Anchors & Curators

Curated content on the internet is all too much like the employee-picks shelf at the local bookstore (or video store). A selection, maybe even an interestingly thematic one, but just a collection of existing items. And presented with no other information to help you decide, but what you would find if simply searching on your own. Consider instead what people with Curator on their business card actually do. They collect, investigate, verify, and organize. They then build exhibits of some items from the collection, in a manner that tells a story. They add their own content. Maps, brochures, labels. Often, it all works together to make the point, to reveal deeper truths about the collection, and to encourage the viewer to explore further on their own. Compare these two paintings, though 20 years apart, the similarities help point out how the artist has grown in the intervening time. Or, consider the classic format of the national nightly news. Behind the scenes, the anchor is the Head of News. He sets the tone for the whole department, and makes key decisions about what and how it will be presented. Then as the on-air anchor he gives an intro to the story, frames not just the basic facts but the reason we care. If there's a graphic over his shoulder, it may well be a map, so you know where this is taking place. And then he hands off to a reporter who was on site, or at least pretends to be based on footage retrieved otherwise. And maybe, if it's a multi-faceted story, then you go to another reporter who gives another point of view; after the on-the-spot report, the reaction in Washington.
All this is all in relation to a number of posts* and discussions I've read and had with people about the point of online media. And it's coming up since I am being paid during the day to actually develop an IA for a very large product catalog, and integrate existing (magazine and other) content and personal details into one experience. I have seen at least a little of most of the available experiences. I don't subscribe to them because I am un-thrilled with the consumable media available. I still read paper magazines, because even cut down to save on costs, They do a much better job than pretty much any digital version. Web and tablet versions seem to have lost the key point of sidebars or related stories, and just use paper paradigms instead of developing their own; or learning from education, museum information design and broadcast radio/TV media even.
If this seems like a subtle change, it's not. Go back to the examples, and look at how much internet content is served. I call most of that a subset of "portal theory." An article is reduced to a smaller version, on a category page. It can be reduced to a smaller-yet version, even a title-only for a higher level category, for cross-linking or for the (portal) home page. Instead, I am starting to think that I want to break that whole model, and use the intelligence of humans, not just to tag and categorize and group things, but to differently re-order, to choose what is presented and not just sort, and to not just crop but actually rewrite content to present it most relevantly to the context. No, I don't have diagrams, or mockups for you. Yet. Maybe later. The only impediment, as I see it, is people. Good, smart, dedicated people who can write have to be found, persuaded and paid. And too much focus is on technology solutions, and paying for software. We have the software and interaction nailed enough. Now it's time to bring people back into the job of presenting information. Give me a news aggregator with the voice of an anchor, and I'll listen. But it could also be a great opportunity. To give a new type of voice -- or a reason to hope for the future -- to writers, and to the whole profession of journalism. If not this, then something like it simply must happen. Not to preserve a dying business, not just to make money in a new market, but to keep the public informed so we can all make decisions about the way we live.
* Now that I look for the links, way too many seem to be centered around Khoi Vinh. And he's a good voice in design and interactive publishing. But I swear others are talking about it also. And some rather interesting ones I can't quote.

** When searching for the links I ran across this, which I swear I didn't read before. It also has good points about curated computing. Very different ones, but the over use (or I say, mis-use) of the term "curated" is covered pretty well in there, if circuituously.

Does it Fax?

This is an old phrase used in logo and brand design. It meant that you need to keep in mind how that 7 color process logo (looking at you, Apple Computer) looks not just one color, but when stretched, muddy and generally screwed up by fax. But it also became shorthand for keeping in mind how it works in anything sub-optimal. How does it look in newsprint? Or on TV? Sadly, on places like the Brand New blog comments, it's now moved to a joke. "Who has a fax machine" they ask. I say, way too damned many people. All sorts of financial institutions still use them. But more importantly is the meaning behind it. It used to be that every logo was designed as a one color exercise. Black on white. You made a shape, and made it perfect. You could (and should!) also make color choices, add gradients and decoration as appropriate, and generally design it as part of a system. The perception that everyone has a high resolution digital display has slipped into logo design being a single-point exercise. Its made to look good comfortably large on the computer. And that's it. Applications are maybe adding different type to the logo for the branches of the organization. Or by adding animations. But I still ask, basically, "does it fax?" What's it look like on a badly calibrated monitor? How about tiny, on a phone screen, in glare? How about as a logo in the corner of a crappy TV screen? What about as a favicon? What if your client prints your tabloid documents letter sized, then photocopies them? Does it look good then? Brand is an often forgotten, but key part of developing relevant interactive design. Every part of the brand matters, and if you give me a crappy logo, or no guidelines for implementation, it's not going to work well. Online doesn't give you a pass for making good branding.

It's Ozone Day!

Someday I need to write up in detail what a total disaster transit systems are. I've had issues trying to figure out where I am going in other cities, or pay the fare, but assumed the system had some sensibility, and communications was the issue. Now that I have used my local system for a while, I assume they are all this bad, and are totally inexplicable. You pretty much cannot tell where anything goes, unless you already know. No one really wants to help, and the system is full of internal process and jargon, so communicating with any staff is difficult. But my favorite is that there are something like five different payment systems:

• Drop cash or coin in a fare box.
• Get change as a paper magstripe card, which you can then use in those fareboxes
• Get monthly ride cards, which are RF, so have a different system than the farebox
• 10-ride cards, which are paper, pass through no electronic system at all, and are hand punched by the driver
• Transfers work in yet another way, which I still do not understand

And the best part is that they are mostly incompatible with each other. If you have money on a change card, you cannot apply it to a 10-ride pass, for example. Today, all the busses say "Ozone alert" in addition to everything they usually say. You get on the bus and the driver says "you have 50¢?" To which most folks say "um..." See, there's an enviro/promo thing where if the city has an inversion or other conditions, they declare an ozone alert and try to get you to fill up your car after dark, and ride the bus. To encourage bus riding, they reduce fares to 50¢ across the board. Simple. Except for two things:

1. Not one person I watched board the bus seemed to understand what "ozone alert" or "ozone day" meant, when the driver said it to them
2. The 50¢ fare is, again, totally incompatible with most other systems. Your 10-ride cards and, apparently, monthly passes won't work. You MUST give them 50¢ or nothing else.

Turns out you can give them more than that and get a change card, or use the card, but the driver didn't seem to know that. Their internal process seemed to assume everyone in the city knows about this, and will being a pocket full of quarters to ride the bus on this, the most special of days. What assumptions are you making about how much your clients or customers understand your process?

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.

"Lo"? What the !@#$ does that mean?!"

One of those standard things I think all homes should have is a smart thermostat. We bought this one shortly after moving in. Though I agonized trying to find a reasonably easy-to-use one that fit the space, I failed. Its sort of junky. Do not buy it.

One thing is that its sort of hard to manually control. There is no real "fan-only" setting, for example. You end up working around the software a lot, to trick it into things.

Lately, its been worse. Its performing uncommanded actions. You set it to manual, click over to the air conditioner (which is still "unplugged" so will not engage) and if you wait a bit you can see it go "nope, you need heat." The little heat-mode icon lights up, and then the wavy lines that mean its making heat light up. Go to the basement, and yup, the heater is on. On a 76° day. One other hint, the temp display has a tendency to say "LO" instead of a number.

So, I finally give up with shorting leads and beating it with a screwdriver, and call the tech support line. Turns out LO means off scale low. The tiny, stupid computer in the thermostat thinks that its freezing cold. But its not, its just a bad temp sensor. Apparently, it feeds signal directly as a resistive signal, and 0° is about 0 volts.

Okay, its not the computer's fault. Its the designers. While its nice it says (cryptically) off-scale low, instead of a falsely low temperature when it gets a zero voltage response, who decided that the thermostat is smarter than the user? I am requesting "cooling" mode, so why switch to heat mode all by itself? Or, how about a spurious data sensor? It seems to disregard the 95% of the time it gets valid temperatures in order to fire some emergency recovery mode if it gets ANY zero-voltage temp gauge readings. This is poor design, making me sweat and wield a screwdriver needlessly.