Seth Godin points out that artificially imposed scarcity can damage customer loyalty (thanks for my friend Jardel in Brazil for the link), and outlines a number of ways that Apple could’ve prevented those hours-long lines that almost certainly pissed more customers off than they pleased.  (I myself am included among those who are upset; if you’ve been looking at my Twitter feed over the last couple of days, you probably noticed that I went to the open-24-hours-365-days-a-year 5th Avenue Apple Store at 1am last night only to be told that “the line forms at 2am” for iPhones, though they wouldn’t actually be available until 7am.  What?!)

I tend to agree with just about all of his assessments, especially the idea of allowing advance orders. Bookstores do this with eagerly anticipated books like Harry Potter ; even the company that I work for full-time occasionally offers pre-orders on products, and it almost always gives you a better handle on how many you’ll need to order/have manufactured to prevent backorders.

There was really no reason that Apple/AT&T couldn’t have planned for the release better.  Amping up an already-eagerly anticipated product like this one creates frenzy, injuries and frustration rather than enthusiasm and goodwill.

• A weekly collage/mixed media class at Cooper Union, since I’ve largely worked in digital media and have kind of neglected physical media over the years
• A modified version of my friend Ray’s “365 Days” photo project, in which I use my point-and-shoot camera to capture a picture of myself or something significant every day for a year
• An ongoing “micro-blog” via Twitter
• Establishing a collaborative story writing site (Room506.org)

I’m particularly proud of myself for sticking with these new projects, but I believe the reason that I’ve maintained interest in all of these endeavors is twofold.

1. None of these projects require a very large time commitment.
   With the exception of the collage class, which is a three-hour class on Wednesday nights and requires getting to and from the school every week, everything else can be done in a few spare minutes at work or at home.  Snapping a picture can be done in 30 seconds; sending a text message to Twitter can take just a minute or so; adding to a story can take just a few minutes over a lunch break.
2. These projects are not mandatory.
   No one is imposing a deadline or a requirement on me to get any of these things done; the world won’t end and no one will die if I fail to snap a photo of myself one day.  Almost all of them are outlets for creativity and “spare” thoughts that might otherwise just be forgotten or discarded summarily.

If I were to construct another list of projects that I’ve started but have yet to successfully complete, though, it would be far longer than the first list above, and would contain any of a number of items that I started with every intention of finishing… but failed to do so.  They basically fell off my mental list of priorities.

As I think about these unfinished tasks (which include everything from creating an updated design portfolio for myself to doing a will to getting rid of extra books from the shelves in my living room),  I think the reasons that they’ve idled for so long are the inverse of the reasons I’m getting new projects done:

1. Most of these incomplete projects require a large time commitment, or must be done in multiple stages.
2. These projects are, in some ways, mandatory (or, if not mandatory, are conceived as means to advance my career, secure my life, etc.).

In short, because I have a short attention span and probably some form of ADD, it’s exceedingly easy for me to procrastinate when a project feels like it’ll take a long time, will be difficult, or if I’m not sure where to start.  I’m wondering how I can beat this habit of procrastination since I’ve been able to specifically pinpoint things that will likely trigger it.  Any suggestions?

As a result of all of this, I had to call my bank to dispute the charges.  Annoyingly, because it was a debit card-related transaction, my debit card (which, coincidentally, I use for literally all of my daily purchases) had to be cancelled; a new one will allegedly arrive in "seven to ten business days."

Are magnetic cards really the best medium to use for financial transactions?  Newer cards include "PayPass" or similar tap-and-go technologies that utilize a short-range RFID tag embedded in the card, but those are troubling, as theoretically someone unscrupulous with a RFID reader could discreetly scan the posteriors of passersby and collect all kinds of information that they would have previously needed physical access to.

I tend to think, at least upon initial consideration, that biometrics are the future of this kind of application.  It’s laughable to think that someone would attempt to make a transaction in a store using a severed human hand or with an eyeball stuffed in a plastic bag.  The back-ends of biometric databases are the problem–we’re still living in an era where laptops are misplaced and hard drives are stolen and suddenly the personal identifying information of thousands is compromised.  So while a retinal scan may be virtually impossible to forge, we’re going to need to see some major advances in data security before I think such scans can go mainstream.

Here’s the trouble with that.

When I’m parked on my couch watching American Gladiators on the television, the last thing that I want to do is pause the TiVo, go to the computer, go to NBC.com, find the American Gladiators homepage, figure out where they keep the "full-length unedited video clips," figure out which clips are the ones that I’ve just been denied the right to see, and then watch them before returning to the show.  It’s pointless for me to watch them after the fact, since I’ll already know who won.

The fundamental problem here is that the producers of the show, perhaps in a well-intentioned effort to lengthen the amount of content contained in the show, have off-loaded a sizable chunk of it to the Internet, which is admirable, but it illustrates a misunderstanding of media consumption modes.  The idea is this–when a consumer is engaged with a particular form of media, it’s distracting and sometimes difficult (not to mention annoying) to put that consumption on hold in order to deal with another form of media.

Here’s another example.  If you’re at the gym on the treadmill listening to your iPod while you run, you can look at the bank of televisions overhead (and if you’re lucky they’ll have closed-captioning turned on, but usually at my gym they don’t), but if you see something interesting such as a bit of breaking news, in order to devote your full attention to the TV you have to pause your iPod, take out your headphones, readjust to the ambient sound level around you, and hope that the sound on the particular TV you were just looking at is turned up.

I’d suggest that the Gladiators producers offload some of the extraneous interviews and filler that they do with the contenders to the website rather than the events themselves. Wouldn’t that make more sense?

Towards the bottom of her timeline, for example, there are four Durex logos–well, three, with one cut in half.  I had some idea as to what that very simple bit of editing signified, and sure enough, she added this note:

I’ve gotten a lot of questions about the 1/2 condom. It is very simple …. after all the beer and weed, you are “in the moment” and things break or things don’t last. I thought it was funny at the time …

That, in a word, is the power of branding, especially when properly executed. An identifiable brand that has been properly positioned can create in the subconscious mind an entire story about itself, about its users, and sometimes about its manufacturers.

I’m curious, though, at what point a brand actually reaches that kind of viability.  Clearly the age-old brands that we all recognize (e.g., Nestlé, Apple, Bic, Heineken, etc.) have power by themselves, and other brands that may not be immediately familiar sometimes contain enough information for us to be able to decode their meanings (e.g., names/logos containing words like "taxi," "pizza" or "coffee"), but if a brand isn’t immediately identifiable and it doesn’t contain any assistive words or phrases, I wonder how much more difficult it is for the brand to gain traction.

One of the most interesting parts of the HOW Conference is, for me, the opportunity to be around thousands of other designers. Generally speaking when someone says "I’m a designer" there’s a certain expectation of creative ability–the casual observer naturally wants to assign the designer some preternatural ability to ooze creative juices nonstop.

To some extent this is true; I’d certainly expect the folks at a conference of this sort to be the type that are always questioning everything around them and looking at things in new and different ways. But in all honesty, designers can be quite lazy, just as employees in virtually any other field can be (witness highway construction projects wherein one guy is in a hole doing something and seven other guys are standing around said hole, discussing it). And a couple of things that I’ve seen so far from my fellow attendees have dismayed me.

On my way to this morning’s first session, I had to walk from my hotel (the Westin Copley Place) through a series of interconnected shopping plazas to the Convention Center. I passed at least two Starbucks locations, an Au Bon Pain, two other hotels, a food court, and a Dunkin’ Donuts, and there were certainly other similar locations in the general vicinity that I’m not even aware of. Alarmingly, the longest lines were at the two Starbucks locations–the lines trailed out the doors and into the promenade outside.

I can just hear the critics now: "It was 9 in the morning. Of course people are going to go to Starbucks. They wanted coffee." Yes, they wanted coffee, and so did I–but I pre-ordered breakfast last night and had an entire pot brought up from room service 15 minutes after I was out of bed. If ordering room service is too rich for someone’s blood, there were plenty of other options in the general vicinity of the Convention Center… and yet, the vast majority of the coffee-buying designers chose to go to Starbucks.

Don’t read this as an anti-corporate, anti-Starbucks tirade; I have a lot of respect for the company and am in awe of how big they’ve gotten in such a relatively short period of time. The point here is that multitudes of designers –people who are paid to think outside the box–all succumbed to groupthink. They saw a line, the primeval herd mentality deep in their DNA kicked in, and they stood in it, thinking nothing more than "coffee." Yes, it’s true that some of these folks may have wanted something that they could only get at Starbucks, and others may not have known that there were other options, but by and large I’d bet that most people in the line didn’t think about it at all. Groupthink, herd mentality.

The other example: The bulk of our presentations are being held in a large auditorium. There are doors on either side of the stage, with one set of doors arbitrarily being used as the ‘primary’ entrance. There’s no real advantage or disadvantage of using one entrance over the other, as you can easily circle the auditorium from the outside and reach the other side. There are also chairs spanning the entire width of the auditorium, with seats on the left side of the stage just as good as seats on the right side of the stage–there is literally no difference in visibility.

And yet, the vast majority (I’d say easily 90%, if not more) of the people attending sessions in this auditorium
all funnel through the bottleneck of the main entrance and then immediately sit down in the chairs closest to the doors . This behavior utterly baffles me, as my instinct is to avoid the crowd altogether and to move to an empty area of the auditorium where I can have a clearer view of the presenter as well as a more unobstructed path to the alternate exit. It’s as if the majority of the people in the room don’t realize that they’re succumbing to a mob mentality. Again–aren’t these supposed to be some of the most creative people around?

Yes, it would be idiotic to assume that someone would think, "Instead of walking into the primary entrance, I’ll charter a helicopter, land on the roof, and rappel down into the auditorium," or "I’m going to vanish myself and then reappear in the auditorium in a puff of smoke." Obviously such entrances would be unrealistic (not to mention expensive), but that’s not the point; the act of thinking about such alternate entrance (and exit) strategies is what’s important.

Perhaps someone would be right in pointing out that these are just basic subconscious human behaviors, and to a certain extent that’s true. My point is this: Creative professionals have an obligation to force themselves to try and break their psychological programming, defy conventions and create solutions to problems that other people can’t see. I think it’s safe to say that the best designers are probably the ones who are always coming up with these very answers, even in their real day-to-day lives and not just when they’re putting pen to paper or working in Photoshop.

The past five months’ worth of work have been difficult and challenging, but I’m pleased with the outcome and will be interested to see what comes of this work next.

If you are interested, the entire document (it’s over 140 pages all told, so be forewarned) is available for download.  I hope it’s as interesting for you to read as it was rewarding for me to write.

Download
From Stovetop to Screen: A Cultural History of Food Television

The Times article is primarily about a new site called JD Supra, which aims to be a law “library” populated with documents contributed by lawyers of all calibers.  The idea is that Joe Schmo can go to the site, type in a search term, narrow the search by jurisdiction and benefit from what lawyers have had to say about it in various cases.  (The library is a bit sparse at the moment–a search for “tenant rights” in the 2nd Circuit returned exactly zero results.)  There are other sites mentioned as well, including PreCYdent, which aims to be a legal search engine.  The site is currently in beta.

It’s interesting to me that it’s taken so long for the legal world to embrace the Internet and to make it easier for consumers to explore and understand the judicial system and its proceedings, but then again part of me understands that lawyers operate in something of a black box.  Law has its own language and codes and complexities and it takes years to understand it all.  Then again, Americans have always had the right to represent themselves in court–nowhere does it say in the Constitution or Bill of Rights that “you must hire a lawyer whose billable hours cost at least $150, lest you lose your case.”  True, relatively few people choose to take this route since it is difficult to argue with a seasoned lawyer who is gifted with a strong grasp of rhetoric, but the whole point of the Internet is to make information more free and available to everyone.

What’s even more baffling to me is when users sometimes disregard simple instructions altogether, especially when they’re clearly presented. I can’t quite grasp why someone would ask someone else for help or give up entirely instead of simply reading the directions. There’s probably a psychological component in play but I’m not a psychologist so I’m uncertain to what that principle is called (if it has a name).

It would be ignorant to try to apply a one-size-fits-all explanation to why users seem to have problems with various interfaces, especially on the Internet. But user error is something you can count on with virtually any technology, even with devices as old as the telephone. Not cell phones, not wireless phones–the old-fashioned telephone that plugs into the wall.

In today’s New York Times there’s a brief article about the phone numbers that people dial when voting for contestants on American Idol.  The article points out that every Tuesday night the owners of toll-free numbers that are even just slightly similar to the numbers used to vote see a drastic uptick in call volume:

Mr. Westendarp received a toll-free phone number late last year, and things were running smoothly until “American Idol” started up again in January. Then, he said in an interview on Friday, he began to notice an uptick in phone calls on Tuesday evenings after his office closed. Most of the calls, he said, resulted in messages in which the callers simply hung up.

After the number of calls spiked to more than 10,000 this week, Mr. Westendarp said he did a little research. His discovery: “American Idol” callers who mistakenly transpose two digits when dialing to cast a vote for a certain contestant end up on his phone line.

Ten thousand mistakenly dialed calls is a lot.  I’m not going to coddle the callers here–this is blatant stupidity on their part.  In an average episode, the producers go to the following lengths to try and make sure people dial correctly:

1. Host Ryan Seacrest reads the numbers aloud at least once and usually twice, verbally warning the viewing audience to dial carefully, using the 866 prefix and not 800.
2. Seacrest also points out that wireless phone users can send a text message (the word “VOTE”) to a much shorter number (5701, 5702, etc.) as an alternative.
3. Lower-third chyrons displaying both the digits to dial (866-436-5701, 5702, etc.) the letters that correspond to the digits (866-IDOLS-01, -02, etc.), as well as text message voting information, are displayed repeatedly.
4. The numbers are shown and announced both during performances and at the end of the show.
5. When a user does dial correctly, they are “rewarded” with a recording that clearly acknowledges that they have registered a vote for a given contestant and that thanks them for watching.

Are these measures enough?  They should be, but they clearly aren’t.  If the producers wanted to make the process absolutely foolproof (which may actually be impossible, given that it’s also impossible to prevent people from misdialing numbers on their phones in general) they’d have to take the following steps as well:

1. Obtain the corresponding toll-free numbers for the 888, 877 and 800 prefixes.  Downside:  This would be extremely expensive.
2. Allow voting online.  Downside:  This might lead to vote hacking.
3. Simplify the numbers to include lots of repeated digits or zeros–something like 866-700-8001.  Downside:  Changing the numbers in the midst of the competition is probably a bad idea.
4. Allow voting using the two-way functions provided with most cable boxes.  Downside:  Not everyone has a cable box.

At a certain point, these measures are overkill.  I am by no means suggesting that designers should ignore user feedback and foibles, but I do believe that the general incompetence of users must be taken into account when developing designs.  A number of individuals will always have problems with every design regardless of the lengths gone to prevent those very problems.

So what are we left with in this instance?  Part of the problem is the actual design of the telephone in general.  Dialing ten random digits on a tiny keypad is not a natural action for anyone to perform, but it’s the system that we’re stuck with until such time that the Internet and/or mobile phones replace phone numbers as we know them with some sort of other identifier (a “screen name,” perhaps–a “phone name?”).  But that’s no excuse.  Reading and writing are unnatural acts as well, and most people are able to do both of those things.  Dialing a telephone number is far simpler than either of those actions; you recognize symbols and press buttons that correspond to them.  I don’t believe it’s a stretch to say that a dolphin or a chimp could be trained to dial more accurately than many American Idol viewers.