DesignAday

Big Bird Lock-in

In the northeast of the United States, there is a supermarket called Giant Eagle. In the Pittsburgh area, it is by far the most common—nearly monopolistic. As many stores do, they have a card that allows you to take advantage of special offers when you check out: the Giant Eagle Advantage Card. Of course, this also allows them to track your purchases and provide coupons at checkout based on that information. It’s really a brilliant system.

Several years ago, they started opening convenience store gas stations by the name of GetGo, often in close proximity to their grocery stores. In concert with this new endeavor, they introduced the FuelPerks program. For every $50 you spend in Giant Eagle using your Advantage card, you earn 10¢ off per gallon at GetGo, again, by scanning your card before pumping. This was another brilliant move, and it resulted in my wife usually getting her gasoline at GetGo stations. However, you save the most by applying it to a full tank, and we don’t spend enough on groceries to earn savings on every tank of gas for one car, let alone two.

I pass three gas stations on my daily commute: one GetGo and two BPs. One of the BP’s is close to the GetGo, so they compete on price and are typically the same. I always went to the BP because it is easier to get in and out of and has more pumps.

Very recently, Giant Eagle crossed the streams and initiated the FoodPerks program. As I’m sure you can deduce, buying gas at GetGo will earn you a discount on your groceries: 1% for every 10 gallons. Bingo! They have now achieved lock-in. I’m buying my gasoline, whenever possible, from GetGo. Absolutely brilliant.

Disney Movie Snub

I have young children, and some years ago signed up for the Disney Movie Club. I don’t often order DVDs from them, but I haven’t taken the effort to close my account. Once a month I receive notification about the selection of the month and have to go on their website and say I don’t want it.

For months now, their website has been completely borked in Safari.

I had to use LittleSnapper to take the screenshot, as I can’t even see the sign-in fields without scrolling. It displays correctly in Firefox, and I assume it loads perfectly in IE. Now, I consider myself an expert in HTML and CSS. I have to deal with cross-browser compatibility issues every week. The differences between Firefox and Safari are negligible. I use CSSEdit, which previews using Webkit, and 99.999% of the time, if it is displaying correctly there, it is perfect in Firefox. Then I have to figure out the extra styles I need to add to get things to work correctly in IE.

For a commercial website to be broken this badly in a major web browser in this day and age is inexcusable, especially for a company as big and universal as Disney. And it isn’t just the login page—although it is the worst example—it’s the entire site! Background images repeat where they shouldn’t. Content is misaligned. Background colors are interrupted in strange ways.

It is obvious that somebody at the company said, “I don’t care. If they want our website to look nice, they’ll use IE or Firefox.” Well, I certainly care, and I’m going to let them know about it. I’ve been meaning to cancel my account anyway.

Update: I played hide-and-seek with their website, trying to find a way to contact them about canceling my account. I finally ended up having to type “How do I cancel my account?” into a field on their FAQ page (The question wasn’t listed in the FAQ). This took me to a page that answered the question—you have to call them. So, I called the number listed and played hide-and-seek with their phone menu. There was no option for canceling an account, but I was finally able to get the “…or please hold to speak with a customer representative” line. Of course, I was then presented with a message explaining that today is a holiday and to please call back later. They aren’t making me feel any worse about my decision to cancel.

Heavy Duty

I was eating leftover steak for lunch today, and I was having a hard time of it. My company stocks the entire office, including the kitchen, from Staples. I guess that easy button works. In one cabinet above the sink, there is a box full of plastic spoons, another containing forks, and a third offering knives. All of them say “Heavy Duty”. Now, I’d like to know what specifications had to be met to earn that designation. As I tried to cut my steak, the handle of the fork was bending, and the knife wasn’t cutting so much as it was wearing through the meat. This plastic cutlery is the wimpiest of any I can recall using. I’ve had the tines of my fork curl from the heat of my lasagna. The fact is, they labeled them “Heavy Duty” because they will sell more that way. There is no body like the FDA making sure that their cutlery adheres to some standard of rigidity.

Software is very often marketed in exactly the same way. “Easy-to-use” is a marketing catch phrase that typically has no scientific basis. The software is easy to use because they say so. Not only is there no standard metric for measuring ease of use, it is a completely contextual claim. A piece of software may be considered easy to use because it only takes a week of training vs. a month, or because it has a GUI rather than a command line, or because it has half the features of its competitors, or because it uses the same UI conventions as another piece of software the users may already be familiar with. Software may be easy for a specific group of users, while completely obtuse for another.

So the next time you are describing something as being easy to use, remember to ask, “In comparison to what and for whom?” Heavy duty is often a lie, and ease of use is in the eye of the user.

No Nissan for You!

The other day, I mentioned that I’m starting to look for a new car. One that I’m very interested in learning more about is the Nissan Cube, which is supposed to be available this Spring. They don’t have much in the way of detailed information on their website, so I registered to have them send me a brochure. I got it in the mail. It is a four-panel fold-out with pretty pictures and less information than is on the site, but it contains a CD.

“Great,” I think, “There’s bound to be some information on that!” Then I read the minimum requirements.

• Pentium 4, 2 GHz or better
• 1 GB of RAM
• Windows XP or Vista
• DirectX 9 compliant graphics card

Seriously?! In this day and age, they couldn’t go to what tiny little effort it would take to make it run on a Mac too?

Crossover was able to install the application, but it was designed to be controlled using a webcam. You are supposed to hold the brochure in front of your webcam to reveal information within the app. While Crossover would run the application, it couldn’t utilize my iSight.

So, they sent out a CD-ROM that requires a webcam, but didn’t make it compatible with Macs, that all come with webcams! I’m willing to bet that a high percentage of webcam owners are also Mac owners.

Stupid marketing! I’d be really interested to know what percentage of the people that get the CD are actually able to view it.

Foiled by a Box

My daughters are giving their mother the collector’s edition of The Tales of Beedle the Bard by J.K. Rowling. I pre-ordered it from Amazon, and it was delivered today… to my house… while I was at work… and my wife was home… in this box:

Thanks, Amazon.

It’s Not the End of Print, but...

Last week, PC Magazine announced that January 2009 will mark its last printed edition. They will be an all-digital publication in February. I don’t find this move at all surprising and expect to see most magazines make this transition in the next two years or so. It makes sense that computer-related magazines will be the first to do so. They were the first magazines to begin using the web, and that’s where the majority of their readers are. Considering the cost of printing and shipping, the timeliness of the internet, and even the increased public awareness of environmental issues, the move to digital is inevitable.

At one time, I was subscribing to Print, Communication Arts, and Macworld. It has been many years since I let those subscriptions lapse. I wasn’t finding time to sit down and read them, for one, and when I did, I was finding that I had already read the “news” on websites weeks before. The power of linking to related content; even the advertising is potentially more useful online.

Magazines aren’t going to become extinct anytime soon. There are some topics that are better suited to print. But we will soon find that all of the mass-market targeted publications will have taken the plunge. What we’ll have left are very focused, small-run magazines that target extremely niche interest groups (I hesitate to even refer to them as markets), most of which will really take advantage of the medium with fine papers, rich photography, large formats, and the like.

And with mobile devices beginning to come into their own, it’s the right time.

What a Picture is Worth

I was at my daughters’ school this evening for an open house. While walking through the halls, I noticed this display.

If I were John McCain, and I knew they were taking my picture for a life-size stand-up that would be displayed in schools and who knows where across the country, I would have made more of an effort to get a good photo. Think about it. If you were a child, which of these two men would you be more likely to, well, like?

Open it with Adobe

To those of us in the design community, Adobe is well known as the producer of software such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere, and the list goes on. We are well aware of the distinction between the company and its products. I have found, however, that to most people, Adobe is an application that opens PDF files. I’ve listened to our customers refer to Adobe Reader simply as Adobe. Even some of my co-workers have made this mistake. “Do you have Adobe installed?” “There’s an update for Adobe.” “Adobe brings my machine to a crawl.”

It used to be called Acrobat Reader. Did Adobe make a marketing blunder in the name change? I can’t imagine they want to be known as a single, free piece of software.

Speaking of old...

The majority of the objects at my vacation spot, both natural and man-made, are far older than I am. As we were making dinner Saturday evening (the same evening as as the power outage), I was wrapping some ground turkey in aluminum foil to brown on the grill. The box, while physically the same as aluminum foil packaging today, was obviously designed in the sixties. The brand name was Alcoa Wrap. Although I am aware of the company, I had never heard of the product. I happened to finish the roll, and in the bottom of the box found the piece of paper shown below.

Sure enough, the Rambler that was being given away was a “new” 1961 Rambler station wagon. It was an amusing find, but it also made me think about brands and consumer culture. Neither Alcoa Wrap nor Ramblers are on the market today, although Alcoa purchased Reynolds Metals, makers of the top brand of aluminum foil, Reynolds Wrap, and the manufacturer of the Rambler, through a series of mergers, ended up as AMC, which was finally purchased by Chrysler. In another fifty years, where will our brands be? What will become of Apple, Nike, and McDonalds? It is hard to imagine them disappearing, and yet the recent negotiations between Microsoft and Yahoo! are a perfect reminder that the tectonic plates of consumerism are shifting.

Other brands/products mentioned on the flyer:

Rival - still making kitchen appliances, but not an electric home food slicer.

Hammond - still making organs after merging with Suzuki.

Heilite - As far as I can tell, they are out of business, but their camping trailers are still popular.

Duraflite - discontinued boat model made by Duracraft, currently owned by Bentley Industries, which still produces Duracraft boats.

Fairchild - then makers of sound cameras and projectors, later played a large role in silicon valley, and is now a major supplier of power management products.

Tappan - manufactured ranges and microwave ovens, but was later purchased by Electrolux.

Can-O-Matic - from what I can tell, this was one of the first, patented electric can openers, which was eventually acquired by Rival, but they no longer make can openers.

Zebco - still selling fishing reels.

Hallite - cookware by Wear-Ever, a company that has vanished, leaving items to sell on eBay.