make a big difference in the end product. Why reinvent the wheel?

* It's not six times more work to make six dishes than one, from a production perspective. After I'd committed to tomato sauce and oven-roasted potatoes, it wasn't hard to get eggplant, padrones, and caprese salad going at the same time. Caldo verde led to sausage and peppers. Small projects may be individually gratifying, but they're not very efficient.

* Once your kitchen is filled with ingredients, you find ways of using them because they're there. This is good and not so good in terms of end product. I still believe in a healthy mix of regulars (olive oil, garlic, eggs) and as needed players (salmon, sausage, lavender salt). But dino kale is like the employee you only needed for one special feature, and now they're still there, working in obscure code. Does calling it "dino" kale make kids want to eat it more?

* Cooking isn't a job for one person. It's more fun to have someone to bounce ideas off, to share the chores with, to stir while you chop. Also it's nicer if you have a kitchen like chefs on TV do.

* You can make perfect omelets but be terrible with eggplant.

* Good tools help, but you don't need 100 gadgets to distract from the task at hand. I love my carving knife, my teapots, my Aero press. I just wish I had a dishwasher, and a prep chef.

* As much as you taste your own cooking, the really satisfying point is when someone else enjoys it.

Lovage, anyone?

*

pillow menu

2008-07-07T21:05:00.001-07:00

I arrived at the Holiday Inn in Salt Lake City late Thursday to find five fluffy pillows and a pillow menu on my king-sized bed.

I felt momentarily like Goldilocks. Soft or firm? Too many choices....

the magic map machine

2008-06-15T10:44:00.000-07:00

AAA has closed its headquarters downtown and opened a bunch of branches out in the neighborhoods, so you no longer have to drive to them.

Imagine my delight to find they're not only open Saturdays (including for DMV services) but they offer self-serve maps! There was no line for a live agent, but I headed right to the machine to check it out.

You insert your membership card and then choose up to 8 frequently requested items. Wineries. California Tour Book. Utah parks, A9. Just like buying a Snickers bar and a bag of CheeseIts.

The only problem is the map machine's located inside the AAA office, which must be open for you to use it. It would be a lot handier at the airport, or a gas station, or the rental car office, at least for people who don't love to spend as many hours researching a route as I do.

"Yes, but then I wouldn't be nearby to restock the maps," the agent said, a little hurt at the thought of being replaced.

"Fair enough," I conceded. "But I'll bet you could make money from on-the-spot renewals."

*

green is for...?

2008-06-05T22:20:00.000-07:00

that existential feeling

2008-06-03T23:38:00.000-07:00

Today I tried to check out Acrobat.com. Except first the log in didn't work.

Then I was invited to participate in a survey, that asked 1000 (okay 27) questions on things I didn't know or care about, like the performance of the Adobe website, and whether the layout made it easy or hard to do things.

Generally I answer surveys as karma, so that other users will participate in my research, but this was taking a quick password retrieval a bit too far. Also it wouldn't let me skip any questions. So I bailed.

Finally, when I was allowed to log in to CONNECTNOW (a service very like one we worked on at Macromedia six years ago with the FlashCom team), the screen was blank, I had no friends, and they disconnected me.

Talk about a welcoming out-of-the-box experience: "you were alone in the room for 20 minutes" :( Doesn't it make you just want to ConnectNow™ ?

which came first?

2008-05-11T17:11:00.000-07:00

from the otherwise quality-obsessed folks at aviary.

404 redux

2008-05-01T22:12:00.000-07:00

diy box?

2008-04-20T21:57:00.000-07:00

I ordered a free refill of checks from Washington Mutual. The branch called me when they arrived to see if I wanted to come in and pick them up or they should mail them. Appreciating this small-town touch, I decided to walk in.

The agent handed me a dark blue plastic bag.

"Where's my box of checks?" I asked.

"In there," she said. I opened it to be sure. "We got too many complaints that the packages didn't fit in people's mailboxes."

They still give you the box. It's just flattened, with instructions on how to pop it up.

*

double take

2008-04-05T11:11:00.000-07:00

don't be evil

2008-04-02T21:09:00.000-07:00

Test your software Google. The pernicious redirect notice only affects people who are signed into G land.

It's not like you don't have enough resources.

*

3/3 update: looks like Google (or Firefox?) got a clue and fixed this remotely. A perfect example of the dangers of software that continuously updates without user consent.

dynamic content sometimes breaks

2008-03-22T16:41:00.000-07:00

pay by cell phone

2008-03-17T16:35:00.000-07:00

Spotted today in San Francisco. Kind of curious. Would you try this?

I have a prepaid meter card, which sort of works if you're out of quarters. There's no interface on the meter so you have to keep inserting and removing it and hoping it deducts the right amount. If you reinsert it to check your balance, it grabs another quarter.

come back later

2008-02-27T18:39:00.001-08:00

This restaurant was too popular.

*

selling the premium experience

2008-01-31T17:40:00.000-08:00

Sundance (as in the Sundance film festival) just took over the Kabuki movie theaters at Japantown. The Kabuki is the site of the San Francisco International Film Festival, the oldest film festival in the US, and so is beloved among serious movie goers. Still the complex had fallen into disrepair, the sightlines were poor, and newer theaters easily surpassed the Kabuki with stadium seating.

Sundance has taken a novel approach, remodeling the entire complex, adding digital projection capabilities, installing bars and restaurants, upgrading seating, and introducing the ability to reserve your seat online. And it's entirely green: coffee spoons made of potatoes, that kind of thing. They’ve had a great selection of high-brow entertainment since they opened, and I’ve been twice.

The first and primary obstacle is price. All this luxury comes at a premium. Movie going is in decline, and prices above $10 don’t help, nor do 20 minutes of previews and commercials at the local Century. For the first time in my life I see fewer than three movies a month in a theater; this after working in movie theaters for more than five years, including a stint as a projectionist in college, simply so I could see more movies.

Not wanting to blast too far beyond the $10 barrier, Sundance introduced a set of amenities fees. These vary from 0 (for the lone person who goes to the movies at noon on Tuesdays) to $3 for Saturday nights. Most of the time the fee is $1-2; it’s the rule rather than an exception This is coupled with matinee pricing and discounts for seniors and students.

And while I understand peak demand pricing in principle (say for Saturday nights versus 5 p.m. on Wednesdays), it irritates me in practice. Plus it’s just too complicated:

Oh, and the base prices posted on the website are wrong--they're for the other Sundance outpost in Wisconsin. In San Francisco matinée adult tickets cost $8.50 plus amenities fees. But you get the idea.

I was appalled that two tickets to the Kite Runner Sunday at 4:30 cost $24! I picked out our reserved seats on the touch screen and began to complain to the friendly cashier. He handed me a brochure on what all those amenities were for: remodeling, and no commercials. I guess I wasn’t the only one unsold on the complex pricing.

But then I went inside the theater. Even the tiny screening rooms were spectacular. Brand new seats. Big spacing between them. Mood lighting. Prominent recycling bins. Everyone came in and found their seats, in a hush. The whole movie seemed better.

Still, I resisted. Another Sunday afternoon I debated whether to go to the Landmark theater or the Kabuki, giving in only when I couldn’t find parking downtown. On my way to see Persepolis, I stopped at the beautiful snack bar and got a cup of Peet’s tea for $1.75, the same price as at Peet’s. They had boutique gelato and local chocolates and a decent looking panini, all at normal prices. Did I mention the full bar? Yes, you can now drink wine at the movies.

They have a few kinks to work out. Because they show Sundance Channel shorts, the theaters are dark when you walk in so it’s hard to see the seat numbers. And otherwise civilized patrons still leave trash on the floor—a habit I will never understand. (Who do they think picks it up?) But otherwise I'm sold.

So how do you sell customers on a premium experience? I don’t think it’s having a fee structure that’s too complicated to explain without a chart. Sundance Kabuki should just charge more: the $12 movie, $14 on Saturday nights. I’d do a combo with the Balcony Bar: a movie and a drink for $20.

They could give out coupons to introduce the concept to new patrons, to encourage you to come in and see what it’s all about. Now is the time to introduce a loyalty program for discriminating movie patrons, a club I'd like to part of.

They might look to Apple Computer, or to MaxJet, companies that have done a good job of selling premium products. But in this case, the bottom line is the customer experience, which really is superior. Now to fill the seats.

*
On a related tangent, this week SF Chronicle food critic Michael Bauer looks at restaurants adding surcharges to pay for city-mandated health insurance.

P.S. I was telling this story to a friend when I realized why the Kabuki is breaking down their pricing this way: if they increase ticket prices, they have to give a percentage to the movie studios.

So theaters (which have to make their own investments in not just chairs and popcorn poppers but also state of the art digital projection equipment) are trying to find a way to fund their own facilities. Makes perfect business sense in this day and age of DIY publishing and distribution. But still irks me as a customer.

rtfm

2008-01-24T15:19:00.000-08:00

Yeah, good luck.

Facebook grammar

2008-01-08T14:37:00.000-08:00

Harvard's admission standards must be slipping.

Very LOLcat, if you ask me.

And then there's the existential. Mitt Romney would be proud of Noah.

Delta is really fast...

2007-12-30T22:45:00.000-08:00

no toys for you

2007-12-18T12:36:00.000-08:00

when an upgrade isn't

2007-12-05T22:32:00.000-08:00

I know, it's been a while. I've been working on the launch of an exciting new language learning platform, rolling out white papers on service performance management, and oh yeah, this little thing called NaNoWriMo. If the words didn't count toward my 50,000, I didn't write them.

Last week, Lonely Planet rolled out an upgrade to its online forum, the ThornTree. I've been on the TT for 7 years, during which time I've seen one significant upgrade that went forgettably smoothly. The site wasn't especially pretty, but it worked. Round the clock, round the world, for tens of thousands of users every day.

BBC bought Lonely Planet a month ago, so I'm not sure it's fair to blame the latest debacle on them. And TT4 is a disaster. An instructive one for any designers or developers, determined to improve on what came before.

Rule number 1 of redesign: if it works, don't break it!

What went wrong:

A site that delivers thousands of page of text now has severe legibility problems. Fonts are poorly spaced, and smaller than they were. The main body of the thread--the most important information on the page--was shrunk to make room for oodles of tiny indecipherable icons. (Okay, there's a legend, if you want to figure out what distinguishes a half-filled circle from a star.)
They didn't test it with users. They didn't ever ask for input. And TT users are a loyal, opinionated bunch. Many of us have spent 5-10 hours a week answering travel questions on this site for years. No one paid us. No one thanked us. We fought and flamed each other and bitched to the mods. We did it, because it was pleasurable.

To make matters worse, RomanB, the only full-time employee for the TT, left after the BBC acquisition. So all the announcements come from CarolBat LP, who may in real life be a lovely person or an incompetent one, but who I know simply as the hapless bearer of bad news:
As communicated previously, we were unable to completely replicate the current Thorn Tree on launch of TT4, and will continue to roll out changes.

I understand there is functionality you are used to that's missing. We are aware of the most popular features and will endeavor to roll them out as regular releases. We know, so many little thing make such a big difference!

Please visit our Work In Progress thread under the About Thorn Tree branch for updates on further releases.
They didn't replicate the original functionality. They took away critical productivity features, like being able to see recent activity on all the threads you'd answered. But they did add tags and blogs.
They removed the ability to set preferences, so the boards default to recent posts instead of recent replies. And I can't figure out how to stay logged in, so I can post. So, I don't. To add insult to injury, they didn't accurately preserve the historical number of posts. I was close to 10,000. Now I have 900.

And on and on. I know it sounds like minutae, but in terms of user experience, this is what matters.

The first few days, posters ranted on the boards, waiting for a moderator to notice. CarolBatLP's info posts got more concilliatory. A bunch of regulars jumped ship by setting up their own board or threatened to; it's not like this is the only travel forum online any more.

Here's where I think they miscalcuated. While the site is used by backpackers from 20-70, many of the regular posters—people who have time and patience to help Brits with prior arrests or Cuban passport stamps understand the details of the Visa Waiver Program or college students find a hostel in NYC—are over 40 or semi-retired or disabled. (Or like me, self-employed.) The very people who are sensitive to massive changes in functionality and legibility. The mood on the USA board is morose.

A few parts of the upgrade are fine. For years, LP did little to monetize the hundreds of thousands of page views and return traffic. You can't begrudge them advertising on their own website.

And I suspect many of the missing features are the result of a lack of specs or docs on how TT3 behaved. Usability issues like those I've cited might not be apparent to a casual developer or new UI designer. It would take hard-core users to feel the pain of having to click to reply every time you want to post instead of just showing the reply field by default.

But I sure wish we could persuade them to turn back the clock and pull this upgrade until it's ready for prime time. Unlike Facebook, Lonely Planet doesn't understand the enormous value of its user base, the huge cost if all those people jump ship. Which we'll do, as soon as it's not fun any more.

Despite the flaws, I'm reluctant to give up the TT entirely; I have a long investment in it. Too bad Lonely Planet doesn't feel the same way about its online community.

*

stung

2007-11-03T12:07:00.000-07:00

Whatever you do, don't click the corner. Don't even hover your mouse near it.

I'm sure I didn't click.

Not that there was any real news to report: a major earthquake, Halloween monster teeth with lead, the Fed cuts rates. Free content comes at a price.

this is not a joke

2007-10-31T17:30:00.000-07:00

Astonishingly, AT&T sent a 12-panel bilingual guide to reading my cellphone bill.

Rather than, I don't know, making the bill easier to understand.

[Real version has twice as many panels!]

opera vision

2007-10-29T10:33:00.000-07:00

I've been a subscriber to San Francisco Opera on and off for more than 10 years. When I first moved here, I joined the hordes for standing room, which had its own precise etiquette for lining up and dashing in the doors to try to grab one of the few good spots for leaning for five hours. Like a high-class game of Musical Chairs, with elderly ushers chasing you across the marble intoning, "Don't run!"

Over time, I've moved around the opera house, occasionally splurging on orchestra seats (today over $100) but just as often enjoying performances from the balcony. It's well known among music lovers that the best acoustics are in the nosebleed section.

The quality of offerings varies considerably, but service from the opera organization rarely dips below stellar. There's a good reason for this. Even with average tickets above $70 and most performances at near capacity, box office only covers half the costs, so the opera depends on contributions and on building long-term relations with subscribers. Their well-heeled subscriber base is aging, and there's always tension in programming between commissions like Phillip Glass' "Appomattox" and crowd pleasers like "La Boheme" and "The Magic Flute."

Even in years when opera offerings are less than tantalizing, I try to subscribe to a minimal number of performances because of the privileges afforded to subscribers. These include the ability to exchange tickets for another performance or upgrade to better seats without charge, along with several backstage tours and invites to rehearsals. Once I lost my tickets and called the box office; they looked me up and sent me new ones. San Francisco Opera, despite my paltry contributions over the years, still treats me royally.

This year, I decided to get nosebleed seats for a half season. After all, I could upgrade or exchange them at will. The half season for balcony sides was sold out, so I took the whole season. The tickets are only $15 each, little more than a movie.

Then I got a letter from the new director, excitedly announcing Opera Vision. The company would broadcast the opera on high definition screens in the balcony. They hoped I would try it out, and like it. They listed the affected performances.

Unfortunately I had only Opera Vision for all ten operas. I guess I wasn't that open to new technology. When I e-mailed and then called to see if they could switch my tickets, they upgraded me to dress circle for the entire season. I'm in the 2nd row, in the $90 seats.

I love the opera. I'll include them in my charitable donations this year and maybe next year, I'll splurge on the more expensive seats. Most companies, especially those offering subscriptions, would do well to follow their example.

*

the return of interstitials

2007-10-13T13:35:00.000-07:00

Some days it really does feel like 1999 again. I was catching up on the season premiere of "30 Rock," which has episodes posted on the NBC website.

The episode was sponsored by Excedrin Back and Body, repeatedly. The video player is wrapped in huge Excedrin ads, top and bottom. And there's an ad in between each chapter. Unfortunately it's the same ad.

When I reloaded, because the player reset at minute 16, I saw ads for Journey Diamond Jewelry. It reset anyway, at the same place. The third time, esurance.

What kind of headache-inducing branding is this? If you're going to take ad money, at least hire someone to test your video player. I still don't know how the episode ends.

*

walk around the block

2007-09-28T10:19:00.000-07:00

I'm off to NY and Boston tonight, and as I research transit connections, I'm struck by how poorly mapping tools work for pedestrians. Here's a perfect example. I'm taking the AirTrain to the LIRR to Keith's apartment:

Mapquest wants to send me in circles because of one-way streets. Except that I'm walking.

Travel times are estimated based on driving. Subway stops are listed but don't always include the lines. Which is fine if you want to go to Lafayette Avenue but doesn't help you figure out how to get there.

So what's the best way to get to Daisy and Lydia's by MTA from Amtrak? Bus...subway...taxi? Who knows! Fortunately they're meeting me at South Station. Those Google cartographers need to get out of their Bauer's shuttle bus a little more often.

*

See you in 10 days.

inter-facial

2007-09-24T11:24:00.000-07:00

I've noticed an increase in online booking tools for small businesses, especially ones that cater to busy professionals. This is a great development as a consumer. It means I can check late at night to see if there's availability for a massage with Rose without having to call during open hours and fish for information.

For a sole proprietor trying to maximize billable hours (and not interrupt a facial or a massage to take a phone call), online booking is a lifesaver. It's a virtual receptionist who's always working.

The tools are ready made, not developed by the person who works on your skin or shoulders. And mostly they work admirably on the front end. I haven't seen what details the salon receives, although I imagine it's similar to Open Table, another upscale booking service I enjoy using because it's fun to imagine fine dining at exclusive restaurants, when you can get a reservation.

Massage
The Flash appointments UI for UNCOIL could be prettier, but the steps are numbered, which makes the sequence and dependencies clear. Their booking table updates faster than most AJAX apps.

I got a confirmation immediately and an appointment reminder by e-mail more than 24 hours in advance, so there was still time to cancel or reschedule without penalty.

There's room for improvement--the fields were spit out of a database and didn't feel very personal. But it's very handy functionality, and less creepy than those automated appointment reminders Kaiser leaves on my voice mail, often at 6 p.m. on a Saturday with no way to change them.

Skin deep
Kimberly Skin Care uses Genbook, which has a prettier interface that matches her website branding and logo. It's also a little simpler because you don't have to choose an aesthetician.

In both cases, I appreciated the summary that listed address, phone number, and price for service. Too many day spas obscure what they charge behind fancy names for services—chocolate coffee wraps and hydrating facials. This allows them to inflate prices and then discount, but it makes you feel like you're buying a car. There's nothing more stressful than being unsure if someone's ripping you off, while they wrap you in fragrant compresses and play Hawaiian music to soothe you.

Unfortunately appointment services may come at a high "convenience" cost to the small business. According to their website Genbook charges $2 per appointment! It's not passed on to the customer, but it's high enough to make me pick up the phone and call.

*

As a note, I found Kimberly and UNCOIL Massage on my own and paid for all treatments received, as I do with all products and services I mention on this site. No coverage was solicited. I highly recommend both, and not just for checking out the interface.

any way you want it

2007-09-20T08:39:00.000-07:00

Somehow, it always comes back to burgers. Arlene and I stopped in at the newly opened Custom Burger/Lounge. We were going to split a burger but she likes hers well and I like mine rare, so we each got one.

Custom Burger/Lounge has a menu with a million choices, and you fill out a checklist, which I suppose gets you exactly what you want, assuming you've been craving a wild salmon burger with cheddar and balsamic marinated onions on a pepper potato bun with Romesco sauce. Yeah, that's how I felt.

We couldn't decide whether to get something boring that we knew we'd like or something weird, so we got a little of each.

The people who work there couldn't be nicer, but for me, it all boils down to expectations. Because my burger was well done.

They'd asked me to make 100 choices and then ignored the only one that mattered. They don't cook the burgers to order. Custom indeed.

*

deals on wheels

2007-09-18T19:04:00.000-07:00

Another service nod for Enterprise rent-a-car. Despite renting an economy car for $18 for a single day (plus another $14 in fees), I was treated warmly and royally.

The agent who checks you in sees you all the way through the process. They do still try to upsell you, as you wait in the garage and watch the freshly washed Cadillacs and Suburbans go by. In my case, he offered a Nissan or Volkswagen for an extra $5.

When my Aveo didn't materialize in 5 minutes, I ended up with a free upgrade to a red Dodge Caliber, a muscle car with 100 miles on it. I felt like I had won the lottery, proving that a business should always overdeliver.

Employees at Enterprise at LAX are clearly rewarded for delivering personal service. Everyone from the shuttle driver to the agents who checked me back in was friendly and sincere. When they asked how my visit had been, they waited to hear my response.

By contrast, I once went to pick up a car at Burbank before Thanksgiving. I had a reservation, and the Budget agent, after failing to upsell me on CDW, decided to badger me by asking for a bunch of extra phone numbers. (He had my cell, and I wasn't staying at a hotel). When I refused, he snarled loudly enough so that everyone in line could hear, "You know, we don't have to rent to you."

He also noted that I'd tried to get a convertible on Priceline but not had my bid accepted. Being cheap is apparently enough to get you blacklisted at Budget.

Flying is stressful enough, and driving in LA is no picnic. I wouldn't hesitate to return to Enterprise and look forward to giving them more than $18 worth of business. How many services can you say that about?

*

flying the trendy skies

2007-09-14T13:02:00.000-07:00

I hopped a Virgin America flight to LA this week. Virgin seems to think it's running a nightclub. Even the signs at the airport say "Are u REDy to party?"

The planes are brand new, and the lighting has a definite Miami club aesthetic. The lead flight attendant heartily welcomed us to "Southw--- You didn't hear that, right? --Virgin America flight 384."

Everyone loved the seatback entertainment. The guy next to me even put down one of his two cell phones to play with it. Three generations of women in front of me watched Hannah Montana and Kelly Clarkson videos. Grandma needed a little help with the touch screens, but even she was singing along by the end.

The college student on my right popped out the game controller, kicked off her sandals, and played cross-legged in her shorts.

I spent half the 55-minute flight adding songs by Thievery Connection and David Bowie to my playlist. The media player interface could use some work. (They even use the wrong icons for next and previous.) Air Canada's enRoute is better designed. But this is a case where having a complicated UI keeps passengers busy and distracted, exactly what flight attendants need.

I tried the much vaunted online chat, but each time I logged in, I was the only one in the chat room. So much for a party.

A lot of features aren't implemented yet. You can't shop or send e-mail, and if you try to order a snack, a message tells you to wait until the food service. But WiFi is reportedly coming next year. The handheld game controllers also take credit cards. And every seat has an outlet, which is ultimately a lot more useful flying cross-country than songs by Beck or Dan Zanes.

The oddest part was the Journey button, which uses Google maps to show flight progress. This display info was slightly delayed, but it was also wrong. San Francisco to LA was listed as 520 miles; it's only 430 to drive.

So the good news is Virgin America has crafted a distinctive user experience, in the blue potato chip vein. Unfortunately that level of care was only occasionally applied to their flashy website.

The first bad sign was the fare went down after I bought my ticket. I sent a friendly e-mail to customer service, describing my disappointment and hoping for an iPhone-like credit, or at least a free drink on my birthday. (No such luck. Maybe I should have appealed directly to Sir Richard.) Fair enough. However you can't easily e-mail VA because each time you try, the site asks you to create an account. But you can't use an e-mail address already in their system.

The morning of my flight, I was able to check in online but the pop-up boarding pass window appeared blank and then reported an error. When I refreshed, the Travel Manager said I had no upcoming flights.

(After I got home, I found a PDF on my desktop with the boarding pass contents, but I'd gotten no feedback anything was downloading.)

For the return, I tried logging in on three different computers and was able to retrieve the reservation but not check in. The greeter at LAX, dressed in a white suit, like a reality show host, said about 30% of people were reporting the same problem.

To be fair, it took less than a minute to check myself in. It helps that Virgin America is located in the international terminal at San Francisco and LAX. At the moment, they have more employees than passengers, at least at midday.

But overall, the hip new kid in the neighborhood is making friends of all ages and persuasions, in an era where everyone loves to hate the airlines. On the shuttle to pick up my car, the people all around me (three retired travelers and a well-dressed woman in her 30s) were buzzing about how much they liked the vibe.

Understanding the importance of sealing the deal, Virgin America has already sent me a discount coupon for a future trip. I'm surprised they haven't done any social networking promotions: their service is ripe for sending a picture of yourself on the plane to a friend. The website doesn't even let you e-mail your itinerary yet.

I just hope they remember my name after they get popular.

world where you live

2007-08-28T10:15:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting at the gastropub waiting for my friends to arrive. It's packed because of the concert up the block, so I've ordered the fastest items: mussels in white wine and garlic, Belgian fries, which come with three dipping sauces, and a glass of fume blanc. Luka's menu has pages of obscure microbrews, cocktails made with high-end spirits and fresh muddled juice, well-priced wines by the glass.

The people next to me are also grabbing a bite before the concert. It's a middle-aged madhouse, a reunion tour. I slide over to make room for them to sit down, and now they're having a culture conflict with the waitress.

Guy #1: Give me a Bud--
Waitress: We don't serve Bud.
Guy #1: No? How about a PBR? Anchor?
She shakes her head.
Guy #1: What do you have--
She points to the four-page menu. It's dark, and the type is small, and I realize he's trying to avoid finding his reading glasses.
Guy #1: on tap?
Waitress: I'll bring you a Stella.
Guy #2: Make that two.
They look like brothers.

Woman with them: A margarita, please. Jose Cuervo is fine.
Harried waitress: We don't serve Cuervo.
Woman: Okay.
Guy #2: Any nachos?
She points to the menu in exasperation and goes off to place drink orders that vaguely correspond to what they asked for.

Guy #2, reading the menu: What kind of bar is this? Oysters and mussels. And tuna tartare.
Guy #1: Tartare. What is that, sushi without rice?

Unfortunately they don't keep reading, or they'd find the burgers and macaroni and cheese. Somewhere in all this, they reveal they're Jimmy Buffett fans, which helps me place them back in South Florida where I grew up. Parrot heads.

And while I'm amused, and I've been that server, trying to explain to my mom what's wrong with sweet wine or Cool Whip, I know they're not wrong. They've driven all this way to see Neil Finn, an ageless pop singer without a shred of pretense. All they want is a beer and a plate of nachos, not a lesson in Belgian brews and mignonette.

The fries are good, I tell them for future reference as we head out. Three hours later, Crowded House is playing like it's 1988, and we're all singing along to "Better Be Home Soon."

*

Charlie is convinced that opening act Liam Finn (Neil's son) is really Bret from "Flight of the Conchords."

customer service hell #687

2007-08-25T10:52:00.000-07:00

We decided to go see Crowded House at the Paramount. I searched for best available seating on Ticketmaster.com and wasn't thrilled with what it offered. The closest seats were off on the far edge. There's no feature for prioritizing parameters or asking to see other available seats, like on an interactive airplane seat map.

Last time I used Ticketmaster to buy a ticket for "Avenue Q," I arrived in Las Vegas and discovered my seat was on the far edge of a half-empty theater. I'd paid $15 in fees and been given the worst seat in the house. The usher moved me to fourth row center when I protested, but I was still annoyed at the "convenience" fees.

So I decided to call. First I looked on the website to see what the extra cost for talking to a person would be. I couldn't find it. I called and asked.

Agent#1: Hello, thank you for calling Ticketmaster.
me: Is there a fee for phone service?
Agent #1: No. It's the same as buying online.

She found seats I wanted, took all my info, and totaled it up: $167.30. When she got to the end of the transaction, she mentioned a $3.20 per order fee. Sigh.

Before I hung up, she sweetly told me I'd won a complimentary 3-month magazine subscription. And some other trial service I politely declined.

A day later, I hadn't received the e-mail confirmation. I had a confirmation number, so I looked on the website. But I didn't want to create another account.

I search around the website, find a phone number, and call back. It's voicemail hell, and I'm desperately trying not to get ditched to the automated system. I press 0#0#0# Eventually I get a live person.

Agent #2 asks for 10 tons of personal information. Mailing address, credit card number, event and venue, date. (Of course I started the call by saying: I have tickets for Crowded House at the Paramount in Oakland.) Five minutes later, she's reading the terms of my ticket when I remind her I just want my confirmation e-mailed.

Agent #2: Oh, I can't do that.
me: What?!
Agent #2: I'll have to transfer you to customer service.

Agent #3 collects all the same info and then says he can't e-mail me either! (How is this possible? I ask. Ticketmaster customer service doesn't have access to e-mail?)

But he confirms the e-mail was sent to the right address and offers to fax me. He then recommends that I log on to their website for more complete info. He also tells me the 10 steps to get to my confirmation.

I try to set up an account and discover I already have one. I reset my password. I click account history because no current events are listed. Eventually I find the receipt and print it out.

Yesterday, 48 hours after my original purchase, I received an e-mail from Ticketmaster confirming my purchase. Oh yeah, it's in the spam folder. But still, not sent until two days later.

Overall: D-

Good luck if you can find the information on outrageous fees anywhere on the site. (Balcony tickets had a $9.25 service charge, but orchestra seats were $10 more per ticket. Plus the $3.20--for talking to an agent? for will call?)

curbside pickup

2007-08-23T10:27:00.000-07:00

After I replaced my printer last week, I was stuck with the usual dilemma: what to do with the old one, besides adding to the landfill. Fortunately the underground economy is alive and well in San Francisco.

When my neighbor got a new sofa, we dragged her futon to the corner, attached a "free" sign, and it was gone before dinner. My favorite desk, designed to fit in a corner, came from the street in Glen Park; my boss at the time, a thrifty Scot, agreed we couldn't just leave it there and stuffed it in the back seat.

My inkjet was broken, but it was accompanied by a perfectly functional flatbed scanner.

This is how efficiently the system works:

I posted on Craigslist in the free section at 2 p.m.
The first reply came in less than 10 minutes.
I e-mailed and asked when he wanted to pick it up. He said he could be by around 4:15. (At this point, convinced he was real, I deleted the ad.)
I left it on the street with his name on it. When I got home at 7, it was gone. I hope he's as happy scanning as I am printing.

Sometimes I love the internet.

*

ceilings

2007-08-21T11:40:00.000-07:00

I paid $10.25 to see "The Bourne Ultimatum" the other night. I know, movie tickets haven't been $6 since I was a kid, but it was the first time I'd paid that much for something that wasn't at a film festival.

The price was odd, as if Century's experimenting to see at what point people notice and stay home. The $10 psychological barrier held prices in place for a long time. Movies were $7.50, then 8, then $8.75 and $9.25. Somewhere--in NYC--they were probably $10, but I hadn't paid it.

Coincidentally, I also recently broke the $10 point for a cocktail. It was a fine drink, but did I have to leave a $2 tip?

Once you've paid $10, what's the next tier? Is it $15 or $20? Because honestly, $10.50 versus $10.25? $11.75? It's all the same. Makes me feel sorry for the cashiers.

$3.50 for a bottle of tap water is another story; candy doesn't seem as much of a ripoff. My friends with kids don't complain about the high cost of entertainment though; they complain about how expensive babysitters are. Every part of this story is inflationary.

Meanwhile, this summer's top films are setting box office records. Not because so many people are going to the movies--quite the contrary, the decline's not as steep as newspapers, but almost as bad--but because film revenues are listed by total box office take rather than number of tickets sold. This means a weekend of "Superbad" or the third "Pirates of the Caribbean" takes in more money than "Gone With the Wind," unless you can find an economist who adjusts for all those price increases over the years. Tricky, eh?

Those widely reported box office opening weekends don't tell you anything about the cost of making a film, or promoting it, or video sales. Or profitability. All puffery and air.

Unless you own a movie studio, though, the real question is value. At what point do people stop going to the movies, or to wine bars. $11 a glass for a mediocre bottle I can buy at my corner store for $20? Come on over to my place.

Pricing is a slippery slope—or whatever the converse is, as it creeps forever higher. Eventually you get tired of banging your head on the ceiling. Regardless of how much or how little we spend, customers like the notion of deals. Make sure you provide that experience.

*

drinking ink

2007-08-18T10:33:00.000-07:00

Wouldn’t you know, my Epson printer stopped working right in the middle of a deadline.

I hadn’t used it since I printed my boarding pass to fly to Canada three weeks ago, and at first, I got streaky output, and then none. I tried replacing the cartridge and only succeeded in covering my hands with ink.

I checked online to see where the nearest in-stock cartridge was. $34 at Office Depot. I didn’t even know if that would fix it.

I searched “Epson Stylus CX5200 ink problems” and found a litany of complaints. Sounds like I was lucky to get three years out of it. The ink nozzle apparently jams at some point, and while it’s possible Epson can be persuaded to repair or trade up, I might as well buy a newer printer. It would cost essentially the same as replacing two ink cartridges.

I didn't want another Epson, because they stop working if any of the four ink cartridges is out. Also I needed to print out fifty pages by noon tomorrow.

I quickly located the model I wanted, an HP Deskjet F4180 with fine reviews. It was on sale at Best Buy for $79.99 minus a $4 discount. They had one in stock. I decided to wait until they opened the next morning and did more editing on screen.

Epson: C-

I got to Best Buy at 10:04 and went to computers. No dice. There were two other HP models for $79.99 and $99.99 but not mine. The aisles were filled with other back to school printers. Fortunately I'd written down the model number and price at home (I couldn't print them out).

I waited for anyone to notice me. One guy was on the phone and avoided my eyes. I walked over to another guy on the phone and asked for help. He said he’d call someone. No one came.

I finally went over to three guys in blue shirts and found someone who used a giant new iMac to look up the printer online and then climbed a ladder to find one for me.

The store was full of employees on the phone and talking to each other. Five guys from the Geek Squad huddled outside the front door. As far as I could tell, none of them except my guy was helping a customer.

The cashier rang up the printer. Except it came up at full price. She told me I had to take it to customer service, and they would match the price online.

Total time: 20 minutes, and I got my printer for $75.99 + tax, including a starter cartridge. But too many hassles and no benefits from in-person service.

I'm thrilled Best Buy has a flexible work policy. Too bad they only seemed to have one results-oriented employee in the store.

Best Buy: D+

Once home, the HP printer was a delight to set up. Decent installation docs (this means not as pretty as Apple's, but they worked). Ink didn’t get all over me.

Minor deduction for not working straight out of the box. I had to use the CD to install the driver, unusual for a Mac printer install. And I had to reboot before the scanner worked consistently.

There are 10 different utilities for faxing and scanning and scanning to faxes. Not cutting down on complexity exactly. And several annoying requests to register. (Who registers with the company that makes OCR technology?) I searched the print dialogs and eventually located the economy draft setting.
Total time: roughly 40 minutes. Less to my first printouts.

HP: B+ for now. The cartridges cost half what Epson's do. Maybe I'll write twice as much.

*

See also: out of ink

ripple effects

2007-08-13T21:41:00.000-07:00

This past weekend's meltdown at LAX was a good lesson in best practices: have a backup system.

17,000 people were held in the airport and on their planes following long flights because homeland security could not access computers to verify their status. In the old days, agents would have evaluated the passports of those entering and used their best judgment. Today, you can't go anywhere without a computer.

Quick, list any of the last five phone numbers you called. (Your mother doesn't count.) I didn't think so.

The great part of automation is our brain cells are no longer occupied remembering phone numbers. But the bad part is we no longer can remember phone numbers when we have to. Like when you leave your phone on the plane, or the computer crashes.

Each time we build a more comprehensive automated system, it typically replaces skilled workers who knew how the system functioned and perhaps made judgment calls. The workers who remain no longer understand how the computer works or how to escalate problems.

In the case of the airlines, their growing inefficiency is masked by changes in how data is characterized. For example, American may have a 71% on-time arrival record this summer, but that only tells half the story. A flight from San Francisco to LA is listed as 75 to 80 minutes, but that's padded. Actual flight time is 50 minutes.

If flights were listed as 55 minutes, would more flights or fewer be late?

The most remarkable part is that no crimes were committed out of rage, unless you count forcibly holding passengers who can't stretch or drink water a crime.

With a hub and spoke model, this is only going to get worse. A blizzard at O'Hare or a thunderstorm in Houston paralyzes the whole fleet. Flights are scheduled too close together, and there's no motivation to provide accurate information, or do something sensible, like send everyone home. The system is only as strong as its weakest link.

*

broken paths

2007-08-11T09:57:00.000-07:00

At last, an error message befitting its iconic masthead.

See also: Better Luck Next Time

the medium is still the message

2007-08-07T08:45:00.000-07:00

I'm struck repeatedly in surveys about cellphone usage and blogging how little traditional journalists and academics understand new mediums.

Sure, teenagers and people in their early 20s spend a lot of time on the phone talking to their friends. Didn't you?

On nights I didn't walk over to Peter's house or Jay's, I did homework on the phone with Doreen. Sometimes my friend Susan, who was rich, called from her car on her way home from riding the horses, and we'd talk for an hour or two. This was in the 80s.

I talk less on the phone socially today because I'm a grownup, so I have a lot less time, and because I prefer e-mail or text messaging, which are more efficient. Plus I have a car, so I can hang out with my friends in person. As far as I can tell, the main difference for teenagers is that you can talk to your friends on the phone at the mall or at the gym, not just holed up in your bedroom, hoping your parents won't hear. And compared to 1980, long distance is basically free.

Cellphones will continue to replace landlines. Smart phones let some of us leave laptops at home. And while I don't mean to diminish the impact of communications technology on our lives, it's hardly a teenaged thing. There are plenty of Twitterers over 40.

It's not technology creating the generation gap though; that's been there all along. We're just so used to thinking of ourselves as rebels that we forget we're old. Old teenagers.

*

Blogging distinctions are equally inane. Comparing The Daily Interface to The New Yorker or Valleywag is losing sight of what makes a blog a blog: it's self-published and distributed. It's online. Blogging is about democracy in publishing, not writing.

In my view, a multi-author blog like The Huffington Post is an online magazine. DailyKos is an old-fashioned online community, one that publishes a lot of original content through blogs, but whose primary function is to discuss.

Lots of traditionally trained journalists blog—they'd be foolish not to. So do depressive cat lovers and food fetishists. There's nothing innately good or bad about a platform. Results vary depending on who uses it and how. There's no reason bloggers can't spell.

Looking at the antique typewriters at the Royal Ontario Museum Monday, I was struck by the indexed models as personal printing presses. It's no accident that I (who received my only failing grade in elementary school handwriting) became a writer after learning to touch-type. Or that the first software programs I learned inside and out were word processors and desktop publishing tools.

RIP PageMaker, and the Olivetti that preceded it. You made my ideas look good.

I wonder whether I'll come to feel the same about WordPress and Blogger, long after they've been replaced by the next new thing.

*

steal this book

2007-08-05T11:11:00.000-07:00

I was at the gym Thursday, when this story in the NY Times about plagiarism caught my eye. Two years ago, I worked with Jason on a design project, and it’s every artist’s worst nightmare, to find your ideas attributed to someone else. But the more I learned, the more complicated the story and proper resolution got.

I come at the issue of protecting—and monetizing—ideas from multiple perspectives. I do work for hire, but I’m also a freelance writer with a love for narrative non-fiction, appropriating the words of real people and not always with their permission.

Producing a feature documentary forced me to wade into the morass of fair use and international copyright law. And as a software designer, I'm equally unhappy with overuse of patents and 90-year copyright extensions as I am frustrated by the web 2.0 ethos that artists should give everything away for free. Most of us profit so little from our art, it’s an extra level of insult not to be recognized.

Individuals and companies do borrow and steal all the time, some consciously, others less so. The title of this entry is an allusion to Abbie Hoffman, who I've never bothered to read. In the early days of the reality TV craze, I described a workplace version of “Survivor” to a friend, who was looking for ideas to pitch. She wasn’t excited by it, but I couldn’t help being annoyed when “The Apprentice” shot to fame.

I haven’t seen either Lynn Lu or Jason Mortara’s pieces except the videos online, so I can’t fairly weigh in on the circumstances except to recognize the similarities and differences and note the issues I've confronted myself.

I see two issues. The first is attribution. The second is permission.

Quoting without referencing is plagiarism, at least in the academic world. Of course if something’s famous or public enough—the Eiffel Tower, Elvis—the reference is implied. Most viewers won't assume you're claming to have created the original. And generally, if you acknowledge people who inspired or helped you, you derail claims of theft or resentment.

Permission can be trickier. If you reference someone else’s art without their permission, they’re more likely to find out about it. But they also may view it as an homage.

If we’ve never met, if I’ve never plausibly seen your work, we probably both came up with the same idea separately. And if I find something online, it may be hard or impossible to determine the creator.

Lawsuits rarely solve ethical issues though. I particularly disliked the comments that implied that Lynn, because she’s an Asian woman, is entitled to rip off Jason, because he’s a white man. Even if he were Disney and therefore rich and powerful, that wouldn’t entitle anyone to misrepresent their work or violate their copyright. Robin Hood to the contrary, it's no more honorable to steal from a rich man than a poor one. (You are more likely to get caught. Music industry attorneys seem to delight in making examples of students. It's easier than cracking down on Chinese factories.)

I much prefer a universe where licensing fees aren't exorbitant and where artists get paid for their work. And inspiration is acknowledged. Living in a remix culture as we do, I suspect we'll see more dialogues like this.

*

remembering Ingmar Bergman

2007-08-04T13:23:00.000-07:00

A moment of reflection upon the deaths this week of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonio.

When I studied film making in college, film was a stepchild of the Drama department. So freshman year we were enrolled in set design and acting seminars until we would be allowed to watch John Ford and Sergei Eisenstein sophomore year.

Jesse Kalin taught a film class in the Philosophy department. I didn't understand philosophy; Decartes always struck me as someone in need of a good editor, or therapist.

But Mr. Kalin was a passionate cinephile, and he encouraged us to find movies showing all over the campus, whether they were part of the regular campus programming or for French class. At one point, I think Fritzi and I were going to a movie a day, all in the name of homework.

For my campus job, I was the projectionist for the senior film seminar. One year, the filmmaker was Kurosawa, and it was halfway through the first semester before I realized I should be paying attention. Blasé from too many years of working at movie theaters, until "Throne of Blood" caught my eye, then "Yojimbo" and "Dodeskaden."

Ingmar Bergman was the subject for our senior film seminar, guest taught by Jesse Kalin. We imagined by the time we graduated we would speak fluent Swedish. Instead I felt like I'd spent a winter in Scandinavia.

Bergman's films were remarkably varied, and my reactions to them equally strong. The worst like "The Virgin Spring" and "The Silence" struck me as heavy-handed allegories, a harsh Lutheran universe. I couldn't relate to the characters and their endless angst. The blood red relationships of "Cries and Whispers" exhausted me.

But his best went far beyond symbolism. "Wild Strawberries" was humane and funny; a story of an old man's dying that even a frivolous 19 year old could related to. "The Seventh Seal captivated me. I did a presentation on "Persona," watching the famous merging of identities montage repeatedly, until it was like a memory.

I drove to Coral Gables with my mother to see "Fanny and Alexander," a cautionary tale about using imagination to defy the authority of bad stepfathers. And "The Serpent's Egg," Bergman's disturbing meditation on the rise of the Nazis and the psychology of the emprisoned, stayed with me all these years.

*

Antonioni I found more mysterious, forever confusing "8 1/2" and "La Notte," which I saw the same week. Antonioni was languid where Fellini was ironic perhaps. He reminded me more of Alain Resnais, making elliptical films, with characters who may or may not have been what they seemed.

It's hard to imagine anyone making a film like "Hour of the Wolf" or "L'Avventura" today. And all that Swedish we were supposed to learn? Nothing.

not invented here

2007-08-01T17:59:00.000-07:00

I'm home from the great hot north and bursting with new topic ideas: Can con. The en route system on the airplane seat backs. Canadian identity branding. Information design problems in the TTY subway map.

But I'll start with a common problem, epitomized by the remodel of the illustrious Royal Ontario Museum, familiarly known as the ROM.

The ROM is an old-fashioned multidisciplinary museum, filled with Ming tombs and woven canoes and dinosaur skeletons and antique typewriters. The original entryway was characterized by elegant arches in light brick, next to a church with a mosaic proclaiming knowledge of god to be within reach of all men. (Indeed.)

The first indication the design is all ego is the labels: the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal or occasionally the Dora Chin Crystal, not the Royal Ontario Museum.

The next is the chairs.

The other phase of restoration, called Renaissance ROM, is lower profile but more promising. Alan Pourvakil and W Studio are sprucing up the carpets and sofas and shining up the old parts "to elevate the levels of comfort and accessibility, and provide a welcoming environment for visitors to rest, reflect, and socialize." Modest goals, and ones they succeed at most admirably.

Throughout the buildings are artifacts from all these years and versions, like stairs that don't connect the galleries, or elevators that go from B1 to 1 but not to 3. No one's rationalized the annexes, or reconciled the exhibition approaches. You can't get there from here.

*

Earlier in the week, we wandered around Kensington Market and stopped in at Courage, My Love. My friend Johanne described shopping there as a college student, a generation ago, while I admired the classification system for walls of unique beads and buttons.

The owner overheard us and described how he took vintage buttons and had copies made in Indonesia. We walked over to the cases displaying exquisite imported sunglasses from the 50s and 60s. He admired a few, then pointed to a particularly awful pair of early 70s op art.

"These," he said disdainfully. "It's as if the quality people went on vacation and left the designers in charge."

*

Every new release, another generation of software designers and developers tries to put its imprint on the look and feel. Some are satisfied with usability enhancements, making the product seem simpler, more streamlined. But most redo the command names and keyboard shortcuts and workflow blithely, forgetting how hard it is for busy customers to relearn everything they liked (or took for granted) about the original.

The cardinal sin in product development is designer-centered design. People are not chomping at the bit for a Frank Gehry word processor, a Mark Zuckerberg social network, a Diana Wynne synthesizer. I don't really want a Google phone; I want one that works.

Rock stars are fine to adorn my feet, not to serve my needs. When it comes to satisfaction, it's all about me.

weCal

2007-07-25T10:25:00.000-07:00

Jerry set up a Google Calendar for my trip to Toronto. I feel like I just got married.

Of course I've used group calendars for work: Outlook events, Basecamp deliverable dates. But this is hour by hour and focused on pleasure rather than deadlines.

Timezone support is sub-optimal. The Persian concert at the music garden is at 7 in Toronto but shows up at 4 on my screen. Even though I'll be in Toronto tomorrow when it occurs.

We have so much to squeeze in: Niagara Falls (did you know they can turn the falls off?). Just for Laughs. The jazz festival at the beaches. Two farmer's markets. The Spiegel tent show. The shoe museum. Dinner at Batifole. Rooftop bar hopping. North America's best Cantonese for dim sum...And of course a stop at the pharmacy, for a little name brand price comparison.

See y'all in a week, when I'll report back on the state of horse tartare, Canadian street theater, and ice wine.

*

feedback loop

2007-07-22T12:41:00.000-07:00

Finally spent a little time playing with an iPhone last week and while it's pretty enough, I suspect it wasn't tested by many women.

In the default vertical mode, the "keys" were too small for even my small fingers, and I kept pressing the wrong letter. But worse, they don't respond to taps from nails. In high school, I tried to learn the guitar, only to discover my nails were too long to play chords (although perfect for picking the strings on the right hand).

I did not cut my nails for the guitar. I took singing lessons instead.

Apple may be skilled in the business of behavior modification, especially the hypnotized blogging masses and happily (for my stock portfolio), Wall Street. But I'll wait for the next version.

***

Last night, I went to a birthday party at the Presidio bowling alley. I've always loved keeping score, and regret that the old oil pencil on transparency system has been replaced by a computer.

Because no one else on my team could figure out how to add a player, I ended up in charge, pressing the keys so we could skip when I was at the bar or Michael was practicing his perfect form.

Not a perfect interface, especially the "Wow dude!" graphics when you bowled a gutter ball or (once) a strike. But tactile, and so, gratifying. Even if I did break all my nails. Or maybe it was just the familiarity of the experience, that and being blasted by Van Halen on the jukebox around midnight.

***

This week I signed up for another 10 or 20 beta web services. Most of them asked--make that, begged--for user feedback. So I sent some.

One fun utility is a non-browser based web-enabled desktop application. Only it didn't show up in my dock, even though I'd installed it in the Applications folder. When I switched applications or tried to force quit, it didn't appear to be running, even though it was.

The default location was the upper right corner of your screen, conflicting with Spotlight. Also the default text color was red. Was this the kind of feedback they were looking for?

I got a sweet personal e-mail back, explaining why they'd made each of the choices I'd just protested. And encouraging me to write again! And tell them what I thought.

One of the first rules--for usability testing, for a listening tour--is to just listen. No matter how politely or passionately you defend your design choices, the main result is you shut off responses.

I know they thought red was a good text color. I'm not going to tell them twice it's a problem, not unless they're paying for my time. And these are the good guys: they test their software with customers and make it easy to communicate with the team. They read their e-mail.

Still, I'd rather not cut my nails to fit your guitar. Think I'll take up singing instead.

*

biometric scans

2007-07-15T11:58:00.000-07:00

For a privacy advocate, I still get giddy over playing with new technology. My gym just put in fingerprint-activated access. All I need to do is touch the pad, and I can work out between 5 a.m. and 2 a.m.

Of course I signed up!

Imagine what shape I'll be in if I work out at midnight. And it's my neighborhood gym, not the FBI, or Google. I'm not sure they even matched my ID card to my fingerprint.

Naive?

Absolutely. Especially about the likelihood of working out at midnight. Good thing my finger isn't tied to my line of credit. Yet.

*

atomic units

2007-07-09T14:35:00.000-07:00

I was wandering around Black Oak Books in Berkeley last week realizing why bookstores are doomed. As a culture we don't read books any more, just collections of articles. I say this even as I'm longing for a juicy novel to sink my teeth into--and feeling a bit frazzled writing my own.

Five years ago, the music industry went through its own atomization. We reverted to the purchase of songs, not albums.

Of course when I was a kid, people still bought vinyl 45s. But cassettes and CDs put an end to the age of the single, that and stupid pricing, charging more than $1 for a song.

Remember the heydey of album rock? Of course not. Some of you were conceived to "Moondance" or "Dark Side of the Moon."

Craigslist isn't the only reason newspapers are in trouble. Our loyalty has shifted from the collection and publisher to the author or content theme. I may like this song or article. But that rarely extends to the publisher's venue because thanks for aggregation, there often isn't one.

Why subscribe to Harper's or The New Yorker when ALdaily cherry-picks the best articles for me? Worse, how do I get the paper onto my iPhone?

No one cares what network their favorite TV show is on, if they still watch TV. I just want someone to TiVo "Flight of the Conchords" or "30 Rock" so I don't miss it. (It's too slow in the living room, on my neighbor's wifi.)

This is the age of the search word, the index, the distracted consumer. We live in mobisodes. We can't concentrate, but we sure do consume a lot of bits. Unfortunately they mostly leave me hungry. And tired.

*

the friendly northern skies

2007-07-04T09:59:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I used American Express miles to book a free ticket on Air Canada. Oh, that it were as simple as that sounds.

Amex's program, Membership Rewards, is notable because the miles bank in your account and can be transferred 1000 at a time to different partner programs. Over the years, I've used it to top off tickets on virtually every US airline. United and American aren't members, but their code share partners are. Mexicana booked a United ticket to Australia. Continental got me to Seoul on Korean Air. US Airways got me an American flight to Miami. Delta booked Air France to Amsterdam. (That's me--never a Mileage Plus Premier executive, forever a dabbler.)

So I was excited to learn after consulting Air Canada's lovely looking Aeroplan website that a flight to Toronto was only 25,000 points. (Did I mention their logo has an infinity sign in the middle?) I enrolled in the program and called to see if they would hold a reservation while I checked the dates with my host. No, they said. I had to transfer the miles now.
I protested that I'd had to wait a while on the phone--and there was only one seat left on the red eye for 25,000. If I did it on the internet, the agent assured me, the transfer would be instantaneous. She would stay on the line. I hesitated. My e-mail is rarely instantaneous, and the Amex site warned a transfer could take 48 hours.

An hour later, I had Jerry on gTalk and Aeroplan on the phone, and the Amex site in front of me--but the seat on the red eye was gone. I could fly a day earlier and return later. Now I needed to check dates with my client.

I went ahead and made a one-way transfer of the points. But when I logged back onto Aeroplan, the 25,000 seats were gone for nearly all of July, and August, even if you were willing to spend a night in Calgary. Toronto Film Festival in September, maybe?

I was starting to despair. Two hours had gone by, and my Aeroplan account balance still said 0. I could add more points, without any guarantee of ever getting my seat.

And there were warnings the site didn't work with Macintosh computers, even though most of the features seemed fine. The availability calendar, though, the one feature I really needed, displayed garbage.

Currently, more than 90% of our members access our website using the Windows operating system and a recent version of the Internet Explorer browser; aeroplan.com was designed with this fact in mind.... Members who are unable to book their rewards online are invited to call 1-800-361-5373 to speak with one of our agents in order to complete their booking (note: these calls are subject to the service fee).

One of those stats that makes me crazy. Of course 90% of their site visitors use Windows, if the Mac experience is unreliable!

Finally I picked up the phone. Now if I were calling an American airline, I might act angry, but how rude can you be to Canadians? An enthusiastic agent immediately found the flights I wanted and booked them. Yes, there would be an extra $30 charge for talking to her, even though I was a Mac user. (So was she.)

Aeroplan is also testing out a "voice print" technology, to identify you on the phone. An automated voice asks you to repeat your membership number three times. I tried doing so twice and failed twice before giving up. Now this might make sense for a bank--but a frequent flier program? Where you log on using a phone, which has already numbers on its keypad?

If this were a U.S. airline, I'd worry John Negroponte was trying to steal my voice print. But the worst scenario I could come up with was an impersonator trying to fly to Newfoundland.

Late last night, as I logged onto Aeroplan to grab a few screenshots, I found more than 20 flights on the dates I wanted for 25,000 miles, including the red eye. Hey, at least I'm going to Toronto.

*

waterproof

2007-06-30T16:03:00.000-07:00

The week before last, I spilled a cappuccino on my laptop. I'm not sure how I avoided doing this for so long. I'm rarely without a beverage and a computer, and prone to fits of clumsiness. Worse, I wasn't even using the computer at the time--just had it open to check for e-mail.

I was drawing a little too passionately (wireframes with a Sharpie, if you must know). And sitting at too small a table, especially with the New York Times spread out.

Instinct made me worry first about the coffee. I grabbed napkins from a guy at the next table and mopped up the mess. The iBook stayed on--but the keys stuck.

A quick typing test showed it had suffered a minor stroke-- malfunctioning P [ ] Return L. Uh oh, spacebar. You can work around Ps and Ls. In fact all the commonly used keys are on the left. But not spaces.

I rebooted, momentarily forgetting my system password required an L. I was locked out. I gathered up my stained wireframes and walked home. This was another mistake. By the time I unfolded it, the whole thing smelled like coffee. The hard drive heated up and began to moan. And so did I.

What to do

Throw it out, drive to the Apple store, and buy the MacBook Pro I've been coveting. This is what my mother raised me to do. Every dent is an opportunity to buy a new car. Unfortunately I'm also frugal enough to consider whether I really needed a new laptop. And I had a perfectly good iMac sitting on my desk, so I couldn't feign urgency.
Mourn. Remember all the good times in Mexico and Iceland and Korea with this laptop, the screenplay I wrote on it, and novel (set in an internet cafe) that I would now never finish. I only did this periodically, like when the laptop kept booting in safe mode. In between panic attacks, I backed up all my files onto my iPod, so I could make a rational decision.
Try to diagnose and fix it. This was the path I chose, because my mother also taught me not to be afraid to take things apart. This turned out to be surprisingly complex, but instructive in how we solve problems online and offline with new and used parts, how a purchase decision is rarely apples to apples, when the division between products and services blurs.

Now what?
First I looked for a Mac repair shop to find out what it would cost to make sure it was just the keyboard. This was hard. Try typing "San Francisco Mac repair" into Google and see the junk you get. Then try the same query in Yelp and get a bunch of reviews that mention someone named Mac.

Call all the surly build-your-own-computer-from-parts (but not Mac) shops in town to no avail. Eons ago, Leo the Mac Wizard saved my Mac Plus. Maybe this called for a Russian.

The Mac repair shop wanted $120 just to look at it. I could buy a used iBook on Craigslist for not much more. I e-mailed to see if they sold parts, because by now I'd figured out it was really just the keyboard I needed. They didn't.

I looked on the Apple website, but the keyboard part wasn't listed. It said to call the Apple store.

So I called the Apple store at Stonestown. They didn't sell iBook keyboards, but I could make an appointment with a genius :) I asked who sold Apple parts locally. She told me to look it up with Google, and then when I protested, informed me Google was a search engine.

Trembling (with fury? tears? laughter?) I called the Apple support number. No, I did not want to pay for tech support. They asked for a serial number. And my phone number. (Eek! It was a borrowed computer. And they'd have on my permanent Apple record that I spilled coffee on laptops.) But a very cheerful rep with a Midwestern accent told me how sorry she was. And that Apple didn't sell those keyboards any more--they weren't in her database.

Back to eBay. And shopping around for a sale on a MacBook.

I also e-mailed a friend who works in IT and asked where he bought Mac parts locally. He asked co-workers and sent a collection of recommendations, including what would turn out to be the most helpful: take it apart and clean it--I used handiwipes--and let it air out.

He also referred me to the Used Computer Store in Berkeley, where they didn't have the part but reassured me that if it worked fine with an external keyboard plugged in, it was worth replacing the keyboard.

Resolution
I got a brand new keyboard three days later from a seller on eBay for $13.99 plus $14.95 shipping, after paying extra to Buy it now. There were two models of keyboard for this iBook, and the first seller I contacted gave me incorrect info about compatibility. Other sellers including one in Hayward charged as much as $40 plus shipping and tax. List price for the keyboard was $60, which is why Fry's wouldn't bother to stock it.

I used excellent directions I found online for installation. And I couldn't have done it without the tiny Phillips head screwdriver in an eyeglass repair kit I bought for traveling. $1000 for a new MacBook (or $2000 for a MacBook Pro) is still burning a hole in my credit card.

What I learned
There's good money in fixing old stuff. Ask your auto mechanic. But you can't charge too much, or no one will bother. I would happily have paid something--$25--for a quick consultation. Instead, I'll encourage you to patronize the Used Computer Store, and bring red wine to Eric's house.

The question is how much to pour into old technology. Even the woman on the phone from Apple suggested waiting for the new laptops (the ones that haven't been announced yet).

The answer depends on how much time you have. How urgently you need it. Actually installing the keyboard was trivial--it's a beautifully designed component. This worked out for me but required a lot of patience and research. Your mileage may vary.

*
If you have Times Select, today's NYT has an acute commentary by Joe Nocera on the iPhone's lack of a replaceable battery and Apple's culture of "assured obsolescence." Recommended.

point of no return

2007-06-24T20:28:00.000-07:00

The real test of a service is how gracefully they handle problems. Think about the last time you got stuck with a breakdown on commuter rail or a delayed flight crossing the country.

But customer service is equally important in the big, bad world of e-commerce. Nowadays you never hear about online shopping. We take it for granted that you order stuff online, and it arrives. The press has moved on to covering the virtual economy, and how to rent upgraded igloos to cartoon penguins.

Ten years ago, a book from Amazon arrived in two days, for half the price of your (now out of business) neighborhood store. It was like Christmas every day. Except when you found a steal from a company you'd never heard of, and they accidentally charged your credit card $2200 for a video camera.

Today everyone needs to be online; even businesses that transact entirely offline need a web listing. When was the last time you opened a phone book? If you don't show up in a Google (or Yelp or Citysearch) search, your business might as well not exist.

My friend Yo, who owns a sushi bar, recently pulled out a Post It I drew for him ages ago, with what should be on his website. He wanted to know if his teen-aged daughter could create it with Dreamweaver. I recommended blogging: Yo's MySpace page.

The real problem comes with maintaining accurate inventory status online. Offline businesses have trouble doing this, especially if someone else designed their site.

I e-mail my hairdresser to get an appointment; he e-mails back proposing a time. By the time I confirm, he's given it away, because his computer's at home and his appointment book is at the salon.

Three weeks ago I ordered a camera from Electronics Expo, an Amazon marketplace vendor. It was an unusual color, and no one else had it in stock, so I paid a little extra.

A week later, when it was due to arrive, I hadn't received any shipping info. So I called EE (unlike Amazon, they provide a phone number). No, it hadn't shipped yet. They apologized--Father's Day rush. It would go out Tuesday. But when I pressed, they admitted they still didn't have any in stock.

They were nice, but I was furious. I hadn't reserved a future camera if it happened to arrive--I'd already paid and lost a week of dazzling close ups. I canceled the order by phone, but it was Saturday afternoon, so the salespeople couldn't give me a confirmation for my Amex credit because their refund department had closed. I checked Amazon, which blithely claimed the order had shipped.

So I started e-mailing both Amazon and Electronics Expo using the Amazon contact pages. Where was my refund? Why had Amazon charged my card if the vendor didn't have the item in stock? No, I did not want them to send me a camera now.

Polite customer service reps cut and pasted nonsense back, indicating they hadn't read my message, and weren't native English speakers. I might as well have been corresponding with a bot. And you can't reply to the messages--you have to go back to the website and enter another complaint.

Meanwhile, I ordered the same camera through Vann's, another Amazon marketplace vendor, after first calling to ensure they had it to sell me. Then I worried I'd end up with two cameras. Fortunately it was out of stock.

Eventually it all worked out, although it took three weeks. I got my camera and refund and lost faith in online status messages. And I'm not sure Amazon marketplace is such a great thing, if Amazon won't help you (or read your messages) in a dispute, even when it's apparently the deadline has been missed. The advantage to ordering through them was price comparison. The hassle wasn't worth the $15 I saved.

I've been debating getting a new laptop, and this week, Amazon had the best price, almost $200 less than walking into the Apple store. I hesitated though, not wanting to reward them for bad service.

But then Amazon surprised me with a great experience. Along with the camera, I'd ordered a memory card, a USB card reader, and a gorillapod. (And I love my gorillapod almost as much as my gorgeous camera--a poseable toy disguised as a tripod! If only it came in blue.) These were all from Amazon, not the marketplace.

The card reader turned out to be defective. It had only cost $7.70; maybe it wasn't worth the trouble of sending it back, another round of messages with Srividhya P.

But in two minutes, I found the return page on the website, identified the defect, and printed out a postage due label.

The ease of return for a trivial item stood out, in contrast a week of aggravation getting a refund for an unfulfilled (but subcontracted) order.

It's how you resolve problems that distresses or impresses. In one week, Amazon managed to do both.

*

7/8 Update. After Amazon received the defective USB card reader, I received this inscrutable message:

We're writing to confirm that we have processed your refund for $6.45
for the above-referenced order.

The following is the breakdown of your refund:
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Item Returned:
1 x "Kingston TravelLite SD/MMC Reader ( FCR-HS2MMC/SD ) "
Item Refund $7.7
Per Item Shipment Refund $0.59

Non-refundable Deductions:
Promotions $-1.84

Refund Issued: $6.45
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

When you use a promotional certificate or other discount on your order, you will not be refunded for the amount of the promotional offer, as this amount was deducted from the original purchase. Any unexpired promotional funds used on the order are returned to your account for use toward future qualifying purchases. Please note that the original expiration date still applies.

Note: If you took advantage of any Free Shipping promotion (including Super Saver Shipping) when placing your order, the original shipping savings associated with the returned item(s) will be deducted from the refund amount unless the return was due to our error. This deduction will appear in the Promotions section above.

For more information on how we calculate refunds, please visit our web site at http://www.amazon.com/refunds

Hmm. There was accompanying text that made little sense. They'd sold me a defective product for $7.70, but they were only crediting $6.45. I wrote another angry e-mail to customer service, which apologized and issued a further $1.25 credit. I can't believe any of this is good for Amazon's long-term health, financial or otherwise.

the last straw

2007-06-14T10:11:00.000-07:00

Honestly I didn't think it was possible, but Yahoo has outdone itself. Yahoo Mail beta sucks--again.

After 18 months of beta testing, they finally got scrollbars working on their mail application. Well, almost.

They added back a few of the useful features in the non-beta version, like checkboxes for moving or deleting a group of messages, which were essential because click and drag was so unresponsive.

Refresh is less terrible than before, although unless you manually refresh the window, your RSS feeds don't update...

And then they added in messenger integration. Whether you want it or not. Whether your e-mail and IM personas are even correctly matched up (which mine are not).

And ads. Did I mention the ADS? Big, slow ads that take up space where I used to be reading my message contents. When I click to go to my drafts folder or the Inbox, Yahoo Mail Beta finishes pushing the ad before it responds. So I click again and accidentally select something else.

I'm not against an occasional ad, as long as it doesn't distract me from my task. And the astute among you will realize Yahoo has always had some ads in their mail product. The difference is that the AJAX beta mail has such disastrous performance that you're looking at ads instead of your mail; and they're taking up space that until last week was allotted to my messages.

I use the free ad-supported Eudora on one of my Macs, and it's fine. This doesn't mean a Yahoo Shopping link above the listings of folders, or a green cars ad where my personal folders and RSS feeds used to be.

Yahoo Mail is free, you say. And it's true, I'm always saying you get what you pay for. But it isn't free. I pay for AT&T/Yahoo internet.

Yahoo got what it paid for. It outsourced development, and the result doesn't work. In the two years since this project began, they could have hired four competent US engineers and had it done a year ago. Instead they're subjecting 25 million people to this, day after day. It makes me long for Microsoft.

And then they want to upsell me. So I won't see "third party" ads in my e-mail. (Are there first- and second-party ads that are permissible?) The problem is you can't upsell unhappy customers.

I'm downloading Thunderbird as I type. I won't be looking at ads when I empty my spam folder (because that's truly an advertiser's dream spot--next to spam).

Maybe it's finally time to dump my Yahoo stock; okay, that time was a year ago. Or five years ago. E-mail is not rocket science.

*

the beverage cart

2007-06-11T20:22:00.000-07:00

Yes, I've been out enjoying the hot summer days. And busy on a fun project, and trying to figure out how to tackle the cat long enough to squirt antibiotics into his mouth..

But it's important to keep hydrated, and I've been consuming new products that help you do just that.

First up is Coca-Cola zero cherry. Or is it Coca-Cola cherry zero? Or cherry Coca-Cola zero...

I don't get the whole zero business. How is this different from Diet Coke? I didn't have time for a blind taste test to be sure.

Some of us are old enough to remember TAB, and new Coke. When Diet Coke came out, the ads on TV all featured construction workers in plaid shirts and hard hats. No longer a ladies' drink in a pink can.

My mother even had Coca-Cola glasses, and TAB glasses, the ones with waists. And Campbell's soup bowls. We are loyal shareholders, my family.

Anyway Coca-Cola zero cherry gets the thumbs up, if I can find it again. It's the first of the Coke variants I've liked at all. Remember BLaK?

Next stop was the tea salon. Actually I stocked up at both Lupicia and Teance this week. Winnie Yu was pouring freshly picked green teas from her trip to China, Taiwan, and Japan.

But because I only have enough cups to serve tea to two or three dozen of my closest friends, I picked up a pair of Bodum Pavina glasses.

These are even cooler than they look. Literally. You pour hot liquid in them, and they stay cool because they have an extra layer. Bodum makes a larger size, but these fit my hands perfectly.

In a house lacking enough plates or chairs for a dinner party, I do have a larger selection of teas than Chez Panisse. Unfortunately I don't have a variable temperature electric kettle. Yet.

Can't be burning all those delicate tea leaves.

But not to be outdone, I've turned my epicurean eye toward coffee.

Next up, a full report on my brand new $30 Aeropress, a vacuum pump that allegedly makes coffee of the same caliber as a full espresso machine, or a $20,000 Clover.

Manufactured in the US, and designed by the same folks who made a better Frisbee. What's not to like? A grinder can't be far behind.

*

guess what?

2007-06-02T10:04:00.000-07:00

After ordering a bagel at the internet cafe around the corner, I start setting up my office. The owner comes by with a pot of tea as I'm plugging in and spreading out the New York Times.

"What is that? A mouse?"

"That's my power supply. It's old," I apologize, like he cares that I don't have a MacBook Pro.

"No, no, that thing."

I laugh. "It's a massager."

I push a button and demonstrate. Red lights flash, and the legs vibrate menacingly. He tries it on his face.

"Best on your neck and shoulders." He tries and nods.

"How much was it?"

"No idea." I got the little android in a gift bag at a Pepsi Jazz event, along with a CD of torch songs and a tiny t-shirt and a lot of gold paper and cocktails. Made with diet soda mixers in flavors like cherry cola and caramel. (Is diet cocktails a new category?)

I have it because my friend Ilene is bringing her three-year-old along for bagels. It's the closest to a kids' toy I could find.

When Ilene arrives, I demonstrate the massager and scare her daughter. I mention the owner thinking it was a mouse.

"That's okay. I thought it was a wifi device."

Personally I prefer this Mr. Potato Head massager, but free's free. Makes a good cat toy too.

*

the rejection bot

2007-05-30T09:33:00.000-07:00

I've been a freelance writer most of my life, so generally I'm pretty hardened to rejection. But last month, I was recruited by a successful company based on my user experience background. They'd recently spun off a small division with a growing UE team, and I was momentarily tempted to leave behind the consulting life.

After establishing my qualifications, the company had a personable outside recruiter conduct a phone screening. The questions were oddly specific, read off a form by someone who clearly hadn't written them: What was an example of a good website? What was the definition of a "heuristic evaluation"? Whose blogs did I read?

It felt like they were trying to categorize me without actually having to meet me. But they seemed less interested in looking at examples of my work.

The next week, I received an e-mail from a woman named Alice asking whether I was looking for full-time work and for a link to my online portfolio. She didn't say what company she worked for, and her message contained my resume. More seriously, her return e-mail address was obviously computer generated: ("fnDTDWfwP@jobvite.com") I wrote back, asking what Jobvite was, since I hadn't applied there, and where she'd gotten my contact information. I also tried looking her up on LinkedIn. No luck or response.

When I spoke to the hiring manager at Company X (who asked if I'd completed their survey), we quickly realized he was looking for a visual designer, not me. We cordially agreed to keep in touch.

But later that day, I received a form rejection e-mail from "Alice" at the same company. The salutation said, "Dear Diana J." and this time, her return address was "notification@jobvite.com"

Now this company works in automating common business processes, and there's nothing wrong with using filters and keyword searches to narrow down first-cut candidates. But from a user experience perspective, it was completely offputting to receive generic notifications without any context, especially after I'd already answered an hourlong questionnaire on my education, influences, likes, and dislikes, which apparently no one read.

Perhaps some candidates are fooled by naming your bots. Maybe there's even an Alice who works at Company X. I won't be following up with them to find out.

*

going off the grid

2007-05-27T11:41:00.000-07:00

I've been considering giving up my landline, which is used almost entirely by telemarketers, and my mom. I keep it because I have a good deal on DSL from the phone company, and I hate them less than I hate the cable companies. Although I use a lot of wifi too.

But this week, several incidents conspired to remind me why it's hard to go off the wire:

First I had an appointment with a client. She was supposed to call my cell at 10, and I sat by the phone and computer and waited. And waited. Maybe she was stuck in a meeting. But no, twenty minutes later she sent an e-mail asking where I was. She'd called and left voicemails. I got them at 11:15.

That night at dinner, my companion asked if I'd gotten his text to say he was on his way. I hadn't. He'd sent it at 6:30. I got it at 9:30.

We take it for granted that e-mail is nearly instantaneous. Except e-mail from my cousin, which arrives hours or sometimes days late. I'm not sure why--it's just a gmail address. I get all my other gmail on time.

And finally I've been working with a colleague who calls me on Skype. It's not bad, in the way cellphone calls didn't used to be bad, for cellphones. Like, you were amazed they worked at all. And of course they're free. But I have to keep saying "What did you say?"

When technology is new, we're less bothered by its quirks and failings. I had passed that point with both mobile calls and e-mail, only to be reminded that networks are only as reliable as the companies passing on the data.

In San Francisco, T-Mobile borrowed space on Cingular's network. My missed calls the past 10 days are the result of a corporate acquisition, now that Cingular has been gobbled up by AT&T. Who incidentally provides my landline and DSL. Hmmm.

*

wikitopia

2007-05-22T23:14:00.000-07:00

Like a lot people I know, I seem to be living in a split paradigm, trying to straddle the world between documents and web pages. I'm working on a collaborative project with people in five locations, and a lot of files get e-mailed around. What's the latest version? Who's the owner? Did I remember to download it onto my laptop or do I need to look for wifi?

Meanwhile, the web OS still isn't quite up to snuff. Or rather, most web developers have to roll their own file upload and download features, so they do a varying and usually terrible job. Developers under 25 think you can do it all in Google docs or ThinkFree. Guess they've never had to print anything or retrieve a phone number during a network outage.

By contrast, Windows and the Mac OS are heaven. Never thought I'd be praising the directory dialog, or Office apps, but here goes:

What I miss about operating systems
Filenames aren't mangled
Revision dates are preserved rather than overwritten as current date and time
File size gives you an indication of how long you need to wait to open and view the first screen/page
WYSIWYG graphics (this means you folks at Blogger!)
Printing
and on and on...

But the converse is true too. Some people cling to a document model long after it's ceased to be effective.

I worked for a company where we had weekly conference calls with the US, India, and Ireland. The producers used to e-mail a document with the agenda two minutes before the meeting started. Reading it required not just opening the e-mail but also downloading an attachment, finding the folder 10 levels deep where Outlook had saved it, and opening it in Word: three extra steps.

If the document had a lot of content or formatting or graphics, this might have made sense. But typically the agenda was four bullet items. The agenda was in Word because someone wanted to preserve a record of what had gone on in the meeting, perhaps to share with upper management. But ironically, it was rare to receive notes of what happened in those status meetings, which would have been useful to circulate to the team afterward and keep on a server for posterity. Instead I had a folder of Word files containing the date, four-bullet agendas, and a list of who was on the call.

A few months ago, a friend in Germany invited me to participate in a collaborative project: a novel set in the future, written by authors all over the world. I immediately thought about a wiki, although she worried that was a little too much overhead, having to create accounts and administer to everyone, and ended up setting it up in Blogger. The writers took off (all except me), and are still busily envisioning a character-driven environmental disaster in 2028.

But the site is a good example of the limitations of a wiki or even a blog. Wikis are ideal for certain kinds of shared information: they're great for a meeting agenda where anyone can participate, or for dissecting the latest episode of "Lost." They're okay for a spec or process that's loosely defined but easily segmented. Anywhere that collective intelligence is better than a single author.

Where they're not good is tracking what's changed or representing the organizational hierarchy in most teams--and for most writing projects. A writer isn't the same role as an editor or a reviewer. Inequality serves a specific purpose.

When I look at the cumulative wikitopia novel a month later, I can't even figure out how catch up. It's in the wrong order--blogging is all about nowness, and so the most recent posts are first. Doro kindly created a PDF for me, in the right order, with just the story, leaving out the meta-discussion. But still I have trouble following it. I want to print it out, but I still have trouble wrapping my editor's brain around the concept--a concept I helped spark.

I feel like this is a personal failing, but in fact it's one of medium. Being a traditional editor, I'm not a fan of having lots of people work on one document to begin with. Even though I've designed collaboration tools, I'm still skeptical about what kinds of team can use them effectively. Which edits (or whose) outrank which?

Markup in Word is a vile implementation, like handing in a previous term paper to an English professor and having it all sent back in red. (My romantic poetry professor used to write more than I did, evoking nothing but terror.) When someone edits and tracks changes to my Word document, I wince in a way that I do not when they mark up a printout with corrections and ideas.

When I was (briefly) a graduate literature student at UC, we were not allowed to use red pen to grade freshman papers for fear of inhibiting their creativity. We wrote in pencil, a dignified practice reflecting sensitivity for the original author. After all, edits are tentative--gray--until they are accepted. Whose paper is it?

So what's it going to be, single user or multiple authors? tangible file or erasable shared whiteboard? web OS or desktop folder? Regardless of technology, we have a ways to go before these relationships are clearly represented. Maybe by 2028 I'll figure out how to write a chapter in a collaborative novel about the future.

Apple v Nike

2007-05-20T08:42:00.000-07:00

At the extreme, businesses can be summarized by one of two philosophies:

Apple's (Do the right thing)

and

Nike's (Just do it)

While it's nice to believe there's a middle ground, I often have trouble finding it in clients. Is this merely a matter of temperament in leadership: whether you're a cool-headed quality-obsessed iterator or a hot-headed carpe diem enthusiast?

I grew up in casinos, watching my grandfather lose his money, which perhaps made me more cautious than I might otherwise be. Both my parents and my former step-father were stockbrokers. You could call my grandmother right at this moment, and she'll tell you within a quarter the current prices of Procter & Gamble and IBM. Constant fluctuations and renegotiations wear me out; but for other people, they're exhilarating.

Maybe success is a matter of balance, or choosing an appropriate product that fits your emotional makeup. For the most part, we don't complain when prescription drugs or new automobiles take years to come to market because of lengthy safety testing.

But sometimes urgency trumps mixing the perfect recipe. I'd rather TurboTax get it right than do it now, unless it's April 14th in which case I'll settle for good enough. In the fashion world, or if you're developing mobile handsets in a fiercely competitive, style-conscious market, nowness is crucial.

Does hesitation result in missed opportunities? Or is that extra pause crucial to making the right decisions? Your answer says a lot about your approach to product design.

*
Contractors all over earned a good name this week when CC Meyers, the company repairing the 580 freeway connector that melted in Oakland, announced they would finish ahead of schedule. In appreciation, IKEA is offering free Swedish meatballs at its Emeryville store to transit workers.

what's wrong with this survey?

2007-05-16T14:07:00.000-07:00

A national survey released this week named my home town of Miami as where the rudest drivers in the U.S. live. There's only one problem: their survey logic doesn't work.

2500 regular drivers in 25 metropolitan areas rated fellow drivers on tailgating, anger, and talking on the phone. So why doesn't it add up?

The survey compares apples to oranges. It's not clear if drivers in Miami are actually worse than they are in LA or if people surveyed are just less tolerant of bad behavior. None of the people in the survey drove in multiple cities because they don't live in multiple cities.

If they were comparing airports, it would be a different story since the same respondent might plausibly hit three or four airports in addition to her home. But they're not. They're comparing frustration with driver behavior.

Now I'm not a market research expert, although I've frequently hired researchers and made use of survey data in product requirements. Most of the time, if numbers don't make sense, there's an obvious reason, like the survey is flawed.

Despite this, inaccurate statistics are used in trend stories all the time.

For example, when Time magazine announces that 97% of Americans won't vote for a Mormon or an atheist for president, what this generally means is they asked 900 "random" people and only 25 said yes. Usually they don't show you the question itself, which often has bias in its wording. Sometimes they ask the same questions year after year, as with the driver survey. But if they don't ask the same people or a closely matching demographic, it's not fair to claim that Minneapolis is worse this year than last. Especially when only 100 drivers—a bare minimum for statistical significance—were surveyed in each location.

With emerging trends where there's no baseline, how do you ensure that your sampling is representative? There are 300 million people in the U.S. Which 100 you choose makes a huge difference in the results, regardless of whether the polling company has any agenda or not.

A little healthy skepticism is in order. (Just ask anyone who's ever talked to a startup about how many active users they have.) And all because I find it hard to believe that drivers are ruder in Miami than in San Francisco.

Despite conventional wisdom, numbers lie all the time.

*

the trouble with mobile

2007-05-13T19:39:00.000-07:00

The mobile space today remains a minefield for consumers. First of all, it's completely balkanized:

handset manufacturers want to sell you the latest doodad, described in language only a hardware engineer from the FCC could love;
service providers want to lock you into two year plans and charge you $40 extra a month to check e-mail;
and advertisers want to put commercials on your little screen.

The operating systems are tested on different handsets than they'll ultimately be used with. There's no standard aspect ratio for the screens.

Reviewers live in spiff dreamland, and presumably complete most phone reviews after putting the device through a day's worth of tasks off a spreadsheet. I just finished reading an 8-page glowing review for the Helio Ocean that nowhere mentioned either its price or how much monthly data charges would be. CNET and the NY Times review phones without ever discussing the cost of the required 2-year service plan. This is reprehensible. Imagine buying a car based on a $200 discount, without anyone disclosing that the cost of actually driving it would be $2500.

Text messages thrive while internet access lags because you can pay a dime for them rather than needing a data plan. Seriously, if price doesn't matter, I'll take a Serene Mobile from Bang & Olufsen for $1275. If you have to ask about service plans, you can't afford it.

As a result it's challenging for developers to build a service that works across a reasonable number of devices without resorting to a least common denominator strategy, in this case SMS, or text.

It's all a lot like the PDA market was 8 or 9 years ago, or the PC market before Windows 95 and the mPC standard, when you really had to roll your own computer and do a lot of work detecting video and sound cards and screen size, because no one did it for you.

In some ways the iPhone is a glorified Newton--and despite my skepticism about next month's overpriced touchscreen wonder device, I don't mean that disparagingly. Presumably we've all learned a lot, especially Palm. We need devices that are optimized in form factor for intended uses, not a single heavy rectangle that requires typing with your thumbs and doesn't work very well as a phone either.

I was at dinner with a large party recently, and when the check came, I reached for it to see if they'd added service and to split the bill. But the woman next to me pulled out her phone, pushed two buttons, and announced the shares. Her phone automatically added the tip and divided by the number of guests.

Now this is basic math, and probably everyone at the table had a phone with a calculator in it, although honestly I'm not sure where mine is buried in the menus. But someone had actually gone to the trouble to take into account a trivially simple scenario that happens all the time and program it as an explicit feature.

Makes you think.

*

selling your soul

2007-05-10T16:28:00.000-07:00

Today's NY Times has a cautionary tale for companies whose business model is sponsorship (aka giving it away for free). Verizon dropped its sponsorship of Gwen Stefani's tour after Akon, the opening act, engaged in what it considered unbecoming conduct on stage.

While I'm sure we'll hear lots of cries about pressure from conservative groups and freedom of speech, the first amendment doesn't apply once you take someone else's money. You can put up a website and espouse anything you like that's legal. But don't ask someone else to pay for it unless you're willing to abide by their rules, both on screen and in real life.

Of course sponsors would be well advised to do their homework before writing checks or making long-term commitments to a specific flashy spokesmodel.

Think about Akon or Pete Doherty next time you advertise you want to hire a rock star. Ever dated a musician, or tried to have a coherent morning meeting with one? Give me a competent unflashy developer any day when there's business involved.

And this is not to imply that I believe in selling out either. There's a lot to be said for separating art and commerce entirely, and creating something good and pure. Just don't confuse popularity with quality.

In the long run, an ad-based distribution channel--the broadcast web or mobile network--is more vulnerable to corporate pressures and fluctuations than one where customers pay for services. Remember 2001?

*

tea parties & sari safaris

2007-05-07T11:09:00.000-07:00

Although more and more products are sold online, for some there's no substitute for seeing the goods in person, where you can touch and taste and try them on. This was brought home this weekend at a sari party featuring extraordinary fabrics Melinda sourced in India and drove all over the West Coast.

Of course her business Sari Safari also has a website. My inspiration for this post came from watching her sitting cross-legged on the floor, reach for the iBook in Audrey's living room to log onto the website to process a credit card transaction.

Perhaps if I'd grown up wearing saris, I'd be able to choose a pattern or a region or a style from a list. But beautiful photos are no substitute for the sensuality of vibrant textiles unfolded and held against your skin. Melinda described how the sari man goes from town to town, as women in the village negotiate and tug over the best ones.

Gina Leibrecht and Les Blank's documentary "All in This Tea" had its US premiere at the San Francisco film festival last week. The film follows David Lee Hoffman, founder of Silk Road Teas, as he wanders the markets and back trails in China in search of tea farmers, and ultimately the best tasting teas.

The film drives home the same points as the sari party, that not everyone wants a uniform product, manufactured in quantity. And that it takes real dedication to seek out farmers and seamstresses, ensuring both that they receive adequate compensation and that the hand-crafted tradition continues. It falls to evangelists like Hoffman and Winnie Yu to explain to Chinese business men why we value small providers of unique goods.

Watching Hoffman smell and taste the tea and describe how transformative it was without having a full sensory experience myself was frustrating. I went home and steeped a pot of 2006 dragonwell that friends brought back from Hangzhou.

Winnie Yu opened Celadon tea room in Berkeley four years ago and recently renamed the store Teance and moved it to 4th Street. She's on a tea buying journey this week in China and blogging about it. This picture from her trip highlights how much of tea cultivation and processing still requires manual labor, human supervision.

I'd like to believe that the internet makes all this possible. That creating new markets preserves and promotes unique crafts by connecting far-away buyers with knitters and batik makers and tea farmers. That it's all not just another excuse for shopping, as newly trendy white tea or rooibos shows up on the shelf at Safeway and Anthropologie is filled with saris.

But first I'll have another cup of Irish breakfast. Long tail, indeed.

*

"Talking about music is like dancing about architecture" - Steve Martin

walking the talk

2007-05-04T11:51:00.000-07:00

Wednesday I was at a packed demo downtown that was fraught with technical problems. None of the presenters seemed to be able to hook up a laptop to a projector and get it quickly online.

This wouldn't be surprising except I was sitting in the back row typing on a laptop that connected pretty much automatically using the Netopia-provided wifi at the Metreon. While the presenters struggled, I went to their websites.

I mean no disrespect. In fact the demos--when there were demos--were great, especially Daniel from Kyte.tv.

But in this connected day and age, hawkers are still wandering around with files on their own computers instead of using a browser to get to what they need. It doesn't matter if you have a PC and they have a Mac. Your software is web-based. That's the whole point you keep telling your customers, that we no longer need desktop apps. Now it's time to prove you believe what you're selling.

Leave the PowerPoint slides at home. Please. Back up your files on a USB drive or an iPod if you must. And take a lesson from cooking shows: show the pre-cut ingredients, stir, and then magically pull a soufflé from the oven. There's a reason TV chefs don't spend most of their time reading the recipe: it puts viewers to sleep. (Did I mention these were all video companies?)

Audiences don't care if your soufflé falls. That's the fun of being there live, listening to Justin struggle with his cell phone from Hollywood and watching his video crash Firefox.

The random cell phone photos that showed up in our group Kyte movie weren't great art, and the beta's still rough around the edges. But everyone in the room left with an understanding of what web-based video collaboration might look like. Which incidentally I didn't get from reading the description on their website ("tv out of the box"? are they competing with TiVo or HBO?).

It's the demo that counts, especially where video's concerned.

*

naming rights

2007-05-01T09:30:00.000-07:00

You wouldn't think a baseball park would be a good metaphor for the problems of software as a service delivered online. But in San Francisco, the Giants play at Pacbell I mean SBC I mean AT&T Park. Almost makes you long for Candlestick (er, Monster Park?), when a stadium that stayed in the same place also had the same name for two years in a row.

It always surprises me that a company would go to so much trouble to create a brand, and then throw the name away after an acquisition. And important to realize how connectivity has become like electricity--something we take for granted. In fact I'd give up my phone and electricity before I gave up my internet.

I was thinking about this reading about EarthLink scaling back its ambitious municipal wifi strategy after a slow quarter. A little like the Research in Motion patent scare last year --would Blackberries just be turned off because of a court ruling? Remember this perpetual shuffling of hungry corporate giants next time you consign your online docs or music or photos to a single source.

Flickr recently decided to differentiate itself from parent company Yahoo's Photos by implementing a 200-photo limit for non-professional users. Any photos over 200 including older ones are hidden--from me! Every time I add a picture, it hides another one. Is that any way to get me to upgrade to a pro account? Seriously. I'm taking my photos on the road, once I have time to download them.

Now I have nothing against private industry, especially where it leads to innovation and better products. But I still want my government (okay, maybe not this administration) to be responsible for some things: ensuring a constant supply of power for all my electronic devices; promptly repairing freeways after they melt down; regulating foods with ingredients imported from China; keeping schools and hospitals open.

What happens when San Francisco's wifi provider invariably goes belly up? Look at the tax filing crisis two weeks ago as a warning. It's only because Intuit has a sweetheart deal on e-filing with the IRS that TurboTax users were granted an extension after being caught in a last-minute network traffic jam. And Intuit, moving from old school software to web-based filing, built its reputation following customers home--they're not a fly-by-night Web 2.0 site with too many vowels in its name and too little password security.

In a world of volatile startups, be careful which rights you sign away, and what spreadsheets and precious family artifacts you consign to the ether. We're just lucky it wasn't the Pets.com ballpark, although maybe Monster Park isn't much better.

*

women 2.0 pitch finals - and the winners

2007-04-26T13:11:00.000-07:00

Last night's Women 2.0 pitch finals attracted an overflow crowd of entrepreneurs, investors, and curious watchers including Justin.tv. It was a remarkably diverse crowd; at least half the presenters were born outside the U.S. and the teams had to be at least half female and under 35.

You couldn't help but be awed by the qualifications of the finalists: Stanford, MIT, Wellesley, Google, Microsoft, Sandisk, Marshall scholars, 24 patents--and that was just the three women from FindYourScene.com.

I was sitting with two engineers, and all of us were surprised at how business-y the crowd was for a tech gathering. I didn't even see anyone else in the audience with a laptop. It reflects Women 2.0's roots, as a spinoff a year ago from Entrepreneur 27, and the omni-presence of Stanford business school and the Silicon Valley investment community.
Flickr pics by itselea

The five teams had been winnowed down from twenty five semi-finalists (including me), and were competing for cash prizes and two private pitch sessions with Tim Draper and Michael Moritz.

FindYourScene is a social network targeted at young urban singles; Upcoming meets Dodgeball with a little Facebook integration thrown in for good measure.

It sounded fun, if hard to achieve critical mass outside urban areas where there's a lot of competition. Like all the products pitched, FindYourScene is a smart idea, one most of us could envision using (or at least trying out).
Laser-Seal is a patented technique for using short-wave lasers to heal wounds.

I was particularly interested in this because my uncle Jim's team at IBM invented the laser surgery technique that Lasik and many other medical innovations is based on. The Laser-Seal team was filled with young but multi-talented individuals: practicing doctors and scientists pursuing Stanford MBAs.

They face a lot of challenges in bringing a product like this to market, first with FDA trials to ensure it works without burning or scarring and then licensing the technique and evangelizing a new medical practice. A woman in hallway said she'd tell Laser-Seal to focus on plastic surgery and set up shop in Brazil :)
O'light uses state of the art OLED (organic light emitting device) to manufacture flexible, transparent, colored products. Yiru Sun of Princeton has been researching OLED for years, and while Sony and Samsung are likely to produce OLED displays in the near future, O'light intends to focus initially on high-end furnishings, where aesthetics are more important than clarity.

This was the weakest set of slides, although virtually all of the teams could have used a graphic designer. But high-end lighting is a visual sell, and I wanted to see pictures of what you could do with transparent, flexible, thin lights. As it turned out, O'light had a few photos, but didn't show them, focusing on bullets and bullets of projections. When asked who their next few hires would be, they said engineers and scientists. My tip to O'light: get a designer onboard now and let them go wild building gorgeous, inventive prototypes and show what this technology can really do.
QT Star intends to be the YouTube of China. Or maybe a more commercially successful Revver. Of all the product ideas presented, this struck me as the largest business opportunity, wrapping video content in tags and providing a revenue split for creator and site.

I found it a bit naive, to talk about user-created content in China without anyone raising issues of censorship or political repercussions for those making and posting videos. (None of the judges even asked about this). And the QT Star team claimed they would capture 2/3 of the market in three years; well, it's good to be an optimist. I do think someone, maybe several someones, will get very rich in this space.
(You)StyleMe is a social shopping website, allowing users to create a digital closet and upload images of their current clothes as well as body style and then receive comments.

This was the best presentation, even though it was at the end of a long night. Amina's a very good speaker, the slides had pictures, and the backgrounds of the founders in Gap retail and Yahoo community development gave me confidence in their ability to make the right partnerships and execute. Even though I've never liked shopping with my mother, and I'd never buy shoes online. I suspect they haven't quite hit the sweet spot in functionality yet, but I'm sure we'll hear more once they refine the feature set. There's money to be made in a more personalized e-commerce experience.

As the judges made their selections, the audience text-messaged our votes. To my surprise, the crowd vote was identical to the judges.

O'light won the audience award with 28% of votes, followed closely by Laser-Seal. I voted for O'light, as I learned afterward did the people I was sitting with. Sometimes an idea captures people's imaginations, and both Laser-Seal and O'light boiled down to something novel but simple. Fix wounds fast, without scarring. Bend colored light. Notably, neither was software.

On the downside, we lost half an hour to technical difficulties (at Macromedia, we used to say the definition of multimedia is anything that makes your presentation start 15 minutes late).

And the format favored the teams presenting to investors in the front row rather than taking questions from the 200 members of the audience. I would have preferred bringing the lights up so we could see the presenters rather than their slides, and be able to tell which of the VCs was asking the questions.

But that's quibbling. The content was great, and the excitement in the room was palpable. And Silicon Valley proves itself again as a center for innovation, fueled in no small part by incredibly smart, ambitious women (and men) who come here from all over the world.

As one of the judges--Carol Sands perhaps--admonished the crowd, "I’d like to see things that change the world." Big ideas, ones you can not only live with for 5 to 10 years while bringing your product to market, but ones that take on the must fix problems of the world around us.

I'm looking forward to seeing what happens with all of these companies, as I move forward with my own mobile product, which I would never have fleshed out if not for having a deadline and this competition.

Many thanks to Shaherose, Shivani, Angie, and Wen-Wen for producing a great event and bringing all the people and pieces together. And for the cupcakes.

blogito ergo sum

2007-04-24T10:57:00.000-07:00

I started this blog a year ago, after resisting for months and months. I was at a startup event at a bar in Palo Alto, trying to explain what user experience was.

Most of my client work is confidential, so I can't really post specs or competitive analysis or screen designs. I thought it might be useful to apply user experience to a wide range of real world problems that we encounter every day, from poorly labeled signs on the freeway to imperfect tea pots. I also had this notion of finishing a book on product design, written in bite-sized pieces.

I was wary of starting a project I couldn't maintain. And as a "real" writer, someone who studied English and journalism, who has a drawer full of rejection slips but also acceptances and checks from print and online publications, I worried that blogging wasn't real writing. That I was diminishing my credibility by giving it away for free.

But it's motivating to have readers who don't know you, even a handful at a time. And there are so many great blogs out there: I'm always inspired when I read Guy Kawasaki. Only now I feel like I know him too. Plus the discipline of writing regularly is very beneficial.

So does this make me a blogger? My definition of a writer has always been someone who writes. Not someone who talks about writing but someone who actually does it. So in that regard, yes.

I can't help feeling that it's the wrong question though. Blogging is a medium. It's an informal, unmediated, self-published one, without editing or oversight.

As an example, I'd never been fond of San Francisco food critic Michael Bauer's reviews. His taste in restaurants is consistently more upscale and European than mine. The writing often felt stilted. He seemed to live in a different city from me. I'd always heard what a great guy he was, though, even though it didn't come through in his reviews.

Then he started a blog, and a different side of him emerged, a more personal, likable voice. And it clearly was the medium or the change in parameters, of not taking his job so seriously, that make him easier to identify with. He's still the same guy whose idea of a Mexican restaurant is paying $4 a taco at Mijita.

The Chron ran a dumb piece recently pitting food bloggers, professional critics, and Yelp reviewers against each other. It offended a great many bloggers, especially those who earned their expertise the old-fashioned way, and it focused on the merits of the medium, rather than the skills of the author.

Reviewing is a sensitive business. The part the Chron missed wasn't that they treated bloggers as second-class critics. Bloggers already know this: aside from a handful of sites focused on ad words more than content, most blogs are labors of love, not income.

It was equating having a blog with posting on a bulletin board that showed their limited understanding. Anyone can create an account and praise or trash a new bar on Yelp or Chowhound after a few (often free) drinks. That doesn't mean you won't find eloquent chefs and wine experts and brilliant critics on discussion boards either.

But it's quite something else to hang out a shingle, sign your name, and show up day after day, pretending you have something to say to strangers. Sometimes you know your readers by name. Sometimes you don't know if anyone's paying attention except the blip in El Carrizal or the insomniac in Sandringham. Writing, as always, is an act of faith.

Anyway, The Daily Interface was meant to be about user experience, a term that's come into vogue with an explosion of wonderful blogs on product design. If there were only a handful of definitive sources on software development, you would have to be the most technical, the most qualified, the most famous, the richest in order to hold court in print. Distribution tends to be hierarchical and reward the world as we know it. The powerful retain control.

Instead every day, we can read a panoply of voices from around the world, sounding off. Sure, some of them are crap. Some are just linking to the same YouTube video or the top story on Digg or a precious photo of a trendy bit of wallpaper. That doesn't take away the energy and creativity and vitality of giving a powerful communications tool to anyone who wants it.

The great part of blogging is the blank page, day after day. Do with it what you will. And don't confuse the medium with the messenger.

*

web 2 entrepreneurs

2007-04-19T12:05:00.000-07:00

After a morning spent scrounging for outlets and whining about the dismal wifi with a Canadian juggler, I enjoyed two complementary (and complimentary) sessions at the Web 2.0 Open track of the Web 2.0 Expo.

Both were hallway presentations by the modest founders of elegantly designed community sites, iStockphoto and Maya's Mom.

Bruce Livingstone described coming up with an idea to allow photographers to trade images online 10 years ago.

"Are we web 2.0?" Bruce asked "1.5?"

E-commerce may not be sexy in this big bad boom, but iStockphoto not only makes money for its shareholders (acquired by Getty Images in 2006)--it provides a livelihood for the many photographers who sell images on the site.

The site has been refined continually since the initial $50,000 investment, moving toward its present model where royalty-free images are sold for an average of $5. Content creators earn 20-50% of the price.

Much of the presentation was devoted to localizing the site, first by adding French, Spanish, and German support and more recently adapting content for Japan.

Bruce and Kelly Thompson both described what they'd learned putting features in front of a vocal community. You have to be willing to give up control. They bucked the trend and decided against ads within the site because "we didn’t want [users] going anywhere else." They receive 35,000 submissions a week and accept roughly 60% of them, reviewed by inspectors hired from the photographers' community.

Tip from Bruce: illustrators do well on the site, much better on a per-image basis than photographers. I know this from my own experience; art elements are generally more reusable than photos.

I've worked on clip art products and used iStockphoto images in marketing promotions and can personally recommend their service. I preferred the interface and lightboxes to using the Getty site, although both have their pluses.

The subjects of iStockphotos look more like real people because they are real people. Bruce and Kelly noted that several of the site's top photographers (of both genders) use their attractive spouses as models.

I'm looking forward to checking out their latest video offerings and curious to see how people are using stock video on the web.

* * *
Next Ann Crady aka Maya's Mom gave a great crash course in ramping up a tech business in a "non-traditional" market.

As we introduced ourselves, several attendees shyly mentioned they were moms and how much they liked the site. Moms rarely get much visibility in the tech world, and this was a notable exception in a conference filled with discussions of Amazon's elastic computing cloud and how socialtext was going to upend the enterprise culture.

With a background in business development at Yahoo, Ann sought initial investment from former colleagues and well-known industry players.

She personally bankrolled a contract developer (who she found using Linked In) until she raised her first real round seven months later at beta. Much of her advice was to focus and stay small, and get your ideas out there before someone else does.

Ann pointed out that most web 2.0 sites are easily copyable, and that you can't really protect ideas. But you can improve features and let the site flourish by putting them in the hands of your users.

"I’m not a big believer in stealth—it’s all about execution and getting to critical mass before other people do.... You can count on being more focused than a large company." She decried the notion that social websites shouldn't need marketing, pointing to Twitter's recent explosion at SXSW as a calculated triumph.

Maya's Mom is still very small, run by fewer than five employees. The design is elegant and deceptively simple, intimate and so far a model for civil discourse online.

"People unfortunately are not honest enough. Everyone who’s founded a company has had hard times, you're just not supposed to admit it."

What impressed me throughout was Ann's focus. Unlike so many founders, she knows what business she's in and why.

Her personal bottom line: "we’re helping people. I am Maya’s mom."

***

As some of you know, I'm working on a startup plan myself and found the discussions heartening and relevant.

This was driven home as I waited for friends in the lobby bar at the W after the conference, surrounded by the Techcrunch entourage, buzzing about what was hot.

Day after day, we're deluged with stories about 22-year-old boy geniuses who sleep until 11, live on Pop Tarts, claim half a million active users in Canadian cities, and get bought by Google for half a billion dollars. It was such a treat to talk with down-to-earth grown ups with a vision (and a business model), who believe in delivering quality and in the community they've personally gathered together.

The bullet point (unaddressed really) that spoke to me most though was in Bruce's slides: "You may need a personality transplant."

the limits (and promise) of livecasting

2007-04-17T17:04:00.000-07:00

I'm home, working on a spec wiki template and watching the Web 2.0 Expo on "TV"--Podtech's remarkable live stream courtesy of UStream.tv And before I get too fussy about content and production values, let me express my admiration for the technology. It's absolutely ready for prime time. The audio is crisp (when the mic is pointed the right way), the images don't stutter. It even works over WiFi. Too bad the connection at NAB's apparently been down.

It reminds me of the first time QuickTime really worked in a browser, or the first audio streaming over the internet: a medium that made sense conceptually but hadn't been available until now. There's no question we're going to see a lot more live video. Justin won't be the last.

Now for the problems:

The fundamental issue is that most of the time, what's happening now isn't all that compelling. In a war zone, during a violent crime, sure. At a conference, not so much. I'd rather watch Cheddarvision. Or read a novel.

Great videos, whether fiction or real world, are edited. Reality TV is cast and edited. ZeFrank is not just broadcasting live and off the cuff.

Then there's the matter of talent. A bunch of web developers sitting on uncomfortable chairs is not the ideal cast for most audiences. They wear jeans and boring shirts and practical shoes. Watch them type. Watch them slouch.

Like you and me, they aren't actors. And most viewers won't recognize them. Who is that man at the podium? Who's the woman to his right? No idea. Maybe you can match them to the tiny photos on their blogs.

They may be articulate, but as anyone who's edited a documentary can tell you, talking heads are boring. It's all about the cutaways. The good news is videobloggers are finally pointing the camera away from themselves.

Just for kicks, I tried watching with audio off. This was fun. I got to focus on doors opening and closing as people left the session in the background. Jeremiah's camera has a lot of depth of field--maybe too much.

I also tried switching browser tabs and listening without watching. This was better for paying attention. I had no idea who was speaking, but most of the time, I couldn't tell that anyway because there were no labels, no overlays.

I wonder what will happen to four solid days of footage after the fact. There's far too much of it to edit into anything meaningful except a montage of quotable quotes. And perhaps more seriously, the video is the documentation--no one's taking notes or inserting markers that I can tell. The way you edit video or audio is by logging the highlights, so you can find them again.

And yet, I couldn't help thinking...what if. Not everyone's as much of a perfectionist as I am. And thank goodness.

It's perfect for videoconferencing, or broadcasting an academic lecture, something without a lot of action-adventure shots. Maybe in the right context, one webcam (with a tripod, or balanced on a laptop or a steady ear) with a good mic can be enough.

The biggest limitation today aside from missing identifiers is the lack of interactivity. For all the claims of social media, the only attention paid was to occasionally (very occasionally) wonder if there were questions from the chat stream. "Maria wants to know if the guy in the front row is single." And then go right back to whatever anyone physically present was talking about.

It's like before we got used to having meetings with people on speakerphones, and stopped to pause now and then, so they could get a word in edgewise.

Chat's probably not the way this will work in the future. The performance is also notably better on the Web 2.0 Expo site than on Ustream's page with the Java chat window.

As I'm typing this, I'm hearing Robert or Jeremiah remark that there are more people watching online than in many of the sessions.

All this has whet my appetite for real conversation. Tomorrow I'm going to hop on BART and actually go to the expo. No telling if it will be better in person, or in browser. It is exciting to have the option.

anti-social media

2007-04-12T20:59:00.000-07:00

Now that we all have hundreds of accounts on web 2.0 sites and thousands of virtual friends, it's time to start implementing more anti-social features.

unfriending
A few weeks ago, I got a Linked In request from someone I didn't remember. It was a company I worked at years ago, and I wasn't sure, so I said yes. I then watched as this person added 50 connections one day, 70 the next.

How do I un-friend the guy? But of course I hesitate unlinking him altogether, because he's collected the whole universe and I'm only one connection away...

nemesis
On review sites like Chowhound or Yelp, there are people who give terrible advice. Social media sites are filled with functions that allow you to follow people you like. And you can report stalkers, effectively banning them from contacting you.

But how do you designate someone as your polar opposite without telling them their taste sucks? Your idea of a great bar is Pink; you love Blowfish Sushi and House of Nanking. I want a feature that lets me always do the opposite of what you recommend.

selective presence
Instant messaging's been around a long time. I've been using it since my friend Martin wrote a Mac version of the Unix Finger command in 1990. We mounted an unsuccessful grassroots campaign to persuade Farallon product management that interrupting people over the network was a viable product. That's an eternity in the tech world, so IM etiquette is more developed, and there are better stealth features.

You can avoid people who don't understand you're in the middle of something, who want to "drop by" and chat even when your boss is sitting 2 feet from your 20" monitor. But lurking is bad form too, one step away from cyberstalking.

The problem with all these relationships is that we're better at hooking up with virtual friends than breaking up with them--or merely asking for space.

sobriety filter
There's another level of hiding that mySpace would do well to incorporate, and that's the ability to exclude embarrassing photos and drunken confessions from officials, prospective employers, and parents. Maybe it's really a ban or time-delay on posting, monitored by a USB breathalyzer attachment. If you exceed the legal limits, your drunken mumblings are recorded and saved, so you can watch them tomorrow hungover and repentant.

I know, grumble grumble grumble. You should see how I get after two hours without a text message or e-mail. My life without online connections is unimaginable. But being tracked makes me cranky too, unless I'm in control of all the settings.

*

better luck next time

2007-04-10T17:18:00.000-07:00

Another episode of the ever-popular "This website is closed for business."

There's the aptly named gimme20:

No chow for you:

See you later?

And there's always, "it's all your fault," from our friends at Adult Swim.

*

designing for cavemen

2007-04-07T22:54:00.000-07:00

Last week, The New York Times interviewed the VP of innovation for Master Lock about a new product he was developing.

WHEN overseeing consumer focus groups of high school students, Steve Hedlund pays closer attention when the deeper voices start talking. “Teen girls, they’re too polite” to say they don’t like a product, said Mr. Hedlund, vice president for growth and innovation at Master Lock, based in Milwaukee. “It’s always the teen boys that are the litmus test.”

This story ran April 1st. Unfortunately it wasn't an April Fool's joke. Available only to TimesSelect subscribers.

Let's try this again. He held focus groups, but the girls were too polite to say what they really thought. So he only listened to the boys?

Good thing this guy has a job at Master Lock, because he’s a moron. He just left half his potential market on the table rather than hold a separate group, or politely encourage the girls to say what they really thought.

On the plus side, he validated his customer requirements: loud boys like big expensive locks. Guess girls only buy wimpy pink locks, for well-mannered princesses.

Now I’m not even sure who I’m more outraged on behalf of: teen-aged girls; polite people; quiet focus group attendees; or just cultural minorities. And maybe this is more apparent to me than usual, because I've been designing products targeted at young girls and women.

How often is product design and its validation process self-limiting because of the assumptions of the designer? What's the cost in lost sales for ignoring huge segments of your market?

If you ask a bunch of a guys who are into sports if they like a cell phone that shows sports scores, they’ll probably say “Yeah! Bring it on!” You can hold your focus group in Wyoming for diversity's sake, and maybe they’ll ask for rodeo scores in addition to baseball stats. (This example comes from a prominent local design firm sharing their insights discovered from market testing.)

Now if they’d held a focus group that included women (maybe a few rude, outspoken ones), they might have found out women want something besides (or in addition to) men’s sports scores on their phone.

But did they ask? Could they not hear that soft-spoken female over the squeaky wheel? Or did they only listen to the deepest voice, which portrayed the world exactly as they themselves saw it? Crudely.

*
A quick note on Don Imus’ offensive remarks this week. I’m thrilled that Imus denigrating female college athletes as "nappy-headed hos" stirred up a firestorm. Unfortunately it’s apparently only unacceptable to be a racist. No one so far has complained that he called them “hos.”

no such thing as a free lunch

2007-04-05T10:55:00.000-07:00

What is it with startups? Do they really believe free food turns out better products or will make their stock price go as high as Google?

For example Sharpcast has banners on its site--not for its software, but advertising free food for its 25 employees. (And look! we hire women!)

And Palantir has lunch and often dinner, or so they claim.

When I worked at Farallon Computing, our fridge was full of Calistogas and beer, right next to the washer-dryer. That made it harder to forget the fateful day the founder drove up in a new sportscar and announced at the company meeting there would be no more free sodas. This was right after we put our name on the building with views of the Golden Gate Bridge. It signaled the beginning of hard times, a return to reality.

What are you spending your money on? When times get tough, will you take away the espresso pods, or the marketing department? Croissants or usability testing? Because surely it will come down to that.

More prudent companies I worked for had bagels and fresh OJ one day a week; they charged 25 cents for sodas; they brought in ice cream for special occasions or got Red Vines from Costco rather than all out catering. (And Americans want to know why we don't fit into airline seats!)

But the real issue is appreciation. If you get it for free all the time, you take it for granted.

Now I am hardly one to argue against good food. At my last staff job, I spent a year compiling all the lunch spots within a mile. And the first thing I check out about a new company is their tea selection.

But it's healthy--dare I say mature--to leave your desk for lunch. And dinner. We are not hamsters. I know, Mark Zuckerberg thinks everyone over 25, everyone who has somewhere else to be besides work is old and useless. Let him eat ramen.

That time you spend away from your computer clears your mind and makes space for new ideas. It keeps your body healthy and gives you a different context for knowing your co-workers. It means when you're back in the office, you're less distracted by all the errands you don't have time to run.

I want to invest my time in a company that spends money on the right things rather than burning through lasagna every day. You may be hiring recent grads but never stop planning for the long term.

*

seeing the big picture

2007-04-03T15:17:00.000-07:00

The San Francisco Film Society just announced the program for its upcoming festival, the 50th anniversary of the oldest film festival in the Western Hemisphere.

Unfortunately ordering tickets is an exhausting chore because the website doesn't let you see the list of films and the overall schedule at the same time. Nor can you scroll through the entire list of films; you must page.

If you go to the film's details page, you can see all the times it plays but not what else is playing at the same time, or adjacent to it. Then you jump over to the schedule, which is zoomed in to a specific date (Friday, April 27 say, at 10 a.m.) and doesn't even show all the venues for that date without having to page. Sigh. Another failure of information design.

The way I usually handle this offline is I pick up two copies of the printed program (if I can find them). I read all the descriptions, circling those of interest. These are listed alphabetically.

Then I take my alpha list, which I usually have to transcribe by hand to get 143 options down to the 10 or 11 I'm likely to see. And I try to match this refined list to the schedule, which is a two-page spread that I pull from the second copy. Ideally I book two or three movies in a row. Sometimes I do something crazy, like try to get from one screening across town to a different one.

(Of course there's nothing unusual about any of this. Online shopping from a catalog requires a similar back and forth: red boots? with a black dress? Oh, not in my size.)

Going back and forth between curiosity and viability, I winnow my choices to a manageable order, using a few critical criteria that I think of as cinematic affirmative action:

See films from countries I've never seen films from before.
Avoid films with distributors or major stars, which will open the week after the festival.
Always go to the silents. San Francisco is lucky to have not only a grand old movie palace with a Wurlitzer organ, but silent restorations sell out its 1000 seats. There's nothing quite like seeing "The It Girl" or "Intolerance" on a giant screen with live accompaniment and a roaring crowd.

The online version of the festival program doesn't support any of this process. When you go to purchase tickets (which incidentally non-members can't do for another two days), you get a shopping cart, but not until then. Just try to remember what interests you and when it's playing in the mean time.

But hey, they have rollovers with bios of the directors. And video clip previews. This is all well and cool. Although if there's a scheduling conflict, I don't care how cute the director is.

Now, do you have those boots in a 7 narrow?

*
As a postscript, the Web 2.0 Expo had the same problem with its session calendars. You had to go back and forth between times, descriptions, and locations. The only viable way to do it was with a printout and a computer. Not that hard a problem to solve...but pervasive in the mean time.

fear of a blank planet

2007-04-01T13:14:00.000-07:00

About the worst thing for a social media site is for it to feel empty. It's like a bad restaurant or nightclub. You're endangering your reputation just by being there.

Happytxt looks like a perfectly nice site, until you realize you're the only one there. Not ideal for a site devoted to moody behavior. Feeling frisky? Sorry, it's just you. Suicidal? The echo reminds you we're all alone.

Equally when you start up a new application, you don't want to be faced with a blank page. Word has been known to induce writers' block. That's ostensibly why Microsoft added the project gallery templates, which overwhelm you with possibilities instead of whiteness.

If I sold iPods, they would come with a few songs on them, so that you could understand how the menus worked and your first experience would be playing music. Not buying a TV show or ripping a CD or setting the clock. Playing a song. Pandora gets this right.

Mobile application developers are increasingly figuring out that the best way to encourage someone to use a feature is to provide an example--a text message, a voice mail, a Twitter from an invisible "friend." Okay, that activation sequence is only to make sure you entered your phone number and e-mail address correctly, not because they like you.

Maybe it's because the interfaces on phones tend to be so deep and obscure, and the features unfamiliar that we need to see how it works before we decide to attempt it ourselves. Or maybe it's just a fear of being alone. Communication technology is supposed to bring us closer together, right?

*

sequencing

2007-03-27T19:25:00.000-07:00

I'm always amused by classes and certification in project management. While there are definitely tips that are useful to know, for the most part sequencing is either something you instinctively know how to do or you don't.

Years ago, I worked on Time Line, the superb project management software product that was an industry standard. Unfortunately Symantec miscalculated, first by underestimating Microsoft and then by hastily buying a personal information manager and rebranding it Time Line for Windows.

Loyal Time Line users were appalled; you couldn't do real resource leveling or forecasting. And everyone else continued the march toward Project, despite the fact that the first version was unusable. Time Line for Windows and Mac 2.0 was going to solve all that. Except that it never shipped.

The more important lesson I learned though, was that project management software is like a vitamin or a health club membership. You can buy it for someone but that doesn't make them a manager. And if they don't actually use it, they won't upgrade. I bought one of my most charming employees software to help him get organized too; it didn't work.

I do enjoy creating Gantt charts for forecasting. They impress executives even if you can spend all your time trying to maintain them, as your schedule slips and the tasks are all still at 80 and 90% done but you don't want the end date to move to 2008. Because you know, that last 10% takes 90% of the schedule.

The test of a real project manager is simple. You don't even need a white board, my preferred project management tool. All you need is a feast. Thanksgiving is good, or Easter brunch.

Prepare a meal for 20 in a small kitchen that includes stuffing a turkey or a whole ham, gravy, sides, dessert, alcohol, and non-alcoholic options for your recovering friends. Do it on a fixed budget. With one oven that hasn't been used in a year and a broken burner.

Your cousin brings his vegan girlfriend. Your boss calls and asks if you still have room for her. And her toddler. You hide the Ukrainian Easter eggs you carefully batiked at midnight.

Most software projects are more complicated than Thanksgiving or Easter, at least technically. But how well you plan for them and adapt to the inevitable crises (who do you send for crushed ice? who else do you know with folding chairs?) says a lot about your style as a project manager. Along with how everyone feels when it's all over. I wouldn't hire anyone to manage a project who couldn't pass Easter brunch. Would you?

*

the return of the plug in

2007-03-25T17:05:00.000-07:00

I've been getting an increased number of invitations to download software lately. Many of them are updates, tiny dot releases for something I might have tried once and now have a disabled toolbar for. Some are plug ins, others desktop apps. My browser's even been crashing again. Shades of 1997. Who's to blame?

These updates started out as minor annoyances. A new version of Adium. iTunes 7.1.2. StumbleUpon 3.0.4. What does MyStickies do again? And why do I need a new Second Life?

I said yes for a while. But half the time, the dot release was as unreliable as what preceded it. Sometimes the downloader and extraction don't get all the way through, so next time I fire up the app, I get another reminder. At least learn to write a reliable updater.

Free software and open source are all well and good, as long as they work. But you only get one crash before you get uninstalled. (Take that firedoodle. A fine idea, but I am not your QA manager.)

Apple gets this right for the most part. The updater works behind the scenes, once a week in the middle of the night. It asks before it takes over your computer. You can skip the latest iTunes update, and the one after that. Plus I know who Apple is.

Mostly it's a matter of whether users think your product is essential to their productivity and how urgently they need a patch. If your current build won't survive another week, you didn't test enough before releasing it. And that's no way to make a reputation for your company.

*

location location location

2007-03-23T11:15:00.000-07:00

Call it a pet peeve. Or if you prefer, one of my top tips for improving website conversions, right after making sure you have a clearly visible call to action. But one of the most significant things about the internet is how far reaching it is, a global yellow pages that lets you converse with people from Cheyenne to Shanghai.

So what's the problem?

You can't assume site visitors know where you are. Try finding a contact address on many websites. You'd be surprised how hard this can be.

Ironically this extends to companies trying to hire people. You have stock options and free organic snacks. You need a Ruby programmer. Cool. None of this matters if you're in Boulder and I'm not. You don't have to be an e-commerce site to reveal where you are.

The missing information isn't directions. Most of the time, I won't need to know how to find you from the interstate.

Rather it's one of context: where are you? Are you the Pepe's Pizza in New Haven or in Albuquerque?

The world may be getting smaller, moving toward a strictly knowledge-based economy. But not that fast. An address in your footer will do nicely.

*

feelings of abandonment

2007-03-21T15:01:00.000-07:00

I got e-mail from the Zagat people reminding me that their deadline was approaching. So I obligingly rated 10 new restaurants to get a free book.

As always, I grumbled about the ethnic restaurants that never make it on the list because their immigrant owners don't know about marketing; and the brand new yuppie spots that do because their owners do.

Then I clicked Submit.

"Thank you!" the page said. "Now please rank your top 5 restaurant choices from 1 to 5."

Er huh? Anointing my favorite place to eat in San Francisco? I hadn't even reviewed my top 5 restaurants so they weren't on the list. And ranking is exhausting.

Close window.

How often does survey design result in abandonment? and why do you lose people?

Here I'd done quite a bit of work to get a free book (on top of my free Zagat.com subscription, which I got from the NY Times). And I was frustrated enough to walk away. I don't know if they even saved my painstakingly entered quotable quotes.

Before you gather data from people or send website users down a path, set appropriate expectations for how long it will take and what they will need beforehand.

One example of how to do this right is Intuit. TurboTax recommends you gather needed documents before you get to the computer screen that asks for them. It's a little like reminding infrequent airline passengers to keep their IDs and boarding passes out because you're standing in a line where you'll be asked to show them. Basic, but still a good reminder.

Another company that deserves praise is Zogby International, whose online surveys tell you not just how long each will take but also how far along you are. They even count the thank you page as part of the task so the percentages are generous estimates. It makes you feel smart: they asked for ten minutes but the task only takes six.

When you're done, they offer you something to download, a report on whether NASCAR dads who celebrate Easter consider themselves members of the investor class.

And that's the real irony: because I don't feel like they wasted my time, I'm more likely to spend extra time browsing around their website afterward.

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this website is closed

2007-03-19T17:55:00.000-07:00

A new gallery of shame, following the popularity of last fall's Off the Air.

Today, Twitter twitched violently, a victim of SXSW excess, and the error, if you could get it, was predictably urgent:

Technorati entered the fray with its borked warning:

And still suffering from a yearlong unusable beta in the mail department came this indecipherable message from Yahoo!:

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in pursuit of surprise

2007-03-18T15:05:00.000-07:00

August Coppola, then dean of creative arts at San Francisco State, famously declared "you can't tickle yourself." I thought of him last week at BayCHI, listening to Tim Westergren and Dan Lythcott-Haims talk about Pandora's origins, following a fascinating presentation by Gideon D'Arcangelo on how strongly we identify with pop music.

I've been listening to Pandora on and off since November 2005. And like most of us, I've used lots of recommendation engines including iTunes' and Amazon's, both literal and poor. Why is Pandora so much better at tickling? Are ears easier to fool? Or is it the human element, that songs are categorized not just by people but by actual musicians?

One of the smart aspects of Pandora is it mixes the familiar with the unfamiliar. So I'm not thrown out into the world of artists I've never heard of without a raft. If you say you like Patti Smith, you get Patti Smith. Along with your not-Patti sound-alikes.

It's also a matter of granularity. A song is more indicative of taste than an album or a book. I don't like everything Toni Morrison wrote any more than I like all of Nabokov.

Perhaps it helps that radio is a medium we don't traditionally have much control over. It just plays. This coming week, KFOG is playing its annual A to Z by song. Which sounds suspiciously like letting the deejays go on vacation and letting the iPod scroll. But the results are fun anyway. Shuffling really does create a new kind of order.

Take the same model and apply it to other avenues with mixed results. Let a chef who's never cooked for me make anything he or she wants? Depends on the chef. Ask my mom to pick out a magazine subscription? Harder than it sounds. Most of us are better judges of our own fancy than someone else's.

How easy are you to shop for? And more important, how open are you to artists you've never heard of? The more idiosyncratic, the better.

The challenge is how to create a wish list, a recipe for what makes you happy, but then forget about it--long enough that the results cycle back to surprise and delight you.

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The Daily Interface is now included in the wonderful design-feed aggregator.

twenty questions

2007-03-14T10:23:00.000-07:00

I work on all phases of product development, but ultimately product definition is my favorite. In theory, you should know what kind of a creature you're building before you get too far. At least you have to if you were designing hardware or a skyscraper.

Software of course changes all of that. You can build it first and decide later what it's good for. Let people try it out. Twist it all around, or find some different group of customers and tailor it for them.

This sounds like fun, right? Especially for creative or subversive types, who don't want to be constrained by specs or building models or gravity.

And it is fun, to be flexible in feature design and product concept as you try out different ideas on real customers. (What's your business model again? How are you going to pay for all this?)

No matter how well you solve a design problem up front, the market may change by the time you put the first prototypes in the hands of customers. Sometimes the context changes radically, and you have to rethink the feature set for a different market. Transformative technologies often arise this way, solving a different problem than they were intended for.

But this doesn't mean you shouldn't have a really clear picture of business and user requirements before you start. What problem are you solving again? For which set(s) of people? Is it a cineplex or a bungalow? A lemonade stand or a subscription service?

You'd be amazed at how far products and services get without plausible answers to most of these questions. Sometimes they get all the way to launch, an amorphous collection of features that does something just cool enough that investors and beta testers are willing to pony up applause and a few checks.

And sure, lightning can strike twice in the same place. But why risk your success on your ability to improvise, when someone else might recognize your brilliant idea, focus on it, and run with it?

Business requirements don't have to take a year to research or a team of management consultants or a locked down spec. Sometimes all you need is a sketch to ensure your vision is shared, and realized in a recognizable form. Think of it as an investment in intellectual property. Yours.

guys & dolls

2007-03-12T17:51:00.000-07:00

"Hi guys" seems like a pretty innocent salutation. But in honor of Women's History Month, I'll argue it tends to be self-fulfilling. When a man posted "hi guys" to a list I belong to this morning, asking for help with a design problem, I decided not to answer.

Language both describes and constrains. When you say, "I need to find the right guy for the job," usually this means you're going to hire a man. Why? Not because you have anything against women, but because, well, you're looking for a guy.

Yeah, I know lots of you have strong, smart wives and girlfriends and sisters, and you're tired of being beaten up over politically correct language. You think "man" is gender neutral. And you'll do fine as long as you don't care about forgoing half your potential market.

If you envision your customers as men, don't be surprised when women avoid your products. Even if you later market directly to them on girlie websites or ads in fashion magazines.

Now I'm not looking for a pink laptop or a cocktail for women's delicate palates. Remember that women buy shoes and cars and iPods not just for ourselves but for our families. Every time I open an in-flight magazine, I feel as if I've time-traveled back to the 70s, when business travelers really were nearly all men.

Case in point: I've been searching for a digital SLR for a while, and at a recent trade show, I made my way to the front of the Canon booth and asked to hold the smallest dSLR they sold. It was far too big and heavy for my hands.

Guess their user requirements said "guy" and the designers tried it (they were guys) and it worked. Or maybe they don't think women spend money on electronics. Wrong on both counts. The money's still burning a hole in my pocket(book), guys.

This cuts both ways, of course. My cousin Keith teaches elementary school, which is a women's world. Or so they claim. I'm not arguing here about brain differences; rather about behavior patterns, and how easy it is to alienate potential customers by not recognizing their needs.

Next time you describe your target users, really visualize them and live inside their worlds. Visit their offices and homes. Find out what they read. Go beyond the stereotypes, including assuming that women and girls will relate to the guys you portray as heroes. Real-world requirements produce services and products that perform better for all your users.

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social currency

2007-03-09T15:47:00.000-08:00

One of my first freelance jobs in San Francisco was editing the handbook for the Kerista commune. Kerista, known by their storefront Utopian Technology as well as by their computer business Abacus, had a lot of rules. They included regulations about openness and best friend identity clusters and the famous rotational sleep cycle.

A favorite rule of thumb was how friendship is like a bank account. If an old friend comes to town, they still have credit with you, and maybe even interest. Conversely, if the last time you saw a long lost relative, you fought or they borrowed money, that's your starting point now. After all, you have history together, and that's what you remember.

Social networks start from a slightly different place, especially those that depend on virtual relationships. But they function like currency just the same.

How I feel about being approached by a relative stranger on Linked In or Chowhound may depend on your reputation (are you famous? well connected? do you have great taste in sushi or startups?). It may also depend on how I feel about strangers.

Some people love to collect friends and have huge social circles. To them, a new friend comes with money in the bank. Pessimists may take the opposite approach; they fear what a stranger wants from them. (Has anyone created a social network for pessimists yet? Maybe this?)

I prefer to keep my contacts close and safe, and meaningful. My public social networks rarely include my closest friends and family. If I want to find out what's happening with friends, I'd rather see them in person than look at their Flickr pictures or Facebook updates. Maybe that makes me weird, or old fashioned, but I spend enough time online. And I like real life, flesh and blood.

The way contacts are handled on most social sites reminds me of collecting girl scout badges or clipping coupons. The friends themselves have become currency.

This is not to say I don't practice it myself, or that I haven't made numerous friends and colleagues online. But I will never have as many MySpace friends as Barack Obama, which suits me fine. Who's counting?

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the nowness of you

2007-03-06T11:35:00.000-08:00

We took nearly six hundred photos in ten days in Korea. (That's nothing of course. A Korean designer I met took nine thousand during a month in Europe.)

I posted 25 pictures to Flickr the first night. I love the process of sitting down and reviewing the day, especially when you've seen and experienced so much.

Keith asked whether I was going to send a link to our family. It was hard to explain why exactly I felt squeamish about doing so, but I said no, that we should wait until we got back. And I held out, believing that waiting would lead to a better overall experience, allowing us to shape a better story.

Writers fall into many camps about revisions. Some revise perpetually. Wordsworth famously rewrote "The Prelude," his great epic poem, from 1805 to 1850. We studied the two versions side by side in college, and it's clear he didn't know when to stop. Like most critics, I vastly preferred the original.

Publication cycles have gotten shorter and shorter with first cable TV and then the internet. We're much more interested in what's happening now, more impatient to see results. But how often would we be better often waiting a little, until all the salient facts emerge?

What you lack in the moment is perspective. Now I have excellent editorial judgment--I'm good at choosing the best 25 out of 97 photos on the spot, or a reasonable approximation. Living in the moment isn't about being a perfectionist; rather it's largely about knowing what's good enough.

But each time you add another 30 or 40 pictures, the selection reshuffles. Meanwhile the attention span of your viewers remains the same. You'll get 3 to 5 minutes at best from them. Only the most dedicated of fans want every moment documented.

Journalism after all is a culling process: highlighting what's important at the time, and later rethinking and recontextualizing it. What seems exciting in the heat of the moment may dull by light of day, after you've seen another five perfectly preserved temples.

In the end, the set of 90 photos I chose the day I got home wasn't that different from the one I might have published as I went along. But the few I changed made all the difference.

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Korean for dummies

2007-03-04T11:55:00.000-08:00

A friend gave me a Berlitz Korean phrase book before I left for Asia. The Korean language shares little in common with Chinese or Japanese; there have been attempts to link it with Hungarian.

For me it was startlingly unfamiliar. (Quick: how do you say "yes" and "no" in Korean? "thank you"? "hello"?)

The Berlitz book didn't help much. It was huge! And true to its name, the answers came mostly in complete sentences. Teach me the important words (the four phrases above plus "toilet," "water," and "English menu"), and at least I have a foothold. But 10 days later we were still struggling with excuse me (to get attention) versus excuse me (sorry).

Worse, it was a perfect illustration of a translation rather than a localization. I doubt its authors spent much time Korea.

Sure, there was a section on Korean foods. But we could not find the word "delicious." And you had to scramble to find that most important of phrases, "not spicy." The situations we found ourselves in--trying to avoid stairs, looking for restaurants with chairs rather than sitting cross-legged on pillows on the floor, far-sighted cabdrivers who had never heard of our hotel--were not covered.

Korean for Dummies would reuse the cover of the book as a quick reference card. It would have only the words you really really need to know. There would be sections on recovering from smog, and obtaining a larger towel at the bathhouse.

I had a Berlitz Italian phrase book once that skipped quickly from "may I dance with your sister?" to "Will you marry me?" It was a section of a multi-lingual phrase book I used on my first railpass trip across Europe. I learned how to say "beautiful" and "expensive" in French, German, Italian, and Dutch. I suggest a more thorough language immersion before wedding a complete stranger though.

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