Absolute fear

...I live every day with the vague nightmare that at some point, someone more knowledgeable than myself is going to sit up and pen a massive screed indicating exactly where my work is shallow and fraudulent and rooted in lame, half-assed assumptions.

Probably my favorite quote, of a dozen worth mentioning, from this excellent interview with David Simon on writing and producing The Wire. Which everyone should watch. Just finished disk 1, season 5 off Netflix the other day. Eagerly awaiting the rest, except for the end of the series. :(

Seriously? That's your excuse?

So, if you use Netflix at all, you might have heard about this insane plan to eliminate profiles. They were neat, a way to organize lists, like one for movies, one for series. Or one for each family member. I needed it because Netflix also has a limit of 500 disks per queue, and I am over that limit. So, the other day they announced that these would be eliminated. Completely. With no migration. They just disappear in two months. Check out this particular reason, though. Yeah, all the usual, but also:

...keeping our service as simple and as easy to use as possible. Too many members found the feature difficult to understand and cumbersome, having to consistently log in and out of the website. Continuing to maintain the profiles feature for the passionate few who use it (including myself) distracts us from the mission of presenting to all our members the easiest way to find the best titles for them...

Okay, the system was somewhat cumbersome. They assumed each was a person, so you had to have a different email (username) and password, and it did some other odd stuff like the first profile is the account owner, so when signed onto another you cannot get to account details stuff. But they are claiming that this poor design means that the whole function is worthless. What? This is a terrible way to use design to justify product features. How about a redesign? How about labeling and marketing it correctly, so more than 2% of users can find it. BTW, I think that's a pretty good use rate for such a poorly-communicated service. To clarify, I am not totally talking out of my ass here. I have designed a few profile-based account management systems, mostly for much, much larger organizations than Netflix. It's not that hard, and it's extremely a better idea to fix than discard. Oh, and the users who employ such systems in detail are the good customers. For an MRC based industry, it's always true that churn is expensive; why annoy these folks. I for one have been a pleased (evangelistic) customer for over 7 years, yet I am willing to consider other options now. Okay, I did participate in turning off a system once. At Sprint we were required once to give the ability to customize the account management screen. People could close portlets and move them around. I had poor hopes, but we worked as hard as possible to make it easy. And it tested okay, so no design issues to speak of. And... it was used at appallingly low rates. One year post launch, while working the next release, we checked and found about 5,000 people had ever customized it. We had 7-8 million customers at the time, and maybe 3 million regular users of the web account management system. That's (appx) 0.0016%. This we tossed without regret. 2%? We'd have kept it for that use rate.

Can you be iconic, but not really any good?

Someone will probably want to run me down over this, but I never really liked Charlton Heston. Sure, Touch of Evil was fully good (and I bought him as an upper-crust Mexican even), but otherwise its mostly intentionally (Wayne's World 2, True Lies) or unintentionally (Airport '75, Earthquake) funny stuff. And do not EVEN get me started on stuff like Planet of the Apes. Jeesh. Okay, I have not seen El Cid. Probably should get around to that. Maybe I'll change my mind then.

Terrible Interface of the Week: Redbox

The wife, a friend and I are hanging out at our house this evening, and after watching all the Dirty Jobs on the PVR, and everyone else decided that they hated the Netflix I have, and didn't want to watch my Thai homage to 50s Technicolor. Plus, we needed ice cream. So, off to the Hy-Vee. And the video department is being cleared out. Now there's a Redbox off to the side: Besides being the only rental solution at the store, its something I had never actually used before so I couldn't resist. Home deck is not bad. Big, obvious choices with no gimmickry. So I click the obvious one, the "Rent a DVD" option. The expected screen comes up, with a list of movies... ...and that's it. There's no overall count of movies available, location in the list, search box... wait. There's no search box? Really, they seem to think that the limited selection (I didn't count, but like 50 movies) means they think browsing is enough. But its really no good. And the buttons are so generic, like any bad PINpad. It took me a good 15 seconds to figure out there was a 'next' button. If it was on the side, or had a big arrow maybe it would work. There is a minor ability to sort, but its not that great. There are two small tabs at the top to sort by release date or title (I guess, alpha, the default). They are small, the color highlight is vague (I got it, but a friend read it backwards) and they are hard to hit. You can get above it, so the cursor appears to be on it, but its not activated; that's a serious failure of basic design principles. The tabs are hard to hit at that target size due to the bezel getting in the way and casting a shadow, and the parallax error. Touch alignment isn't perfect. The scrollbar (used a few other places) is just as bad in the same ways. Perhaps my favorite is when you press the "Online Rental Pickup" option: There are clear, animated instructions. Unless you don't want that option. At which point you have to wait for timeout. There is NO back button of any sort. Nothing to get you anywhere else, to a help screen or anything that is available in the rest of the application. You'll note I don't comment on the payment, delivery and return processes. That's because we didn't rent anything. As I said, we were somewhat in the mood to get something to watch, but the inability to actually find anything but top-40 playlist items from the Redbox meant we didn't begin to consider getting anything from there. We actually spent time looking thru the clearance bin (from closing out the store video department) instead. Even not finding something worth buying, that was a more satisfying browsing experience. Aside from the selection, there may be something satisfyingly social about browsing movies on a scale larger than touchscreen. Have to think about that some more.

I didn't know half these people were still alive

I watched the Helvetica movie. Nicely constructed film, actually. I like how its (almost) entirely narrated by the interviewees. Instead of being about a specific font per. se., I read a lot of this as a discussion of contemporary design. Nice hook to get lots of designers to talk about the role of type in design and meaning, how design and typography communicates meaning, and the future of visual communcation as it continues be more egalitarian and accessible. Highly suggested.

Helvetica on DVD

Remember the Helvetica movie? Well, its now available on Netflix! Its at the top of my Queue right now.

Personally, I am still into Akzidenz Grotesk, and playing and am starting to play with the Olive/Nord family. Gillsans isn't bad for heads, but its SO heavily used by all the Apple presentation software themes.

Design DVD

I subscribe to some of the netflix rss feeds, including the new releases one. Why do you think I have 1200 disks spread over half a dozen queues? So much neat stuff comes out. Anyway, I saw this Design disk (or, on netflix and couldn't resist. Got it and pushed to the top of the queue.

It was really neat, and very interesting for any designer, despite focusing on dimensional products. While they were all produced by the same people, in the same style, each product was a free-standing segment, so I'll briefly cover them each that way. The DS19, turns out to be the epitome of the Citroen, the one that I suspect all Americans hate, with the rear axle way at the back. But its still really interesting seeing how Flaminio Bertoni changed stodgy designs, and more or less invented some of the modern auto methods of modeling cars in clay, for example. Nice addressing of function, not just form, and problem solving (like chopping off the back of the car to fit it into typical garages, then hiding the odd shapes with lighting enclosures) and even production troubles. This one had no talking heads, presumably because all the designers are long dead, but it does ask for a bit of trust to the narrator.

The choice of the Bubble Club sofa and chair baffled me. Its as cool as cool can get, but iconic? Cheap? Maybe its just a U.S. problem. Did I forget to mention this is a French DVD? English language track works fine, and its beautiful, but the cultural references are sorta remote, and well, its a French film. Minor nudity, believe it or not. Anyway, Starck himself talking about the genesis of the Bubble Club is great. He even draws for us to explain things; I love seeing other people who cannot bring themselves to describe things without drawing.

The Bic pen segment was nothing special. Partly because no designer was involved. A bunch of engineers were set to task by Marcel Bich and that's it. Needed more exploration of why it looks like this, and how that's helped. Instead, it was treated as a marketing phenomenon in many ways, and didn't fit in like the others.

Akari lamps. I particularly enjoyed that I watched this on a TV flanked by two of the more organically-shaped ones. I always knew these as Noguchi lamps, as I learned about them in design school, so attributed them directly to the designer. Nice background on him, including some old interview footage where he talks directly about design emerging from sculpture. I'd always gotten a very simple and slightly cut-down version of the lamp-creation myth, but this went into some detail about revitalizing the lamp industry by making a modern design, which is good (interesting) in that it's about making a product that meets the needs of customers, the need for the manufacturer to be able to make it (and make money) and the overall needs of the economy to have good products and employ workers. Really outstanding footage (and description) of the manufacturing process. Apparently, they are all hand-made still.

The Hoover 150. Henry Dreyfus, of many other objects, like the model 500 phone and many Singer sewing machines, did well partly because he worked with the engineers and manufacturing side, so could make things actually work. Overall lots of discussion of the streamline style, with some nice socio-economic tie-ins, and fantasy designs as well as other real products. Nice cutaways and diagrams to show off how the previous model was mechanically very similar, and Dreyfus in large measure just improved it by encasing it, using new metallurgy to lighten it, and so on. Nice coverage of anthropometrics as well, since he was a trend-setter and had to make his own "average" man and women models (Joe and Josephine). The iMac suprised me. Sure, its clear and everything, but I still have an iMac DV in the other room, so it feels too proximate to judge in the sense of these other 50-70 year old items. I'm even using an original iMac keyboard at work every day. Yet, they do an okay placing it in the bio-design movement and cover why it is designed this way, and how this matters.

Some nice historical computer overview. Not just "punchcards came from weaving" but newly-shot film of such looms, and other punchcard machines, as well as some neat stock footage of all sorts of old computer equipment and its use. Lots of stock is used in all of these segments, but its French stock, so I had seen about 1% of it before. Hence, fresher than you'd think. Johnathan Ive is way younger and more cool than I had thought. And, he's English. I always thought he was American for whatever reason. Lots of good talking head video of him here. Ive says its translucent because its a celebration of the material (not mentioned, but see Good Design), but he mostly went on and on about the translucency giving a lush external finish; the "surface" changes all the time, baed on angle, time of day, etc. He seems to not buy ("fairly specious argument") that if you can see inside its less terrifying. Which contradicts some of what the narrator just said, which is funny.