Daniel Pink’s “A Whole New Mind” Gets It

Happy 2009, everyone!

In the spirit of kicking off the New Year on a positive note, I am just going to scrap the follow-up missive I was writing to my previous post about US Airways and their ongoing frequent flier miles swindle (based on further experience over the holiday break, it continues to get more bizarre, and their underestimation of the intelligence of their passengers/customers is mind-boggling).

Instead, I am going to focus on something that was inspiring and uplifting – Daniel Pink’s book “A Whole New Mind”. The book was recently recommended to me by our friend Todd Marrone, who said, “hey, this book seems to really parallel what Think Brownstone is all about” – and after finishing it on the plane coming back from New Orleans a few days ago, I take that as a very high compliment indeed. I’m glad others (particularly accomplished right-brainers such as Todd) see these qualities in our work.

Checking out the listing on Amazon will give you the basic gist of the book, so I won’t reiterate here – but this was a fun, quick, and exciting read that made me more pumped than ever to hit the ground running in 2009 and add some of these new tips and techniques to our arsenal for crafting the best user experiences. I’m hereby suggesting that this book be added to the Think Brownstone bible (along with MUST reads like this) – and to quote the Fort Worth Star-Telegram: “If its likely that someone in China or India can do your work more cheaply than you can, of if a computer can do your work faster than you can, READ THIS BOOK.”

A few nuggets that I dog-eared because they struck a nerve with me and echoed the way I talk about what we do:

“…because of abundance, businesses are realizing that the only way to differentiate their goods and services in today’s overstocked marketplace is to make their offerings physically beautiful and emotionally compelling.”

“As (overseas outsourcing) takes over the routine work of software fabrication, maintenance, testing, and upgrading, Conceptual Age software types will concentrate on novelty and nuance. After all, before the Indian programmers have something to fabricate, maintain, test, or upgrade, that something must first be imagined or invented. And these creations must then be explained and tailored to customers and entered into the swirl of commerce, all of which require aptitudes that can’t be reduced to a set of rules on a spec sheet – ingenuity, personal rapport, and gut instinct.”

“Design is a classic whole-minded aptitude. It is, to borrow (John) Heskett’s terms, a combination of utility and significance. Design has become an essential aptitude for personal fulfillment and professional success for at least three reasons. First, thanks to rising prosperity and advancing technology, good design is now more accessible than ever, which allows more people to partake in its pleasures and become connoisseurs of what was once specialized knowledge. Second, in an age of material abundance, design has become crucial for most modern businesses – as a means of differentiation and as a way to create new markets. Third, as more people develop a design sensibility, we’ll increasingly be able to deploy design for its ultimate purpose: changing the world.”

Changing the world. I’m in. How about you? Let’s hit it!

P.S. To have your mind completely blown, follow up this read with Kurt Vonnegut’s “Player Piano” (as I did, completely by chance) - written in 1952 and, amazingly, the embodiment of so many of Pink’s observations in fictional prose. I become more of a fan of KV with each passing year…

Falcon Waterfree Technologies Gets It

“As much as 5% of fresh water consumed is currently used to carry away urine. Each Falcon Waterfree urinal typically saves an average of 40,000 gallons (151,000 liters) of fresh water per year.”

Not much would be required beyond that quote to say that Falcon Waterfree Technologies clearly “gets it”. Read about them and their mission and vision, and you’ll also be thinking “yes, these are the kinds of companies that deserve to thrive and prosper” - and should they succeed, it’s going to make the world a better place for all of us.

But wouldn’t you know it; they’ve taken it a step further and incorporated some great design as well. Sure, as far as urinals go, their products have some nice lines and are easy enough on the eyes – plus, no piping or anything that you need to touch with your hands (bonus).

But did you notice that little speck in the back of the bowl? No, that’s not a bad scan – that is, in fact, a little cartoon bee that is painted on the unit itself – and it is a brilliant example of iconography, universal language, and simplicity.

The unit is water-free after all, so to keep things as clean as possible and working properly it stands to reason that there are optimal ways to, um, “interact” with it. They could have created little instruction panels (bringing up language concerns) that nobody would read or certainly wouldn’t read until they were already in mid-relief. They could have done any number of designs like bulls-eyes or arrows or other things that were heavy-handed and might make people loathe to comply for just that reason (unless the consequences were dire) because we’ve all got a little bit of rebellion in us. Instead, they acted upon a piece of universal knowledge: guys like to aim at stuff.

There’s something about that bee, isn’t there? It’s not overly cartoon-ish. It’s not overly realistic, making you think that it might crawl out of there if you don’t zap it – perhaps adding to some patrons’ existing stage fright. There’s no explanation, and no pressure. It just…is. Consequently, it is almost diabolically hard to resist aiming at. You see, there isn’t really much else to do whilst in the act, so there’s a bit of human nature there to turn what would otherwise be total downtime into a simple game. That’s the impulse that makes you kick a bottle cap around when you’re waiting for your friend to pick you up; the impulse that used to make you try to flick a field goal with a little paper football while waiting for the bell to ring. So, if all else is white on a standard urinal but there’s a little black chip mark in the porcelain or something, dollars to donuts, guys will aim at it. Why not take it up a notch, and in the process, guide the users of your product to keep it working more efficiently (proper aim reinforces the vortex that keeps the liquid moving down the water-free drain) – reducing maintenance costs, keeping things more sanitary, and improving the experience for everyone?

So there are a few lessons here:

1. When all else is equal, something that offers people the chance to test their skill or have a little fun in an otherwise rote or mundane setting will likely be utilized.
2. There are few things as intuitive as directing specific behaviors by capitalizing on the innate trends and tendencies of the target audience; thereby reducing potential fatigue and misunderstanding that can occur when using more traditional methods of communication (text, audio, video, instructive graphics).
3. Not every design decision has to be beaten into the ground – sometimes it really is acceptable to just go with something because you have a visceral response to it or because it is “cool” (properly executed, of course). I’m sure there was research behind using the bee, but if it was a little hammer or one of those mushroom guys from Super Mario Brothers, I’m willing to bet the results would be the same.

Strong iconography that can be understood (or elicit specific behaviors) globally is something to strive for – I’d be pretty proud of this had I come up with it. To quote one of our fearless leaders (Brian) when we were talking about the genius of this design at the Think Space (obviously, our inspirations know no bounds): “…that’s what is so brilliant about it…I mean, I think Europeans probably like peeing on bees too.”

Who wouldn’t, Mr. McIntire. Who wouldn’t.

Ivan Gets It: How to get your point across

Last night I was enjoying an IM conversation with a former colleague of mine. Among the topics was a bit of a gripe session about some designers we’ve known who insist on creating Flash applications inside of browsers that look and function more like a software application than a web app. I think I said something like, “Not only do you lose a lot of real estate by building a frame within a browser frame, but you’re limiting any kind of expandability by building a frame in the first place.” I thought I was soooo smart.

This morning I started catching up on some of my blogs and Darryl over at Plaid wrote about Ringo by Ivan Tihienko.

Holographic Interface - round interface - Ringo from Ivan Tihienko on Vimeo.

This is still a concept piece done for a final project at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, but it blows away my thoughts about the limitations of a frame.

Why does Ivan get it? Aside from coming up with a cool idea, Ivan found a way to demonstrate it in a compelling and entertaining way. How many great ideas have been destroyed by the 30-minute PowerPoint presentation meant to pitch the idea? This is the same reason car manufacturers create unbuildable prototypes.

Will Ringo ever be built? Who knows. But it has more potential to inspire the next generation of UIs to be built than a flash app in a browser window.

Way to go Ivan!

A Simple Site Solves a Holiday Dilemma

Years ago, I was awarded the honor of generating a pollyanna list of gift givers and receivers between me, my siblings and our spouses. The rules were simple: you are assigned one person to buy a gift for, you won’t get your spouse’s name, you won’t get the name of the person you bought for last year. I was still too lazy to think every year, so a friend and I wrote a pollyanna generator that stored lists from previous years and generated random lists to ensure absolute pollyanna integrity.

Sadly, I lost the source code. As more siblings got married the software grew confused with too many names. When my wife and I married I inherited the same responsibility with my new in-laws. Now I rely on a sophisticated system of spreadsheets, scratch paper and email. Every year I say to myself, “I should create a web site that does this for everyone. It could be a free service - linked to online shopping services. It’s not that complicated… I should do that before someone else gets the idea…” It’s no surprise that someone figured this out:

great idea, great name, great slogan... wish it was mine...

This is not sour grapes - an unfulfilled idea isn’t worth the brain cells it’s written on. Our friends at Elfster have done what I never bothered to do and they did it better than I ever would have. I played with the site this evening. It’s well designed, simple and free. A few highlights:

• The organizer sets up a list of names & email addresses
• It waits for all invitees to accept the invitations or waits for a deadline to pass before starting the gift exchange
• All participants are anonymous - even the organizer
• Participants are notified of their pollyanna through email
• Participants create wish lists, but cannot view the status of gifts
• All other participants can change the status of gifts (in case Santa bought you that tie and doesn’t want someone to duplicate it)
• You can communicate anonymously with your pollyanna

There’s more, but you should play with it. Set up your office gift exchange on it. And the next time you hear me talk about an idea I have, give me a kick in the pants and tell me to do something about it…

A Company is “Born”

It was a great night. A dream come true, really. Now that I’ve had a few days to reflect on it, the best way I can describe what happened on Friday night is to compare it to the birth of a child. OK, I know it sounds weird, but stick with me.

201 Fayette Street, Second Floor, Conshohocken PA

Last September we started Think Brownstone. Carl and I had a vision, some basic principles, and a few really great clients. Yet with just a placeholder web page, fake business cards and no real office space, Brownstone was still somewhat under wraps, hidden from view.

Collect all nine colors

Over the last 12 months our company developed. Several incredible people joined our team. We defined our brand with a logo and website. Business cards were printed. An office space was transformed into a Think Space. A date was set, invitations were mailed and anticipation grew.

Lots of great friends

Then on Friday November 7th, 2008, Think Brownstone was introduced to the world. A company was “born”. Thanks so much for coming out and making our First Anniversary Celebration and Open House truly a night to remember. Even more than that, thank you all for your support, passion and trust through the years. We are going to make you proud.

Think Space

Visit our Flickr photostream for more photos from the Open House (thanks Steve!).

TV News Gets It: The Future of Presentations

Don’t worry, this is not a political entry. For all of you who have ever made a presentation with PowerPoint using 60 slides riddled with bullets: We want you to watch this short clip from Meet the Press. This should be the future of business presentations:

See what’s going on here? This is an interactive presentation tool. It is not just ten bullets on a slide in 14-point text. This allows the presenter to do several things:

1. Get his initial point across
2. Demonstrate variations on his point
3. Not just answer questions, but SHOW the answer to questions
4. Involve his audience by letting them play “what if”

Think about this the next time you put together a presentation. We’re all guilty of putting our audiences to sleep with PowerPoint, it’s about time we started devising ways to involve our audiences.

You don’t need an expensive touch screen either. I remember staying up late during the 2000 election because I wanted to go to sleep knowing who our next president was going to be. The late, great Tim Russert got it, he sat at the news desk with a small white board and sketched out every possible scenario. A WHITE BOARD!

Russert and his famous mini-white board

MLB Store Doesn’t Get It: Costs My Wife $6, Me One Cap and Delays World Series

A while ago, my loving wife heard me mutter, “All I want is an old-school Phillies cap, from the late 70’s, where the P had a baseball in it.”  She went on the prowl and found one on the MLB shopping site, ordering one to arrive just in time for game 3 of the World Series. It was quite a surprise, but there was one hitch - they shipped a size small. So we both jumped on line and ordered a replacement for overnight delivery hoping I could cover my head for at least games 4 or 5. Of course, shipping was late and the Phils had to battle the Rays in the rain. Although they were winning most of the game, the Rays tied the score right before the rain delay - most likely because I wasn’t wearing my new old-school cap.

The new cap arrived yesterday, but when I opened it - it was not what we thought we had ordered. When my wife called to complain and ask for the overnight shipping money to be returned, customer service told her, “No Ma’am, that’s what you ordered. If you want to return it, you’ll be refunded the cost of the hat minus $6 for the return shipping. I’m sorry I can’t credit you the return fee.” There are four reasons why this is so wrong:

Note the absence of a size selector pull-down menu

ISSUE #1: POOR DESIGN OF SIZE SELECTOR

The MLB store ran out of all sizes except small. So, rather than give you a size pull down that only says “Small” they replace the size selector with straight text that says “Small.” My wife didn’t see that for the first order and thought the hat was adjustable. We’re willing to accept that mistake.

Visually similar "You May Also Like" items cause confusion

ISSUE #2: POOR DESIGN OF SHOPPING CART

The second time we ordered, we noticed that the cap was size small, but in the margin on the right was an image of the cap. The screen grab above shows a different cap, but the cap that landed in there before was very similar to the cap I wanted. THAT cap had a size selector - so we just thought you chose sizes in your shopping cart. Sure it’s odd, but this is MLB, their key strength isn’t designing shopping carts. When we selected the size and saw two similar caps in our shopping cart, we simply deleted the small size.

ISSUE #3: CUSTOMER SERVICE HAS NO AUTHORITY

Once we figured out what caused the mistake, we didn’t want a free cap, we just didn’t want to pay a $6 return fee again for their poor site design. The customer service rep insisted it was our fault, not because he’s a jerk, but because he has no authority to please the customer. Just a note to all the online merchants out there: things will happen. You want loyal customers. If you fear giving authority to customer service reps, you may be in the wrong business. Don’t hogtie all of your CSRs because one of them may be dumb enough to steal from you. There are better ways to prevent employee theft than keeping them from doing their jobs.

ISSUE #4: GAME 5 WAS DELAYED FOR TWO DAYS BECAUSE OF RAIN

This wouldn’t have happened if I had my Phillies cap on.

Apple Gets It - It’s the Little Things

I’m not always a huge fan of Apple’s Mail client, but for a series of reasons that can be rolled up into the master excuse of “Sometimes Phil is kinda lazy,” I use it.

I was a huge Mac fan back when a color 8″ monitor caused crowds to gather and the folks in the university computer lab I ran would wait in line to use the Mac II with the 20Mb hard drive. But then I joined the corporate world and the PC became my friend.

We’ve made the welcome decision to standardize everyone at Think Brownstone to Macs. It’s been a learning experience (yes, there are things you need to learn how to use on a Mac) but it’s also been like a reunion with a long lost friend. The kind of friend that brings you small gifts you’d never think of buying for yourself, but once you get it, you never put it down…

The other day, I emailed an old friend asking for his mailing address. When I hovered over it to copy/paste it into my address book, I saw this:

Just what I always wanted!

It even found matches between the content of the email and any fields in my address book and suggested existing contacts to add the address… phone number… email address to.

You see, it’s smart enough to recognize patterns… phone numbers, emails, addresses… and it knows that hovering over it is usually the precursor to the acts of highlight, copy, open address book, paste, rearrange into correct fields (zip, area code, etc.). So my new Mac has just saved me a frustrating series of clicks, drags and edits that I’ve done a thousand times before. I’m oh-so-happy.

I know, I know, you lifetime Mac users are snickering at me… “Silly PC Phil, Macs are our friends.” You’re right, this is very friendly. It kills me because a computer is just a tool. There’s no reason that any computer I touch can give me little bouts of joy like this… It shouldn’t be specific to a Mac - but it is… I’m just grateful it’s there.

fivethirtyeight.com - Sometimes Gets It, Sometimes Doesn’t

It happens every two years. During a Senatorial or Presidential election cycle, I get a little obsessed and I end up having to check in on the pulse of the nation way too regularly. Every time this happens to me, I find a few web sites that feed my need for political crack. This time, it’s FiveThirtyEight.com. And it’s not just me: for a blog launched in March 2008 to be in Blogpulse’s top 10 linked to blogs is quite an achievement.

FiveThirtyEight.com is run by Nate Silver, a baseball statistician best known for developing a system to forecast the performance of baseball players. The power of this site is not so much the blog entries, but the collection of charts and graphs displayed on the edges of the site. You see, Nate has a method for compiling all of the political polls into a model and predicting the elections if they were held today. This isn’t as simple as averaging a bunch of numbers. For instance, we learned in 2000 that the electoral college can be more important than the popular vote. We also know that some polling agencies are more or less reliable than others.

To account for all of this, Nate weighs each poll based on its past performance vs actual results. After that, it gets much more complicated. Those of you into predictive modelling porn may want to look here - just scroll down to “Process Overview” and keep reading.

Nate has a clear bias in his blog entries, but he goes to great lengths to keep the stats balanced. It’s clear when it comes to handling data and predictive analysis that Nate Gets It. But when it comes to visuals, sometimes Nate Gets It, sometimes he Doesn’t Get It.

I routinely check four things on the site: the Electoral Vote pie chart, the Win Percentage pie chart, the Obama vs. McCain Projection Map, and his “Today’s Polls” posting. Sometimes I venture deeper and try to pretend some of the more complex stuff makes sense to me.  For instance, I really want to know what everything in this chart means:

what do the two red bars mean?

The primary message of this chart is clear: Democrats are going to dominate the Senate this year. Where I get confused is the zebra striping on the chart combined with the two red lines. On all of his other charts Red = Republican and Blue = Democrat, but I’m pretty sure that’s not what he intended here. The first red bar seems to say that’s where there is less than 100% chance, but why the other red bar at 25%? Wouldn’t it make more sense to highlight the part where the first likelihood is below 50%? Or maybe I just don’t understand the significance of the two red bars.

Then there’s this chart, which is so important that it sits right under the projection map:

Blue spikes = Happy Dems... I guess

All the words make sense, but I feel like I’m missing something. This chart is important to statisticians, but I feel like a child looking at it saying, “More blue simulations = happy dems… I guess.”

FiveThirtyEight’s charts are simple and get the point across, so this isn’t a classic case of what Tufte calls chartjunk. I may also not be the typical audience for the site. Clearly charts like this are important to the site, and I applaud Nate for displaying things visually. I’d love to buy him a copy of this. I think he’s too busy right now to read it.

What I would LOVE is a clickthrough for each chart with a short primer on what the chart is telling me, where the numbers come from and what the significance is. Don’t change your charts, Nate - just let novice statistics geeks like me in on the hard stuff.

US Airways Doesn’t Get It

OK so, I’m quite sure we’ve all had our share of complaints with airlines – and this isn’t your typical “they lost my luggage/my flight was canceled/the service rep was so rude” rant. That would be like shooting fish in a barrel, and we know that the user experience on that end leaves a lot to be desired. But there is another way that US Airways (in particular) doesn’t get it, and it has to do with the bone-chilling process of trying to book award travel with frequent flyer miles.

Most people who have tried to book awards travel with US Airways will tell you that throughout the process, you get the feeling like they don’t really want you to succeed. In response to that, some have said to me “well, of course they don’t – why would they want you to be able to fly for free?” and my response to that is, if that were true (and I sincerely hope it’s not true, though I have my suspicions), they shouldn’t have the program in the first place. So, giving them the benefit of the doubt, it should concern them that we feel that way – that we feel like we’ve faked them out if we actually manage to book a flight. Not good.

Part of this comes from the way that the Dividend Miles section of their website is set up.

ISSUE #1 - POOR INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE/LINK STRUCTURE

Now, you can pretty easily find out how many miles you’ve earned by clicking “My Account” under “Dividend Miles”, and you can book travel by clicking “Book Award Travel”. Pretty straightforward. Finding out how many miles you’ll need to score a trip is a bit more difficult – that is under ”Use Miles”. Not only did that take me several minutes to find, but it wasn’t a result of a logical thought process, like “based on the title of this choice, I have a pretty good idea of what I’m going to get when I click it.” It was instead a result of thinking “well, what I’m looking for so far hasn’t been anywhere I’d expect it to be, and since there is no other choice that makes sense, I might as well start clicking them all until I stumble upon it.” That, for starters, made me feel like US Airways didn’t really want to reward me. They wanted me to get frustrated and give up.

ISSUE #2 - SMART CLICKS vs. LESS CLICKS; CONFUSING NAVIGATIONAL REDUNDANCY

I realize there are more things you can do with miles than just book award travel, but I bet I know what happened there. “Book Award Travel” is a logical subset of “Use Miles”. Instead of making “Use Miles” the first choice, someone said “well, the most common thing that people want to do is book award travel, so let’s bubble that one up to the first selection under Dividend Miles”, even though it also exists under “Use Miles.” Two points about this kind of thinking: first, the old adage of “how many clicks does it take to do XYZ” starts to fall apart when you’ve got really complicated sites with a lot of functionality on them. Everyone wants their function “ONE CLICK AWAY!”, which results in a lot of mismatched things being moved to higher levels in the hierarchy. Second, this results in the kind of navigational redundancy that you don’t want – the kind that confuses people. See, “Book Award Travel” was one click away, but by the time I figured out how many miles I had and refreshed myself about how many miles you need (and a few other things), I had spent so many more clicks than if those things had just been organized intuitively. It’s not about how many clicks - it’s about smart clicks. I’m fine with a few more clicks if I’m making logical progress – then it’s mindless; it’s not work. Get Carl White talking about that subject at some point – it’s a huge pet peeve of his.

ISSUE #3 - CHANGING THE RULES WITHOUT TELLING US

But this is the one that kills me, and it’s really more about marketing and perception than anything else. Back when I was attempting to book my flights, the award chart (when I finally found the bugger) said that coach tickets were 25,000 miles for a round trip ticket excluding holidays, etc. That’s all it said. I was as far off-season as you could get, and every single combination of flights I punched in said that I’d need 50,000 miles. I called customer service and got a few different people, all of whom had different answers ranging from “that must be a mistake on the website, it’ll only take 25,000 when you book it” to “actually, that means 25,000 miles each way, even though it doesn’t say it” – so not only was the policy not communicated to customers, it wasn’t even communicated properly to customer service.

Let’s revisit that one statement, however – “actually, it’s 25,000 miles each way.” I had booked award travel before, and that was not the case. The website wasn’t telling me this was now the case. The metaphor for how I felt was this: it takes a LONG time to amass enough mileage to earn a flight…this was the equivalent of running a marathon, thinking you’re at the end of the race, and someone happily tells you “congrats, you’re half way!”

ACKNOWLEDGE IT, AND YOU OWN IT - HIDE IT, AND YOU’VE BLOWN IT

What is my point? Well, part of me just wants the cathartic release of blogging about this publicly. But the other part walked away with this: this episode happened right when gas prices were exploding and we all started feeling it, big-time. The fact that US Airways had changed their policy behind the scenes and not clearly communicated it made me angry for a few reasons, but probably the biggest was that I felt insulted – I felt like they thought I was too stupid to understand this simple equation: higher cost of fuel = higher cost of flying. Instead of owning it, and issuing a kindly and professional “we’re in this together” statement saying that the rising price of fuel that was affecting us all meant there would have to be some policy changes, there was silence – and what felt to me like an attempt to fool me into thinking that tickets could readily be had for 25,000 miles (turns out that those elusive fares are now called “mileage-savers”) , which was, and still is, misleading at best. So instead of being mad at the situation (whatever its cause), and being mad ALONG WITH the airline, I was simply mad AT them.

The lesson: always err on the side of treating your customers as intelligent human beings who can connect the dots. You can choose to communicate early and openly, or take the risk of being seen as dishonest and like you’re hiding something. And if you ARE hiding something…well, what goes around comes around, my friend.

AFTERMATH - A FEW IMPROVEMENTS

After this episode, I promptly canceled my US Airways mileage card (I now have an “anytime miles” card that is airline-independent…they don’t even know when I’m booking award travel! Tee hee!). However, I revisited the US Airways site for booking award travel before writing this to see if it had been updated in any way. Although the travel chart still doesn’t define what a “mileage-saver” is, when you try to book dates there is now a color-coded key telling you which dates are mileage-savers (25,000 miles round-trip), which are standard (50,000 miles) and which are blackout dates – a vast improvement from last time, when there was no explanation as to what those things even meant, let along indicators on the calendar. Picking dates was kind of like pin the tail on the donkey, but not nearly as fun.

For those who are curious:

Blackout Dates = any date within two weeks of something remotely interesting happening in the city you’d like to visit
Standard Dates = any other date that would be somewhat convenient to fly on
Mileage-Savers = a small handful of dates, always in the middle of the week, that would require taking a heap of days off from work to take advantage of (sucker!)

EPILOGUE

I still think the fact that roping people in by saying “25,000 miles for a round trip ticket!”, and then making it more difficult than panning for gold to find dates that apply, is dishonest. Another lesson: make people feel like they’re being abused or lied to, and they’re not going to like you very much. When people don’t like you very much, they will go elsewhere whenever they can.

P.S. We finally did book a flight - originally we were trying to fly to Santa Fe, but kept picking other cities until we found one that had a mileage saver opportunity…never again!