Pants Pant Pants (a Q&A Comparison)

Clothing & Costume Design, Interaction Design, Search

A pants problem

I had a pants problem, and I turned to the Internet for advice.

And then I turned my pants problem into a practical comparison of some of the different ways to get answers to tricky life questions from the Internet.

A short summary of my problem:

I'm really picky about pants, and having trouble finding pants I like. I'm tired of super-expensive jeans, and khakis and most dressy pants I see are boring.

Does anyone have suggestions for pants that I can wear to the office, that look good, aren't totally boring, and are fairly durable? Easy to clean would be nice, but I can handle dry-cleaning.

I'm totally serious about this question.

Questions and answers

I posted that to Quora, which was the service which got me thinking about question and answer services. (That and my desperate need for better pants.) Quora seemed intriguing, and I keep getting invites from other people, but the questions seemed pretty … limited in scope. It's all very Silicon Valley inward-facing with lots of thinky questions about design process and The State of The Industry and etc. All the questions I came up with on that front seemed pretty artificial, and I wondered how they'd handle a more down-to-earth subject.

Similarly, with Aardvark, I'd done a bunch of answering questions (usually about restaurants in San Francisco, a perennial favorite), and enjoyed the experience, but had never tried asking something myself.

So I decided to use my pants problem to put them to the test.

Continue reading Pants Pant Pants (a Q&A Comparison) →

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.

Reffell’s law of PowerPoint writing loss

Writing

I'm in my home office, sorting old papers. And of course reading some of them. Apparently, in graduate school I was able to write clearly and analytically, at length, about complicated things like privacy regulations in the EU. There is little poetry, but there are thoughts, conveyed in English, by words on paper. There is clarity. There is precision. There are ideas that carefully build upon each other, in crisp sentences, stacked in well-ordered paragraphs, to a logical conclusion. (There are also too many commas and horrible typos, but that's always been true of my writing.)

I've had a Theory for a while (which for this post I've given a field promotion to Law) that explains why graduate school was the peak of my writing ability.  It is not because of age, or because I write less now. It is because of PowerPoint.

Reffell's law: For every year you write seriously, starting around Kindergarten, you get incrementally better at writing. And for every year you write serious amounts of PowerPoint (or Keynote) in a corporate environment, you lose one of those increments.

That's put me back, effectively, to my senior year in high school. (The startup years don't count for this, there's a low PPT count.) That's not so bad! I was a pretty good writer in high school. Better than a lot of adults. But it will go seriously downhill from here. Another two years and I'll be at 10th grade; two more and we'll be in middle school. Quickly we'll be in "Dick and Jane go up hill" territory.

I think, by the way, this is specific to intra-corporate use. Something about the highly concentrated jargon, shared assumptions, and positioning of cliches (verbal and visual) as a means of bludgeoning the decision-making apparatus into submission. Probably the decks you build for public presentations are safe. Probably.

How not to handle co-branding

Uncategorized

I swear I’ve ranted about this before, but I was presented with the following atrocity while buying some prints from my Flickr photos:

Snapfish_atrocity

That’s four brands for the customer to (fail to) absorb:

  1. Snapfish (company doing the photo printing)
  2. Hewlett-Packard (apparently insecure company which owns Snapfish)
  3. Flickr (company who hosts the photos, partnering with Snapfish for printing)
  4. PayPal (company who handles payment)

Flickr_yahoo I suppose we’re lucky Flickr didn’t use the ghastly “Flickr from Yahoo” logo which would have brought the total to 5 brands. And eBay, bless their souls, does not as far as I know ever use “PayPal, an eBay company.” (Or even “eBay, a PayPal company” as would probably be more appropriate these days.)

If I were to try to fix the situation, I might leave PayPal as is (payments are important, and the branding is properly contextual), force HP to either fish or cut bait (leave HP out or rename Snapfish) and try to find a more elegant placement for Flickr, possibly text-only.

There’s not much of a larger point here, other than “Bad co-branding: don’t do it!”

MMO subscription charts

Books, Games

Book_coverI’m reading a few books on online gaming, starting with Edward Castronova’s Synthetic Worlds. It’s mostly about MMORPGs, or MMOs as we’ve thankfully started to call them.

I’m about halfway through the book, which was published in 2006, and it’s startling how much has changed in a few years. As the book was written, World of Warcraft was just starting to take off — and the current crop of lightweight social games wasn’t even on the horizon.

Castronova spends some time talking about the number of folks spending their time in online worlds, and I wanted to know how those numbers looked now. So I headed over to MMOdata.net, which does a fine job of collecting those stats. (It’s worth spending a little time with their MMO and Accuracy list, a nice bit of data collection transparency.)

All the following charts are from MMOdata as of August 3, 2010: the charts are regularly updated.

The first chart is total subscriptions for all MMOs tracked — a pretty steady curve up, at least until the last 6 months or so.

TotalSubs

The next tracks subscriber growth for the top MMOs (those with 1+ million subscribers):

Subs-1

Finally (and I find this the most interesting chart of all), the number of peak concurrent users for the largest shards. Most games control the number of peak users by adding more shards, and so aren’t shown — instead we see the two main worlds with no sharding. In other words, everyone logging on is in the same world at the same time.

PCUShard

Eve Online is an interesting example of slow, steady growth as a relatively minor game world.

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.

Identity Providers and 3rd -Party Authentication, Some Data

Identity, Interaction Design, Product Design

Inspired by Luke Wroblewski's Data Monday blog posts, I rounded up some numbers on identity and authentication on the web.

I'm particularly interested in the growth of third-party authentication, OAuth, OpenID, and Facebook Connect.

Here are some numbers from Gigya (a "social optimization" service), from May 2010:

  • Facebook is by far the most frequently used identity provider, with 46% of logins across the web, compared to 17% from Google, 14% from Twitter, 12% from Yahoo, 7% from MySpace, 2% from LinkedIn, and 1% from AOL.
  • Twitter does far better when looking at commenting on or sharing news stories, with 45% of the total compared to Facebook's 25% and Google's 16%.

Data from JanRain's RPX service, published in April 2010, shows a slightly different picture:

  • Google was picked for 39% of logins, compared to Facebook at 23%, Yahoo at 12%, Twitter at 6%, Windows Live at 3%, and all others totalling 15%.
  • JanRain had slightly different numbers for some verticals, with Facebook logins making up 45% of both logins at media company sites and on technology platforms.
  • When measuring publishing activites back to social networks using a sample set of sites, users shared to Facebook 54% of the time, Twitter 38& of the time, Yahoo 9%, and MySpace 8%.

Leah Culver measured logins and signups on TypePad's platform in September 2009 and found the following:

  • 73% were using Typepad accounts, but 27% were using another identity provider. The largest percentage were from Facebook (13%), followed by Google (5%), Twitter (4%), and Yahoo (2%).
  • When looking at signups (rather than logins), however, Typepad saw growth of 775% in non-Typepad identity providers from June to September. This growth is linked to redesigns that promoted use of alternative identity providers.

Facebook's own data contains a few tidbits about Facebook Connect:

  • A case study with SimplyHired showed that "users who log in with Facebook are twice as engaged as non-Facebook
    users."
  • They also state that "More than 150 million people engage with Facebook on external websites
    every month."

Sources:

“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.