I just noticed something interesting.

I’ve been reading some research lately about how those typical popup messages don’t really work all that well, because many people click confirm without reading the message. But Firefox does something interesting, at least in one dialog: it has a time-delay of about 5 seconds before the Save button becomes enabled.

In the Firefox extensions dialog, the button includes a timer that counts down from 5 to 1, after which it becomes enabled. When I saw the timer and noticed that it was at 3, I then looked up at the top of the dialog box, probably to figure out a cause of the delay. This reminded me of the application that I was installing, and caused me to at least briefly skim over the text. Not that I could recite the dialog or anything, but without the timeout I probably wouldn’t have even looked up there at all.

I wonder about the usefulness of this technique to other dialogs where you really want to make the user read the message. Making it so that they can’t automatically and thoughtlessly hit “Yes” is probably a good idea. On the other hand, you have to balance this against annoyance, by not making the delay too long.

Still, it seems like a neat idea, and one I haven’t noticed anywhere else.

Recently I was having a conversation with my mother that got me thinking again about cars. She mentioned that she and Dad are thinking about getting a bigger vehicle, like a small pickup truck, because they’ve both started to have trouble getting in and out of small cars.

This led me to wonder if, given the current aging trend and people’s tendency to stay healthy and driving longer, there might not be a developing market for vehicles that are specifically tailored for older folks.

For example, as mentioned above, many older people have trouble getting into and out of small cars, and prefer vehicles that sit high off the road. However, too often the only alternative for a higher vehicle is a huge, inefficient gas-guzzler. I wonder if we might not see a growth in vehicles that are designed to sit high off the road, but are still relatively light and fuel-efficient.

Since many older folks have a fixed income, the reduction in fuel costs could be very beneficial. (And of course, it would also help reduce carbon emissions.)

Another possibility is that we could see options and add-on packages specifically dealing with accessibility.

For example, just as you have large-print books for to folks with poorer vision, maybe you could have a dash with larger numbers and simplified displays. That would be an interesting problem in information design, figuring out how to fit the necessary information, while making it as readable as possible. Maybe some information, like RPM, gets moved to somewhere else, and the key information like speed and fuel is made much larger in the display. And maybe there are added notifications if, for example, you exceed a certain speed.

Additionally, many seniors have trouble with fine motor control. What if you could upgrade your car to have larger, easy to grasp dials for the stereo and climate controls? Again, this may require the rearrangement or removal of less-important buttons and features, but in the case of many seniors that might be worthwhile for greater ease of use.

Many of these changes would not only improve the driving experience for seniors, they would also make the road safer in general, by decreasing the potential for distraction, such as fumbling with small buttons to change the radio, or increasing the rate of access to key data, such as fuel levels and speed. And with increasing numbers of seniors on the road, that could only benefit everyone.

BTW, I hope to start posting more regularly again. (Of course, that’s always easier said than done.) Coming soon: some thoughts about larger computer screens and how they change the use of full-screen mode. Also, happy New Year!

Wow, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted. I guess this past month hasn’t brought a lot that’s new, at least not in my professional or creative lives. It’s largely been about wrapping up my information architecture rotation at work, and finishing some freelance programming work in my spare time.

Today was the first day of my new rotation as a [title yet to be determined]. Seriously, the job that I’m doing right now is so new in my department that they haven’t even decided on a final job title yet. Some of ones that I like are Interaction Developer, Design Engineer, and Design Technologist. All of which basically mean that I know how to code, and know something about design as well.

My personal thought is that the role might as well be called Design Translator. Because sometimes it seems like designers and developers really are speaking 2 different languages, and my job is to know as much of each one as I can, so that I can translate between the two and help them understand each other. That’s how I see it, anyway.

I’m pretty excited about trying out this role. I’ve always been drawn to interdisciplinary work — just look at both of my college majors for proof. Something about my brain really likes being able to look at something from multiple angles at once. And it’ll be nice to finally get to use some of my programming skills, and hopefully develop them even further by practice and by studying new technologies. I started working on a little project today, just basic HTML and CSS to get myself back into practice; but the day just flew by. I think that’s a good sign.

I think that my goals for this rotation are to learn Flex, to further develop my JavaScript / AJAX skills, and to become skilled at Illustrator and Flash. (I’m self-taught in Flash, but I’m sure there’s a lot that I still don’t know.)

So lately I’ve been trying to get better about money and budgeting and stuff. And I was thinking, one of the big things that gets people in trouble is that they use their credit card or debit card for everything (seriously, no one my age writes checks), and then lose track of how much they’ve spent. So I was thinking, wouldn’t it be nice to have a way to always be able to get an up-to-date view of your account balances? After all, the banks already have that information, and it’s available through any computer.

There are two ways that I could see it work. The first way is if some sort of small display were incorporated into the card itself, that displayed the balance and updated every time the card was used. The big advantage of this is that you wouldn’t have any separate thingy to lose, and you couldn’t avoid seeing the display every time you used your card. However, it also severely limits the display (if not making it entirely unfeasible) because the card still has to both fit into your wallet and be swipe-able with a current device.

The other way to do it is to have a device that’s separate from the card. I’m thinking, something like the keychain RSA token that I carry for work, so that I can access our systems from home. Something about that size, with a similar display, could easily display the balance of any credit card or bank account, or even toggle between multiple accounts. And it might be easier to integrate something like that with current systems, because you wouldn’t have to change all of the card readers or cards.

That way, it could start out by just working with people’s home computers, and then maybe spread to ATMs or merchants. (Merchants wouldn’t be as likely to offer it, in this case, unless some sort of incentive was built in, and right now I can’t really think of anything. On the other hand, ATMs would seem like a natural fit, as an extension of their current services.)

[EDIT: And smart phones/PDAs too. Yes.]

This would be a case in which design (of a product) could potentially affect people’s behavior, by making them more aware of their spending and less likely to go over budget or overdraw their account.

Just a thought that I had.

This interview is awesome.

There were three reasons why I found it fascinating:

1) One is the fact of applying design tools such as ethnographic research in a medical environment, where one might not normally expect to find designers at work.

2) The second is the widely diverse nature of the problems they study and the solutions that they recommend. “Our solutions focus on the areas of people, process, content, space, and technology.” Sounds like it goes beyond look-and-feel to me. (Not that look-and-feel isn’t important, at all.) The type of design they’re doing is fascinating to me for the breadth of its scope. I mean, it sounds like their job is to look at practically any aspect of the Mayo Clinic and figure out ways to make it better. Damn, that’s awesome.

3) The third is their overtly stated interest in “designing for emotion”.

Emotion is such an important element to talk about in relation to designing compelling service experiences. In a healthcare environment, emotion is often at its peak levels, mostly because of the nature of the situation that patients are in when they seek healthcare services.

It seems like this is a huge difference from most hospitals and healthcare facilities I’ve seen, where the environment and processes seem designed to suppress or ignore emotion as much as possible. I’m not even quite sure what he means by “designing for emotion”, but it sounds like a good idea to me.

Is “design” more like invention, or more like decoration?

According to Wikipedia, “to design” refers to the process of originating and developing a plan for a product, structure, system, or component. That sounds more like invention to me.

But then you have Michael Beirut bringing up the other side:

Perhaps design is the field of mindless prettiness. But hasn’t it always been so? After all, most of us entered the profession not because we’ve determined after long thought that it represented a more effective way of influencing the course of world events than, say, law or medicine. Instead, somewhere along the way, we discovered we liked making things look good, and that we were better at it than other people.

(I won’t lie, this quote threw me for a bit of a loop. And it’s funny, if I did “become a designer”, his not-reason would be exactly why.)

Or is it just that they’re using the word design to mean two very different things?

Discuss amongst yourselves.

1) The order of grades of gas on a gas pump.

The vast majority of the time, the cheap grade of gas is on the left side of the row. However, there’s one particular gas station chain where the order is reversed, and the most expensive grade is on the left.

I’ll bet that chain makes a lot of money from consumers who accidentally purchase the premium grade instead of regular unleaded. I know I almost do that, all the time. So standardization in this case would probably have to be imposed from the outside.

2) The location and design of the wipers, headlights, and turn signals in cars.

It isn’t just annoying that this is always different; it could be a safety concern when driving a new or unfamiliar car. At worst, you could end up blinding an oncoming driver instead of turning on your windshield wipers in the rain. At best, it distracts attention from the road, which is never a good thing.

A friend once argued, when I mentioned this, that it was a branding method for car manufacturers. That doesn’t ring true to me; when was the last time you heard the location and operation of the windshield wipers trumpeted in an automobile ad? I think that standardizing these three things would still leave plenty of room for brand differentiation in the rest of a car’s interior.

3) The way you set the time on a digital watch.

I always dread the return to Standard Time, because I know that even though we get an hour back, I’ll spend about that long trying to figure out how to set my damn watch.

It has four buttons; you’d think that one of them would allow you to change the time. But no, they managed to design it such that setting the time involves three of the buttons (all of them but “glow”), which have to be pressed in a particular combination, including some which must be held down for three seconds to change the mode. I’ve had this watch for more than three years, and I still can’t remember how to do this every time.

I feel like analog watches have this down pretty well. Digital watches should follow suit.

From Part I: It’s the problem that you’re trying to address, and not the field of design into which it (primarily) falls, that makes a project important or not.

If this is true, that’s unfortunate in a way, because it means that I can’t be assured of doing meaningful work just by getting into the right field, or getting the right degree from the right school. It’s not so easy as all that. Every field has its frivolous aspects, which may still bring joy and definitely make money, but which aren’t as important to me; likewise, every field has its interesting problems.

If there’s no easy answer, then what is the answer? I can only share my own answer, which is necessarily personal to me.

First, what I can do is look at the types of problems I’m most interested in working on. Am I interested in figuring out how to convey important information in a clear and elegant way, or how to use words and images to spread a message and persuade? Am I interested in designing products that meet real needs and actually improve people’s lives? Am I interested in creating information environments that allow people to access and understand important data, or that bring people together and help them communicate? Am I interested in designing physical spaces that encourage community and that work with nature instead of against? All of these things are valuable, but I can’t do everything. I need to pick a direction of focus.

Second, once I pick a direction, I need more education. I need to be able to speak the lingo, to know the history and background, to have a toolbox of abilities upon which I can draw. I need to know current state, past states, and thoughts toward the future. I need to know people, places, and times. And most of all, I need practice and feedback, the kind that I can probably best get in a group of other people who are doing the same thing.

Third, once I get some education, I need to practice and practice and practice some more. I need to work, and to create, and to develop authority. I need to create a reputation for myself, and build respect so that people will listen to me. I need to become known. And practice, and practice, and practice some more.

And while I’m practicing and building my skills, I’m also observing, and noting problems that exist, and coming up with ideas. And while I’m doing that, I’m also trying to network and align myself with institutions and people that can support me and my work.

And then at some point, magic happens and the stars align, and I take a flying leap out onto the limb of a badly mixed metaphor and do something with it all. Something that really matters. Something that I know is the Point Of It All. (This is the point where my logic runs out, and I can only assume that I’ll know it when I see it. Hey, I never said I had it all figured out!)

This doesn’t sound rational, or easy, or glamorous. And worst of all to an impatient person like me, it sounds like it might take a damn long time.

Nonetheless. Nonetheless, the part of me that grew up believing in Big Stories, and believing that God had a purpose for every life, still believes. (Although I wouldn’t perhaps put it in quite the same words.) It’s not quite hip and cynical, I know, but somewhere buried in me is an incurable optimist, foolish enough to believe that I can do something that matters.

But not foolish enough to believe that it will fall into my lap without a damn lot of hard work. Which is okay, I’m good for that.

First, a little bit of context: Cornell was one of the first schools to get Facebook, and as a result I’ve been using it for about 4 years now. (In fact, I still remember when the URL was thefacebook.com, and facebook.com was something else entirely.) In that time period I’ve seen it go through some pretty drastic changes — most especially, the change from a closed, school-specific network to a wide-open network that anyone can join. This change has its good sides, definitely, but it also presents some problems.

In real life, we present ourselves differently to different people, depending on who they are. I act differently at work vs. when I’m on a date, vs. when I’m with my parents. When Facebook was limited to students at one college, this wasn’t so much of a concern, because it was more or less just one’s peer group. But if Facebook wants to become a social network for everyone, then maybe it should consider letting people do the same thing in virtual form.

Right now you have the ability to specify a limited profile, which is a subset of your full profile, and to show the limited profile to certain people. Why not take that even further, and give users the ability to create multiple profiles, with different subsets of information in each? So for example, one could create a full profile for college buddies and one’s peer group, a sanitized version for coworkers and professional contacts, a “flirting” profile for romantic interests, and so on. You could have different pictures in each profile — save the kegstand pix for your college buddies, and show colleagues a nice professional headshot. And you could show different applications, too.

This would be similar to one of the features of LiveJournal which I absolutely love, which is the ability to define subgroups of friends and to target your posts to specific friends groups. I use this all the time; in fact, it’s one of the reasons that I’ve kept using LiveJournal for the past several years.

On Facebook, when you approve a friend request, it would be easy to right then add that person to a class of friends. And each class of friends could be targeted by a different profile.

If Facebook is trying to become a tool for adults, as well as a toy for college students, it needs to consider how to balance the effects of its new openness by allowing users to do as we do in real life: present ourselves differently to our contacts depending on who they are. And doing this might also address some of the fuss about privacy that periodically comes up.

With this post, I’m inaugurating a new blog category: “Navel Gazing”. Like a good introvert, I tend to do a lot of that, and I thought I would share some of it with you.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about meaningful work, and about what that means to me, and how I can create meaningful work for myself. And I’ve been thinking about what Matters, by which I mean: solves a problem, helps people, or makes the world a better place in some way. These are the questions I’ve been wrestling with:

How much does design Matter, really?

And are there certain types of design that matter more than others?

I started out thinking that the answer was yes. That, since I’m so interested in this Whole Design Thing, maybe I just had to get into the right field and then I would be able to work on Things That Matter. I wrote this in my UX Week program while I was at that conference: “It seems like some types of design are pure nicety; others are beneficial but not essential; and others have the potential to impact real problems and make a huge difference.”

At that time I was thinking, maybe if I were an industrial designer, or a product designer, or an architect, maybe then I’d be able to work on Things That Matter and make a real difference.

And I was thinking especially that I needed to move away from interaction design, because how much does anything that happens on the Internet really matter in the grand scheme of things?

(Looking back, I’m tempted to turn that into a sarcastic statement. At the time, though, it really wasn’t at all.)

Then throughout the course of the conference, I was presented over and over again with examples of design that Mattered, that addressed real problems. In the keynotes, we learned about Charmr, Adaptive Path’s R&D project to redesign a medical device for diabetics. We got to hear about ClearRx, a redesign of prescription drug labeling to make it easier to understand and safer to use. And we saw a UI demo from One Laptop per Child, with its innovative new operating system created for schoolchildren in developing countries.

I was very impressed by all of these examples. And the thing about them that struck me the most was how they all came from different fields of design, from graphics design (ClearRx), to industrial & product design (Charmr), to interaction design (OLPC). And really, none of those projects was pure — they all drew on and mixed up all of those fields and more, to varying degrees.

The conclusion that I’ve come to, and where I’m at right now, is that it’s more the problem than the discipline that makes a design project Matter. It’s not an issue, in the broad view of things, what I end up calling myself, or even what my diploma says. Rather, it’s an issue of looking at the problems that are out there in the world, and looking at the skillset that I have and the skillset I could reasonably gain, and then applying the one to the other in order to try and fix some shit.

And we all know there’s a lot of broken shit that needs fixing.

(Stay tuned for Part II, in which I continue to gaze fixedly at my navel.)