No fear of flying Southwest
According to Wikipedia, the 35-year old Southwest Airlines is the third larger airline in the world for passenger carried. Fortune magazine defined Southwest "the most successful airline in history." Yet, I didn’t understand what a big deal Southwest was until I flew with them for the first time.
Museum art is dead
Yesterday Husband and I went to the Whitney Museum in NYC. In this period the Whitney is having the 2006 Biennial, which is titled Day for Night in homage to François Truffaut’s movie La Nuit américaine. Some of the pieces were outrageous (a large virginal white canvas with piece of dirty chewing gum splattered on it, huge holes in the museum’s walls), some were moving and unsettling (Brauntuch’s shirts, Hannah Greely’s baby), ironic and/or provocative in a sexual (Vezzoli’s trailer for the never made remake of Caligula, Iannone’s "I was thinking of you") or political way (Serra’s Stop Bush, Anderson’s take on Black History, Nari Ward’s Glory).
But what was truly odd and out of place was to see modern art in a modern art museum.
User Research: Don’t neglect the goldmine in your own backyard
A product development process built around the user and the experience is an expensive proposition for many companies. On the surface, companies may reject user- and experience-centric approaches because they appear more expensive (more steps, more people involved, more time); deep inside, taking a user-centric approach is frightening because it requires relinquishing control and embracing a 180° cultural shift.
Putting a lot of thought in the early phases of product design clashes against the "faster, cheaper," "let’s see if it sticks" IT culture. Reaching out to people outside the company to discover solutions, ideas, and opportunities is unsettling for companies in which "the boss" makes all decisions and sets all strategic directions. True user-centered design requires a flatter, more democratic, and distributed corporate structure to work.
Because adopting a user-centered framework requires a cultural paradigm shift we often need to start small and proceed slowly to avoid a massive immune rejection response from the corporate culture. The good news is that in each company there are pockets of user knowledge that designers can easily leverage to get important user information.
Public Service Announcement: Please contribute to my list of friendly, locally owned cybercafes.
I am starting a list of friendly, small, locally owned cybercafes. I have looked around on the net for annotated lists and I could not find anything useful.
So far I have a tiny list of places I have personally visited, but I hope to expand the list with your help. If you know of a cybercafe you like and visit often or any friendly place that offers free or cheap wireless access, please send me a note with the name, address, website (if available), and a brief description of the place. Thank you!
Tags: cybercafe, list, wireless, hotspots
Scott Cook, founder of Intuit, talks about innovation at CHI 2006
Scott Cook opened CHI 2006 with a plenary on fostering innovation. Live-blogging notes have been posted on the CHI Blog. Here are my notes, which are not a word-by-word report on the talk but more of an annotated reconstruction (quote at your own risk).
Creating Game-changing Invention
The brief - Innovation happens at the junction between business and customer needs, not from executive ideas or lonely geniuses within the company. Indeed, innovation bottlenecks are often at the top. Creating a culture of innovation is about nurturing customer observation, incubating new ideas, celebrating failure, and staying out of the way. Read Thomas Kuhn (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) and Peter Drucker (Innovation and Entrepreneurship).
Intuit: Changes lives so profoundly people can’t imagine going back to the old way.
In Montréal, attending CHI 2006
Today is the first day of CHI 2006 in Montréal, Québec and my first time at a CHI conference.
First impression - Who would have imagined that so many people are into Human-Computer Interaction! (In practical terms, this means that there no way to get to the coffee and food without hurting somebody or faking an emergency).
Good stuff - CHI Madness: each paper in 40 seconds, the entire day in a few minutes. Really clever and useful. Microphones in the rooms to ask questions. Ice cream at the coffee breaks!
Annoying stuff - It seems that conference organizers have not figured out yet how to get wireless internet connection to work properly, and CHI is no exception: wireless connections are sluggish and unrealiable, especially inside the conference rooms. Second usual annoyance for laptop users: no power outlets in the conference rooms (but the Palais De Congrès does have a lot of lovely seats with power outlets along the hallways that I highly recommend).
Later I’ll post my blog report on Scott Cook’s talk on innovation.
Tags: CHI2006, computer-human interaction, conference, Montreal
Best of Web 2.0: Remember the Milk
What’s a girl got to do when she has too many things to accomplish and too little time? Creating a to do list, of course! But not any simple, paper-based to do list. We are too geeky and our world is too complicated for old fashion to do lists (you know the drill: the lists multiply, they are never there when we need them, and life changes too fast for a static paper document).
Luckily for us, the Web 2.0 new wave has brought us many tools to create fancier and ubiquitous to do lists, from 37 Signals’ Tada List and Backpack, to Mark Hurst’s Gootodo. None of them however is so elegant, well designed, and grown-up as Remember the Milk (aka RTM).
The social life of humans and machines: How to design for the social interaction
Solitary designers, lonely geniuses, and isolated creative teams: it’s time for you to think about social interaction for your user interfaces. No, I am not talking about social software, user-created content, or Web 2.0. I am talking about any old-fashion user interface: because for us human beings any interaction is a social interaction–even when we are interacting with "a stupid machine."
We all know this: we tend to treat objects that display intelligent behavior as humans. We curse at our computers and at frustrating websites, we trust or distrust them, we talk to them, we find them cute or insufferable; we get angry, happy, frustrated, outraged, even if there is no living creature on the other side. (Well, there is always a living creature on the other side: somebody has designed and built the application. And human qualities bleed into inanimate objects very easily.)
Interfaces can persuade, make us uncomfortable, happy, or unhappy. The personality of an interface emerges by the interactions with humans: the style of the content, the choice of words, the behavior, how well it responds to our expectations and needs, and the appearance blend together to trigger our all too human feelings. Interactions between humans and machines are conversations (or arguments) in which information is exchanged, connections are made, needs are satisfied or frustrated, and relationships are built. When we design applications we need to think of them as social entities.
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