If you were at HIVE you know it was a wonderful day. I was particularly pleased by the emergence of themes across many of the talks. This is always a good sign that your discipline is moving in a positive direction if many great thinkers and doers arrive at similar conclusions independently. Well, as independently as you can in this information sharing world of ours.

One of the themes I was most happy to hear again and again was the importance’s of having design leadership present in every company and project. A number of speakers including myself talked about this in addition to the need for experience design to be present and active throughout the project design and development cycle.

I’ll get my slides with notes up next week and hopefully we can keep the conversation going. In the meantime. If you were there, I’d love to hear what you think about this.

There are these ugly little things that appear again and again in our lives (particularly in our digital lives) and I think it’s time to speak up.

Not only are they ugly they give you a negative jolt each time you encounter them and THEY NEED TO BE REDESIGNED. I’ll be calling them out as I find them in hopes that someone will hear our cries.

So, I was going through the beautiful, well designed flow of  Two of Us. Then I  clicked the button to record my smile and BOOM the Adobe Flash Player Settings module. Grrrr.

It looks scary. It’s as though it was designed to encourage folks to “Deny” it.

The experience I was in, is now over and I’m no longer thinking about sending my smile into the world I’m thinking about my computer hardware, web security, identity theft, stop signs, what is that eye ball supposed to mean?, what is Flash anyway?, am I supposed to know what Flash is?, do I have the expertise to decide if I should allow this, do I have an option?, what are the risks?, where will the question mark take me?, Is that safe?, I better just quit. I don’t feel like smiling anymore.

I can’t imagine that’s what the designer of this project had hoped for. I know because I’ve had to implement this once and it was very frustrating.

We all understand that it’s necessary to ask permission for this type of activity but what message are we sending when we pop this in front of them?

If this was designed better or better yet able to be skinned like Facebook and Twitter permission messages the product designers could send a message that yes, this action is something you should understand but we have vetted it and would like you to trust us. We  are doing everything we can to protect your privacy and keep you secure while allowing you to be part of this awesome site. You are safe, keep going. You can review what you have allowed at anytime from your account page.

So please Adobe, Redesign This.

My wish is that the banning of bottled water for casual use would soon become a major issue.

With data like this I imagine the people of the future will look back and wonder how we could allow something so damaging to everyone exist for the ease, vanity and irrational fears of a few.

I hope some of these stats echo in your head next time you consider buying or using bottled water

http://www.onlineeducation.net/bottled_water/

As always, please educate yourself and support access to clean drinking water for here. http://www.facebook.com/charitywater

Google keeps trying stuff. Wave, that social media thing I can’t remember, Google Docs.  Not all of it has worked but I like that there are smart people still trying to make my every day more efficient and effective.  I like that there are groups of people working on eliminate the daily frustrations that go with using software instead of coming up with something new I have to figure out how to integrate into my life. Don’t get me wrong I love new ideas, I have a few in the works and I’m addicted to trying new products out. My life is better with all of this new stuff. But I think if some of the basic activities of my day were streamlined I’d have better success utilizing the new stuff.

So I was extremely please to discover Fantastical a calender input program that integrates with all your Mac calenders.

The idea is brilliant. Throw away the old clunky methods of entering events into your calender and replace with an elegant time saving input program.

You must try it yourself but here is what I like about it.

1. Natural language input.

2. Enter all of the information into one field rather than the average 4 field steps of other calender programs.

3.  You can cut and paste into said field!!!

4. Beautiful interface design with fun and elegant visual feedback of actions.

5. Easy to access list view of all upcoming events and meetings.

6. Search

High five! to the creators flexibits.

Love their company description too.

Flexibits is Michael Simmons & Kent Sutherland

…and we create applications that are enjoyable and flexible. What do we mean by flexible? Making your Mac better. Making your life better. Removing frustration.

We’re users too, so we know what a good user experience should be. If you’re disappointed or frustrated with anything, please let us know. With many years of experience working on many popular apps, our hope is that our experience and passion is evident in everything we do.

Flexibits: Flexible bits.

Hooray for improvement instead of invention! Hooray for not giving up on the dream of seamless, enjoyable, natural computing!

The story of iSnack 2.0, aka Vegemite, is so interesting (and it is so hard to type iSnack 2.0 without laughing).  I’m not even sure how I feel about it or what the most important lesson of the story is.  Pop over and read Idsng’s article about it.

Are you back? Ok.

From the perspective of a creative professional there are so many things wrong with this story and it’s obvious that the public wasn’t immune to the ridiculousness of it, but what really bothers me is the underlining assumption that everything must be continually improved. It’s troublesome that a product that was clearly doing fine and has the affection of a nation could be vulnerable to this ugly side of business.

Constant unquestioned unending growth, optimization, updating to try and sell more has never set well with me. We’ve seen what can happen when the economy became addicted to growth.  I think that same crash’n burn can happen to a brand when it looses sight of the intention and limitations of a product.

Why can’t companies just leave things alone. The product is special, it brings in a good profit, it strengthens your other brands by bringing stability and trust, people identify and consider it part of their life. What else could you ask for?  To sell more?  I guess so…..  but my approach would be to enrich what is already there. To dig deeper into what people feel and what they need and see what ideas come out of that.

I’m working on talk about Strategy as it applies to the creative industries, digital focused of course, this story is strengthening my resolve to get it done and out there.

ps I don’t think you are a bad guy/gal Kraft. Just a little misdirected. I would love to work with you sometime.

via: apartment therapy

This post is not about the green handle and sign All This Chittah Chattah said it very well here.
This photo is from there too.

I would like to draw your attention to something that is driving me crazy. You may have noticed this too.

I first saw this new way to conserve water in the Portland Airport a few couple years ago and I was really excited until I used it.

The way it works is, you the flusher choose the amount of water, power of the flush, swirl of the bowl you need, based on what you just put in it.  It’s great. Most of the time you only need enough flush power to push a little extra liquid and a bit of TP. Every 5th or so time (just a guess) you need flushing power to get a lot more down the pipes.

This is were the good idea meets bad design.

When I’m in a public restroom it isn’t just about performing the task of going to the restroom, most of my thoughts, decisions and movements are around the issue of staying clean and not coming into contact with anything visible or invisible that might be disgusting or unhealthy.

We avoid using our hands.  Hips, knees, elbows, feet, chins to necks and butts are all recruited to assist in the tasks of getting in the room, opening the stall door, hanging up your purse, covering the seat, working with your clothing,  flushing the toilet, getting out of the stall, washing hands, getting a paper towel, turning the faucet on and off and finally getting out of the room.

Now look at this image.  What’s wrong with it?

The designer wants you to pull up for less water and push down for more.  Has the designer ever used a public restroom?

I would guess that most people use their foot to activate the flush. When you use your foot, the easiest way is to bend and lift your knee and come down on the top of the lever with your foot. It’s possible to lift it up with your foot but it takes more balance and some thought. I also think people would be concerned about getting the dripping water usually found on these levers on the tops of their shoes.

So what we have is a design that asks us to do the more difficult, less automatic, potentially damaging action 80% of the time. The easy, more natural, cleaner action is being assigned to the less used function.

boo.

Had the designer done just a bit of research I’m sure these two actions would have been switched.

Wait. New thought. I wonder if it was intentional because they saw problems that could arrive if the Liquid Waste function was used when the Solid Waste function should be used. Crap. Well, if this is the reason it’s another example of business needs vs. users needs and is an excellent opportunity to be more creative and more exceptional in our problem solving.

ps I do acknowledge that the design maybe a result of engineering constraints but it’s still bad.

Well, I’ll first say that I don’t know if Method actually performed contextual research around the product design of their baby + kids products, but one of their justifications for a recent packaging changes, smells very strongly of in store/ in home observations.

From the Method blog:

Q: Why the change?

A: Leaky Otters! We found that people were unable to resist taking the Otter’s pants off (no joke!) to get a big whiff of the what the product smelled like. This more often than not loosened the cap underneath the Otter which in turn sometimes created a big mess either on a shelf in the store or all over your bathroom floor at home.

This is great. It’s great because the company is checking in on how their products are performing and not just from a financial perspective. Understanding how well your products are performing can be measured in many ways, but there’s nothing like watching customer interact with it in the store and then watch a clerk go over and wipe up the mess while muttering to himself about how much he hates Method’s stupid little Otter. A slow decline in sales will never tell you why and it will never ever tell you it’s because of the ottter’s pants.

It couldn’t have been cheap to make the change and to tell you the truth I think the Otter is much more esthetically pleasing than the Penguin, but making the change was smart, responsible and respectful to the sellers and users of their products.

If any of the Method people read this, I’d love to hear about your research methods and anyother interesting insight you’ve come across.

Happy Thursday everyone!  I’m heading to PickaThon to get my groove on this weekend. Yeah!