designcult

Politics, brand, and graphic design

Excerpt from an interview with Michael Bierut on the Obama campaign's visual brand:

The thing that sort of flabbergasts me as a professional graphic designer is that, somewhere along the way, they decided that all their graphics would basically be done in the same typeface, which is this typeface called Gotham If you look at one of his rallies, every single non-handmade sign is in that font. Every single one of them. And they're all perfectly spaced and perfectly arranged. Trust me. I've done graphics for events --and I know what it takes to have rally after rally without someone saying, "Oh, we ran out of signs, let's do a batch in Arial." It just doesn't seem to happen. There's an absolute level of control that I have trouble achieving with my corporate clients.

ROUS's?

I don't think they exist.

Deadlines

"I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."

-- Douglas Adams

Facebooked

Sometimes the difference between thinking about design and having design happen to you hits you in the face. This happened to me yesterday -- I've followed the launch of Facebook's Beacon program and ensuing controversy, and had seen screenshots of the feature, but had never seen it in the wild. Yesterday I was printing out tickets from Fandango for Sweeney Todd (quick review: well done but not for the squeamish and/or those recovering from the flu) and this little creature popped out at me (with a nice transition animation). Suddenly the theoretical was real, and frankly a little jarring.

My immediate reactions:

• I noticed this, in a way that I would never see much similarly positioned pop-up ad crap. This is probably a combination of the smoothness of the animation and the clean design -- I'm not sure if I immediately clocked that the message was from Facebook, but the design definitely cued "Not an ad."
• I knew what it was. Unclear if I would have without being pre-informed, but it is pretty clearly messaged.
• It was shocking in a way I didn't expect -- it's one thing to intellectually grapple with the implications of a thing and another to actually be shocked by it. Apparently on some gut level I didn't expect my personal habits to be (potentially) publicized in this context, even while I'm in the industry and know at a different level that it's possible.

At this point I was dragged out of the house by my wife, who wanted to make sure we didn't let the process of design inquiry make us miss the movie. Afterwards, we talked it over and I thought a little more about my reactions, and also checked out the Facebook side of the interaction.

My slightly more considered reactions:

• What is happening is pretty clearly messaged but what to do about it is not -- it feels like they're got disclosure down reasonably well, but the copy sets a pretty aggressive "this is hapening but you can make it stop if you must" tone that I'm not comfortable with, and which ends up being confusing (e.g. the uncheck-the-box-and-hit-OK opt-out interaction, which is a classic way to muddle folks up). I'm not sure whether this is intentional aggression or cluelessness.
• Movies are actually a pretty good area for a feature like this -- letting other folks know what movie I'm going to fits in well with the continuous partial attention-feeding nature of Facebook, Twitter, and etc., and they have a lot fewer downsides than other areas Beacon covers (movie-going is pretty low-risk from a privacy standpoint, and is less likely to ruin a surprise gift than broadcasting product purchases). If it had been, say, a book purchase, my negative reaction might have been even stronger.

So, not that last word on Beacon, or even my last word, just an interesting (to me) experience.

Interactive LED Coffee Table

Just as soon as a brush up on my soldering skills and have room for a new coffee table, I'm gonna build me one of these.

As an aside, I ordered some stickers from the same outfit. Happily, I could pay with PayPal, and the result was the awesomest PayPal screen I've ever seen.

Book Review | Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency

Gen-Xers got a bad rap for a while in the 90s. There was the whole "slackers" media craze in the 90s (which some of us recognized as not having much to do with true Slack, Praise "Bob"). In retrospect, all that was about was a bunch of relatively smart middle-class youths looking at the jobs the previous generation had in mind for them and thinking: "Nah ...." Which is normal intergenerational behavior. But at the time, I recall a lot of Boomer fretting about lazy kids these days, etc. Funny thing was, (and I'm thinking in terms of zeitgeists here, not actual data), it seems like the minute there was something actually interesting to do -- like a radical technological and cultural shift happening out in the fabled West, for example -- there was a collective packing of bags, moving out, and suddenly all the former slackers were putting in 80+ hour weeks at dot-com jobs. Followed by a boom, then a bust, then a boomlet, and here we all are.

80+ hours can make (some) sense (in certain circumstances, for not too long) when you're changing the world at a crazy start-up. But it makes much less sense as the crazy start-up starts to get big and stable -- and it takes a toll when done over the long haul. Unfortunately, some companies have tried to keep that aspect of their start-up culture a little too long. Which brings us to Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency by Tom DeMarco.

Preston Smalley recommended the book to me, and I found it pretty compelling. It's aimed primarily at managers of knowledge workers (e.g. designers and software developers), but could also be useful, or at least therapeutic, for folks who've been subjected to certain kinds of work cultures. It's really a couple of ideas wrapped up in one (smallish) package:

• When dealing with folks like designers and developers, many ways corporations have of maximizing "efficiency" have limited success, can actually backfire and make things slower and more costly, and have pretty serious consequences in terms of burnout, turnover, low quality, lack of innovation. 
• Following these, it discusses more general management issues that spring from the overall efficiency culture he's just poked holes in, taking on various management fads and failings like management by fear and overemphasis on process and quality. He also takes some swipes at Dilbert here, which is always nice.
• Finally he wraps his recommendations for what to do as a manager of knowledge workers primarily around planning for change: ways of creating flexible groups that can adapt to changing circumstances, building slack into schedules to manage risk, and having trust in your team.

There were a bunch of "a-ha" moments for me in the early chapters -- DeMarco has a nice way of capturing the absurdities at the heart of some cherished workplace cultural habits simply and neatly. The later chapters are a little more scattered, but then figuring out what to do is always a little harder than figuring out what not to do. 

Quotes

"You've got to wear pointy shoes so you know which way you're going."
-- Joe Strummer

eBay Blogs

A quick note to point out that Shri Mahesh has put together this nice wiki of blogs by current and former eBay employees. There's some good stuff in there -- and if you fit the description, you should add yours as well!

Design and managing risk

Ever thought about hanging out your own shingle? If so, you'd better think about how you'll handle health insurance. If you'd be covered through a spouse's insurance, you're probably set, but otherwise you might have to buy individual health insurance, which typically costs more. And that's if you're lucky enough to get individual health insurance, since it could be denied to you for all sorts of reasons -- from serious prior conditions to minor ones like allergies, ear infections, or joint sprains. Or because you'd been a lumberjack or carnival worker. (Here's a list of over 50 reasons health insurers may reject you. It's scary stuff.)

Jacob Hacker talks about healthcare as one type of increasing risk for folks in the US in his book The Great Risk Shift, along with retirement and jobs. It's a great book, full of meaty policy goodness (if you like that sort of thing), but the basic point is simple: in some important ways, Americans are at greater risk of dramatic swings in income, prolonged job loss, massive healthcare costs, and other forms of economic insecurity than in the past. For example, he states that "The chance that a person with average demographic characteristics will experience a 50 percent or larger drop in income over a two-year period has risen from 7 percent in the early 1970s to 17 percent in 2002." So it's not just healthcare risks we have to worry about. He goes on to talk about both the causes of this shift and some possible policy solutions, and I hope we'll hear more about some of those solutions as the various presidential campaigns start heating up.

So, what does this have to do with design (other than discouraging design entrepreneurs starting their own consultancies)? Well, while actually fixing the problems probably requires national policy changes, those can take a while. In the meantime, we can think about designing products and services that can help folks at least manage these risks.

I first started thinking about this when Scott Cook, founder of Intuit, came to talk to the product team at eBay a while ago. He's a pretty engaging speaker, and frames the history of the company as a series of products inspired by deep customer insights -- insights which he cheerfully admits they came to very late in some cases. One such case was the origin of Quickbooks -- for many years Intuit researchers noticed that a significant number of Quicken users seemed to be small businesses. This didn't make any sense, as it was designed for home financial use, not accounting -- until they eventually realized that there was a need for small business accounting software designed for non-accountants.

I was intrigued by his mentioning, as a similar case, a new software product created specifically to manage health insurance paperwork Quicken Medical Expense Manager. It turns out that the inspiration for this came from even closer to home, as this story (PDF) relates:

Dan Robinson's life changed forever in the winter of 2000. His newborn son entered the world with a rare illness that required a life-saving heart surgery -- the first of many, it would turn out -- when he was just two months old ...

At the time of his son's birth, Dan was an engineering manager with the Quicken team and Intuit Inc. As the parent of a child with a serious medical condition, he experienced firsthand how stressful managing medical expenses can be.

By 2001, the Robinson's medical bills exceeded $1.2 million. "I felt overwhelmed by the number of bills and statements -- I was unable to make sense of it all, Robinson said ...

Robinson developed his own basic medical expense management  software program and proposed a more formal software solution to the Quicken organization for development.  At first his ideas was met with skepticism, but eventually he was given the go ahead to pursue it.  The premise was simple: develop a product that could help track  healthcare expenses and insurance for individuals and families.

I think this is an amazing example of product design targeting a real and scary risk (the risk of bankruptcy due to overwhelming healthcare costs) and helping empower individuals to manage that risk. Product designers have a tendency to talk about what good things using their product will do for their customers -- but sometimes the  best path is to help  manage risks, i.e. reduce the likelihood of bad things happening.

Edit: My friend Karen posted about this subject (and dictators and complex systems) a little while ago.

Quick Links: Wiki Zeitgeist Edition

Sometimes you gotta pay attention to what the Internet oracle is saying, and right now it's apparently saying "wiki!"

We'll start with yesterday, when I was pointed to the corollary to my science fiction about search engines post by boingboing: science fiction about wikis! Specifically, the story Wikiworld by Paul Di Filippo:

Realizing that such a task was beyond my own capabilities, I called in my wikis: The Dark Galactics. The PEP Boyz. The Chindogurus. Mother Hitton's Littul Kittons. The Bishojos. The Glamazons. The Provincetown Pickers. And several more. All of them owed me simoleons for the usual—goods received, or time and expertise invested—and now they’d be eager to balance the accounts.

Then a friend pointed my at a cartoon that summed up the problem with wikipedia.

Finally, Dahlia Lithwick at Slate explained to me -- and i think she's right -- that babies invented community-based collaborative authorship:

I took my small sons to visit family over the holidays. As invariably happens when one wants to show off one's young, the smaller one's face exploded into great green ropes of snot only seconds after deplaning. The consumptive Victorian wheeze followed mere hours later. And suddenly, he was no longer my baby. He was a server-side wiki.

So there you go. I'm not sure why the Internet decided it's wiki zeitgeist week, but it clearly must be.