Wired magazine has an interesting article about using Ambient Orbs to help people conserve energy:
Martinez realized he could use Orbs to signal changes in electrical rates, programming them to glow green when the grid was underused — and, thus, electricity cheaper — and red during peak hours when customers were paying more for power.
The result? Peak period use was reduced by 40%. It’s amazing how much easier it is for people to change their behavior if you make them aware of it.
We implemented some simple feedback loops in Google Reader in the form of the trends feature, which lets users track their data consumption and see which feeds they should unsubscribe from.
An interesting WSJ article on retail in India:
Mr. Biyani doesn’t allow haggling, but having damaged as well as good quality produce in the same box gives customers a chance to choose and think they are getting a better deal.
A few months ago, the Washington Post organized a little experiment in the subway: they had violin prodigy Joshua Bell play incognito for 45 minutes. Along with a detailed account of the event, the article offers some great analysis of why we like art and the importance of context.
This article provoked a real storm of posts on the blogosphere, so I expect many of you will already have read it. However, I wanted to highlight a few posts that I found particularly interesting:
A little meta-comment here: some of you may have noticed these longer “link summary” posts. It’s a new format I’m experimenting with: rather than try to post everything as soon as possible (which I’ve clearly given up on), I’ll occasionally accumulate a few articles on a given topic and tie them together in one post. This not only fits my posting habits better, but hopefully makes for more interesting content than just links. Let me know what you think!
Continuing our recap of the GEL conference:
Danny Meyer, the entrepreneur behind the Union Square Cafe and Gramercy Tavern among others, gave a talk about hospitality in the restaurant business. He talked about how quality and service were no longer enough, but that employees needed to have high HQ, or hospitality quotient (yeah it’s gimmicky, but it’s memorable). Danny claims that you can’t learn this, but you can learn to hire the right people. I’m not sure I agree with this, but I like his broader point about making the customer trust that you are on their side.
After a recommendation by Kottke, I got a burger at the Shake Shack, another Danny Meyer project. Interestingly, the excessively long line actually contributes to the experience: standing around for more than an hour heightens your hunger to the breaking point, but when the food lives up to expectations, the wait endured only makes it taste better — it was worth it! (Of course, I ran into some newfound GEL friends in line, so I didn’t have to wait quite so long, but let’s ignore that…)
[photo by Bonimo]
Erin McKean, a lexicographer for the OED, ran a workshop on the first day about how to create new words. I attended this and learnt about how English shamelessly borrows words from other cultures, how new words are created through various Frankensteinian operations, and how new words are added to the OED. Erin is exactly the kind of person you’d like to be in charge of your language: not a literature scholar, but a true word geek, gladly embracing new words and repeatedly quoting the Simpsons (cromulent anyone?).
More importantly, I won third place in the word creation contest. “Mispronoonce” is a variation of mispronounce to be used after a particularly embarassing mispronunciation. It can only be used in the first person, as in “oh god, I mispronoonced that…”. You can read more about the contest on Erin’s blog, and here is a video of a talk she gave at Pop!Tech.
[picture by Neil Hunt]
John Williams is the founder of Frog’s Leap Winery, in Napa Valley. John told us the amazing tale of his winery, from his arrival in California with $40 in his pocket to his early embrace of organic winemaking. Among other things, he grows his grapes without chemicals and gets all his electricity from solar panels on his house.
John’s talk was full of great anecdotes (”all decisions made sober have to be revisited over a bottle of wine”), but was also an interesting account of how to build a unique business. Authenticity is an overused term, but John’s was the most genuine, honest talk I’ve seen in a while. I’ll most definitely be stopping by Frog’s Leap this summer and buying a case.
Here’s a bold move from Kodak: they’re launching a printer with cheap ink cartridges. Just like the razor industry, the printer industry is based on the lucrative scheme of selling cheap machines at a loss and recouping the cost on outrageously expensive supplies. This has obviously been a pain point for consumers, but no one has had the incentive to change this model. Kodak needs to do something disruptive to gain share in a crowded market — sometimes all it takes is one dissident to bring down the system.
This post about Jaguar’s new Concept XF is a good example of why I love car design — so much thought has to go into every little detail. Next time you’re driving at night, try to recognize cars from the shape of their headlights. You’ll be surprised at how easy many brands are to spot.
In other news, the new Jaguar XK is stunningly beautiful.
The History of the Button blog has a really interesting post on a seemingly smart, but ultimately confusing elevator design. Is it possible for designs to be too clever for their own good?
Dealing with the user’s ingrained expectations is often a dilemma when trying to innovate: do you create something that is novel and potentially confusing, or do you conform to the user’s expectations? Often, an idea will be a clear improvement on paper, but the user’s habits will in practice prove an overwhelming barrier. This is particularly true when the interaction is almost subconscious, as in the elevator example linked to above.
When a novel design provides significant new value, users may be willing to invest some time and mental effort to learn new behaviors. Many people are willing to learn how to use a navigation system, as it makes life so much easier. Nevertheless, designers should work to minimize these switching costs by providing adequate explanations (preferably in context, not tucked away in an obscure manual), adhering to usability conventions as much as possible, and using methods such as progressive disclosure.
Of course, the most revolutionary designs are those that innovate in a way that is so intuitive that they behave exactly as the user expects them to — even though the interaction is completely novel. Automatic transmissions are a good example of this — they are clearly simpler to use than their alternative. Not to use a tired example, the iPod’s scroll-wheel also springs to mind. It remains to be seen if the iPhone lives up to expectations, though usability expert Bruce Tognazzini has high hopes.
I’ve touched on this subject before: elevator algorithms
Nintendo’s site has a series of good interviews with the designers of the Wii. There’s a lot of material there, and of course a fair amount of self-complimenting, but the first two volumes (hardware and remote) are well worth reading. In other news, I still really want a Wii.
