I’ve been following the evolution of information visualization since I first blogged in 1998. Well, even before then, Muriel Cooper was leading her students at MIT’s Media Lab to probe on new ways of interacting with textual information. You can see the work she presented at TED5 in 1994, the same year that the Web really took root, in this post from David Young’s blog. But don’t just watch the video — there’s also a link to an in-depth profile of Muriel written by my friend Janet Abrams, and a link to Lisa Strausfeld’s 1995 CHI paper on visualizing financial data. (15 years later, Lisa continues to blaze trails at Pentagram.
Category: Uncategorized
Sorry about the rss feed problems folks.
Working out some kinks. Nothing to see here.
Two blogs in one: peterme.com and peterme’s linkblog
Since the start of the year, I’ve been trying out some new stuff for peterme.com, and I’ve gotten it to a point where it’s time to share.
People reading peterme.com via RSS (Google Reader or some such) would have noticed a bunch of links in the feed. This was an attempt on my part to see if I could get back to old school linkblogging, the kind I did when I maintained this site by hand. I have now separated the link blog into a separate feed, which you can either read in normal web on the sidebar of my home page, or subscribe to its RSS feed. The feed for just the main peterme.com posts is still available here.
Or, if you want to see both in one feed stream, subscribe to this feed.
OK. Enough housekeeping.
Don’t allow yourself to be abused by employers (What I would tell interaction design students, #4 in a series)
We are entering the season of college recruiting. Across the country, design schools are inviting potential employers to meet their students. Students are burnishing their portfolios, preparing their spiels, all the while trying to maintain their overburdened academic load.
One of the things that saddens me about many designers is how little professional self-esteem they have. As long as they get to occasionally work on cool projects, they’re willing to put up with remarkable abuse. I suspect many don’t realize that it doesn’t have to be that way. So, to all the students out there looking for work, when the recruiter offers you the opening, “What questions do you have about us?”, ask questions like:
How many hours a week do you regularly expect people to work?
From what I’ve seen, most design firms, particularly name design firms, expect team members to regularly put in 60- or 70-hour weeks. They do this either because: a) they bill you out hourly, and so want you to generate as much revenue as possible or b) they’re terrible at planning projects, and overcommit within a particular timeframe. The problem is, if you’re a full-time employee, you’re not getting any extra cash for work beyond 40 hours a week. So, the company is benefiting from exploiting your time, but you are not.
What kinds of activities will I get to perform in this role?
In school, interaction design students typically engage across a range of activities, including user research, interaction design, product strategy, visual design, and prototyping. However, most employers tightly align a job title with a job description. And that job description is the box within which you can work. So if you’re an “interaction designer” or a “UX designer”, you might be just a workflow-and-wireframes jockey, because user research is done by people with the title “User Researcher”, and Flash prototyping is done by people with the title “Web developer”. Design firms do this so they can task people as if they are interchangeable cogs in a machine. It makes it a lot easier for planning, but it’s stultifying as an employee.
So find out what freedom you’ll have in your practice.
What do you expect for an employee’s utilization percentage?
(This is more for design services firms as opposed to working in-house.) Most people, if they’ve never worked for a services firm, don’t even know what a “utilization percentage” is. It’s the amount of time you spend doing billable work. Utilization percentage * billing rate = company revenue. As such, employers want that utilization rate to be very high.
I feel that a 75% rate is humane. Any expectation above 85% is out of line (particularly if they’re working you more than 40 hours a week). Some companies have 100% utilization targets. That’s crazy. Basically, it means you’re turning the crank all day. You have no time for internal business. No time to read, think, grow. No time to experiment, try new things. When you’re going beyond 85%, you’re basically sacrificing your professional growth in order to line your company’s owner’s pockets.
Will you own any intellectual property I develop during the time I work there, even if it’s created outside of work hours?
Some companies, and I know this can be hard to believe, lay claim to an employee’s entire creative output, regardless of whether it happens during work hours. Now, I’m no lawyer, and if memory serves, these claims are not defensible, but would you want to work for any company that attempted this, whether or not the attempt stuck?
What support will I get for expressing myself publicly, and engaging with a wider community?
Unless you are a senior employee, most design firms offer no support for, and some actively discourage, their staff members developing public personas and engaging with a wider community. I’ve heard countless stories from friends who have had to fight their companies in order to submit talks to conferences, or contribute articles in publications.
(If you’re talking to a design firm) Are you a public company, or owned by one?
Public companies require levels of growth and profitability that lead to policies which often run contrary to delivering high-quality design in a sane environment. If you find out the design firm you’re talking to is public, or owned by a public company, be wary, and be certain you have satisfactory answers to the previous questions.
It’s about treating you like a person, not a revenue-generating asset
The questions I’ve posed here all boils down to whether the employer will treat you as a person, a human with wants, needs, aspirations, and desire for happiness, or do they just see their staff as a means to making money? (And, let me be clear — I’m all for making money, but there’s a point beyond which it just becomes greedy.) Never except the answer “It’s just business.” There’s no reason humanity and business cannot mix.
Book Review: The Book of Basketball
When I was a kid, I wore glasses (and looked something like this (second photo)), and when I played sports, I wore goggles. And when we put up a basketball hoop in my backyard, my friends and I prentended to be the Lakers (local team), and because I wore goggles, I pretended to be Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (with skyhooks and everything). Which is a little strange for a 10-or-so year-old white kid of average height, but there you go. (Somewhere in my life I have an autographed photo of Kareem, sky-hooking over Wilt. It’s awesome.)
As a child, basketball was my favorite sport to watch. I drifted away from sports when I went to college (I in fact could get quite self-righteous about how professional sports is a tool for narcotizing masses). About 4 or so years ago, I got back into watching sports. I tried out football for a season, but it didn’t really take. Basketball has, and, for better or worse, I root for the Warriors (local team).
One of the sad truths of my current life is that I don’t believe any of my friends are basketball devotees. Football, yes, even baseball, but the graceful game is lost on my companions. So, I’ve turned to the internet to get my fix when it comes to basketball discourse, and as part of that, I’ve become quite a follower of Bill Simmons, aka The Sports Guy, whose columns are the most reliably funny writing since vintage Dave Barry. It turns out that while Simmons follows all sports (including, it seems hockey and even a little international soccer), basketball stokes his passion most, and his latest tome, the 700-page The Book of Basketball, is his love letter to the NBA.
Though I’ve finished the book, I’ll admit I read about 80 or so percent of it. It’s crammed with stuff, including exegeses on players and teams from so long ago that I had trouble caring. But the bulk of the book engages, is funny, and informative. You do have to look past his Boston homer-ism (and his strange antipathy for Kareem, even though as a kid, Simmons wanted to change his name to Jabaal Abdul-Simmons), his needless porn, stripper, and Vegas references, and his inscrutable support for Allen Iverson, a player who violates pretty much everyone of his tenets for great basketball, and ranks extremely high in his Pyramid (Simmons’ suggestion for a new Hall of Fame). If you do, you’ll learn a lot about basketball, it’s history (pre-ABA, during ABA, and post-merger with the ABA), what players and coaches themselves have said about one another, and why, when you study it closely enough, Russell is simply better than Wilt. You’ll also laugh, as Simmons is nothing if not funny.
There’s no way I can recommend this book to anyone who doesn’t love basketball. Those who do have likely already heard about it. I don’t know if it’s worth the full price, but if you do check it out from a library, be prepared to renew it at least once if you plan to get through it all.
Book review: CHRONIC CITY
I don’t know if it’s related to fatherhood, but in the past year I’ve read a lot more fiction than had been my habit. My two favorite novels from this past year are China Mieville’s The City and the City and Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City. (I only just realized I never reviewed The City and The City, and as it has been a while since I read it, I won’t do a full review here. Rooted in the hard-boiled detective genre, it’s a tantalizing mindfuck of a book, involving a pair of Eastern European cities that actually overlap, and where the populace conducts a consensual hallucination to ignore the other city (and if they break the spell, they’re taken away). This construct allows Mieville to pursue ideas on urban existence, many revolving around the idea of “unseeing”, an act that citydwellers unconsciously do everyday.)
Chronic City is also a mindfuck, though in a different way. Set in a parallel-universe Manhattan (the 9/11 bombings have been replaced by a mysterious gray fog; The New York Times publishes a war-free edition; every character has a strange, but awesome name), our guide and narrator (the book is mostly first-person) is Chase Insteadman, a former child actor engaged to a marooned astronaut. In the opening chapter he meets Perkus Tooth, an apartment-bound pot-smoking contrarian intellectual driven by conspiratorial thoughts at the fringes of pop culture, and gets caught up in Tooth’s associations, both human and cognitive.
I really enjoyed the book. Mostly, it’s a lot of fun. Lethem constructs a oompelling simulacrum of Manhattan, and teasing it out provides endless amusement. The mind-trip is well executed. And Lethem has evolved into a remarkable prose stylist, a master of metaphoric language, someone who can really paint with words in a way I haven’t read in a very long time.
If you like trippy fiction; if you’re a pop culture and literati junkie; if you already find Manhattan otherworldly, Chronic City is definitely worth a shot.
Movie review: UP IN THE AIR
About a week ago, Stacy and I saw Up in the Air for one of our cherished (and too seldom) nights out (well, it was an afternoon out, but close enough). I enjoyed director Jason Reitman’s Thank You For Smoking and felt that his Juno was better than the other 2007 best picture nominees that I had seen (yes, including No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood), and so was looking forward to his latest. And I knew a fair bit about the movie going into it — if you listen to public radio podcasts about movies and entertainment, Reitman had been on all of them.
This is probably his weakest effort of his three films. It’s not a bad movie, and I thought it was basically okay. I was never bored, and didn’t want to leave midway, which for me is a sign that the film has something going for it. But the idea that Up in the Air is seriously considered a Best Picture candidate, much less considered the odds-on favorite, is appalling. That such a trifle, a wisp of a film is accorded such plaudits confuses me (until I look at the other candidates and realize, Hoo-boy, this was a lame year for movies.)
My dad’s tweet about the film captures my feelings pretty well: “UP IN THE AIR is a balloon filled with the hot stuff; it justs floats aloft, going nowhere fast, then deflates and crashes with a dull thud.” And I don’t mind that for the first 2/3rds or so the film goes nowhere. But, yeah, when it decides that it needs a resolution, it turns a corner toward an unfulfilling climax and denouement.
I think where Reitman fell down was a matter of tone. As he explained in his various interviews, the film was first conceived in a pre-recession world, and was originally planned to play a lot more arch, perhaps more like Thank You For Smoking. The recession hits, and no longer can you play laying people off for laughs. However, Reitman couldn’t let go of the humor altogether (it’s clearly his natural inclination), and so you get this tonal mish-mosh, and the movie loses its emotional resonance. Compare that with The Informant!, a similarly-scaled film, also relying on a movie star to carry it, but where the director (Steven Soderbergh) unwaveringly struck the same amplified tone throughout the entire film.
All that said, there is one remarkably powerful element in Up in the Air, one that struck me on first viewing, and has haunted me since. As Reitman explained in interviews, most of the people we see getting laid off in the film are people who actually had been recently laid off, and were asked to re-create the horrible moment of their firing. There’s one guys in particular, an African-American man, who’s eye starts twitching uncontrollably, and asks the firer: “What are you going to do this weekend? You have money in your bank? You got gas in your gas tank? You going to take your kids out to Chuck E. Cheese?” That man’s performance (and it’s hard to call it a performance because it doesn’t at all seem “performed”) floored me. It’s the one thing in that entire movie that stuck with me more than a couple hours later.
Apple’s Tablet – Game Machine?
John Gruber’s lengthy and thoughtful take on what the Apple Tablet could be has been making the blogospheric rounds. His reasoning is solid I definitely think he’s onto something:
Do I think The Tablet is an e-reader? A video player? A web browser? A document viewer? It’s not a matter of or but rather and. I say it is all of these things. It’s a computer.
What I found surprising is that Gruber doesn’t say that the tablet will be a game machine. Apple has a checkered history when it comes to gaming — though encouraged with the Apple II, it wasn’t at all supported with the original Macintosh (Steve thought it would make it seem too much like a toy), and some think that’s part of the reason that PCs dominated the home market. With iPhone and iPod Touch, Apple has all but rebranded them as a gaming platform, after seeing which apps were the most popular.
So, along with being an e-reader, video player, web browser, document viewer, I would expect the new tablet to be a game platform, and a potentially game changing one at that. With a flat form factor, accelerometer, iSight (especially if there’s two iSights, one on the front, one on the back), and wireless, the gaming opportunities are remarkable. You could have a driving game where what you’re holding actually held like a steering wheel. You could have two lined up side by side and play air hockey. You could do some crazy augmented reality stuff, or body control stuff, and come up with game ideas no one has thought yet.
Anyway, yeah, games. Oh, the other thing I suspect is that the only way to get software on the device will be through an App Store. The model is just too attractive, especially if they sell it as a “not-computer” (yes, it will be a computer, but they will very likely sell it as some type of appliance).
Mindset, not process; Outcomes, not methods (What I would tell interaction design students, #2 in a series)
I had originally planned to speak in SVA’s Interaction Design lecture series yesterday, but had to cancel because I’m needed in the SF Bay Area. So, I thought I might blog the things I would have said
In school, and, well, in most companies, product design and development is approached as a process. The problem with this is that people stop being able to see the forest for the trees — they get so focused on following the process that they lose site of why they’re engaged in the process to begin with.
What’s more important than process is mindset. And when it comes to interaction design, that mindset is having empathy for and understanding your users, and creating something great for them. If you and your colleagues have the right mindset, you’ll likely do the right thing, because you won’t be satisfied until your users are pleased. At UX Week 2009, Aaron Forth, the VP of Product for Mint.com, spoke. (You can see his talk here.) One thing that Aaron points out is that his team didn’t engage in anything resembling a user experience process, but because everybody at the company, from the CEO on down, cared about the user, they weren’t satisfied until they produced great results.
In Jared Spool’s talk “Journey to the Center of Design”, he claims that companies adopting a “user-centered design process’ actually produce less usable designs than those that don’t. What happens is that companies offload critical thinking onto the process, and assume that if they follow the recipe, good things will come out at the other end. It just doesn’t work that way.
Speaking of what comes out at the other end, that’s all that matters. Results and outcomes are what’s important, not the methods you use to get there. If a rigorous UCD process is what gets you to great design, awesome. If sketching on a napkin, then bringing that into Photoshop works, great. The proof of the pudding is in the eating — if people are happy to use the design, and it satisfies whatever tasks/goals/etc they seek to achieve, that’s what matters.
So, at most, use methods and methodologies as a scaffold to help you think and work through your problems. But don’t adhere to a process. Just use whatever works.
Experience (and services and systems), not products (What I would tell interaction design students, #1 in a series)
I had originally planned to speak in SVA’s Interaction Design lecture series today, but had to cancel because I’m needed in the SF Bay Area. So, I thought I might blog the things I would have said
This is a subject I’ve talked about at length before, perhaps most notably in the essay, “Experience IS the Product… and the only thing users care about”, the slidecast “Experience is the Product”, and it was a main theme in Adaptive Path’s book Subject to Change. So I won’t go into in detail again, but it’s worth acknowledging that most people still approach product development very much from a features-and-functionality standpoint, and most design work gets so focused on the specific outcome that the designers lose sight of the ecosystem in which their work must fit.
In this increasingly complex world, product design is really systems design. A number of elements must be marshaled and coordinated. But it doesn’t make sense to design a system for the sake of it.
So, a system to what end?
I would argue, a system to support great experiences for people. And from figuring out how to support the delivery of great experiences, then design the interactions, identify the touchpoints, and build the systems that support that.