Misusing Mood Boards

It seems there is no design tool that cannot be misused. I don't recall calling them them "mood boards" in school, but I've used things like this over time. see hundreds of other examples Instead of describing this myself, I'll quote someone else:

...You create a bunch of logo ideas in Illustrator. You print them out on your fancy high-resolution color printer and then show the client. Although the print-outs are just rough examples of what a design could be, the inherent precision of your computer and printer will always make your work seem “finished.” No matter how rough, the client can’t help but think, “ok, what I see is what I’ll get.” So, instead of the broader concepts, the client will zero-in on the details. During early explorations, you can short circuit time-wasting debate about blue versus purple or Times New Roman versus Comic Sans by using mood boards... ...So what do they look like? Just think back to kindergarten. Like your first art projects, mood boards are collages that center around an idea, concept, or feeling. You can create them on the computer, but it’s more fun to literally to gather and paste photos, magazine cut-outs, and objects on a board... Read the whole article

So, I'm getting presented this nascent new... thing here at my day job, and the agency which will remain nameless says they came up with the final message style by running a half dozen mood boards in front of some focus groups. I want to see the mood boards, and finally realize I am seeing them. Obviously I cannot show them, so go to a magazine, pick any shiny ad, and tear it out. That's it. Not clustered with others, not cut apart, just one concept ad. Huh? That's not a moodboard. In fact, its not a valid test of any sort, even if the focus group is well-run. And frankly, the high concepts aren't that reflected in each of the comps. So? Why do I care? Well, aside from being bad process, its a clear way to get nothing out of it. At this point we might as well just have let the designers at the agency pick their favorite.

Off Scale High

I've finished the overwhelming stack of magazines I was behind on, and now I'm into the overwhelming pile of books I am behind on reading. Right now, its Inviting Disaster. I love disaster books. Especially when they get into engineering or design failures. Why Buildings Fall Down is a must read if this appeals to you also.

Anyway, its covering the usual. Challenger O-rings, the Ocean Ranger capsize, etc. Well, I just finished the TMI2 part. There are plenty of lessons about procedure, training, usability, human behavior, control room design, etc. (the best of course being a light to indicate you asked a valve to close, not whether its actually closed!) But there was one I didn't recall before.

When the morning shift arrived, someone noticed the overflow cooling tank temperature was high. They see something like this:


Which means its 280°, which is not too bad. Too hot, so they start figuring out its a loss-of-coolant accident, instead of a danger of going-solid accident, but no one noticed before because its not all /that/ hot.

Well, that's because the water is not really 280°. Seems some programmer decided that all values over 280 should be discarded, so the top of the scale is...280. No standard way to know that on a digital readout, though. And certainly it was not indicated on the meter, or in any obvious place in the

Consider if that gauge was displayed like this:


Not necessarily bad that someone makes the decision no reading over 280 is important, but the classic dial gives us other information. Lots of it, really. But here, you can detect the top end, and understand that the reading is not a specific value, but an unknown above a certain value, off scale high.


This is something I particularly hate about digital display of anything. My GPS (actually, all of them) is similar. It will happily give your position down to at least 1 meter. But if you look somewhere else, it will also inform you that it only knows its position within a certain accuracy, usually between 11 and 70 feet. There's even a handy circle around your location marker if you look at the map; somewhere in this circle is where you actually are.

I have warned about this but I still think there is a fundamental design flaw in most of these sorts of display mechanisms. Excessive implied precision, and implied accuracy. Everyone I work with seems to understand its true, yet hardly anything seems to actually happen about it.

In the disaster book, Chiles talks about how the control room is oddly isolated from the boiler functions, much more so than any boiler operator from a century before would let himself be. Not just in proximity, so he can observe it, but in the type and value of his instruments. Those instruments were developed carefully, over time, to meet specific needs and avoid dangers. Since digital display is not going anywhere, I wonder when will universal digital standards start to emerge to prevent these sorts of issues?

Gunsite All Week

The convoy was something of a gaggle, and oddly full of two-lane state highways, but we made it on time with only one blown engine in the group. Really.



Lots of standing in the hot sun, getting instructed.



And hiding in the shade. Did I mention its hellishly hot? Like, we start actually shooting at 6 am?




Some people need more instruction than others. Well, actually, everyone gets lots of personal attention. Me at least as much as anyone. There are four instructors for the 17 in the class.




These are all off my camera (more people are taking photos, but I haven't seen them). Still, I made someone get a shot of me, to prove I actually showed up. This is pretty much what we do all day. Draw, shoot, reload, holster, repeat. Some cool shoot houses and an outdoor simulator today (yes, I shot the unarmed man) but they are all impact zone, so there's no way to get photos inside.

Bloat or Stagnation?

The basic story is that this guy ran a head-to-head test of a mid-80s Mac and a brand-new AMD super tower of some description. Selecting tests that could be even possibly equal (OS and Office tasks, really) the 20 year old Mac won.

Is this to say that the Mac Plus is a better computer than the AMD? Of course not. The technological advancements of 21 years have placed modern PCs in a completely different league of varied capacities. But the "User Experience" has not changed much in two decades. Due to bloated code that has to incorporate hundreds of functions that average users don't even know exist, let alone ever utilize, the software companies have weighed down our PCs to effectively neutralize their vast speed advantages. When we compare strictly common, everyday, basic user tasks between the Mac Plus and the AMD we find remarkable similarities in overall speed, thus it can be stated that for the majority of simple office uses, the massive advances in technology in the past two decades have brought zero advance in productivity.

Read the whole article Most people are arguing its not fair because it doesn't check large files, it doesn't do graphics or music, . A few think its a Mac vs. PC thing. Its supposed to be pointing out that software is bloated, and really serves as proof of Henry Petroski's quote:

"The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry..."

But I saw something else. What happened to my Information Superhighway? What about internet appliances everywhere? Where is my fridge that orders food for me? Overall, why the hell am I doing the same damned stuff with my computer I did back in Mac SE days? Back in 1989 I had an XT, and I used some 9" all-in-one Macs periodically. Oh, and I had this weird AA powered portable thing with a 2 line LCD text screen. Between the devices I: - Typed papers for school - Organized my schedule - Looked up books to get from libraries on the school network - Laid out pages in Pagemaker (in color, on a B&W screen!) - Formatted document - Had an address book, with CTI thru the modem when I wanted to call someone - Took notes in class, and synched them with the desktop - Mailed (physically) files on floppy disks to people (and hoped the mailman didn't fold them in half) Here at work I am typing on a Powerbook G4. So far I have: - Used VNC to tie into the PC behind me to: - Read and send email, sent files - Viewed and organized my schedule, set an OOO response - Read cartoons over the internet - Posted this blog entry - Edited an xls file - Typed versioning information on a specification - Drawn some changes in a different specification - Listened to music, hosted on my computer at home Not a huge difference, and not really conceptually that far off. The blogging, for example, is still manual, sitting at a computer and doing things. Keyboard, monitor, pointing device. About the only change is entertainment. Media files are available. And the internet is more pervasive, so there's no need to physically mail media around. Though even with that, I get Netflix as there is no good over-the-wire (much less OTA) solution for renting media that large. So, I wonder not why we aren't more productive, but why we haven't changed more than this? Easy availability of computers seems to have done nothing to speak of for office work; I still have to go in and sit at a desk all day. There are lots of meetings. Things are typed, and organized and filed. Even design is just not that different from the earliest CAD and page layout and raster drawing programs. Why no revolution since then? Where are the killer apps since VisiCalc? There are lots of products I could relate this to, but I think it meshes really nicely with an email everyone I work with got earlier today asking how we would use Surface in our stores. I object to the premise. Not that I am against MS, or the product, but because I automatically react against letting technology drive needs. There are plenty of needs that could be met with this, but why are we not pursuing them with paper, with duratrans, with training, with PINpads, with the kiosks already in the stores, with less advanced touchscreens with a simpler tabletop touchscreen, with any of a zillion interactive concepts or with something we dream up to meet the core need. Again, no real conclusion on my part, just a general sadness. Where did innovation in meeting user needs go to?

Mmmm... Delicious, Delicious Intelligence

Violating Communications Paradigms is Not Just for the Internet

Take the much misused button. On the web its really for submitting data. At Sprint we even made standards to this effect some time back. We had to because it was so often misused as a "more important" link. Its big and (at the time) red, so it must be more important than a simple colored, underlined word. The current Sprint home page has a button for "all phones" that does nothing more than the links above it, except be big and yellow. Other prominent examples abound.

I've always given particular grief to interactive systems due to their immaturity about such issues. Newspapers don't mess up this sort of thing. Road signs, regardless of country, are often another good one. In the US orange, for example, means construction.



And nothing else. Reserving it for construction means that any driver can pay special attention to such signs and know there is an exception message contained therein. If you've never been here, there's a temporary, probably dangerous situation. If you are used to this place, disregard all you know and start looking at the signs again because something probably changed (like, the road is closed). This is all well reinforced by using the same orange for pylons, with white stripes for barricades, etc. I even saw a team of guys paving on the way to work this morning, everyone one of them wearing construction-orange T-shirts.

Which makes this annoying:



This is near my house, but I saw scads of them throughout extreme northern California. Something the highway department thinks is just "really important" at the time gets a sign. Often, its just not that important. Like, 6% grade ahead. Which is perfectly well served with a yellow sign everywhere else in the world. Yellow is a fine color for warning signs.

What I think of this is pretty much what I think of over-using buttons. If there is a problem that legitimately is solved by using an orange sign, you need to solve it some other way instead. Aside from misleading everyone, eventually the value of the orange sign will be diluted, and comprehension or urgency failures will occur. In traffic signage, this could have much more dire consequences than any website.