YouTube - Typography from Vancouver Film School.

(from a group of excellent of examples of kinetic type compiled by Garr Reynolds)

Seth’s experience of trying to talk to someone about his broken Kettle has got NOTHING to trying to talk to Rogers.

• While surfing, I get a message saying that I am near my bandwidth limit for the month. I don’t know when my billing date is, so I’m not sure how bad this is. Clicking on the “monitor your bandwidth” link brings me to a login page.

• I have a Rogers book with my account info, but I can’t work out the username and password for this page.
• I read through the book for clues. There is information about logging in to the rogers.yahoo.com site and information about how to check your account once there.
• I know that information, so I log in.
• I find a billing section but have trouble finding usage info.
• Help centre search returns lots of results none of which have to do with my question.
• On the billing page, I find a link to monitor my bandwidth.
• Clicking on it brings me to a new login page.
• I enter the username and password that worked before. It does not work here. They want a different username and password. I still have no idea what this is.
• Luckily, they give me a 1 877 number to call for assistance. I call it.
• A recording tells me that THE NUMBER I AM CALLING IS GOING TO BE DISCONTINUED. Then it repeats the message in French. Then it transfers me to the right number.
• I have to go through the voice recognition menu (pro tip - speak gibberish until it gives up and gives you a human).
• The human tells me my billing date, so I’ll know when the usage limit resets.

Why, oh why couldn’t the process have been

• While surfing I get a message saying that I am near my bandwidth limit for the month and it will reset on [BILLING DATE GOES HERE]?

Every step of the way was clearly designed by people with institutional needs in mind instead of customer experience.

• Why can’t I actually look at my billing through the roger.yahoo.com account info page?

• Why do I need to create a new login and password to view my rogers information?
• Why didn’t my account book COME with a login and password (at least Bell gets this much right).
• Why does their web page send you to a soon-to-be-discontinued phone number?
• Why doesn’t the old 1-877 number just silently route you to their new phone system? How much can it possibly cost to maintain more than one points of entry?

I’m sure there are reasonable answers to each of these questions, having to do with how the architecture of the user authentication systems relate to various protocols. I don’t care. All I know is that I spent 20 minutes trying to find a very simple answer to a very simple question.

(I will say that the actual dude I talked to was very helpful and quick with the answers. So top marks for hiring him. But he’s only a part of the service. I hate how long it took me to get to him.)

This is from a popular (and reasonably well funded) survey company.

Is there a good reason for the layout of the buttons, or did no one over there look at the entire screen?

Oh man, this is pretty much everything that this blog is about in one place.

This is a piece of brilliant design, for an excellent presentation about a critical problem, backed up by a raft of interesting statistics relating to the impact and efficacy of helping girls vs helping other groups.

(via Presentation Zen)

photo credit: bensonkua

One of my new favourite applications is called Time Out.

Time Out is donationware created by indie Mac developer, Dejal. The program does only one thing. Every X minutes, it darkens the screen for a set period of time, acting as a gentle reminder that you really ought to take a break. That’s it. That’s the whole app.

The key is that it does it really, really well. You didn’t know that there were over a dozen ways that you could tweak the experience of having your computer screen darkened after a predetermined amount of time, but there are.

It may be something that is special to Macs because of the way they OS architechture works or is may be because a certain kind of person gets attracted the software and hardware look and feel. It’s even possible that my impression is prejudice based on my own failure to find equivalent apps on the PC. But it seems like there is a wealth of applications available from indie developers on the Macintosh that only do one or two things but do them really, really well. I contrast this to the kind of massive bloated suites of software like Open Office or MS Office, both of which feel kind of out of place on my computer.

Has anyone else noticed this? Mac people does your experience mirror mine? PC people am I just being obtuse?

I came across this at the National Art Gallery of Canada.

It’s a bathroom door. It’s a little dark, but you should be able to make out the nice shiny metal rectangle where they thought that people would push to open the door and the white worn-away patch where people actually do.

Michale Pollan tells stories about nature so that we can begin to FEEL the reality of science, rather than just “know”. It’s been 150 years since Darwin, he says, and we are still all Cartesians. “We still think it’s human vs nature.”

The most important point in the talk: We are just as sophisticated as rice, because WE HAVE BEEN EVOLVING FOR THE SAME LENGTH OF TIME (rice actually hare more genes than humans).

photo credit: JasonJT

This is very exciting.

After 8 years of development, the Rosetta Project has released the 1st edition of their Rosetta disks, which have the text of Genesis 1-3 translated into over 1,500 languages, etched in micro text (you need about 1000x magnification to read it all). The idea is that, unlike the single Rosetta stone, these will eventually be mass produced, with the idea that at least SOME of the very durable copies will survive into the distant future when most or all of these languages are dead.

There are so many interesting things going on here.

They chose optical engraving because, presumably, humans will always be able to see while it’s far less certain that we’ll be able to read digital media, even a few decades from now (an enormous problem for historians - it’s easier to read Da Vinci’s notes than those of scientists working on computers in the 1960s).

They chose small but durable mass-production technology because even when some of the copies get destroyed, there will be more. These will be heirlooms handed down from generation to generation, perhaps spread across the solar system or galaxy as we spread out from the surface of the planet (assuming we make it that far).

And as for Genesis?

Alexander Rose Says:
Regarding Genesis… yes we get this a lot. We had a ton of debate about it. It came down to a totally mechanical reason, the bible is the most translated text and it starts with Genesis. Finding John 3:16 in languages you dont know or scripts you dont recognize while scanning documents from a shoebox out of a closet in Papua New Ginea is really hard it turns out. Here is the question I always ask, “Without looking it up, can you tell me what was on the original Rosetta Stone?” It was a bunch of boring tax stuff, but we dont judge those cultures by that material. We are smart enough to know that this was just one piece of text that randomly survived and we are thankful to have it.

When you work on a product for too long, you get used to all of the little workarounds you need to do in order to use your software. Part of you is aware that they need to be fixed at some point, but then deadlines loom and memory fades and bugs become features.

The best cure is external playtesters. Fresh eyes, attached to bodies that have never played your game before. People who are as new to the experience as the people who will pay money for your product. In a perfect world, this means having the resources to build a multi-million test centre like Microsoft did for Halo 3 or building it in to your design process like Valve does and running playtest sessions every week or two.

Failing that, it’s a good idea to have people in your company who are not part of the day to day production of your game try a build. An outsider to the project doesn’t know or care about WHY you made the compromises that you made, they only care about their experience of the product. You should be using the same techniques as you’d use if it were external playtesters. Valve has a good PDF that covers this.

What put me in mind of this was a rant by Bill Gates about his experience trying to download Moviemaker in 2003. Most commenters seem to be taking potshots at Microsoft or at Gates, but it’s actually a great example of why having outside eyes is so important. Without knowing them, I am pretty sure that the people who worked on Microsoft.com were all pretty intelligent. Having worked in the trenches of software development, I can only sympathize and cringe along with the poor developers when Gates says:

So I gave up and sent mail to Amir saying - where is this Moviemaker download? Does it exist?

So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.

This speech by Clay Shirky is really, really good.

I was being interviewed by a TV producer to see whether I should be on their show, and she asked me, “What are you seeing out there that’s interesting?”

I started telling her about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus–”How should we characterize this change in Pluto’s status?” And a little bit at a time they move the article–fighting offstage all the while–from, “Pluto is the ninth planet,” to “Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system.”

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”