What Would Croesus Do?

"Thus we want to suggest an approach to watching customers that is less expensive and more expansive: Watch what a hypothetical customer would do. Since the customer is imaginary, this approach brings the costs way down. To encourage expansive thinking, we give our hypothetical customer extremely large resources -- if there is a solution to the problem, this person can find it. In short, we ask, What would Croesus do? "

This intially struck me as a strange variation on personas... rather than design for the least able, we start with design for the most able....

Gosh, Darwin Magazine is always so darn good: Are You Ready for Social Software? - explains social software in a manageable way.

The new Yahoo! companion search tool bar thingie offers a bunch of stuff like pop-up blocking, search within site, highlight search term and the usual Yahoo! stuff like access to calendar, bookmarks and mail, but what *I* like is the right click access to search. Now I search on everything like crazy-- love it!

(I feel like such a ho, but I love it!)

BTW, I never noticed I had google access in my rightclick until I took the screenshot. What a difference a bit of white space, and icon and a good call to action make. "google search" vs. "Search the web for term" are day and night apart in clarity.

From The Business of Technology "Economists have a name for this problem: moral hazard. Moral hazard happens when the actions of agents can be hidden from principals, creating "agency costs" because agents are able to shirk and not deliver on their end of the bargain."

This is the best explaination I've seen of the rise of napster, kazaa et al....

There are two sites I've been spending a lot of time at: Web Design Practices and UI Patterns and Techniques. One observes they way things are done on the web and pulls out the common design choices; they other collects instances of the best way to design. You could say one is common practices and best practices.

There is a certain amount of overlap, but not as much as one might expect. This is partially because the practices site reverse-engineers, and thus must be primarily concerned with the visible; while the patterns site grows out of designers' knowledge, and concerns itself with the invisible as well.

I can't help but ponder the two: descriptive and prescriptive. And wonder what they mean to a designer: if a common practice turned out to be a bad practice, Nielson aside, what does that mean? Could you as a designer do something crappy just because everyone else did it? If a pattern is a great practice but nobody does it, what does that mean? Could you win the battles with your larger team to do something unusual (see earlier post on copying...) Would you want to flout convention?

I venture it means what it always means: design it as you best see fit.

When my husband wants to cook something he's never done before, he has an odd practice. Rather than choosing a recipe to work from, he tries to find a dozen, reads them all then makes his own up based on the themes he's found (a practice made easier by the web.) I see these new sites as cookbooks, to be read and learned from and improvised out of rather than followed. After all, we're designers, not recipe followers.

From Valley firms ditch desks to cut costs

"Freeing workers from their cubicles has been touted for at least two decades as a way to cut corporate real estate costs. Now, spurred by the sluggish economy and new technology, some of Silicon Valley's biggest firms seem to be taking the advice seriously....
The noise of shared work spaces bothers many people, while others regard offices as status symbols. Some can't get any work done without a regular place to sit."

I've sat in open spaces, and cubes. I've never have had the pleasure of an office, but I can easily imagine the productivity it would provide... if I was an individual contributor. As it is, I'm a manager, and I don't sit at my desk much. When I do, I love eavesdropping on the conversations around me. Tom Wailes, who sits next to me, and I have poked a hole in between our cubes, and have dozens of impromptu conferences a day about what's going on in Search.

But if I was trying to do an architecture, or design an interface, this open and communal enviroment would be hell. As it is if I have to write a presentation, or do some thinking, I have to go home, find a conference room or take a walk on the nearby hill. Only part of design is collabortive; the other part is interanl. how can a space support both?

Open spaces encourage collaboration, but they smoother thinking. Perhaps it's cube culture that has led us to a culture of copying... altavista copies google copies google copies microsoft copies aol copies yahoo.... expedia copies yahoo travel copies travelocity copies expedia... wells fargo copies bank of america copies wachovia copies wells fargo.... I'm sure you have your nemesis who you copy (instructed to, perhaps, but still.)

Perhaps simply finding a place quiet to sit and think a few days in a row would allow someone to come up with more original ideas. Then again, it also might only foster self-referential product design.

At least this article concentrates on the reality of seating arrangements-- it's about cost reduction, not about creativity enhancement. I guess I wonder what that easily measured savings in floorspace and electricity costs them in a loss in strategic advantage?

Check it out: the fly-out menu uses transparency, which means you have this mishmash of type on type. A great choice for a book that's called In Search of Stupidity

From Good Information Architecture Increases Online Sales

"Information Architecture can be applied to resolve breakdowns in site design and navigation structure. The role of good Information Architecture is to make the Website work not in the technical sense, but from a functional, organized, conceptual perspective. "

I love writing, excellent craftful writing. Often my favorite articles in New Yorker are on the most banal subjects: a recent article on concrete, a much older one on steel processing. It's almost like watching the strong man at the fair-- you don't really care what he's lifting, it's the show of the raw strength. A writer who makes five pages of concrete or ten pages of steel riveting is impressive as a chopin impromptu.

Everyone knows that the web has allowed every moron that can type access to publishing, but what too few people say when they speak of blogging and self-publishing on the web is how common it's made good writing. Reading a recent entry by Anil Dash on Fear of Flying I was struck by the muscular grace his writing had achieved. While not at a New Yorker level (editors do count) it still reflected a comfortable strength in constructing words on almost any topic to entertain. A quick flip the blogs I read shows a dozen other proto-articles also thoughtful and skillfully executed.

Revist your daily reads now and rather than just luxuriating in the tales of mark-up and parking, consider this is just some fellow in his/her basement, or on the couch, with a background in who knows what-- history, or engineering and not a journalism major... what a marvelous little miracle.

The metaphor of muscles was not chosen randomly, btw--- the one way to become a better writer is to write daily. A journal will transform anyone's prose, and a public one does so much faster. Working out makes you strong; working out in public makes you push yourself. Writing makes you strong, writing in public makes you try harder.

I suppose that makes an editor a personal trainer.

I've been sick for two weeks. Some folks at work have been sick a month and more. I haven't slept properly in three nights, from coughing horribly. the nyquel has stopped working, the grog is upsetting my stomach, and I go to sleep so propped up I get a neckache.

I have a doctor's appointment friday... please, someone do you have a herbal or over the counter remedy to get me to that appointment? I ready to pay someone to come over and hit me in the head with a hammer...

From Yahoo! News - What, You Don't Have Broadband Yet? "I've got a buddy who's equally into high-tech gadgets, and he's crawling around the Web with a pokey dial-up modem. The funny thing is, he doesn't seem to mind--except on days when I send him hefty Adobe Acrobat files. You know why? Because he watches video on his TV and listens to music on his stereo--not on his PC, as broadband providers might wish."

A recent study by Strategy Analytics surveying 525 broadband households who upgraded to broadband found out that people upgrade for pragmatic rather than gee-whiz reasons, including:

Freeing up a phone line
A constant connection
You can share it (via a network)
Helps with dealing with Spam
Faster downloads of files (PPT, etc.)
Keeps your PC up-to-date (downloading software updates)

interesting study, interesting story....

Patterns for Personal Web Sites could nearly be "a pattern language for blogging"... or even "best practices for blogs". Check it out!

Reading urlgreyhot : Is Movable Type scalable? and then speeding up movabletype I wonder if I'll have to consider migrating to something like drupal. MT is my third blog tool. I started on blogger, migrated to greymatter for feature (and stability) reasons, and then ended up on MT when greymatter stopped being updated. I've been pretty happy with MT until recently as my rebuilds grew longer and longer and died more often. jay helped me make them never die (as well as creating the wonderful mtblacklist) but i wonder-- the poor classification, the slowing rebuilds. Maybe it's time to move ship again.

I have mixed feelings. MT is the tool I have a personal stake in, as I helped with an early version of it by providing user testing as well as beta testing. So I feel it is *my* tool to a degree.

Also, I love the Mt community, especially Brad Choate and Jay Allen, whose constant hacking has taken the tool so far beyond the clever vision of its creators.

On the other hand, it's just a program. And when your tool no longer meets your needs, you get a new tool.

MT is like my old fiat, which I loved even though it was steadily apparent it was no longer the right vehicle for me.

I was reading Starting a Business: Advice from the Trenches: A List Apart

and along with the usual-- get an accountant, do you really need an office, etc-- came across this slightly unexpected bit of advice; get a partner. "A partner will keep you on your toes. When you want to buy that $2,000 scanner, he or she should question why. If you want to design a promotional piece, it should be a group effort to get the best results. If you start to slack off, he or she will be there to remind you of business priorities. No one can do everything, and two complementary skill sets create an asset that cannot be reproduced when flying solo."

I've long thought about partnerships in design processes... xtreme programming advocates pair programming for speed, quality and to avoid the bus factor. Cooper adapts this in their design approach, pairing an interaction designer with a design communicator on all projects. AIfIA, in the beginning, tried to make sure all project leaders had co-leaders, as volunteering can be onerous (though it turns out sometimes a short burst from a determined individual can be just as valuable. Actually, when you're a volunteer organization, anytime anyone does anything it's valuable).

But lately I've been adding to this contemplation of the value of partners the consideration of creative conflict. Creative Conflict is what my former creative director at Egreetings used to call it when two folks were going at it like cats and dogs over a design choice. Unlike many folks who shun conflict, he welcomed it and encouraged it. He explained it to me like this: Creative Conflict is when two viewpoints on how to design --slightly to very out-of-sync-- come together in a passionate but constructive argument and enhance product quality. (paraphrased, sorry rossi!)

Lately I have come across the concept of Creative Abrasion which sounds a lot like Creative Conflict to me.
"Each of us is hard-wired and highly proficient in some modes of thinking and relatively uncomfortable with others. Yet, if we are to spark innovation, we need the intellectual disagreement that raises options." -- Dorothy Leonard, When Sparks Fly.

Ms. Leonard champions designing teams with members from different backgrounds to create conflict for the purpose of enabling innovation.
In a talk in which he embraces this concept, John Seeley Brown says "Disciplines are not very good at interacting with each other. Just walk into any type of campus. So the catch to me is: how do you create a space of pluralism that somehow manages to foster and honor a kind of creative abrasion. So you can get ideas that really rub against each other productively as opposed to destructively." and talks about it in terms of physical space that allows disciplines to interact and argue safely.

And now I'm wondering now if the real value of a partner is someone to argue with (which means your partner must be someone you *can* argue with).

So I think the question next to ask yourself is who are your design partners... who do you argue with, who cares about making good design as you do, who can hold the knowledge of the design along with you, and who makes your design better?

Off hand I'd think any designer would need a business partner to fight to balance business and design, a user advocate partner so the designer can fight for elegance over mass appeal (and vice-versa) a technology partner to fight to push the borders of what's possible... and all these battles if done respectfully, eloquently, thoughtful and with the best interest of the product at heart should be better than mere design by committee.

So finding a partner requires finding someone

I always thought Asilomar at 40 bucks was a fine deal-- cheaper than most magazine subscriptions. But this is not the case if you live in Chile or India, our membership has told us.

So I am very proud to say Asilomar Institute for Information Architecture has taken one more step to being a truly international organization. AIfIA Membership - pricing is now based on the world bank's country classification system.

Along with the translation project, AIfIA is taking steps to bring IA to the world-- and why not? the web is the world-wide web, neh?

You may think this is small potatoes, but I say if the devil is in the details, so are the angels.