Cultural.ca

Get on board Ark.com

2010-07-04T13:16:00.000-07:00

My friend Patrick is launching a new site called Ark. It's a social causes website that lets you convert your regular web surfing behaviour to actual dollars (USD) for your own cause.

Some of the causes currently listed are:

Disabled Veterans
One Laptop Per Child
Poverty
Homelessness

Take a look at www.ark.com and join on Facebook or Twitter.

Facebook co-opting twitter?

2009-10-17T06:07:00.000-07:00

Woah, facebook is now using a @ notation that Twitter is using. Maybe they've been doing this for a while, but it's the first that I've seen it so far.

So now how does this work, does it let me link my Twitter account and my friends' twitter accounts to their Facebook or can I use @ and it will still get to them.

I suppose I should look up how this works, a shame that their UI doesn't give me a link to learn more.

Although an interesting point, if it is actually linked up to Twitter, how come it's giving me this note, my Twitter account and Facebook accounts are separate unless ... Data Mining?

Oopsie, you can crash the Wave

2009-10-05T10:15:00.000-07:00

Whoops, looks like Wave can't handle 3 gadgets, typing in multiple levels of threads and adding someone at the same time.
Frankly I'm surprised it didn't crash earlier.

Initial impressions of Google Wave

2009-10-01T09:39:00.000-07:00

Like one of the many hundreds of thousands of people that are using Google Wave, I'm sure I'm not the first to be saying ... WHAT?!?

Now, I have gone through a few of the YouTube videos explaining what Google Wave is and understand that it's a communications platform that includes some of Google's product offerings. I'll break it down to how I see it in my own set of paradigms.
(NB - yeah I know it's kludgy but it's the way I think)

Wave as an email client
- Well ok, this is a poor email client since email you'll be messaging a large number of people who may not be a "Google contact" and who you may not really care what they look like with their user photo
- Still has nice message threading UI

Wave as an IM client
- Works well to see you contacts close and all the message history
- It looks like the best asynchronous IM viewers that I've seen. Other clients like Adium or Trillian are pretty poor for looking at past conversations
- It's still limited for me 'cause I don't have that many friends on Google Wave

Wave as a wiki
- I haven't tested this out yet since again, I don't have many friends on Wave
- Looks to be the most promising of features as an agile work Team-room

Wave as a communications platform
- Well I suppose this is the future, when the hackathons and Google Wave app store drive more functionality, we may have this as
> gaming
> document sharing and group editing
> recording and playback of google chat (voice & video)
> possibly even the random conversations that ICQ had back in the day

So these paradigms are how I see Google Wave evolving over time, as part of my usage. I'm sure there are people (re: Google employees) that are all over that spectrum. The challenge going forward is how to satisfy all these different user behaviours without creating a mess of a UI.

Good Luck Google!

iSkin manufacturer error

2009-09-28T17:13:00.001-07:00

Kinda weird, the Enter key and Backslash are joined together.

The product is still useful though, I feel much more comfortable with potato chips near my laptop.

If you're interested this is the one I got.

The counter to Rolling Stone's article on Goldman Sachs

2009-07-30T12:20:00.000-07:00

I just read a very witty response to the Rolling Stone article on Goldman by Michael Lewis (via Bloomberg).

There was one quote that I found particularly interesting:
"The bozos at Merrill Lynch, the dimwits at Citigroup, the nimrods at Lehman Brothers, the louts at Bear Stearns, even that momentarily useful lunatic Joe Cassano at AIG -- all of these people took risks that no non-Goldman person should ever take"

Now probably Michael Lewis is right. Maybe Goldman Sachs is just much better than all of its competition and they should be richly rewarded for their performance. In fact, they're probably so good that I'd be willing to award them victory. It's time that they're crowned king of their industry and now we'll break them up and let competition flourish again. It's time for all those idiots who are running the other companies to fail & die and let the smart folk over at GS run everything, but at separate companies. Thus letting the capitalist enterprise work by having competition create the efficiencies.

Obviously this is an impossibility in this world, but something amusing to speculate. We thrive on an ideal that the free market creates the best value and most efficiencies; but we fail to recognize that in a competitive arena, companies will drive towards one victor and to that victor, they are awarded the coveted Monopoly status. Which effectively ends our free market.

So go take your spoils and your monopolistic position over your idiot enemies. I'm not going to stop you, and really, no one will.

A note on Waterloo and a response to Brand New

2009-07-27T10:20:00.000-07:00

I apologize to the people of Brand New for having to comment about this on my blog, but the way their site is structured, I can't really tell who this Armin person is who posted about the logo of my school (U of Waterloo) nor am I going to give in any sign in information to a site that has no about page. But I will give attribution to the link here so you can trackback.

If you hate the logo join the Facebook group.

I take offense in the general tone of the article but mostly at this particular part of the authors blog post:
"But somehow, a crest, like thousands of other crests — who the majority of people don’t know what they stand for anyway — does. Unfortunately this is antiquated thinking. Universities can not get by with traditional crests in today’s über branded environment and, if you look around, most large universities operate with a “marketing” logo and use a traditional seal for boring things like diplomas or the back covers of their catalogues"

1. Majority of people don't know what the crest stands for
- One of the benefits of having a crest, even among thousands, is that it is part of our visual vocabulary that denotes a University. While the new "W" logo is plain hideous (to which he also agrees) an non-crest is not automatically the answer.
- While Armin is certainly correct that "a majority of people" don't know Waterloo's crest. I would also guess that presenting a random internet sampling of people with a red crest with the word "VERITAS" on it wouldn't get instant recognition of Harvard University either.

2. Most large universities operate with a “marketing” logo and use a traditional seal
- I'm not sure where the author is claiming that most large universities operate with 2 sets of logos. In a quick scan, U of T, Queens, McGill, UBC do not use a separate logo.
- The exception I found was Western, but that has a specific use for the Western Mustangs, the sporting logo.
- It seems that American universities tend to do so in order to create a specific and separate brand around the sporting and alumni aspect of the university separate from the academics. At Waterloo (and in other Canadian universities), we do not support athletics in the same manner and really Waterloo's alumni efforts concentrate around how it is an excellent academic institution.
- If there is a comparison to Californian schools, like my own UC Berkeley, you have the Cal logo and the crest logo. Where it is also an excellent academic university, however, it is a University of California school, so all of the UCs (LA, Irvine, Berkeley, etc) all have the same crest, so a second logo is necessary for such differentiation.

3. Universities cannot get by with with a traditional crest in an über branded environment
- One of the thngs about brand is that it generally takes a while to be recognized. Waterloo is a fairly young university and probably does a better job with recognition compared to other instituions that are 50 years old.
- Waterloo has already invested over 20 years in the crest (wikipedia link) with the primary growth happening in recent times with graduates successes at RIM, OpenText, and various companies throughout the Silicon Valley.
- Brands take time and effort to cultivate. In the über branded marketing world, there's often millions of dollars that are put into launching or re-launching a new brand. Waterloo as a public university will unlikely have such an ability to put a new brand front and centre so it will try to rely on word of mouth to push this new logo. Which given the Facebook group and other conversations informally here in California, it will alienate the alumni.

If I could go back in time to talk to President Johnston, I would keep the word of mouth going and invest more time in alumni to promote the brand and the existing logo which most alums are accustomed to. All that time in committee could instead be put into really building the community and reputation of Waterloo rather than drawing up the next big "W".

[If you're coming here randomly, I have not worked in a branding focused agency. I'm a designer formerly in the advertising world and I've done branding at the Haas Graduate School of Business at UC Berkeley]

Sick of health care debates

2009-07-22T10:48:00.000-07:00

I was just reading this article on the health care debate (via Fox News) and I'm really tired of lawmakers trying to stall and do nothing instead of passing a bill that gets closer to fixing the system. The number bandied about is 1 Trillion dollars over 10 years. For an economy the size of the United States, who cares?!?!? It's chump change. Just take a look at the US's GDP number last year.

14 Trillion, in one year.

And how much of that is health care? Well, Mr. Krugman summarizes it here as a percent of GDP (via NY Times). Assuming it's around 16% this year, the cost of health care is 2.25 Trillion dollars in one year. Hmm, 1T in 10 years or 2.25T in 1 year (and rising).

Why is fixing this an issue?

Paul Krugman on Goldman's bonuses

2009-07-17T10:05:00.001-07:00

Paul Krugman put it much more eloquently than I did in my last post (via NY Times). And was also put better than I (and more vitriolically) in this Rolling Stones piece.

I think my attitude has fallen to the wayside as pure cynicism. My experiences over the years here in the United States is that the will and desire to make change has evapourated. Maybe there was some spark and glimmer of said change when Obama took office but at the end of the day, he's still a politician. Anyone that would try to really fight for social change and economic change that truly benefits the people is labeled a radical and ridiculed to the point where their impact on politics is reduced to zero.

The small hope I do have is within the realm of technology. Much in the way that the financial industry has gained control of this country; technology can move it in a different direction. The principle in my mind is the same.
That in a political system, the easiest message is the one that gets voted on and debated. All others slip through the cracks.

Technology, like finance, has the ability to make more efficient the growth of the state. Also like finance, the workings of the technology are very difficult to understand without an in-depth knowledge of the rules and procedures that govern it. With technology, we can virally introduce concepts that undermine the finance industry, such as transparency. So a small change like www.citability.org can create a technological framework and a political framework that makes transparent the rules in which this political system is based.

It could also be used in more nefarious ways to such end as well. For example, we could have a police state in which all transactions are tracked and monitored by the government, so Goldman Sachs only paying 1% in corporate taxes would be monitored and funds automatically seized and placed into government coffers.

Or we could be subtle, such that rogue financial systems with peer to peer lending and financing aggregate to have the same impact on raising capital and borrowing against futures on an individual level so you don't just have institutional investment, when someone owns part of your company, they are a Facebook profile and not some faceless shareholder to be duped or cheated.

I'm reminded of the book by Thomas Friedman, the Lexus & the Olive Tree. The olive tree is a representation of us and our pride in our homes & homeland. One of the consequences of this rampant economic growth & increased wealth is that we're becoming a globalized people without the pride of being an earthling. It's easy to not care about things like oil piracy since it happens in some other country. I'd like to think that our global financiers are also global citizens but it's hardly the case.

I think that while the purse strings of the world are controlled by people are without care for their fellow human, we're only going to continue along this same course of development. Maybe Bladerunner is going to come true after all.

Banker's pay is just another tax

2009-07-08T12:35:00.000-07:00

I'm just as miffed as many other people were over the recent announcement that banks will be raising salaries for employees that will restore their earnings back to their 2007 level. Like in this NY Times article or in many of the other ones around the same time.
Not that I'm angry about people getting paid a high amount of money, if you're doing good work and bringing in lots of value, I don't have a problem with salaries at an average of 1/2 a million dollars per year.

The main issue is that it's my tax dollars that are supporting this industry and that it's not good value that they're bringing in. Financial institutions need to provide a fluid financial market to let
borrowers and investors connect. An investment bank is not the group that puts together circuit boards and aluminum to make iPods, it connects the financial forces to let a company get enough capital to put them together, and market them, and sell them, and service them, and everything.

It's like in my own industry in the media & advertising world. The media business is a connector, it doesn't really produce anything. Like if Huggies diapers wanted to get their commercials on some shows on ABC Family, they'd pay a media company to negotiate the 15 or 30 second spots but the media company doesn't create the TV commercials, nor does it manufacture diapers. The media company takes it's cut and connects the 2 happy parties.

Both are still valuable services so why am I annoyed at the pay? Well, I happen to also be a techie and I love it when technical innovations drive down the cost and makes it easier to do things yourself. The newspapers have seen much of their media dollars erode from people
advertising on search engines. Google even goes as far as to make it simple to bid on your own advertising terms and target them on where they should appear. The niftyness of Google ads is that it makes it easy to see your customers and it's very visible on how your ads appear and your advertising dollars are spent in their auction system, driving prices down and changing the way media companies work.

With the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been pumped into the banking industry to preserve 1/2 million dollar salaries; I think we're about time for the same change in the way we do financial services. Right now the mess of regulations and multi-million dollar lobbying efforts is keeping this system at the status quo. If there's enough political will to open up & simplify the banking system then we can create a platform for smaller and more competitive financial
innovations instead of mega corps that are too big to fail.

So instead of being worried about losing your top employees and paying out billions of my tax dollars; I say let them go! Start something new and then give me a good value for my money.

The "new" Facebook -

2009-03-19T16:58:00.000-07:00

Last week I was at South by Southwest Interactive and attended a talk by Dave Morin, senior platform manager at Facebook.
Most of the highlights of the presentation you can read here or here. But what struck me in the presentation what the fundamental way that Facebook sees its users and it's overall model of data. This is the first in a few posts of my thoughts on Facebook.

You and Your Connections: At a macro level, Facebook thinks you're connected to people in one of 4 different ways.
1. Friends
2. Family
3. Coworkers
4. Public Figures

As a step for providing some structure its commendable since they lifted the cap on the 5000 friends. However, humans aren't quite as binary as a 01 or a 11. We don't just split our friends into preset groups, it's fluid and changes over time.

For example, there was a talk at SXSWi on Social Engineering: Scam Your Way Into Anything or From Anybody (mp3). If I had that posted on Facebook, some of my friends would commend me for getting to know more about social engineer and others would deride me for learning how to be a scam artist.

This will increasing cause problems across the web with the proliferation of Facebook Connect. The three areas of focus for FB Connect that Morin highlighted were:
1. Identity - Real Name Real Identity
2. Friends - Add social context to filter & highlight content
3. Feed - Publish actions with 3rd parties to show your friends what you're doing

This leads to the fallacy that assumes that your social network provides context to who you are. But a computerized representation can never capture a person's entire identity. So what we're probably going to see in the next few months is Facebook doing semi-targeted link bombing everything across the web as FB Connect makes an assumption that the little information spoors you drop as you surf the web wants to be shown and streamed to everyone in your network. Traffic volumes and links will rise crazily as ad agencies like mine try to game this system and make sure their stuff get the more number of links across the web. Then eventually it will subside as people learn privacy controls and people realise that the value of social linking drops as the signal to noise ratio plummets.
Maybe some new upstart company will come along and unseat Facebook in the meantime. Who knows?

Facebook and Reach

2009-03-04T08:57:00.000-08:00

@Silona tweeted about an Economist article that talks about the max number of social connections a human brain can handle is about 150 (the Dunbar number). They interviewed Cameron Marlow, a researcher with Facebook that gave data on the average number of connections a person has on Facebook is 120. However, the people in the high network group are about 500.

The average male Facebook user with 120 friends:

Leaves comments on 7 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
Messages or chats with 4 friends

The average female Facebook user with 120 friends:

Leaves comments on 10 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
Messages or chats with 6 friends

The average male Facebook user with 500 friends:

Leaves comments on 17 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
Messages or chats with 10 friends

The average female Facebook user with 500 friends:

Leaves comments on 26 friends’ photos, status updates, or wall
Messages or chats with 16 friends

So what does this mean for campaigns?

If we're looking at doing a branded Facebook application we'd probably see about 1000 users for a moderately successful app. So this lets us serve up 120,000 impressions on the status updates or about 840,000 impressions per week. [Note: As of last year when I checked, Facebook allows applications to send out 7 updates per week].
This level of engagement is pretty low as status update, the number of users that are active in that range is about 5.8% so you're probably getting a number closer to 50,000 real eyeballs on your brand.
So next time you do a media spend, take a look at how much it costs for getting your impressions on to Facebook and maybe the cost will justify doing an application instead.

Skittles: Social Web and the Navigation Takeover

2009-03-02T09:45:00.000-08:00

A coworker of mine pointed me to a new campaign site for Skittles. It's a homepage takeover where their home page is replaced by a Twitter search and a navigator that takes you to the Skittles Facebook page and the Skittles YouTube page.

My own quick summary of what I've seen out on the web in comments are:

Marketers that are asking questions to see if their readers have any opinions
Social media people who are mostly saying that Skittles "gets it" by going social
Advertising pundits that are saying how Skittles is ripping off the agency Modernista

From a usability point of view, I'd have to say I hate it. The usefulness of this explorer far degrades the sites that they're pointing to. I get a distracted from my goal of finding out more about skittles because my UI is blocked by their own navigator.

For brand and ad perspective. I think this campaign hits at the perfect time. Twitter usage is quite high and to do a splashy homepage takeover is drawing hundreds of thousands of eye-balls. As the first major brand to do this, they're probably the only ones now since the newness will have worn off. Executionally, it's so so. The creative aspects around this site and the navigator are not very exciting and future agencies will have to wrap this content around better creative to interest and engage their users.

The most interesting thing that I saw is that external groups are already piggy-backing off of this twitter effort to promote their own groups. I saw a tweet about saving Tibet that had the word Skittles to bring it into the tweet search results page. Also another by Jessica Stanell that promoted her own blog.

One of the big risks of opening up your brand to the web is the lack of reputation systems. If I was Wrigley's, I could have a bunch of anonymous users log on and start trashing Skittles on twitter and that would flood the site temporarily. It probably would only need to go on for about 5 minutes in order to get picked up by blogs or the press and bring the lawyers of the Mars Candy corporation to lock the site down. A reputation system could help (not bulletproof) the PR of Skittles against baseless attacks.

Although at the end of the day, being social on the web means you've got to have thick skin and given enough time, everyone will have it and the eyes to ignore all the crazies.

Points of Touch: User Experience in Spore

2009-01-26T13:37:00.000-08:00

I came across a post on Boxes and Arrows about a Bolt|Peters user research project on the video game Spore. It happens that one of the sister agencies that I work with also had a side project alongside called Spore Stories.

So that got me thinking to more of an end to end experience of a video game. Total User Experience encompasses much more than just the game itself, in the marketing realm, you have to generate interest and connect to your audience even before the game itself is launched.

As a full service agency typically our process to engage in both media drivers as well as creative experiences to approach potential customers and create a continuous relationship with them in the months leading up to a game's launch.

1. Develop the integrated strategy with the client
- Market research and user research showing where prospective customers will engage with gaming related resources and types of behaviours they have online
- Create a content calendar that mixes in media buys and video content as it will be released up to launch

2. Excite the early adopters
- Video game teasers and trailers tend to have standard release schedules and this content gets presented to video game sites where games in-the-know will go for the latest on a new game
- Enable CRM activities to catch potential customers that want to give you their email address
- A website with social media functions can start the formation of a community as they discuss and guess at the story of the game
- Alternatively other social networks such as facebook or myspace can be used as a social platform instead of building your own

3. Push people into the site
- As the game nears launch and if the demand warrants, you can get some to purchase the game ahead of time
- Media buys with banner ads on targeted sites can have a huge impact on web traffic, if you're really well targeted, you can see a 2-5% clickthrough rate
- Catchy viral sites may get some interests pushing to games to like My Black Valentine. Which pushes to the EA title, Black.

4. Stay with customers through their gaming experience
- Actively manage your community and look for ways to solve pain points of your gamers
- Your most vocal customers will be the gaming review sites, make it known if there are patches or updates that improve the game

Keeping on top of all the ways gamers interact outside the game certainly helps put a nice touch on the game and more importantly helps push the bottom line and set you up for a sequel!

Clip: Search Spending Off 8 Percent In Q4

2009-01-20T09:04:00.001-08:00

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Arthur Law <arthur.law@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 20 Jan 2009 02:14:00 +0000
Subject: Report: Search Spending Off 8 Percent In Q4
To: alaw_viigo <arthur.law@gmail.com>

While search engine marketing has been somewhat more durable during
the recession (to date) than other media, that may not save SEM from
negative growth. The Wall Street Journal is reporting on the latest
Efficient Frontier search marketing report, set to be released
tomorrow. According to the Journal, the report will state that SEM
declined 8 [...]

....

http://feeds.searchengineland.com/~r/searchengineland/~3/516646581/report-search-spending-off-8-percent-in-q4-16211

--
This article was sent using my Viigo.
For a free download, go to http://getviigo.com

"Voici mon secret. Il est tres simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le
coeur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux."
Antoine-Marie-Roger de Saint-Exupery, Le Petit Prince

--
Sent from my mobile device

"Voici mon secret. Il est tres simple: on ne voit bien qu'avec le
coeur. L'essentiel est invisible pour les yeux."
Antoine-Marie-Roger de Saint-Exupery, Le Petit Prince

Start of the New Year Potluck

2009-01-02T10:54:00.000-08:00

Here's the food I'm making for the Pot Luck, just drop down if you can make it and what you're bringing below in the comments!

See you all tomorrow (Saturday)!
6pm for drinks
7pm for dinner

Appetizer:
- Be the first!

Salads:
- Pinenut & Blackberry

Entree:
- Black Bean sauce chicken breast
- Black-eyed peas and spinach
- Whole duck

Starch:
- Coconut sticky rice

Dessert:
- Raspberry Lembic & Ice Cream
- Ginger Cake
- Pie

Drinks:
- Red Stripe

Design by Google (a la Chrome)

2008-12-09T22:38:00.000-08:00

Disappointed is what I would say in a word. In learning about Google's design process for their Chrome browser, I was certainly less than impressed at finding out about a fully agile development for software. Google happens to be in a lucky enough environment to have really smart teams and large enough where you can do a big software project that way. However, after having worked in agile environments, I find it causes more headache than help.

Things I learned at this BayChi talk:
1. Google Chrome renders HTML & CSS like Safari
2. There is no revolutionary content model for Chrome. It's an evolution as a faster browser
3. Rapid usability studies really helps in an agile environment if you can spare the resources

Here are my raw notes on the Google Chrome design process:
Designing Google Chrome
- Glenn Murphy

Functionality - Tab Isolation
- Core function, if one tab crashes, the other tabs keep running

Functionality - Omnibox
- Core function, combined Search and location bar

Why?
1. Speed & Reliability
- control their own Google application
- needed a better platform for these applications
- current browsers weren't fast enough so web apps would be 2nd class citizens

2. Better Framework
- Old OS -> Application -> Content
- Current OS -> Browser Application -> Web Application -> Content

Top features used by users in their browsers:
(researched in a one week period)
- Back 85%
- Reload 50%
- Open Bookmark 33%

UX Researcher - Rick Boardman
Cognitive Walkthroughs
Lab based studies
Longitudinal studies

Design Process
- no wireframes
- went to multiple iterations of mock-ups
- designed from final design
- all tabs belonged on the top because information flowed down from them [Arthur: it seems like they didn't really explore other options]
- This overall design was like a tabbed windows explorer. The frame is just glue to stick tabs together
- Thought: What if one of those tabs was iTunes? It should work the same
- Played with 60 types of tab variations and experimented with exact degrees. [Arthur: this was a trial and error and based off of their own judgement]
- Colour of tabs was chosen as something that was neutral but visible separation.

UX - Frame (Graphic designing)
- Frame: Experimented with multi-level tabs, single level would get crowded. Settled on half way between one and two level tabs. [Arthur: Did they test this?]
- Frame: The colour of the frame couldn't use the windows style b/c it would look strange. In research, they found frames in Windows are blue. For something to feel intuitively grabbable, it would have to be blue. Blue also blends into default windows backgrounds (as it should, so you can ignore it)
- Frame: Windows Vista you can ignore that blue b/c they have their own native version.
- Frame Testing: Using a small title bar, people were not able to find out how to drag the frame in user testing. Users aimed for the blue.

UX - Omnibox
- Testing found that users often type URLs into the search bar.
- So they wanted to combine it.
- Hardest to figure out was a single word search.
- One solution was a type-ahead drop down.
- In user studies they found that people didn't follow drop downs. Users look down at their keyboards to type.
- Solution: Search (and try to navigate in the background)
- It takes a while to figure out if that single word URL exists so the check happens in the background.
- Puts a message asking the user if they want to visit the URL www.pie.com
- Autocomplete helps people get to sites that they visit again. Found that users visit 10-15 sites per day.
- The engineers doing the functionality for omnibox was done with rapid iteration. [Arthur: This may be useful for really smart teams but in most cases, you can't iterate that fast]
- Some initial mockups of the type-ahead show more information. e.g. flight detail, snippets of sites, suggested words, history of your search
- They didn't want this list flickering around and typing around. They wanted the user to just finish typing in their query
- Would rather put this on a page so users could see this content and then use the back button

What's next?
- Extensions
- Wants to stop people from adding toolbars so it doesn't look crazy.
- If a user wants to add a toolbar we should let them. But the next exercise is to figure out how to allow the user to not create a mess
- Openness: How do you design in the open?
- Openness: How do we allow users to give feedback to Google yet not put it out in the open web?

Questions
1. Where are the PMs?
- They're scattered throughout
2. How do you QA if no one reads your design docs?
- The QA always watches the code and they design tests as the code gets done
- If an engineer writes code, they let people know it's there and QA catches up
3. Have you tried different graphics on the tabs?
- Yes, we have a large graphics design team
- When they spoke to "people" the angled tabs resonated better.
- Internal to the team, people were into angled tabs, people used to work at NeXT and they were comfortable with angled tabs.
- Chrome was in development at the same time it was designed. The height of the frame above the tabs, they played non-stop for about a year. Kept changing between 15-20 pixels. They would get feedback from people instantly, emails & IMs.
4. If content is new, how do things change with open source. Will it be grassroots change?
- I don't know. There's another team that is in charge of this
5. The Google toolbar is missing from here
- These are the things that belong as extensions
6. How is Blue a grabbable colour?
- We winged it.
- It's what felt natural
- We didn't run user studies
7. You mentioned dropping iTunes into a tab. Is this something you'd keep addressing?
- With the exception of powerpoint, everything i use is online apps
- sometimes I wish I could have tab management
- we're not planning on addressing, but we things tabs are a better way of managing content
8. Rendering
- Go faster on certain benchmarks
- On reliability we track how we crash
- Speed, we think we've met it
9. Render on multiple browsers
- didn't want to add an additional engine
- benchmark against safari
- there will be some pain in the start but we should be compliant with safari and anytime it's not please log a bug against chrome
10. You've put alot of emphasis on tabs. Did you think about the discoverability of tabs?
- Other browsers do an omnibox but don't surface it as much.
- Tab usage is 78% adoption in Chrome
- In firefox, they show 2 tabs on startup
- Some people don't use multiple tabs. People who are curious can find it.
11. Other complicated design issues?
- Users never notice anything you do. You tell them to notice the lock and they never do
- Even if you throw up a screen that says the page you are about to visit isn't the one you think, users will still ignore it.
- Users respond to the full-screen popup
- We're trying to figure out how to keep them safe without annoying people.
- Sometimes there are sites that have malware but I still want to visit them
- We tried to hide the Omnibox and it turns out you do. One of those reasons is for security. Our Google security team jumps on our backs everytime we send out mockups
12. Can you not ask us everytime you restart that you want to restore the tabs? How often were you doing testing?
- Initially we had a mandate to design a browser without any dialogs
- Aza Rafkin says that they're getting rid of it in Firefox 3.1
- Started user testing 1/2 way through the product.
- Testing intensified at the end.
- Cognitive walkthroughs happened anytime there was a question they couldn't answer
- Lab based studies were done at every implementation when they needed questions.
- These weren't new to many of us
- They were useful in settling arguments and they tracked user comments
- The comments they got internally look like comments they get out in the wild.

Beautiful video game campaign site

2008-10-19T22:09:00.000-07:00

I came across a new flash video game site for an upcoming game called Dragon Hunters. It coincides with the release of a new movie by the same name. Although I'm pretty sure the movie is the precursor.
*correction: The movie came out March 2008, I assume the game was around the same timeframe*

It caught my eye with one of the most beautiful loading screens I have ever seen. It's a scene of free fall with about a dozen objects that move from the bottom of the screen to the top to give the illusion of motion. These objects are pieces of stone and clouds. The objects repeat in random order and distance from the front of the screen to make it seem like it's a long and continuous movie. Thankfully with a slow internet connection, I was able to catch the repeats as it took FOREVER to load the site.

IA review:
Once in the site, it's a very simple navigation. 4 items in the primary nav and 2 links off the site. The primary nav stays hidden until you roll over the top menu cabinet. Each of the items in the top nav require mouseover and click. Some of them are hidden from view and you have to move your mouse to the left or right to scroll the screen to get to them.

IxD review:
The site uses full screen to frame the display and allow the gorgeous graphics to be enjoyed. The scene tracks your mouse and moves with it letting you rotate the world to get to the different characters that represent movies, screenshots, wallpaper, or about. One of the neat ideas is the menu cabinet that hides the nav until you mouse over. The really cute part about it is that the dragon hunters sign tips left and right to add that additional sense of movement as you're exploring the world. The motion really helps put you into a 3d environment that shows off the great artwork that will be in this animated movie.

My guess is that they used Papervision3D to power the flash objects in a 3d environment. It's a brilliant technology that I first saw in the video game Mass Effect, who's site was designed by Freestyle Interactive.

The movie site is also quite cute although not as immersive as the video game site. One of the cute touches was a dragon's foot that comes crashing down through the screen and it shakes the browser window.

It's really a great example of how an elegant creative execution with attention to the tiny details can create an engaging, emotional experience online.

Clean bart train

2008-10-11T13:55:00.000-07:00

I don't suppose that the picture can accurately show how clean this bart train is, but I just got on and the first thing to hit me was the smell of detergent. On public transit!

Must be my lucky day!
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Clean bart train

2008-10-11T13:50:00.000-07:00

I don't suppose that the picture can accurately show how clean this bart train is, but I just got on and the first thing to hit me was the smell of detergent. On public transit!

Must be my lucky day!
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile

Financial crisis hurting the silicon valley

2008-10-06T12:08:00.000-07:00

Came across an article on TechCrunch today the reported on the startups that will be affected by Lehman Brothers' bankrupcy.
I would assume that the popular sites, like my beloved Kayak will still stick around (someone will pick them up). But who knows what impacts it may have to other startups as their investment money dries up or not even arrives after it was won.

Continuing the zombie meme

2008-09-29T06:17:00.000-07:00

Through a rather serendipitous link clicking on Google News, I came across an article on Zombie Feminism. On the surface, it's a review of a new horror movie called Deadgirl; one of the talked-about movies at the Toronto International Film Festival.

What I find intriguing here was in this editorial focused on the denigration of women and through this movie, this would be some type of retribution by a powerful woman. In this case a zombie. Although I'm certainly not unaffected by society's (especially asian) placement and treatment of women, the issue is one that's generally out of mine. In my interpretation, it's similar to how I find that most Americans have little understanding of world politics. They know there's a world out there, but are unaware of the issues.

Perhaps I'll see if there's some Halloween screening of it around here or I'll wait until 2009 when it hits a wider distribution. There's always room for some more meme expansion. (the feminism part, not zombies)

Back at designing again

2008-09-21T13:06:00.001-07:00

It's that kind of day...

Financial meltdown = tech boom?

2008-09-21T11:46:00.000-07:00

Hey if the Guardian is talking about grid computing, web services, and open source in the financial section, maybe we've got some rosiness to the Silicon Valley future.

Virtual dating (no, really virtual)

2008-09-20T11:40:00.000-07:00

Every once in a while, something comes along that kinda freaks me out. Not really, really freaky, like this, but more incompatible with how I view the world. Today's bit of news is a new site called Webkare. It's a dating simulator for women.
Techcrunch reports that it hit 10,000 users and 3.5M hits.
I know guys are pretty simple creatures and it really doesn't take much to understand us, but I wonder if this site is more demeaning towards men or the 10,000 women that are using this site.
I should probably go and learn how to read Japanese to see what it's really about. It would be awesome if the site was really just a catchy pretext for women having an open social networky conversation around guys. Hmm... come to think of it, maybe that's a way to jump-start discussions. Lead in with something fun and cutesy and let the conversation be the actual value of the site.

Sunrise at Burning Man

2008-09-13T21:01:00.000-07:00

An expression of beauty. Captured by a reporter from Vail, Colorado.

Roasting Plant in NYC

2008-08-10T12:52:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine in Vancouver pointed this cafe out to me. It's a pneumatic system that pulls beans from one side of the room over to the front where it's ground and processed into espresso all at the touch of a Mac.

It's a soothing spot with light jazz music and the light rattle of coffee beans flying through plastic tubing. There are 4 seats here with power outlet making it possible to slide in with your MacBook Air and cuddle up with a fantastic coffee. I really mean cuddle since each spot has about 1.5 square feet of space. Modern coffee Manhattan-style.

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One year anniversary of Virgin America

2008-08-08T12:51:00.000-07:00

I finally touched down at JFK after a slight delay in the air. This was my first flight on VA and I have to say that I was pretty impressed.

The in-flight entertainment was really the star of the show offering a large selection of music, live TV, and some old school games like Doom.

I may be a little more jaded than some of my fellow travellers about flying but it really seemed that everyone really appreciated the flight. I would constantly hear passengers complimenting the staff and asking about the service system. To top it all off the passengers clapped when we landed (and not out of fear for our lives).

Way to go Virgin, I look forward to making you my domestic carrier of choice
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Blue Bottle Coffee Beans

2008-08-07T10:38:00.000-07:00

It may not be much but that's what it takes for me to get by. Yeah... I'm an addict
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2008-08-07T09:58:00.001-07:00

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Adaptive Path talk

2008-04-14T14:36:00.000-07:00

OK, so this post is a little on the late-side, however, I figure better late than never.

I attended a talk at AP with 2 talks, "The Long Wow" by Brandon Schauer, and "Street Hacks" by Jan Chipchase and Duncan Burns. This possibly was a way of getting key influencers in front of the new AP book, Subject to Change. The book looks to be a good way of approaching design by user experience rather than traditional functional drivers. This book definitely goes on my Amazon Wishlist.
[Street Hacks will be in a later post]

The Long Wow - Brandon Schauer
In my opinion, this talk is one amongst many important conversations that helps codify a new design thinking in a highly competitive, agile, and globalised market. Design is an evolving process as culture and people change. It didn't stop in the 70s with the introduction of CAD, new methods such as spiral design or agile development grew out of our technological advances. I think we're closer to emotional design, where design is a multi-faceted approach to meet customers' needs, wants, and desires.
Brandon's talk focused on 4 main things to develop a stronger relationship with your customers:
1. Know your platform for delivery
2. Tackle a wide area of unmet customer needs
3. Create and evolve your repeatable process
4. Plan and stage the wow experiences

1) Knowing your platform may seem like a no-brainer but it may easily be forgotten. For example, the company Fry's is one of the top electronics companies in the bay area yet if you go to their online site, it's a complete mess. While a mess does (at times) capture the store experience, if their primary touch point is their brick and mortar store, the online experience should help support it, rather than hinder.
Brandon brought up an example of Nike+ iPod as a great platform for launching a great experience. My company recently helped launch a new product called MiCoach (by adidas & Samsung). This is one product that works as a great comparison, MiCoach has a similar and competing platform that one-ups Nike in terms of functionality and the ability to deliver these "wow" experiences. If anything, I think the marketplace will be better to have these 2 competing products to continue to provide outstanding exercise user experiences and the choice of products to match more customers.

2) Unmet customers needs can be one of the more challenging aspects of design. Brandon's example was an OXO measuring cup that accounted for a steep angle of viewing to the cup. So instead of having to lift the cup to eye-level to look at how much liquid you had, you could look down and see it.
As a design consultant, it's often hard to devise such solutions. Most often a client will come to me and say build me a website that does X. When really they should be asking, "I need to do A, B, & C, show me the best way to do it." It's sometimes a bit of a pipe dream to always engage strategically, but ultimately, it's what clients should be asking of their consultants. If you want something built, you can find some people to do it in a less expensive country. Come back to me when you want solutions.

3) Create and evolve your repeatable process is fantastic when you can do it. I particularly like AP's mental model process. Using a design process that brings in direct and indirect research, includes clients, and considers your users/customers holistically is a great way to identify problems & needs; essential before you start building.
Of course I've got my own tricks of the trade such as a customer lifecycle analysis (a slimmed down version of mental model). Persona development is another key tool. There are many others that should be done early & often in an experience-centric design methodology.

4) Plan & Staging wow experiences was one of the hardest things for me to wrap my head around. I completely understand why you would want to manage expectations in such a way. If you think about Cosmopolitan Magazine, they draw people into their content as a way of teasers that reward you for exploring more.
Being a consultant and thinking beyond one turn of the design circle is really hard because the money tends to run out after the first delivery. But without this kind of thinking, you're taking a roulette spin every time you re-design. Brandon certainly nails it with his example of Weight-watchers. You can go to the classes, or learn about dieting on the web, but their launch of On-The-Go services provides a continual Wow that you can use in-context of sitting down to eat (or diet).

My key takeaway from this talk is to direct people to the notes from this talk when we start getting bogged down with user-centric design and to get people thinking more about experience design.

Trashing Comcast

2008-04-07T12:09:00.000-07:00

An interesting phenomenon is the squeaky wheel getting the oil. Michael Arrington of Techcrunch blogged about his Comcast going down.

I've had these problems with Comcast many times this past winter with poor performance or just plain outages in internet connectivity. Many complaints hit brain-deadening muzak or voicemail that never gets returned.

When a person like Michael Arrington complains, we can see that the powers that be at Comcast actually listen and go out to fix his problem. His internet status certainly lets him squeak far louder than I can. I wonder if we can democratize this easily so that us nobodies can collectively squeak too.

There's one option that I know of called Get Satisfaction. You can connect to communities and business to have your customer support needs answered. But sometimes it takes a more heavy-handed approach. I recently switched from AT&T to T-Mobile, after being a customer for 5 years. Large issues with customer service and network performance really prompted that switch. Now, if I had a large bullhorn (or was famous), I could have probably worked out some deal. However, if we can network some people in to shout at the same time, this could have the same effect.

There's a facebook application called Causes that lets you support a particular cause. Perhaps there's enough ire towards companies that this application can be cloned or co-opted to rail against companies that abuse their customers. Especially in monopoly situations such as Comcast cable.

Why won't facebook go away?

2008-03-28T09:56:00.000-07:00

Well obviously since there isn't a stronger competitor, but right now we probably have an open slot for some competitor to come in. After all the negative press that Facebook has received at SXSW and and now with it's goofs with what is a country and what isn't.
I can't hate on just FB, Myspace and Hi5 would probably be worse if they were in the enviable position that facebook is in. At least FB isn't pushing porn like the other 2 sites.
After today's news, it looks like I'll have to wait a little longer for facebook to go under. Hong Kong investor Li Ka Shing just put up another $60 mil into the little Palo Alto company. I can see housing prices in San Francisco going up again...

SEM in different languages/countries

2008-03-26T10:12:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting around and looking at some Japanese sites and musing about how you can drive people to your site. If you're going to pay Google for a keyword in Japan, do you have to do it 3 times for Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana?
Borrowing from wikipedia as an example, let's say I was advertising Marlboro cigarettes:
Do I pay for the keywords: Marlboro 煙草, Marlboro たばこ, and Marlboro タバコ. So that means paying for 3 ads and using 4 different character sets.
I'm going under the assumption that they'd use English for the word Marlboro from this example.
I guess this will be a pet project.

AIM & G-talk?

2008-03-17T15:32:00.000-07:00

Since when was AOL instant messenger compatible with Google Talk? I must be really behind in my techcrunch

Global Gaming (in 7 languages)

2008-03-14T12:34:00.001-07:00

I'm always impressed when a game reaches sufficient proportion to address the entire globe. A new game from uber game designer and UC Berkeley PhD student, Jane McGonigal has launched a game called The Lost Ring.

I'm pretty psyched about diving into this alternate reality game and practising my detective skills and probably my language skills too as I try to find out what happened to one of the lost olympic games.

Check it out! The Lost Ring

Another Paris Hilton in the works?

2008-03-13T14:10:00.000-07:00

I'm always split between being utterly disgusted by pop culture and fascinated by how it can drive some of the most interesting & strange behaviour in people.

The call girl implicated in the Governor Elliot Spitzer scandal also happens to be a singer/songwriter in the R&B/pop genre. Within days of her being discovered with the now former governor, her music popularity is on the rise. Here's the link on Amie Street.

At least for the next 72 hours, she's going to have more press coverage than Hollywood starlets. If she can capitalize on this, she can end up having as great a music career as the infamous Paris Hilton.

Canadians interfering in US elections

2008-03-13T00:36:00.000-07:00

I don't know how I didn't hear of this earlier. News about the democratic candidate's positions on NAFTA are few and far between. I had heard both Hillary Clinton & Barack Obama were both taking an anti-NAFTA position. However, after living here for several years and hearing absolutely no news about it, I figured the issue was more or less pointless. Also I know for most Americans that the fear about NAFTA really means fear of Mexicans.

The scant media from the US is that McCain & Clinton are attacking Obama over statements from his staff re-assuring Canadians that despite his stance on pulling out of NAFTA, Canadians need not worry.

So I finally get to reading CBC today and see an article about the Liberal party wanting the Conservative government to recall the ambassador over a suggestive statement about the US election (CBC.ca article).

Now I see that the CBC is reporting that all of it is wrong and that someone in the Canadian Foreign Ministry implied that the Obama campaign was making secret deals with Canada (CBC report on Youtube).

Personally I think that interfering with another country's election is reprehensible. This smacks of Austria's Heider's rise to power in 2000 (CNN special). Heider was able to leverage news that the EU was sanctioning Austria to reinforce his position as being a sovereigntist and defying the European Union and their actions to meddle in the internal business of their country. Maybe there's some secret handshake between McCain and Harper to discredit the Democratic party. Who knows, but this is not a place that I want my government to go.

Survey on Mac Users

2008-02-26T07:50:00.000-08:00

Already a couple of days old but I thought it was funny.
http://gizmodo.com/357437/the-street-says-mac-users-are-pretentious-assholes-pc-users-are-cheapskates?autoplay=true

For the record, I do not own a Macbook, but I do have an iPod and am a snobby party of the Prii-nation (Toyota Prius)

New languages for Blogger

2008-01-28T13:24:00.000-08:00

Floating across the news on Techcrunch let me see that Blogger is now available in Arabic. That news has wound up on Blogger.com's homepage too. Odd that they now say they're available in Arabic, Hebrew and Persian. I was pretty sure the language was called Farsi.

The article does cite that people blog at their own risk since some countries restrict the freedom of speech. I kinda figure that it's all breaking down now. Yeah, you'll have people who are thrown in jail for people typing article that rail against the state but if you take a look at China, I think we're already at a place where the genie is out of the bottle and you can never fully stop people from expressing what they want.

China still jails more journalists than any other country in the world put together, however, each arrest garners more support for free speech and reflects negatively on their international reputation. I have no reason to think that the same wouldn't happen to any of the other countries in the middle east. The young people will want to be more liberalised and express themselves online like all the other rich countries are doing. Even in KSA, they can see what people in Dubai are doing and they'll want to blog and express themselves too. It may take a while, but I'm pretty sure it's all inevitable as these countries keep increasing their level of affluence.

What is tanking anyways?

2008-01-22T13:37:00.000-08:00

On those rare occasions I start caring about the origins of certain words that I use. The one that's come up quite often lately is the word "Tanking". A very a propos word when concerning the state of the American (and the rest of the world) stock market.

The source of all knowledge, Wikipedia (and it's sister dictionary site) say this about Tanking.

To fail or fall (often used in describing the economy or the stockmarket); to degenerate or decline rapidly; to plummet.
(Online RPG) To attract the attacks of a monster, so that the other people in the group can defeat the monster in question more efficiently.
To put fuel into a tank

Looking at today's stock market, I'd certainly say number 1 is the most common use of the term today. This morning the treemap was looking much more red.

A little aside here. I have no idea how to use the definition tag within blogger so I'll put the definition of a treemap here: "a visualization technique in which hierarchical information is displayed within nested rectangles, with each level of nesting corresponding to a level of hierarchical decomposition"

So the financial markets have picked up slightly. The Fed chairman has slashed interest rates to get the banks lending out money again. One will wait and see until this evening to see how well Tokyo and Hong Kong respond.

Thailand's Olive Tree

2008-01-09T11:38:00.000-08:00

I'm reminded of Tom Friedman's book, the Lexus and the Olive Tree, when walking through a crowd of people all dressed in black for the Princess Galyani Vadhana's funeral. She's the King of Thailand's older sister and she passed away on the day that I arrived in Bangkok.

I never realised that tradition was so important for the Thai people and it was really evident in how well they revere their royalty. The Guardian reported that the government is spending $9 million on the funeral. There's a 15 day mourning period and company meetings, new years events, and corporate trade shows have been rescheduled or canceled.

Having grown up under British Commonwealth rule, I doubt we'd ever have any major mourning periods if anyone other than the Queen died. I can't see my country closing down for 15 days if Charles passed away. Nor the UK for that matter.

The value of a royal family as cultural/spiritual leadership helped Thailand get through military coups and the latest political meltdown with former Prime Minister Thaksin. I was told not to mention his name too loudly. Apparently he doesn't have that many supporters in Krabi and the police or military tends to detain people that talk about him. But with all the strife, I can see why you'd rather put your faith in a king than in a president.

Photo of ICC

2007-12-31T01:41:00.000-08:00

Here's a photo taken from a ferry of the ICC.

Changing Cityscapes

2007-12-29T05:05:00.000-08:00

Hong Kong; a place I call home. It's quite different from Ottawa, it's a growing and living city. The skyline has been changing over the years that I've been here. New massive 60+ story skyscrapers like the Centre have appeared in the Central district and others have popped up where the old Kai Tak airport once stood.

The latest is the new ICC (International Commerce Centre) building going up in Tsim Sha Tsui. This tower is in competition with the Burj Dubai, the Shanghai World Financial Centre, and several other towers all being completed in the next year or so. None of these towers actually has an official height, I'm guessing they're all just trying the be the highest tower by the end of the decade.

The new one in Hong Kong now looms over it's nearest neighbour at 74 stories. I'm guessing in its uncompleted state, maybe about 90 stories or so.

I'm always impressed with the growth and expansion in Asia. If you take a look at the listing in About.com 8 of the top 10 towers under construction are all in East Asia.

Well, at least back in the states, we've got the new Freedom Tower to look forward to.