Yummy or Crummy?

Here’s a list of skills essential for a designer to take on a more strategic role rather than a tactical one, from Luke Wroblewski’s Functioning Form.

I would add one more to this list:

Learn to build consensus.
It’s essential to approach these high-level meetings with stakeholders as a chance to get everyone on the same page. If you’re a good designer, your solution will always be gounded on long- and short-term business objectives. What separates you as a good strategist is your skill to corral disparate organizational needs and allow your client to shoot for the same goal as a group. If everyone feels like they’re heard during strategy phase, it builds a good foundation for when you get into actual design and implementation. The client will trust you and you will feel like you’re working together. But if you come off as an outside expert who’s telling them what’s best for them, there will always be somebody who will make a point of diagreeing with you, and you’re in for a rocky project. Sometimes it’s not even about design. It comes down to involving the client and making them feel invested in the process.

Something else about this topic in general… I’m just starting to learn how to lead these strategic meetings with high-level stakeholders, and I want to stress that this and other skills that Luke lists on his post are all learnable. I think many designers fall in the trap of thinking that they’re somehow more authentic than those in the suit talking strategy, and it’s not their role, or they can’t because “it’s not me” to speak in business terms. I myself used to associate “strategy” with something a little negative, because I felt that real value was in a solid design and implementation rather than just talking about something to death. But now I realize that in order to win bigger clients and have a meaningful impact as a designer, you have to share a strategic vision with the client as well. As someone who’s always been tactical, the learning curve has been pretty steep. Fortunately I have great coworkers who can teach me a few points and keep a very collaborative environment internally, so we’re able to brainstorm almost daily about how best to improve as a group in this direction. Hopefully soon I’ll be able to share some of the things we collectively learned.

House Members Eat at Food-Stamp Level for a Week

This segment on NPR‘s All Things Considered last night reminded me of some of what we used to do in college. It’s a common design technique to try to put yourself in your target audience’s shoes, and/or to observe your users in the context in which they use your product. It’s the central idea in the user-centered design principles.

It is a gimmick, but there is a reality to it right now… Nonetheless, this is what I’m eating on for a week, and I have a new appreciation, and in that sense it’s not a gimmick.

It’s nothing new, I just thought it was interesting that politicians are using it, and the mainstream media picking it up. Of course it’s a part publicity stunt, but this congresswoman sounds pretty genuine about her desire to understand the reality of the people she’s serving.

OK, I’m now back from the Google Analytics training. Unfortunately I cannot talk about a lot of the things covered there, because it’s either soon-to-be-released secrets by Google or their internal company info that they would rather not share with the public.

It was great to meet the folks from Google, and take in all the good information they had to feed us. I’m still very much new to GA, so it was good for me to learn about what it can do and how everyone else is using it. It really is a whole different way to make decisions about your site. As a design-oriented person, I’m trained to rely on problem-solving methodologies and the best practices that are supposed to yield good results. And yes, admittedly, that sometimes includes gut instincts that could be proven wrong from time to time. GA, and to a greater extent their new product Website Optimizer, if used right, eliminate the guessing work because the numbers are all there. There’s really no reason to waste time talking about which one is the best solution. It’ll be so easy to implement testing that will tell you exactly what the best solution is. I’m not saying these tools will make designers obsolete — instead, I’m hopeful that these products will be yet another tool in a good designer’s toolset. It’s another reason to collaborate with marketers, statisticians, developers to create the best user experience possible, and keep iterating on your success because the target is always moving.

It was also nice to hear about how Google anticipates the Optimizer to be the next big thing for them. They are excited about the product, and it was great to hear them encourage us and others to give them lots of feedback as well as ideas about how the tool can be improved. They recognize the importance of integration partners like us to spread the use of a new product, so it was great to get the sense that they value our opinions.

Overall a very good trip — I had fun, and I feel like I learned a lot. Now my challenge is to share what I learned with my co-workers, and inspire them to feel the same way!

POP has been a Google Analytics partner for a while. Every year Google hosts a training/conference for all the partners to attend. This year, with the new UI/features for the analytics tools and the new Optimizer being unveiled, our search and analytics guy thought someone from the user experience team should take part and share in on all the learning.

So — I’m off to Mountain View for Thursday and Friday this week. Will try to take some photos if I can, but I’m really not sure what to expect since this will be my first time!

I used TurboTax to do my taxes for the last 3-4 years, but this year I was attracted by what seemed like a cheaper alternative, TaxCut from H&R Block.

It sucks ass. If you’re tempted to use it, don’t do it.

The UI sucks ass. It tries to be easy to use, but in various ways it fails to be as easy as it could be — or as easy as TurboTax.

The software sucks ass. Sometimes you find yourself clicking a button to tell the software to do something it probably should know to do on its own. I bought a CD version, and it required some updates to be downloaded before I could finish.

The cost sucks ass. I bought it because I thought it included the cost to e-file Federal tax, but all it did was prepare my forms for me. I could have done that for free with Turbo Tax online, I think. I admit I was too lazy to do all the necessary research, but it shouldn’t be that confusing, either.

Conclusion: TaxCut sucks ass.

Lucretia’s old phone was getting REALLY crappy — some buttons stopped working, and the battery wasn’t charging well. It was time to switch, which meant that we could finally look outside of Cingular. After doing some research, we settled on T-Mobile since their selection of phones was decent, plus she was really set on getting a PEBL.

I probably could have kept my SonyEricsson S710a, which I really liked. But the battery on that was dying as well, so I decided to take this opportunity to switch to something else. I think in general, SonyEricsson has the best phones. Nice, satisfying industrial design, better-than-average UI, and great features. It’s just that North American carriers don’t sell any of their good phones, and you end up paying a lot if you want an unlocked one. As expected, T-Mobile didn’t have any SE phones that I wanted, so I chose the next best thing — the relatively recently released BlackBerry Pearl.

My first impression is that it’s slick. Shiny and slippery — but not in a bad way. The buttons are small, but with a stick phone you deal with it. The back cover on mine comes off a bit too easily, although I talked to a friend who has one and his is too tight. Go figure.

The namesake feature — the “pearl” trackball in the middle is easy to use, and it’s pretty good for scrolling down a long list, which the BlackBerry UI has many of. I’m afraid of wearing it out with constant use. If the trackball breaks, I guess I can use the keypad as the directional pad (which I just discovered) — but that’s no fun at all.

So I’m assigning both “Yummy” and “Crummy” to this post — because there are some things I like about the Pearl, and there are some things I definitely don’t like.

Yummy

• Email — I hooked up my personal and work emails, and they come in with no problem (I had to play with the work email a bit, but it didn’t take very long). I realize I’m not away from a computer all that much, but it’s still nice to be able to read quick emails when I’m sitting on the couch or whatever. Plus it’s great when you are actually away.
• Camera — has a flash. Not perfect, but better than nothing.
• Browser — I haven’t played with the settings, but it looks like I can tweak it to make the pages look more like they do in real browsers. I got T-Mobile’s unlimited internet access, which seems to work in most places that I would go, and the speed is not bad for a phone.
• Address book — can handle many fields. It even kept the notes field from my Mac address book.

Crummy

• Camera — no video! WTF?
• Bluetooth — doesn’t seem to be able to receive anything. It can send, though. This may be due to some settings I don’t know about, but it should work out of the box.
• Browser — can’t display Flash. No YouTube on the go for me.
• Email — can’t handle attachments other than images. I sent myself an MP3, but no go. Do I need to install something? It’s not clear. UPDATE: Since I wrote this, I have opened a .doc attachment on BB. Haven’t been able to open a large PDF, and still no luck with MP3. To clarify, MP3 plays on the phone, if you manage to put it in the right folder. I just can’t get the phone to recognize the file in email attachment.
• Clock/calendar — when I flew to Chicago for Christmas, the phone detected that the network’s timezone changed. But the phone’s clock wouldn’t automatically change! According to this messageboard found by another friend, it’s so that your calendar doesn’t get messed up. Dumb!

Overall, I must say I miss my S710a in a lot of ways. I would consider switching back if the battery on it wasn’t so dead and the email didn’t work so well on the Pearl. But the emails keep popping in no problem, and now I can see why people get addicted to it. Any free moment I have, I reach in my pocket and start playing. I really should do my homework and read up on how everything works and maybe download/install some add-ons — so my impression may change over time after I take the full advantage of all of its features. I just hope SE phones will have penetrated the market better by the time I consider switching to a new phone after this one!

I know, I know. Everyone else blogging about getting a Wii used that spelling. But I can’t help it. It’s just so exciting. I feel so shallow and silly for being excited about a video game console. Maybe it’s the fact that Lucretia and I won it in a raffle at my employer’s holiday party. It was the top prize of the night, and we had won the DS (would have been our second one) prior to the Wii drawing — but when our number was called for Wii, I jumped up and returned the DS for Wii. I didn’t want to be a prize hog!

Anyway, the gameplay is sweet. It’s amazing how sensitive the controller is. A slight turn of your wrist is all you need to tweak your bowling or golf swing. And I can easily believe all the reports of people getting injured and breaking stuff while playing the game. (I already banged our Wiimote on the low ceiling. It doesn’t seem to be broken just yet, though!)

Here’s Lucretia playing tennis. And yes, I was planning on gutting it out with our old POS TV, but now with Wii in the house, I may have to upgrade soon.

And to add to the excitement, Wii now has a web browser. Hmm — I can watch a Flash video of a show on YouTube using the Wii browser on my TV. Love how everything comes back full circle…

And finally, these are our Miis.

IDEA 2006 is here. Wasn’t sure what to expect — all sessions sounded promising enough, but you know how these events go. This is the first year, so as far as that goes I think everything has been running well, and speakers all seem well prepared, and they’re all well spoken. Unlike the Webvisions, it is about ideas and high trends. No talks about practical applications, but it’d still be nice to get some consumable take-aways at the end of each session. They talk for an hour and you’d think they’d repeat the three things everyone should remember at the end. None of them explicitly did that, but Linda Stone’s talk was well structured enough that you got her message (you were sleeping if you didn’t), and David Guiney from National Park Service had a really sincere, memorable approach to his presentation. Others were pretty standard, I thought.

Linda Stone, opening keynote

• Our world is becoming noisier
• World is craving meaningfulness
• Sweetspot of a “phenomenon” is where human desire meets a product or a message that resonates with the desire — meaning a product/service might be great, but in order to take off, it needs to come at a time that coincides with our general consiousness
• From ’65 to ’85, the trend was me-me-me, self expression, creativity, and personal productivity
• From ’85 to recent years, we trusted the network, being connected
• Being always connected, always on means we’re scanning for activity — don’t want to miss something
• Linda calls this “paying continuous partial attention”
• But we’re all getting overwhelmed, leading to unfulfilled experience
• So we seek higher quality of information, higher quality of life
• We don’t totally give up trends from the past eras, we adapt and integrate to create a new trend
• We want protection from bad information, meaningful connections, authenticity, trust, values that resonate with ours, and clear signals over noises
• Tools that will flourish will in the next few years will provide these things
• Will help us make better choices — help us discern opportunities rather than make us scan for them
• It won’t be enough for products to be easy to use — they will need to improve the quality of our lives

David Guiney, Communicating the Stories of our National Parks
This was broken into two sessions, where he talked about the backgrounds and designing for the National Park Service in general in the first one, and about specific challenges associated in the second one. He is a passionate person who was impossible to not like. Don’t feel like posting everything I wrote down, so I’ll boil it down as much as I can.

• NPS strives to achieve balance between enjoying the park and preserving the nature
• Communication focus is on interpretation rather than straight education — what does it mean to you?
• Attitude of serving the taxpayers, because we pay for it all
• The slogan: Experience Your America
• Many contexts: signage, newspapers, films/audio, maps and guides, museums, websites, etc.
• Communication has many roles: safety, indicating historical areas, outdoor classroom, education about global climate changes, validation of what you learned in school
• Interpretation is about provocation (stirrs up something inside you), meaningful, and revelation based on information
• Successful if you come away being interested in things you didn’t know before, things you might not use in the future, things that might not be relevant to you, things you may never see again

The conference offered a nice spread of bagels and other goodies today, even though I did not take advantage. No tea, though. Just coffee.

Central Library is a nice space, but I haven’t had a chance to explore. Maybe tomorrow. Same goes for the food…

Also interesting to note is that this is the first event I’ve been where attendees are free to register for a blog account, encouraging participation by posting session notes, commentary, etc. This is a nice move.

When they first launched, both the Crazy Egg website and the application seemed a bit unstable. Can’t blame them, they were getting a lot of exposure even before the launch. Their product seemed well designed, the premise simple enough to understand and appreciate. Plus they marketed themselves really well, placing cute web 2.0 banners all over other cute web 2.0 sites.

Coupled with the instability, there were some issues that caused me to have a difficult time getting started on using Crazy Egg.

First, I got tripped up with their terminology. They use these words to mean slightly different (but very similar) things: session, page, and test. I didn’t read any instruction text (there wasn’t much) and I assume most people don’t, either. I realize now, that if I was using Crazy Egg for the exact purpose it was invented for I would understand those terms better. The app is for learning where your users are going, so that you can optimize placement for your ads, links, etc. So you set up a “page” to be watched by Crazy Egg, and then you’re supposed to try multiple “tests” of that page to see which version produced the best results. Me, I was just checking out what kind of traffic I was getting on a page, with no campaigns to test, so the subtle difference between the two words were lost on me. I still don’t know what a “session” is. I would imagine plenty of people would use Crazy Egg for simple traffic analysis, because their representation of the data makes so much more sense and easy to understand than other tools. For those people, Crazy Egg’s terms wouldn’t make as much sense as originally intended.

Second, I wasn’t sure if I had completed the steps to set up the page to be watched by Crazy Egg, even after the app told me I was done, and my page appeared on my “dashboard.” That’s because during the second step I was supposed to copy a javascript snippet and paste it into the page that I want monitored, but I hadn’t completed that task yet. Even though in my head I knew there was no way Crazy Egg would be able to begin monitoring my page without the javascript code, I was confused because the dashboard made it look like I was good to go. It would have been more clear if the dashboard had a status message like, “Javascript code was not found on the page. Have you pasted the code into your page?”

And this is a minor point, but the app doesn’t seem to support Safari well. The overlay markers are offset a bit, and background images don’t display for some reason. But I might be the one at fault here, because I’m still using Safari 1.3.2 on Panther. (I’ve been super lazy.)

In any case — after I got these “tests” running, it’s been fun to watch the heat map and the click overlays. They seem to be hard at work fixing the bugs to improve stability. I also see that they’ve been making some UI tweaks to enhance usability. It’s great that they’re not simply sitting back and watching after launch. They’re constantly improving, and that should be enough to erase any negative thoughts from the initial set-up.

Apple to pay $100 million in iPod patent disputes

Part of Creative’s patent is not specific to the technology related to their music player itself, but how the information is categorized. The method in
question is commonly called faceted classification, because an item could belong to multiple categories.

There is an interesting discussion starting in the IA community, because this seems to suggest that you can patent a way to organize information. Peter Merholz began a thread on the IA Institute’s mailing list, and someone posed interesting questions — perhaps somewhat rhetorically:

If information architecture creates mental models that frame a user’s experience, can you patent that? Or is the patent on the IA in use on a specific device? Is there a difference? Is IA a gateway to experience that you can patent?

I didn’t read the patent or anything, but the idea is rather unsettling. I think it’s easy to see that it’s a very slippery slope.

Does this mean Red Envelope owes Creative some money because their customers can choose to shop by recipient, occasion, or price? What if Webster decides to patent the way a dictionary is organized — A to Z! Want to sell clothes online? Better pay Gap — they patented organizing clothes by men, women, and kids. Ingenius!

I admit I have close to zero knowledge on this subject, so I’ll be interested to hear an expert’s take on this…