Dr. Bob Bailey (the report's author) and I have exchanged a few emails about the report, primarily to address his assertion that my article states "...that as monitors size get larger, offering larger viewable browsing areas, users tend to concurrently open more pages." This is not at all what my article states. In fact, my article tries to avoid drawing any conclusions, and simply shows the numbers. Now, the numbers suggest that people will surf full- screen up to 800x600, and that viewable window size is never the same as available screen real estate. The chart in the WebReview article pretty much shows it all. Dr. Bailey seems to understand my points, but I don't know if he'll be updating the report.Other issues I had included his lack of understanding of liquid layouts, and even the comment, "To make it even more difficult, any serious discussion of monitor resolution also should include a discussion of monitor size." Monitor size is not a factor. Window size and screen resolution are the two factors.
And nobody even touched the bit-depth data I gathered...
Thursday, April 26, 2001
we've been waiting for you!
Finally, the website we've all been waiting for. The exciting new feature is "Ask E.T." Quick, everyone think up a good problem to ask!
The Work of Edward Tufte and Graphics Press (via Carbon Log)
Don Norman gets sassy
Guru: Engineers Won't Design Next-Gen Systems
Guru: Engineers Won't Design Next-Gen Systems
(05/07/99, 9:27 a.m. ET) By Peter Clarke, EE Times
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Engineers are the wrong people to define and design next-generation consumer-electronics equipment, keynoter Don Norman told an audience full of engineers at the Embedded Processor Forum here Tuesday.
"It's not you guys" who will build equipment and systems that are easy to use, said Norman, of the Nielsen Norman consultancy. "You're the wrong people." Instead, future systems will be designed "by psychologists and social scientists working in combination with engineers and technologists," he said he predicted.
Then they all stood up and slapped him.
He also said "It's important to know what your product is, focus on it, and don't listen to your customers -- but do it with care."
which does intellegently focus on the diference between design and use, listening and watching... too bad it sounds like "throw out usability"
Wednesday, April 25, 2001
origami
I've oft pointed out origami diagrams are great examples of information design. These aren't true origami, but sure are dang fun. (via dynagirl)
YAMAHA MOTOR - PAPER CRAFT : VMAX Edition
"For easier use, Yamaha has completely redesigned the assembly manual for the VMAX, the commemorative first edition authentic paper sculpture. Anyone, including those who have completed the previous version, or who have given up on it, or who haven't tried it yet, can take this special opportunity to make their own authentic paper sculpture of the VMAX."
index of all papercraft
some tasty reading
Human Factors International Articles
ones I'm excited to read include: Managing Your Defense Against GUI's from Hell, Pull Down Menus: Out of Sight, Out of Mind, Key Tips for User-Centered GUI Design and Icons: Much Ado about Something
yum!
Monday, April 23, 2001
the pressure of being public
what is it about bloggers imploding? is this the next phenomena? is this the price of a successful personal site? am I next?
elan
noah
Sunday, April 22, 2001
me.com
There's a debate raging on the bay-chi list over nathan.com (he made his links too small, defying Fitt's law. Shocking! I've never seen a designer do that before.) The part of the debate I found interesting was the question of how to evaluate this weird hybrid, the personal-professional site. I've always held that personal sites do not get attacked on their usability. period. However, Nathan's site is a hybrid-- a personal-professional site.
some other personal-professional sites include
they vary in their emphasis on the more personal aspects of their life: Peter and Jef seem willing to marry the two, while Jesse and Jakob keep them neatly separate. The both have a ton of content, and pay the minimum effort to design (obviously some are more skilled than others, but I don't dare name names for fear of scoldings). They also often don't reflect what they preach: both Peter's site and Jakob's are notoriously hard to use when one is trying to locate a resource the offered in the past.
and of course this site is an example of the same: Eleganthack is decidedly a personal-professional site. I run it alone, it reveals my design and editorial failings, and it doesn't always practice what I preach (or what you might assume I'd preach). Instead it's a place where -- whenever I can steal some minute out of my day -- I shove my baby thoughts into the world to fly.
I guess my question is: what are the rules for evaluators when looking at these hybrids? Do we demand they practice what they preach, or do we simply thanks them for taking the time to share their knowledge. I lean toward the latter, but if your site is out there to promote your professional skills, shouldn't it also be an example of yoru excellence? The one chance to not have your craft watered down by compromises with marketing, technology, etc., typically foisted upon one in a commercial project?
Mike wrote to me:
there's a fine line between being usability advocates and usability police. comments about "being allowed" to do things and "the rules for" personal sites can come across as guliani-esque.fly your freak flag nathan!
Nathan himself has this to say about personal websites.
choose elegance over friendliness
Wonderful post on chiweb from adam on choosing not making software more friendly.
Saturday, April 21, 2001
lazy saturday afternoon
did usability testing this morning, and when I got back felt too lazy to leave the house. You are the beneficiary, with a ton of updates on the site. I *should* be writing a book proposal, I *should* be doing the IA for the redesign, I *should* be writing some new articles; but instead I tweak, and poke around and contemplate going to Josie and the Pussycats tonight.
hell yeah!
Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You (via antenna)
Friday, April 20, 2001
string of me?
GO/FA>LS d? s+: a C++++ U P+ L E-- W+++ N- w M-- V- PS+ PE !Y PGP-- t 5 X++ R* tv+ b++++ D G e++ h--* r+++ x+++++
?
Thursday, April 19, 2001
idear
so a while ago I saw evan rose's wish list and saw he has a book I thought he might like (The Mezzanine). i remembered how pleasent it was when vincent unexpectedly bought me a book. so I bought it for evan, even though he had no idea who I was. it felt good.
next i bought noah a dvd off his wish list, to say "thanks for greymatter."
it felt damn good.
so now i'm asking everyone to find someone's wish list (not mine, lazybones!) and buy them a book. or a video. it's gonna cost you maybe 20-30 bucks, but you'll tingle all over.
cheap thrill.
good thrill.
and be sure to add a link to your own wish list on your site, so when goodness comes a knocking, you'll be at the door.
why not?
better than voting someone off an island
The newly public Carbon Log allows you to give advice to recently laid off stacia. should she look for a new job? go to spain? grow mushrooms?
Wednesday, April 18, 2001
this, that and of course, the other...
NETSCAPE.
F*cking netscape.
it's been a long time since I did any heavy html lifting, and netscape has got my goat. if anyone has a clue why my comments field doesn't show up in netscape, please write. Oh, and what are those wacked out squares? I don't get it.
later that same day
charles of little green footballs is a god. visit his blog view tips on netscape 4 workarounds and tell him he rules. he gave me the code that fixed my problem.
it's because of this, in your stylesheet:input, textarea {
font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 10px;
color: #333333;
border-color: #000000;
border-width: 1px;
padding: 2px;
margin-bottom: 4px;
}
netscape 4 doesn't like stuff like this. the border settings in particular. it's probably better to give netscape 4 a stylesheet that doesn't do anything to INPUTs and TEXTAREAs.
what i did was to separate out that style into a separate stylesheet and then make sure that only IE loads it with this trick:
link rel="stylesheet" href="/css/weblog1.css"
then add
style type="text/css" media="all" @import "/css/weblog2.css";
(this goes in the head section, of course.) all the styles that work in both browsers are in weblog1.css. the INPUT and TEXTAREA styles are in weblog2.css. netscape 4 doesn't understand the @import method of including a stylesheet, so it ignores the second sheet.
poncy old netscape.
next question: how does one deal with the fact that forms are sooo much bigger in netscape than in ie? I'm not writing two sets of code for two browsers. jeez louise, I want to love netscape, but it is a giant bug fest. 'scuse me now, gotta go buy some roach motels.
it's a personal site, so I don't care if it looks lousy in netscape, but it does have to work...
still later... charles continues to rock my world-- he's explained the deal with netscape forms.
by the way, i can also tell you a way to fix those huge netscape form fields. the reason that happens: netscape calculates the width of form elements based on a monospaced font, while IE calculates based on the current font. how IE derives a width from a proportional font -- i don't know.
there are a couple of ways to handle the discrepancy. the quick and dirty way is to use CSS to set the font for form elements to a monospaced font, like Courier or Courier New. the other way is to get it looking right in netscape, then adjust the width using CSS so it looks the same in IE.
human filters
nadav points at What Was Once A Village Paved In Gold Is Now A Metropolis With Rat-infested Ghettos which is interesting to me both as a history of a company's evolution, but also as a consequence of what happens on a site where you let your customers review products: at some point the product they review will be you.
It also makes me realize that I'm getting most of my news through a human filter (except, of course the holy two hours on sunday morning with the newspaper and iht) and I'm happy about it. I've long doubted the existence of "journalist objectivity" and by receiving all my news through blogs and the like, every single piece of news is so very clearly slanted, I feel free-- no, obligated-- to form my own opinions on the matter. I question what I see, I have to think, I search for other opinions... the "untrustworthy narrator" makes reading an interactive rather than a passive activity.
feel free to disagree.
a short note on the exception: I have loved the International Herald Tribune for years, and have always wished I could get it in America (I buy it when I'm traveling). Their website is all the things the paper is: succinct news with a world view presented elegantly.
you will think what I tell you to think
from monday's gleanings
Welcome to Monday. Republic.com is the book everyone is talking about. Supposedly in it (I'll cheerfully admit I haven't read it and feel no urgency to do so), the author speculates that new technologies will allow us to become ignorant about the world around us and more intolerant, because we'll be able to filter out the news we don't want. Has he ever seen a family read the newspaper? In the most archetypical scenario, mom takes the food section, dad takes sports, brother takes classified, sis take fashion and little one reads comics. In a real life a similar but perhaps less gender driven scenario takes place: people read the sections that interest them. Ever watch someone couch surf across the TV channels? Filters happen.Instead the author should be grateful that email allows people to forward news articles to each other, suddenly allowing a human filter to push through current events through the way a newsbreak interrupts a rerun of "friends".
Of course gleanings is very much a "daily me:" a human filter for your news. Don't you-all go having any orginal thoughts without me, y'hear.
Law Professor Sees Hazard in Personalized News
and matt rose then wrote
Well yes, but doesn't that prove the author's point? Maybe it's not just new technologies alone that allow the filtering to happen. The point is that filtering does happen, and new technologies make it easier to do this.
Filtering can be a good thing, but it is also certainly open to abuse. It doesn't necessarily allow more and better information through, it provides a way for the person to monitor the types of information they access, and adjust accordingly to get only the information they want. This matches your archetypical newspaper model, and it matches the way people personalize Web sites, news sites, sports sites, etc., so they only see the items they want to see.In no way can this be construed as the user getting a full and unbiased account of the world around them. This is still true of the newspaper model, so it's not necessarily a Luddite reaction on my part. But the newspaper is at least delivered to your home in a complete unit, unlike the sports bullets on your favorite team that you get from a wireless delivery service, or unlike news on the Middle East conflict that one chooses to access only from a pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian point of view. If
individuals filter too much, they are in grave danger of creating an information source for themselves that is completely one-sided, and are willfully blinding themselves to things that they may not think are of interest when creating the initial filter, but which they could find fascinating.
This is the thing that bugs me most about personalization and information filtering. There is little opportunity for the chance discovery, the possibility that a random piece of information one would not expect to know is interesting beforehand jumps out at you and becomes a worthwhile part of your knowledge base. If we can program ourselves and our news sources to map to only what we want to hear, that DOES lead to mass ignorance and increasing tolerance.
Just a thought.
Good point. I've put the book on my wishlist. i still think these issues are too complex to be summed up as filters bad, filters good. I think it's more like filters inevitable, and information leaks out despite filters. can people be forced to be more knowledgable and tolerant than they choose to be? maybe, maybe not. not sure. have to ponder more...
Monday, April 16, 2001
peter joins the conversation
Peter's April 15th entry comments on and expands upon many of the themes discussed here. Until he gets sleepy.
Saturday, April 14, 2001
broke everything, fixed everything
Sorry for any spyonit false alarms. I'm trying to set up a redesign blog, and ended up breaking this one. Ah well, can't make an omlette...
Friday, April 13, 2001
more pondering on the 31 IA flavors
Travis has consented to allow me to reprint his insightful email here:
"The meat of your post from Monday -- where you cast about trying to arbitrarily determine whether the term "usability" should be applied to people who measure usability, or to people who create usability -- I'm not even gonna touch that. (except to the extent that I just did.) and I'm not even going to touch the word "arbitrarily"--c
But I dig your question at the end, about whether to split forces, and I have an answer for you.
Info-centered IA is basically a term I picked up from the SF IA discussion to increase the chance that you and Noel would have a sense of what I meant. Application-centered IA is probably a better moniker. So there's that, there's user-centered IA, and my usual answer for a third type is revenue-centered IA (you know, MBAs do it, deliberately restricting some info while exposing enough to string people along -- very different from user-centric design).
My purpose in app-centered IA is to create structures for info -- data records, actions, processes, whatnot -- that are organized such that applications -- processes -- can use them well and build on them whenever necessary. The structures are never completed products, since you want them
to last, to evolve along with their applications, to be friendly to new apps. I don't know how much this philosophy figures into user IA but it's critical to app IA. A complete website redesign has no equivalent in a good application information structure.
All the primary applications -- serial communication (e.g., encoding into XML), display (presenting in a web page), persistence (storing in a relational database), service (manipulating with program logic), etc. -- define the borders of my environment as an IA. So of course I'm particularly aware of all of them, and there's some translation that has to happen between each, but the idea is either to minimize that or to make it seamless and scalable.
Point is, I think that user IA and app IA are _very_ different, because user-centric design is all about patterns friendly to the human brain, which are exactly the kind of patterns you have to filter out if you want to be objective about app-centric design. Don't want to disappoint you as a would-be uniter, but I bet very few people are good at both. Maybe this is why my discipline is not very well covered in the preferred media of cocktail hours and weblogs; if you really want to get into technical
information semantics you go to W3C and start reading specs. And there's less room for speculation and rambling theorizing, which is definitely the fun and social part.
_Any_ IA is, like Adam says, a creative endeavor. Everyone wants to design _something_. Anyone with a single bit of serotonin in their brain wants to make pleasant order from chaos. Musicians organize sound. Writers organize thoughts. Software architects organize application logic. I'm sitting here
trying to organize variants of information architecture. But the fields are pretty divergent and that's why we usually specialize in just one. To be honest, I think "usability" -- or the constantly evolving acronym known as UI/UE/UX -- is more specific about describing your work than is "information architecture", which is understood by everyone you work with, but it doesn't surprise me that "defining IA" is such a necessary topic when dealing with those outside your circle.
If you want a real bit of fun, ask a traditional architect to define "information architect". An architect I know thought it must refer to the person who kept track of the specs for buildings. In fact, when I explained it, she was a little offended at the use of the term "architect" outside the context of buildings. Yeah, that's a bit extreme, but you get the point."
Thursday, April 12, 2001
inspiration
glassdog looks back on five years and finds it good. happy birthday, you old dog!
http://www.glassdog.com
a title is born
I've been corresponding with adam, the author of the terrific article I mentioned below, "Why is usability so hard?" and I got so het up I thought I'd share:
adam writes:
And therein lies the irony. As much as usability specialist and usability engineer may be confusing, it's nothing compared with the confusion that surrounds information architect. I suspect that you and I have similar definitions, but I've had people tell me that it's an extension of library science or that it's part of database programming, and when I look at job listings and see information architect, what they're usually describing is someone with good, solid user interface design skills. You seem to approach it as if it were most closely related to information design, is that correct?
me:
pretty much--
you have to understand the history of the title to some degree.
Richard Saul Wurman selected the title Information Architect to describe anyone who organized information into a form that promoted human understanding. In his book, Information Architects he showed examples of this that ranged from folks who did weather maps in newspapers to website design. But what he didn't know is the title already existed in the software world as a type of database engineer. When Lou and Peter came out with their definition in Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, it was heavily affected by their background in Library science. As former librarians, they were very good at organizing information for retrieval-- the key problem in most intranets (nearly all Argus's clients were intranets in the beginning). So their definition was filtered through their experience, just as Wurman's was through his background as an Information Designer.
Next: a lot of companies had these two books laying around: "Information Architects" and the polar bear book--"Information Architecture for the World Wide Web" And as websites grew too big for any one person to hold it in their head, people stepped up to plan those websites out-- sometimes graphic designers, sometimes usability folks, sometimes project managers, sometimes writers, sometimes engineers--- all they really had in common is they looked at big websites and thought "what a mess."
So they started organizing the websites. And in those days of strange and shifting titles, they realized they were spending all their time planning and organizing the structure of the website and no longer doing their old job, and maybe they were due a title change. And odds were high they had one of the two books on their desk, and decided that Information Architect was probably the best title for them, even if they didn't do everything in the book, or even if they did quote a bit more. IA's have grown up quite organically, responding to a need.
We are actually seeing some title-splintering now: new titles such as experience architect, information designer, interaction designer, content architect/strategist are showing up left and right. It is entirely possible as the job of "plan and organize website" becomes "plan and organize the interface" or "plan and organize the content" or "plan and organize the interactive behavior on the website" that the information architect will disappear much in the way webmasters are becoming more and more rare. Or Information Architect may only do one tiny part-- just the content organization, perhaps. Or just create site maps.
Personally I think that would lose the greatest value the IA gives to a project. When you have nothing but specialists work on a project, you have the equivalent of blind men describing an elephant: most engineers don't much care about business or user needs and they concentrate on how to make the code most effective. Most business people don't fully understand the consequence of code (nor do they care) and are interested in users only as consumers, and usability folks often get so concerned with users they forget the business needs or the engineering constraints.... A good IA takes in what is possible from engineering, what is viable/profitable from business and what is desirable/necessary from the users and balances them out into a system that works.
Please note my qualifiers "most" and "a good." I know many folks who can see beyond their discipline, and I know some IA's who cannot. But in my experience most IA's act as translators, going from one discipline to another to ferret out the compromises that will allow a solid system to be created. At Jesse's talk at ASIS: "What Do You 'DO' All Day?" pdf we discovered most IA's do a fair amount of requirements gathering and a chunk of project management. Mostly they don't touch the schedules (except to complain about them, natch) but they do run back and forth trying to marry conflicting requirements. Once those compromises are reached, they document them and realize them by designing systems (site maps, content organization schemes, wire frames, conceptual models and the like) to create a blueprint for the work to be done by design and engineering.
So if they IA is whittled down into the role of "thesaurus designer" or "interface designer" who will see the big picture from a design standpoint? Who will know what the elephant looks like? On the other hand both those jobs could be full-time jobs. I wonder what the future will look like. Will be have both? Neither?
Monday, April 9, 2001
what kind of IA are you?
Found "Why is usability so hard?" thanks to the lovely reborn xblog
Tons and tons of good stuff in the article, but this section in particular caught my eye:
The difference between a user interface designer and usability specialistThe user interface designer takes information gathered about the nature of the tasks and goals, combines it with a knowledge of human factors, culture, psychology, graphic design, and many other areas, and produces an interface which is designed to allow the end user to achieve their goals in a clear, appropriate way. The usability specialist is the one who tests that design.
The role of the usability specialist is not a creative one in the same way that a user interface designer is creative. The usability specialist simply reacts to the design based on established guidelines borne of experiments and experience (heuristics), or has end users react to the design by having them use the design in a typical way and observing the results. In both cases, what the usability specialist does is provide a verification role.
IA and usability are starting to be seen as the same thing. A friend writes:
"Souls who describe themselves as "information architects" almost always mean 'user-centered information architects', so much so that I've stopped bothering to clarify it. "
He defines himself as a "info-centered information architect, where the goal is not to make users happy but to drastically reduce development time and effort by making information structures fit a wide range of apps (including html display)"
I've always said that the usability specialist (or usability engineer or whatever.. would you people please decide on a title) studies and tests, while the IA designs structures. IA is a calculatedly creative act, while usability is research-- during the beginning, middle and end of a project. IA's should not test their own work any more than a writer should edit their own.. it's just too hard to stay objective.
And usability folks need to not design if they are testing. It muddles things. I've seen more usability reports that look like text-redesigns. It's hard when you are evaluating (I know!) not to recommend a few simple changes that might fix the site, but it must be done with great caution. If a usability person is there only during testing, they may not fully understand the constraints made by the requirements, and make specific recommendations that are impossible for technical or political reasons. "Move banner to top so users understand it is an ad" could contradict the VP of marketing's desire to keep ads out of the branding space. "Most user's were not certain what was an ad and what was not, and may leave site before completing transaction. Recommendation: make it clear clicking ad will take user to another site and abort the sale" By pointing out the consequences of not making the design change, but leaving the change in the hands of the client is a more effective way to get the message across.
Usability folks also may step on delicate egos with their recommendations and --I'm very sad to admit-- have perfectly good insights discarded out of pique. A good recommendation is phrased with caution, using many qualifiers and kept general: "Most users had difficultly finding the search box, possibly because they were looking for a text entry field with the word search next to it. You may wish to explore ways to make the search box more visible, possibly by considering adopting standard web conventions such as placing it in the top left and/or using a standard format." I've seen recommendations such as "make links blue so user understand to click them", or "put box around text so users understand location of content." This prompts some entertaining eye-rolling -- Oh, those Jakob-types just don't get design-- but doesn't help get the interface working better.
But I digress... I keep coming back to my friend's quote. Should we really be splitting forces into info-centered and user-centered? Isn't an IA who is trying to "drastically reduce development time and effort by making information structures fit a wide range of apps " thinking of another set of users-- those in the company? Isn't it possible one could be user-centered in that one considers both internal and external users? Or is that too much knowledge for one IA's head?
battle of the titans
or rather, Jef Raskin refuting an Alan Cooper interview:
Here's a taste--
Cooper: "We believe that good design is self-evident."
Raskin: "If you believe that, then you are stuck in a rut, because the value of deep improvements are rarely self-evident, and even when a better design -- if unfamiliar -- is shown to developers or experienced users, they tend to reject it. "
check it out
Sunday, April 8, 2001
medium and message
I went to see the Soft Boys last night. I've always been a cockhead-- one who loves Robyn Hitchcock. I dig the music and I adore the surreal lyrics.
I was pondering his weirder stuff-- music that, upon reading the lyrics made no damn sense, yet when you took it in uncritically you know what he's singing about, even if you can't articulate it very well.
Some of my favorite lines from his songs:
"some things go in, some things go out, next time 'round I'll be a trout"
"a radio is playing in the darkness of a hall, there is someone standing near you who just isn't there at all"
"sleeping with your devil mask is all I want to do, and when I stop it means I'm through with you"
Some lines are easier to understand--
"In agony of pleasure, I crumble to my knees, I lick your frozen treasure, You cup my furry bees"
and some are just plain impossible--
"She uncorked herself, teeth spilling from her nostrils"
He's the John Ashbery of rock and roll, a man who strings together disparate images to create a genuine emotion-- conflicting and peculiar as those juxtopositions may seem to be.
It seems to me that this style of art-- I hesitate to call it surrealism-- is not confined by the medium it is executed in: it doesn't matter if the maker is a musicians or a painter or a writer, what matters is these works are created by smashing together strongly flavored disparate images. Roschenberg did it with his collages. Ashbery does it in What Is Poetry. Heck, San Francisco chef Elka did it with every menu she made at oodles: "chawan mushi with scallops, duck confit, gingko nuts, and shiso leaf " indeed!
A Degas sculpture isn't that different from a Degas pastel... I think of Picasso painting with light, with ceramics, with paint, with torn up magazines-- didn't matter much to him.
When I first got involved with the web, everyone around me felt they had to invent from scratch everything they did. There was no learning from past disciplines-- the baby was tossed out with the bathwater. While it was very very true that many rules of print did not apply and there were many bad sites built by scanning a brocure and uploading it, we ended up going too far, and forgetting the basics of human communication. We chose to unlearn lessons about understanding the market (the users, the audience), lessons on taking the time to design the composition of the work, to create visual hierachies that lead the eye, to use language that engages and seduces. We need to relearn those rules while still understanding that the way people view and digest material online is fundamentally different--I suppose I'm trying to talk about how the medium is and is not important.
I have no idea why I'm haunted this sunday afternoon to try to get down this elusive notion. But I am... it's overly simplistic to say: it's nothing like print. or, it's just another tool. It conforting to say, it's business as usual, the revolution is over. It was exhilerating to say "throw out the old! we're doing something completely different" Both statements are false. Both statements are true. Humans are the same, it's the paper that has changed.
Anyhow, I'm interested in finding examples of artisits (or anyone) trying to use the web the same way as Hitchcock and Ashbery and Roschenberg.
And if you want a taste of Robyn Hitchcock, buy one of his "perfect" albums, either the Soft Boys' Underwater Moonlight or one of his exquisite solo albums, eye or I often dream of trains Or you can fire up napster and try mispelling glass hotel.
p.s. ralph sent me the underwater moonlight site. cool.
Dot-eyed optimist
Was reading the Sunday paper this morning and got pissed off.
I don't I ever get to read the Sunday morning paper without getting pissed off about something. This morning my eye was caught by the headline San Francisco's painted ladies have never looked so good, thanks to dot-com cash infusion. Reading the article it seems everyone agrees the city is looking better than ever, with tons of once-dilapidated buildings restored lovingly, but not everyone agrees on why they've finally got the treatment they deserve. The author of the book Painted Ladies says "I don't think the dot-com people give a damn about anything except money, so why would they care how their house or their neighborhood looks?"
I don't even know where to start with this sentence. Of course people with money care about how their house and neighborhood looks. Every drive through pacific heights or seaview or <insert your posh neighborhood here>? People with money care a whole hell of a lot. People with new money often like to look like they have old moneyand restoring houses is one way to achieve that. The dot-com people in San Francisco were often young media hipsters, and restoring a funky old house was much better than building some sprawling south-bay monster. So that's the easy part of the sentence to dismantle.
The harder one is the first part: "I don't think the dot-com people give a damn about anything except money" I don't know about your dot-com, but at Egreetings getting rich was considered about as possible as winning the lottery, at least by the folks in the trenches. The engineers routinely told stories of losing money with their options during the first tech-craze, tainting us new-to-the biz folk's green-eyed ways. So why did we work 70 hour weeks?
I think it was the nifty-factor. We were building something new, something that hadn't happened before. We were changing lives in tiny ways. Yes, we really did buy into it-- I didn't say we weren't ridiculous optimists, or silly idealists, I just said we weren't in it just for the money.
I remember Tony --co-founder of Egreetings and chief evangelist-- often sitting on the edge of someone's desk, telling one of our favorite speeches like a dad retelling a kid's favorite fairy tale at bed time: Email was soulless, email failed to carry emotions, it let folks down again and aging promoting misunderstandings and not caring the weight of our powerful human sentiments. And how an Egreeting was a rich medium, with pictures and sound, and could create a tool to allow people to express the full tone of their message." We all knew it was kinda goofy, and we all kind of believed it anyway. And you know, sending ecards is the second most common task people do online. We did touch people's lives in a small but nice way.
Ask Peter Merholtz about Epinions and he'll go on and on about the possibilities of self-defining systems and community as decision making tool. Ask John Shiple about Big Step and he'll talk about helping small businesses get online. Susan Gorbet at Snapfish will talk about how important people's photos are to them, and how sharing those pictures online is magical for families sprawled across America. They won't whine about lost stock gains, and they won't talk about dot-coms with a sneer. Yes, it was a mad time, but it let strange new ideas see the light of day.
When we look at this time, I think we'll see both the wackiness of a store devoted to selling panty-hose online, but we'll also see that the crazy investing allowed some very good and useful ideas to see the light of day. I'm embarrassed to admit that before the web, I had sent my grandfather about two presents, total. Now he gets Christmas and birthday gifts thanks to Red Envelope and we have quadrupled our correspondence thanks to email and egreetings. Heck, I bought a stranger a book the other day, just because I was reading their blog and saw they had a terrific novel on their Amazon wishlist.
Even after the craziness of tulip-madness the tulip fields of Holland continue to be beautiful. In San Francisco the newly restored Painted Ladies continue to make the city lovely. But for me the real gain is the invisible one-- the millions of ways my daily life got better, from the kozmo delivery that brings you ice cream in the middle of a hard day to my husband, who I met on yahoo personals.
Friday, April 6, 2001
you say good-bye and I say hello
I said goodbye to Egreetings last night.
Bought by American Greetings, they shut their doors yesterday. The generous former CFO rented out Cafe Du Nord and provided a spread complete with little wild mushroom appetizers and plenty of free flowing liquor. The founders gave speeches and handed out awards to longtimers.
Some people were angry, blaming this mistake or that for ending what was a truly amazing place to work. But others, including myself, were just happy we could have been part of it in a time when you could do insane things and they would work. It was a company that allowed you to grow as fast as you could-- grow as fast as it was growing.
Egreetings took chances on people. I went from shy temp writing marketing copy for the greetings to Information Architect running around quoting Jakob Neilson in hopes of making a great product.
I chatted with a former waiter who ended up heading the production team. It was a little bit company-as-cult, but you know, that can be okay. It's nice to know the product you're making doesn't hurt the environment or cause cancer, and even makes people smile. I remember times when we were up at 2 a.m. screaming about the database or cursing javascript that didn't work, and someone would yell "Hey, it's not brain surgery. We get this wrong, nobody dies."
I also remember many times, riding on a plane or a taxi or anywhere strangers suddenly start talking to you, I would be asked "Where do you work?" and I'd say "Egreetings.com" and they would reply "Oh, I love those! My sister (brother, wife) sent me one and it made my day."
Kinda cool.
I couldn't help but think as I watched the founders, Tony and Fred, up on the stage: that's Noel and Gabe and me up there. Foolhardy and hopeful and trying to get a product we believe in off the ground.
And tonight Carbon IQ is holding its housewarming. Will we grow big? Will we stay small? Will be get bought, as Egreetings did, but a larger older company? Will we quietly go under with no fanfare? I don't know. We're in a strange business, in strange times. But damn I love an adventure.
Good bye Egreetings. Hello Carbon IQ.
Fasten your seatbelt, it's going to be a bumpy ride.
See the party pictures
more party pics, on wooland
more party pics, thanks to bob
Thursday, April 5, 2001
Censorship and me
I deleted a comment today. I'm feeling a touch guilty.
Let me start at the beginning. Some of you may have noticed that the comments section has recently been peppered with mysterious messages from "Michael Sippy" stating such things as "i am everywhere" and "all your blog are belong to me."
I wrote Sippy asking him what was up with him, and he replied
"it's not me. i wrote this: "we hereby implore you to inject chaos and anarchy into the post button by hijacking the identities and namesakes of your favorite web 'icons.'"
Okay, cute, of course Sippy would be the first to have his identity hijacked. The another comment showed up on my blog:
"and I'd like you to call me mike. or mikey."
This was tiresome. So I pondered-- should I delete these comments? Wouldn't that be-- shudder-- censorship?Earlier today chatting with Gabe I talked about a large mailing list I'm on, where people were going on and on-- someone had been rude to another person, who then got snippy, and suddenly I had 20 messages in my mail box stating how this person was right or the other was... this argument has now been going on for five days.
I wondered out loud to Gabe why the moderators didn't step in and unsubscribe them. I would. I did. I used to moderate a mailing list, and I would happily unsubscribe someone who was out of line-- anyone who was rude or who used the list for spam. No problem. I just made them go away. I felt a touch guilty at this thought of my early totalitarian ways.
Gabe just laughed.
So I sat in front of the computer tonight seeing another moronic fake comment arrive on the blog. Do I delete? Do I?
and then I remembered the whole point of this site was to filter out all the noise for people who care about what I do-- designing usable humane products. Heck, my mailing list is nothing but a way to help people better the signal to noise ratio. And hell yeah, this mock-sippy stuff was noise.
I'm now a censor.
and I'm feeling a touch guilty about my totalitarian ways.
Monday, April 2, 2001
i have no thoughts
Got an email today on something I haven't really thought about:
"do u have any thoughts or resources regarding the application of IA to game design? thanx petros"
First let me say I *heart* gamer/hacker spelling.
Second let me say: I'm so happy that greymatter allows comments so that I can pass this question on to you...
Come on, peanut gallery!
Sunday, April 1, 2001
And that redesign thing....
The survey is proving to entertaining and edifying. (it's not too late to add your two cents!)
My favorite responses to "How can I improve Eleganthack?"
- "better looking"
- "naked photos of friends"
- "Smell-o-vision."
- "Keep the site simple. I don't come for layout and pictures, I come for the interesting content."
- "less boring design maybe? "
- "Keep the simplicity of your web site, it's efficient"
- "Add pretty colours and graphical design... ;) "
- "the rambling logotype with bad fonts. "
- "Check your spelling...please!"
- "You don't brag about Gabe enough. More Gabe! More Gabe! More Gabe!"
- "I still like underlined links."
- "more personality"
Well, folks I'll try to balance the design and undesign issues as best I can. I'll talk to my friends about posing naked,and perhaps they'll offer some oders for the smell-o-vision thing also. As for spelling, unless I magically get over dyslexia and learn to spell and type OR someone starts editing for me, I fear yr going to have to live with my bizarro spellings. And as for "more personality" -- are you really ready for that?
In any case, the most common requests were
- go to grematter so we can add our coments
- move blog to the front page
- let me know what you have on the site and what's new
- "make gleanings (and archives) easier to find, especially to people who just read the blog. i had been reading the blog for a long time before i found gleanings and like gleanings more than the blog"
Well, I promise you ALL of these will be addressed (hey, we're already in greymatter). I've actually hated the front page rambling quote for some time now, and want to redo it, except it seems silly since I'm about to redo everything. But the blog *will* go to the front page, and that dang quote will go. And for those who don't know I do a little newsletter called gleanings.
You may like it, if you like this blog.
Keep sending in your comments!
And by the way, Gabe is great! It's such a pleasure to work with him! Every sunday I lie awake in bed 'cause I'm so excited to work with Gabe on Monday-- it's like Christmas eve! Gabe is the Santa Claus of UX!
(see, I told you I listen to your comments...)
Gone grey
Okay, folks; as requested, going to greymatter.
Actually I had planned to some weeks ago, but didn't have time to get it up and running. Then I realized I archive monthly, so waiting for April 1 was the best launch time. But this is not an april fool's joke! Oh, no...
Anyhow, will be messing to get this just right for the next hour or so. Please use the feedback form on the left to tell me if something ain't right. Or add a comment. I guess you can do that now!
