My name is
Jack Moffett. I am an Interaction Designer with over ten years of experience. According to
Herb Simon, that makes me an expert, so I must have something worth sharing. I have started this venture as an exercise to spur critical thinking about my chosen profession. I hope that others may find it thought provoking as well.
DesignAday will present a brief thought about Design every weekday.
I was trying to book my hotel for Interaction 10 today. Since I’m covering my own travel expenses this year, I’m not going to be able to stay in the hotel that the conference has picked. Even with the conference rate, it is still several hundred dollars more expensive than several other hotels in the area. I was using Orbitz to find the best rates and comparing it against hotels’ own websites. Interestingly, even with a AAA discount, the Orbitz rates were cheaper. At any rate, I was doing this in parallel with a couple other things, and when I finally pressed the button to book the hotel through Orbitz, it blew up!
It explained very nicely that it noticed that there had been a period of inactivity and that I should check again to ensure availability. Then it dumped me back on their first page. I had to start from scratch, reentering my travel dates and the city. Room availability doesn’t change all that rapidly, but I can understand the necessity of checking again. It’s not as if the hotel is shipping out, however. There was no need for me to have to perform the hotel search all over again. My destination and travel dates aren’t going to change in the ten minutes or so that I had the browser window open. If it has to ask me again what type of bed I want, so be it, but don’t make me search for the hotel that I’ve already decided I want to stay at.
I almost decided to pay an extra $20 and book the room elsewhere just to spite them.
My wife and I just upgraded our original iPhones to the new 3GS. We both ended up having to call AT&T’s customer service to get them activated. My wife missed the Quick Start Guide included in the shipping box, so she didn’t realize that you had to activate the phone either online or by calling a number. I, however, followed the instructions, and it still didn’t work.
Step 1 says to leave the new phone off, explaining that turning your iPhone on could cause activation problems. Step 2 has you sync your phone with iTunes, though, which turns it on. Step 4 then has you visit a URL or call an automated system to accept your terms of service and activate the phone. I tried the web method, and it told me that my phone was activated. Unfortunately, the phone itself reported “No Service”. Then I tried calling the number. After it took me through a couple steps, it forwarded me to a service representative.
Apparently, both the old phone and the new phone have to be turned off at the time of activation, or it fails. AT&T made a slew of mistakes in the design of this activation process. Their instructions say nothing about turning off the old phone. The instructions explicitly state right off that “…you MUST follow these steps IN ORDER”, which doesn’t work, because it has you turn the phone on after telling you to leave it off. Finally, when the activation fails, the website tells you that it was successful. Apple got it right with the first version, where activation was handled directly through iTunes. It’s a shame they are now dependent on AT&T for this small, yet crucial, part of the process.
I’d like to feature the work of one of my graduate students. I gave an assignment in which each student was to design a map of the design landscape depicting major disciplines, organizations, educational institutions, firms, luminaries, and methods. They didn’t necessarily have to include all of this information, nor were they limited to it. Forrest Conroy incorporated everything just mentioned, and then added conferences, related companies, and example products. He mapped everything over time, showing relationships between them. The resulting chart is a beautiful piece of work.
Forrest used three major categories: communications in yellow, which is equivalent to Graphic Design, interactions + activities in blue, which includes Interaction Design, Information Architecture, and Service Design, and products in red, which is basically Industrial Design. You can watch these intertwine as digital products like computers and mobile phones incorporate hardware and software design.
Lines track the careers of prominent designers along the horizontal axis of time, while vertical lines make connections between people, organizations, and methods.
Insets on the right-hand side list all NASAD approved design programs.
The program for Interaction 10 has been posted, and it looks like it will be another outstanding conference. The keynote speakers will be Paola Antonelli, Dan Hill, Jon Kolko, Ezio Manzini, Nathan Shedroff, and a true legend in the field, Bill Moggridge. Additional invited speakers are Timo Arnall, Cindy Chastain, Liz Danzico, Shelley Evenson, Dave Gray, Tom Igoe, Peter Morville, and Denise Wilton. Looking at this list and the 28 speakers selected from 250 session submissions, it appears that Service Design and sustainability with both be significant themes running through the conference.
Registration is now open, and early bird pricing is in effect through November. The past two conferences have sold out, and I see no reason for this one to not follow suit. I’m hoping to attend again, but that’s likely dependent on at least partial support from my company. Here’s hoping.
My life is overflowing with products. Now, I’m a gadget geek, so I don’t typically think of this as a problem. However, when there are problems with the products, resolving the issues can be a real time-sink. For example, at this moment, I have a defective lawnmower battery that I’ve just contacted customer service about, the light in my garage door opener won’t turn off, the DVD player is malfunctioning in my wife’s car, and I have to get a replacement key for my car-top carrier. All of these problems come under warranty and should be resolved without any cost to me, but the time I have to invest to take care of them all is maddening at times.
This is the context in which I have to deal with customer service websites, phone trees, and email correspondence. It is no wonder, then, that I can be very easily annoyed by poorly designed systems and services, or even small hiccups in what are otherwise relatively smooth experiences. It is imperative that the design of customer services, in whatever forms they may take, is given a high priority. Don’t waste your customer’s time.
The winners of the 2009 International Design Excellence Award competition have been announced. I’ve perused the gallery and picked out the ones that I find most inspirational.
I’m always a sucker for new takes on products that we take for granted. The Eva Solo Grating Bucket “…turns the traditional handheld grater upside down.” The grated matter is contained within the grater, rather than left in a pile on your counter. It only received a bronze, but I give it the “Duh! Why didn’t somebody think of this decades ago?” award. Kudos to Tools Design.
A few years back, I was trying to find a kid-friendly digital camera. I gave up. TEAMS Design has filled this obvious need with flair and won a bronze award with the Argus Bean Children’s Digital Camera. Rugged, affordable, water resistant, slip resistant, minimum controls, clips onto things, has a handle, and looks fun—what more could you want?
Hospitals are scary enough for adults, let alone children. My daughter’s recent experience going through surgery for a broken arm was testament to that fact. The Healthcare Design Team of Phillips Design deserves a medal for coming up with the idea of placing toy versions of medical equipment in waiting rooms. They received a bronze one for the Kitten Scanner. As described in the gallery, “The Kitten Scanner helps lessen children’s anxiety about a CT exam. By placing the Kitten Scanner in the waiting room, children are invited to play and interact with the device in a non-threatening environment. Interactive role play and storytelling explain the different steps of the procedure and, through the act of playing, children become familiar with the procedure and learn what to expect.” This is design at its best.
Energy Seed is a gold-winning concept design from an educational project sponsored by Samsung Design. It is a “collection bin for batteries that uses leftover power to light the attached LED streetlamps.” I love the idea, but I would like to know a little bit more about how it would work. How does it drain the energy from the discarded batteries? How many batteries would it take to keep the light on for a night? What service would be put in place to collect the batteries, and how would they be disposed of? As in years past, the all-to-brief descriptions on IDSA’s site leave me hungering for more information.
Those are my favorites, but there are 146 other winners to check out.
I’m not a fan of Eat’nPark. They serve a decent breakfast, but overall, I find their food to be blasé. There is very little on their menu that I would want to order for dinner. If I’m going to spend money to eat out, I’d prefer to spend it somewhere that I look forward to eating. Of course, not everyone shares this opinion, so that is where I found myself having dinner last night. To wit, I ordered a buffalo chicken salad. It was made with iceberg lettuce and served in a bowl that was hot to the touch, so all the lettuce in the bottom of the bowl was wilted.
As it happened, a couple of the people I was dining with are on a low-carb diet, while a couple others are vegetarian. I’ve oft seen menus that mark healthy dishes with an icon, but I was impressed with Eat’nPark’s menu. The entire back page was a guide for those with all manner of dietary restrictions. Even on their website, you can see that they have “Low Carb,” “Celiac,” “Eat‘n Smart,” and “Smaller Portions” as major categories. The printed menu included a chart with detailed nutritional information for each entrée, such as calories, cholesterol, and fat. The website incorporates a meal calculator that allows you to select multiple menu items, presenting statistics for individual items and the entire meal.
While this may be catering to senior citizens, who seem to make up a large percentage of their customers, I think it is a good idea for any restaurant and any age or other clientele metric. As a populace, we are only becoming more informed about our health and the effects of our eating habits. We are likely to see more “special” dietary requirements, not to mention food allergies and intolerances. Such a supplement could improve customer experience and increase brand loyalty, not to mention actually helping people stay, or even become, healthy.
I had a good excuse for missing Monday’s post. My daughter broke her arm Sunday afternoon, and I spent the majority of my time until Monday evening at the hospital. Children’s Hospital, part of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), is one of the best pediatric hospitals in the country. I was quite pleased with the doctors and nurses we interacted with. Aside from the fact that my daughter was scared and in pain, it was a generally good experience. However, it only takes one hole to sink a ship.
My daughter was the last operation performed Sunday, and it was after 11:00 pm when she and my wife were settled in a room for the night. As I prepared to take my younger daughter home, the nurse explained that I should stop in the security booth outside the ER to have my parking validated. So, I arrive at the security booth late at night, completely exhausted from witnessing my daughter’s ordeal, and ask to have my parking validated. In a surly tone, the officer berates me for not having it validated during the hours stipulated for it. I didn’t say anything, but my thoughts ran along the lines of, “Look, lady, I just spent the past eight hours watching my daughter suffer from excruciating pain and the fear of what was going to happen to her. Your parking regulations are rather low on my list of priorities!”
A broken arm is fairly minor in the grand scheme of things. What if I was the father of a child with cancer or another serious affliction? What if I was leaving the hospital after sitting with my spouse during her final minutes of life? Service Design is extremely important in a hospital, and it must be considered at every touchpoint from the surgeons on down to security officers, parking attendants, and cafeteria workers. There is no excuse for mistreating people that are likely there for unpleasant reasons.
Upon visiting Amazon’s front page today, I was shown a message from Amazon about their new initiative, “Frustration-Free Packaging”. We’ve all been there. It’s Christmas morning and the children are crying because they want to play with the new toy but it’s taking an hour to get it out of the box. How many times have you cut yourself trying to open blister packs? And think of all the cardboard, plastic, wire, and other materials that are thrown away.
There are basically two reasons for such packaging. One is to make it difficult for shoplifters to remove items from their packaging in the store. More often, it is for display. Dolls have their hair sewn to the cardboard backing to keep it arranged perfectly. Plastic allows us to see the contents of the package. Ties keep all parts in the pose that will attract attention and sell product.
Of course, neither of those purposes matter for items ordered over the web. You aren’t looking at them on a shelf, and you can’t steal them. Amazon is working with manufacturers to reduce packaging to be environmentally friendly and to improve the customer experience. This is a brilliant move from both a marketing and service perspective. From Amazon’s announcement:
Today, we’re excited to announce the beginning of a multi-year initiative designed to alleviate wrap rage—Amazon “Frustration-Free Packaging.”
Amazon is working with leading manufacturers to deliver products inside smaller, easy-to-open, recyclable cardboard boxes with less packaging material (and no frustrating plastic clamshells or wire ties).
As part of their promotion of this new effort, Amazon is accepting photos and videos from people who have experienced wrap rage.
I can’t imagine the amount of negotiation they must be going through to get manufacturers on board—there are only 19 items thus far—but it is undeniably the right thing to do.
During my second year of grad school, back in 1998, I proposed a spatial representation of websites to evolve the web. I even went so far as submitting it to CHI, but it wasn’t accepted, as it was only a concept demonstrated without research to back it up.
I am proposing the evolution of the page metaphor to a spatial metaphor. It is time to stop loading webpages, and start visiting webplaces. Harrison and Dourish describe the difference between space and place in their paper “Re-Place-ing Space: The Roles of Place and Space in Collaborative Systems”.
“Physically, a place is a space which is invested with understandings of behavioral appropriateness, cultural expectations, and so forth. We are located in ‘space’, but we act in ‘place’. Furthermore, ‘places’ are spaces that are valued.”
The web will truly prove its worth when it becomes a place; when we carry memories of events which have taken place there; when we talk about going somewhere on the web.
There were two components of the concept, the first being the addition of co-presence awareness, allowing website visitors to see, communicate, and interact with each other. I demonstrated scenarios in which companies would staff their websites with receptionists, and visitors would chat about the content of the site, be it informational or retail. The second component was the spatial metaphor, relating to issues of wayfinding. The location of a person’s avatar would indicate the information they are interested in, or the conversation in which they are participating.
I was listening to Businessweek’s Innovation of the Week podcast today, in which Nortel’s CTO and innovation chief, John Roese, talks about their new venture, Web.Alive.
One of the first applications of Web.Alive is around e-commerce. Imagine going to a website to buy something. Today, you show up at the website and you may as well be the only person on the internet when you’re at that website. It’s two dimensional. It might be very pretty. But you don’t know that you’re there with anyone else. But most of the time when you try to buy something in the real world, it’s a social experience. You want to interact with sales people. You want to interact with your friends. You want to see what other customers are actually buying, and you want to actually do it in real time with audio and with visual cues. If you have Web.Alive on a website, what happens is, instead of just going to the website, you maybe now see a little window. In the window are virtual people—avatars if you want to describe them that way. Those people are a reflection of the other people that are on the website with you. If you choose to, you can step through that window and become part of that virtual experience. But instead of just being in some random virtual world, you are in a virtual environment that is in fact the website that you just went to. The people in there with you are also trying to buy the same goods and services. The employees of the company you are interacting with know that you’re there to interact for that purpose.
Their solution involves a VR space (similar to Second Life) that is separated from the content of the webpage, rather than a direct integration, but the concept behind the design is identical.
