Category Archives: Inspiration

Best email unsubscribe flow ever?

Inspiration, Interaction Design

I’ve been on a binge of unsubscribing from various email marketing lists, as an attention cleanser. It makes me feel good. There’s a hierarchy of experience to unsubscribe flows, from the good (clear link in the email, one click to unsubscribe) to the meh (have to hunt to find the link, unsubscribe not the default action on the resulting page) to the awful (you have to log in to unsubscribe, and you’re not sure you even have an account). Some even have some charming copy, but I’d never run into one that was flat out AWESOME until I unsubbed from Etsy’s newsletter.

(Don’t worry, Etsy. I still love you. I just don’t want the newsletter anymore.)

Screenshots below, but honestly, it’s worth subscribing and unsubscribing for the full experience.

Screen 1:

Etsy_unsub_1

Screen 2:

Etsy_unsub_2

Bravo, Etsy!

ETA: Link to the video, because you want to now, don’t you.

Lessons from designing role-playing game adventures

Design Theory, Games, Inspiration, Interaction Design, Quotes

I was reading James Maliszewski's interview of Paul Jacquays*, and came across this bit:

10. Are there any lessons you've
learned from working in the computer game field that you think ought to
be applied to tabletop RPG design?

Provide more than one
solution to encounters, if only to be willing to accept the other
solutions that your players devise.

Take into consideration your
players' (not their characters') skills and ability to understand 3D
space when creating or choosing adventures. Don't throw new players into
complex 3D settings. Mapping and understanding one's position inside
3D space can be challenging even for skilled players. Start "flat" and
work them up to spaces with more complicated vertical relationships.

Create
spaces that could work in the real world. Walls have thickness. Large
open interior spaces have to be supported by columns to be believable.
As a fantasy illustrator, I learned to engage the viewer's suspension of
disbelief by creating realistic, believable environments which would in
turn lend their reality and believability to the fantasy elements found
within. Designers need to do the same thing … engage the players'
suspension of disbelief just long enough to convince them that game
situations are grounded in things that could happen.

Give your
players "save spots" in your gaming sessions, natural breaks in the
adventure where they can pull back, regroup, return to base, etc.

Finally,
don't overwork the game's backstory. Less can be more, so write as
little as you can to convey it. I emphasize this to the content
designers on my own project teams. Your players will appreciate that you
are creating plot and character links, but could probably care less
about detailed ancestries, hidden motivations, or involved descriptions
of locations and events that they will never encounter. They just want
to hit things and move on. Don't make success in your game depend on
reading multiple paragraphs of stilted description or dialogue.

I don't think it's too crazy a stretch to apply these lessons to design outside of a game context altogether.

*James Maliszewski is a somewhat-old-school RPG designer and author of the old-school gaming blog Grognardia. Paul Jacquays is a really-old-school game designer.

“The age of surplus pixels”

Design Theory, Inspiration, Interaction Design, Quotes

I keep coming back to this short post by Russell Davies. (No, not that Russell Davies.)

By way of reexamining Being Digital and Pointcast, he says:

But we're about to enter an age of surplus pixels – screens sitting
there, resting, not showing much, perhaps the odd slide show, screens
that aren't the thing we're doing. In public spaces, in offices, in our
homes. iPads and iPad-killers are going to be sitting around our living
rooms, next to our desks, next our beds. And we'll soon want more on
there than our picture libraries Ken Burnsing slowly away to themselves.
But we're going to want less than most designers are inclined to
design. We'll need a restful, slow, quiet sort of
information/entertainment design. Stuff that's happy not to be looked at
that much. That'll be interesting.

This makes a lot of sense to me, and triggers a bunch of reactions, not all well thought-out.

  • I really, really like the idea of "restful, slow, quiet" design. I'd like to see more of it in the digital realm. I love garish and loud as much as the next person, but the eyeballs, they get tired.
  • What are the print equivalents of restful/slow/quiet design? What are the architectural equivalents? Is this a call for the digital equivalents of the arts and crafts movement?
  • (Is that why we're seeing so many fake wood-grain apps on iDevices? I'm not sure William Morris would approve: plopping wood imagery on silicon/glass/aluminum devices is hardly "truth to material".)
  • Dragging this post back to the subject at hand, my fear is that instead of restful/slow/quiet, we'll get twitchy/fast/loud, particularly in the form of ads/ads/ads. We've already got extra screens at the grocery store (ADS!) and the gas station (ADS!) and there's talk of adding some to license plates (ADS!).
  • The opposite of an arts and crafts approach to all the surplus pixels, then, is a cyberpunk-style dystopia where behaviorally-targeted ads follow you from screen to screen down the street jabbering at you incessantly until you go postal. So that wouldn't be good.
  • Which in turn brings to mind projects like this LCD TV zapper kit as one possible response.
  • A pretty safe prediction (based on our culture's track record so far) is that which types of screens you see will split on class lines. In the same ways it does already, money will buy peaceful and tranquil spaces for those that have the money, and the twitchy/fast/loud will dominate mass culture.

Inspirational Design: Francesca Lanzavecchia

Inspiration

Lanzavecchia-proaesthetics I saw these on Haute Macabre, but it’s turned up on all sorts of design blogs. It’s a line of medical accessories (back braces, neck braces, canes, crutches), redesigned, called ProAesthetics Supports (note_slightly annoying design-ey nav). These are concept pieces for school, and the designer, Francesca Lanzavecchia, is playing with the intersection of body, skin, clothing, and medicine in a positively Ballardian way. Which is cool.

But I hope she takes these designs and finds a way to make them real. Because there are people — particularly teenagers — who are having to wear the ugly versions of these right now, for a short time or for a long time. And they’re dealing with the discomfort, the inability to be ‘normal’, the reactions from peers that range from (at best) bafflement and repeated explanations to (at worst) mockery and humiliation. If they can hide the gear, they are, by avoiding — or at least thinking about avoiding — sports, and showers, and pools. And they’re worrying about how to explain to a girlfriend or boyfriend what that stuff is they’re wearing, and what reaction they’ll get. If they even feel confident enough to snag a girlfriend or boyfriend.

How much better they’d have it if they could pick something out that rocked. That turned something to hide into something to flaunt. Hell, they’d probably get the mockery and weird looks anyway, but at least they’d look damn good. It would make a difference.

Design and managing risk

Design Theory, Inspiration, Product Design

Ever thought about hanging out your own shingle? If so, you’d better think about how you’ll handle health insurance. If you’d be covered through a spouse’s insurance, you’re probably set, but otherwise you might have to buy individual health insurance, which typically costs more. And that’s if you’re lucky enough to get individual health insurance, since it could be denied to you for all sorts of reasons — from serious prior conditions to minor ones like allergies, ear infections, or joint sprains. Or because you’d been a lumberjack or carnival worker. (Here’s a list of over 50 reasons health insurers may reject you. It’s scary stuff.)

Jacob Hacker talks about healthcare as one type of increasing risk for folks in the US in his book The Great Risk Shift, along with retirement and jobs. It’s a great book, full of meaty policy goodness (if you like that sort of thing), but the basic point is simple: in some important ways, Americans are at greater risk of dramatic swings in income, prolonged job loss, massive healthcare costs, and other forms of economic insecurity than in the past. For example, he states that "The chance that a person with average demographic characteristics will
experience a 50 percent or larger drop in income over a two-year period
has risen from 7 percent in the early 1970s to 17 percent in 2002." So it’s not just healthcare risks we have to worry about. He goes on to talk about both the causes of this shift and some possible policy solutions, and I hope we’ll hear more about some of those solutions as the various presidential campaigns start heating up.

So, what does this have to do with design (other than discouraging design entrepreneurs starting their own consultancies)? Well, while actually fixing the problems probably requires national policy changes, those can take a while. In the meantime, we can think about designing products and services that can help folks at least manage these risks.

I first started thinking about this when Scott Cook, founder of Intuit, came to talk to the product team at eBay a while ago. He’s a pretty engaging speaker, and frames the history of the company as a series of products inspired by deep customer insights — insights which he cheerfully admits they came to very late in some cases. One such case was the origin of Quickbooks — for many years Intuit researchers noticed that a significant number of Quicken users seemed to be small businesses. This didn’t make any sense, as it was designed for home financial use, not accounting — until they eventually realized that there was a need for small business accounting software designed for non-accountants.

I was intrigued by his mentioning, as a similar case, a new software product created specifically to manage health insurance paperwork Quicken Medical Expense Manager. It turns out that the inspiration for this came from even closer to home, as this story (PDF) relates:

Dan Robinson’s life changed forever in the winter of 2000. His newborn son entered the world with a rare illness that required a life-saving heart surgery — the first of many, it would turn out — when he was just two months old …

At the time of his son’s birth, Dan was an engineering manager with the Quicken team and Intuit Inc. As the parent of a child with a serious medical condition, he experienced firsthand how stressful managing medical expenses can be.

By 2001, the Robinson’s medical bills exceeded $1.2 million. "I felt overwhelmed by the number of bills and statements — I was unable to make sense of it all, Robinson said …

Robinson developed his own basic medical expense management  software program and proposed a more formal software solution to the Quicken organization for development.  At first his ideas was met with skepticism, but eventually he was given the go ahead to pursue it.  The premise was simple: develop a product that could help track  healthcare expenses and insurance for individuals and families.

I think this is an amazing example of product design targeting a real and scary risk (the risk of bankruptcy due to overwhelming healthcare costs) and helping empower individuals to manage that risk. Product designers have a tendency to talk about what good things using their product will do for their customers — but sometimes the  best path is to help  manage risks, i.e. reduce the likelihood of bad things happening.

Edit: My friend Karen posted about this subject (and dictators and complex systems) a little while ago.

Political PowerPoint 2

Inspiration

Yep, more political PowerPoint.*

First, go watch this presentation by Hans Rosling at the TED 2006 conference. It’s long, but it’s worth it.

Now, go see Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

Leaving aside the messages of these two pieces — and both are very powerful messages — what impresses me most as a designer is the careful use of information visualization in each. There’s some tricks (Mr. Gore’s "stretching" of one chart beyond the bounds of the screen) and some innovation (Hans’s moving play-by-play and live-action graph splitting), but some of the sharpest moments in each are pure old-school charting. Maybe a little more tarted up than Tufte would approve of, but beautifully done.

Good content + good speaking style + good visualizations = powerful messages.

 

*Really this is about the use of design in formal presentations — and the power of those presentations to change the world. Entertainingly, I’m pretty sure that neither Al Gore nor Hans Rosling used PowerPoint to create their presentations — Rosling helps make his own presentation software, and Mr. Gore’s pretty clearly a Keynote guy.

political powerpoint

Inspiration

This presentation is a wonderful example of PowerPoint being used for (satirical) political ends. (Backstory here and here.) What fascinates me even more is the use of conceptual interface designs for the same purpose. We often talk within the corporate design world about the power of concepual design to change minds — how about in the wider world as well?

I particularly like the pop-up warning in the second image below.

Mcds
Mcds2