What with being busy with work and play I hardly have enough time reading the backlog of New Yorker articles I get referred to via blogs. How people manage to be subscribed to the New Yorker, have a television and maybe even read a newspaper is beyond me.

Anyway, this week I read this great article on elevators: “Up And Then Down”. One part in it was particularly enlightening:

Helplessness may exacerbate claustrophobia. […] In most elevators, at least in any built or installed since the early nineties, the door-close button doesn’t work. It is there mainly to make you think it works. […] Once you know this, it can be illuminating to watch people compulsively press the door-close button. That the door eventually closes reinforces their belief in the button’s power. It’s a little like prayer.

This explains many interactions I have had with elevators over the course of my life where this button never worked and where I always wanted it to work, immediately. I hadn’t really considered this explanation blaming it mostly on shoddy engineering or interface design—which it of course also is.

About the culture of riding an elevator and the politeness norms, I think most of those are lost on the Dutch. But that’s another story.

Just a little something I noticed on apple’s wireless keyboard: The command and option keys, which are duplicated on both sides of the space bar, are symmetrical. There’s actually such a thing as a ‘left command key’ and a ‘right command key’ if you need replacement keys, in other words.

Design is in the details!

Most of you must have already heard from Pecha Kucha. For the ones who haven’t, Garr Reynolds explains it in detail on his blog. But in short:

On a Pecha Kucha evening, people who have something to share with others can tell their story to the audience with only one constraint: Each of the 20 slides they have to use is shown for only 20 seconds.

The Pecha Kucha (which means chit-chat) originated in Japan, and quickly spread around the globe. Berlin was one of the first cities to follow, so I had to check it out locally.

What I experienced earlier in Rotterdam and the Hague, was that the evening completely depends on the quality of the speakers. It can be shit, or a hit. The same case in Berlin:

Shiro Masuyama

Shiro MASUYAMA from Japan hardly spoke English nor German. Although the slides showed interesting art installations, it was impossible to understand a word, so I could have just watched them on the internet. Twenty seconds suddenly seemed like a awful long time for a slide.

However, there were two speakers who actually saved the evening with their projects:

Tobi’s Timemachine:

Tobi has developed a Firefox Plug-in that restyles any web page to the 90’s, completely with animated gif’s and midi-music. Completely useless, but we, the audience, loved it. FourStarters would look like this. You can download his timemachine or watch some more examples on flickr.

Alex von Furstenberg:

David Henry Brown Jr is an Artist based in NYC. For one of his projects he used to dress up as a German royalty called Alex von Furstenberg. He would bluf his way into VIP parties this way, and meet up with famous Celebrities to gain his 15 minutes of fame.

His talk really gave extra value to his photos, giving extra information behind every shot. The reason for example, that he had a red nose on some of the pictures, was that he had to wait in the cold before he finally found a way to penetrate into the party ground.

Of course I visited the party afterwards (which wasn’t VIP) to collect a picture with Alex von Furstenberg for my personal 15 minutes of fame.

Round Up:

First of all, the Evening could have used a bit more spice to my taste. Why not ‘boo’ at someone who doesn’t captivate your attention, and ‘cheer’ at someone who does? It may sound harsh, but they are grown-ups who choose to get up that stage. At least it motivates them more to improve, than their friends saying “Great Talk!”.

Secondly, some of the Speakers have no clue about their audience. The event is mainly visited by designers, architects, artists, filmmakers and musicians. So there is no point in asking “Who of you owns a Football Club to sponsor me?” Pecha Kucha is a great place to promote your projects, but don’t expect any miracles if the audience has the same interests as yourself.

Did I learn anything? No. Did I get inspired? Yes.

Will I participate in the future? Yes.

About what? To be continued…

The holidays have been over for a while now and life has picked up again with a ruthless schedule. Here’s a quick schedule update from us to tell you what is keeping us busy at the moment and where you can expect us the coming year. If I forget something, I’m sure that the rest will add it themselves.

Reinier

Reinier is currently finalizing all arrangements to be able to launch his startup Tipit.to. To say that this consumes a lot of his time is an understatement.

Cristiano

Cristiano used to be our top blogger but he is currently directing more time to his studies. He is currently busy writing academic prose with the hopes of graduating sometime in the future.

Martijn

Martijn has also focused a lot of his attention back to his studies but he (and we) also came to the realization that blogging is not his thing. That is why we decided to part on amicable terms. We wish Martijn well for the future.

Eelke

Eelke has settled into Berlin and is feeling quite at home from what I understand. He has produced some great movie clips on his own blog in the past days. Eelke is pursuing work in the Berlin area, so if you want to hire a great designer there, you should look him up (his new professional site should be up soon).

Alper

I am undergoing numerous changes in my life with a graduation due this Friday, a change of jobs and a new house. In this new life a lot of my time is spent working on experience and promotion for Tipit.to or doing web projects for Boost Company. I do have more bandwidth available and will be putting up a professional site soon.

Events

And to finish this update here is a slightly annotated event schedule for the rest of this year. You can always track us on Upcoming, browse through my contacts for the other Four Starters members. You should be able to find most of us on Dopplr as well (my profile).

PICNIC (25/9 — 28/9) is going on right now. Something of an overhyped event it is hard not to be influenced by it. Reinier is going tomorrow to take a masterclass in pitching from Boris and then onto pitch for a jury. This Friday is a meeting on portable social networks (upcoming) which I’m debating not going to.

FOWA (upcoming) Ryan Carson’s visit to Amsterdam was a great appetizer for the real event in London next month. Cristiano will attend the event and report back for us.

The future of GOOGLE (upcoming) This event should at least be interesting where Dutch ‘pundits’ are going to ruminate about the future of Google. I am positively influenced because it is at Info.nl.

Wikimedia (upcoming) The Dutch Wikimedia conference should be interesting and I plan to attend.

Barcamp Berlin (upcoming) Barcamps are among my favorite events and this promises to be a great one. Because of the subsequent Web2.0Expo event international attendance should be at a peak level. Now just to hope that the venue is big enough to hold all of us. This should be no problem in Berlin, right? Eelke and myself will definitely attend this.

Web 2.0 Expo Berlin (upcoming) Big multi-day conference for everybody into the web scene in Europe. This promises to be jam packed and very interesting with the barcamp preceding it and the web2open event at the same time. Reinier and myself will attend.

BrightLive (upcoming) Obligatory Dutch technojam event. I hope this year sports an improvement with some less commerce and some more substance but still I will probably go.

LeWeb3 (upcoming) is always controversial but I don’t really know if it’s worth attending.

Chaos Communication Congres (site) always looks like a great event to close off the year.

What do you think about these events, any of them must see or must avoid? If you happen to visit any of these events and we’re there drop by and say hello.

As I said, Reinier and I were in the Apple Store Regent Street yesterday, mainly to have a look at the Apple Store, but also to have a look at the new iPods. Apple announced a complete update to their iPod lineup last week, most notably replacing the iPod Nano with a new smaller version and introducing a new iPod Touch that is based on the iPhone interface.

Although the iPod Touch was the big announcement, it isn’t available yet in store. Still, the iPod Nano and iPod Classic (the new name for the old style iPod) have gotten a few updates that really make a difference, so we had a look at those. I didn’t bring my camera so I don’t have any photo’s, I hope to get some of the iPod Touch once it’s in store.

The iPod Nano got the biggest update as it is now comes in a way smaller form factor and is able to play video. Bringing video to the entire iPod lineup (except the shuffle) is important to Apple as well as many other players like Podcasters. When I tried the new iPod Nano, I noticed that the video playback is “just fine” as it can only be so much impressive on a 2″ screen. Yes, the resolution is sharp and the playback is smooth, but I rather watch stuff on my Macbook if I can.

The iPod Classic and iPod Nano both got a new interface update, giving them both Cover Flow and a new split screen interface for certain views. We noticed that the iPod Nano is much faster in starting up and powering down than its predecessor, but somehow sometimes felt a bit slow in navigating and especially when scrolling through a whole lot of photos. Reinier noted that scrolling through photos is much smoother on his iPod Nano 2G.

To see if this scrolling went any smoother on the new iPod Classic, I looked one up and had a play with it. It’s way faster in the menu’s and the photo viewing, and I would even enjoy watching a video on it. Still, I noticed some performance problems when playing a song and scrolling through the Cover Flow at high speed. Somehow doing these things caused the music to “skip” repeatedly, but strangely we couldn’t repeat this skipping later on when we tried some other iPod Classics. Is this posibly a hardware defect or does it have something to do with the song I played?

In the end we really liked the iPod Nano as it is cheap, very portable (may I say it is a Shuffle competitor in size?) and the new Product Red color is very nice and funky. The ability to play video’s on it might seem trivial but it opens the world of Podcasts to those people who want to have something interesting to watch on the road. I am actually thinking of getting one myself, although I still love my Shuffle.

Reinier and I were at the Apple Store Regent Street this afternoon, admiring the new iPod line (short review to come soon). Besides finding some new details about the iPods that aren’t visible in the adds, we also noticed something about Apple’s personal approach to offering support: the Genius Bar.

The Genius Bar is a bar-like counter in the middle of every Apple Store, where a Mac user can get help from a so called genius. The Genius Bar can help you with hardware problems (which I have had a lot) but also with software problems. Across the bar is another bar called the iPod Bar where iPod users can get help with their iPod. These bars are in the middle of the store, among people buying their new stuff that they hope to never have to bring to the bar.

In a traditional electronics store like Media World or PC World, these service desks tend to be hidden in some kind of hidden part of the store, tucked away to hide angry customers from the new customers that are about to buy their new products. In some cases (like in the Media World in Arnhem, NL) this service desk even has its own entrance to avoid any new customer from ever seeingwhat goes on in the service area.

Clearly, stores like PC World have a good reason to make sure that you, the new customer, don’t notice that there are 10 people in the service area with the crappy product that you just wanted to buy. Imagine buying an HP laptop while you see 4 people in line at the support counter with the same laptop! Amazingly stores like PC World will even charge you �29 for installing your Windows again, while a MacBook can be reset in the Apple Store for free (within warranty).

Customer Support - Also Relevant to Experience Design

Apple’s decision to make their support desk so extremely present in the Apple Store doesn’t just show that they have major guts, it also shows that Apple considers support to be part of the product you buy and therefore part of their experience. When you buy an Apple you get support, it is there in the store, it is something that you can rely on. When you buy a PC or any other hardware, you just get the option of support. When you want support, you will first have to ask for it, as it won’t always just be there for you.

Obviously this comes with consequences as Apple will really want to avoid any really pissed of customers. I think that this is why Apple recently fixed my Macbook 1 month after warranty, simply because it was reasonable. Now, this it is probably also the reason that they gave those early iPhone adopters a $100 Apple Store credit. The end result is that Apple soon will have a lot of happy users in the store, that just had some excellent service as they got another $100 to buy a new experience. What is a better image to create to your other new customers?

In the end it is not that hard to do what Apple does, and I would hope that others would follow. To summarize what Apple does I hope to inspire some local companies to give the same experience here is a list of simple things you can do:

1. Make the service desk a nice place to be.
2. Make it present in the store.
3. Get some nice and honest “Geniuses”.
4. Be reasonable.
5. Give your “Geniuses” the power to decide what is reasonable.
6. Take responsibility for what you sell. (See this article for more elaboration)
7. Make customers that need support leave the store with a smile.

I’m over at Brighton already soon to be joined by Reinier and Cristiano to cover this weekend’s events over here. dconstruct looks to be a great event. The program is filled with interesting speakers and the venue is packed.

What I am doing currently is a cross between web development and interaction design which is going towards experience desing. Most of the principles and examples are ones which are very familiar and which I am already trying to apply in daily practice. It is nice to have them retold by practical luminaries to fix these principles and strengthen the arguments to be able to advocate experience based design.

Here are some notes for the morning’s talks. The edits are quite rough, but I don’t have the time or opportunity right now to do proper writing.

Jared Spool - “The dawn of the Age of Experience”

Jared Spool started off by giving us some examples of succesful experience design such as Apple and Netflix. He told us the same success stories we have heard countless times before. It would have been more interesting if he had told us what we need to do to get to the same level, but of course he does not have the ready answers for that question.

One interesting observation is that these successes are getting the attention of board rooms all over the place. Board attention promises a lot of opportunities but experience design gone bad can also result in some catastrophic failures.

He then talked about how succesful experience design can be done by either research of the users and the target audience or by really thinking stuff through. There are good things to be said for either approach.

He finally said that succesful experience design is invisible and it integrates the user and the business and is incredibly multidisciplinary.

A nice talk about the importance of experience design with a lot of examples but not with that many concrete strategies to actually create a good experience. The essence of the field contains within it some elusiveness.

Peter Merholz - “Experience Strategies”

Then Peter Merholz from Adaptive Path started talking about how the Experience is your product for all your users care about it. No user cares about the technical details or the internals, you need to provide your users with a good experience.

There are technological innovations that make it possible to completely change the way products are made and stuff works and it revolutionizes the experience instead of playing the more features game. Talked about TiVo, the Kodak camera and the Wii.

He talk about the importance of focusing on products with great experiences. That you need an experience vision to sail for which will serve as a guideline for everything that you do.

Products are people too (The title of Matt Webb’s presentation on Reboot9 this year.) and the same things that make us like people also make us like products.

Leisa Reichelt - “Waterfall Bad, Washing Machine Good”

Leisa Reichelt talked a lot about how the waterfall model that is still quite pervasive throughout the software industry is bad and how a more iterative model dubbed the ‘Washing Machine’ is better attuned towards how people work.

I learnt the waterfall model for software development and project management at university. I think there now are some elective courses on agile methodologies but as we already commented in the post “The IT world moves too fast for universities”, they take some time to catch up.

Waterfalls are bad because they assume that you know what you’re doing when you start, assume that design is a discrete process step that stops at a certain point in time to be implemented and it assumes that it is a single discipline contained in a single phase. This is inherently not how people and designers function in large and complex projects.

She then talked about using agile methodologies and combining them with User Centric Design. This is still quite experimental and open and there is a lot of trying out and mixing and matching to do to find a combined methodology that works.

That’s all for now: I’ll write a wrap up of the conference at the end of the day or maybe tomorrow.

A while back I wrote that Apple should do something similar to the announced Palm Foleo. Although the thought of a Foleo-like device by Apple might have sounded like a good plan, a Palm Foleo seems to have had less than a warm welcome. So, today Palm announced that the Foleo is dead, mainly because they actually felt it would be better to focus on their battle with actual cool products like the iPhone and those HTC phones. All and all it will probably be a better plan anyway.

Bye bye Foleo, we will miss you.

Monday a week ago I visited Mediamatic on invitation from Willem Velthoven to talk about how they could fit in Portable Social Networks in their anyMeta system. This meeting was inspired by our meeting in Copenhagen and the talks we had about opening up social networks.

Picture by Matt Biddulph

anyMeta and OpenCI

Mediamatic.lab implements and maintains a series of social networking sites for the creative industries (CI) in Amsterdam. These are sites built on the anyMeta system that resemble structured wikis with a strong social dimension. They are positive towards open source, but the anyMeta system is not open source for reasons of manageability of the projects.

Seeing as that these sites have a lot of overlap in both in functionality and in the people that have an account on them, they wanted to abstract and syndicate the social stuff as much as possible. Currently people can have accounts on each of the different sites, all with the same information on them.

Seeing as Mediamatic builds anyMeta themselves and they have total control, it is very feasible for them to devise and mandate the exchange of information between their own sites. To enable the exchange between their own sites, they will use their own protocol and data format to provide for a high fidelity exchange of information. Leaving implementation details for what they are, it should become possible to use one account on any of the sites in the network.

To verify your identity on the various sites of the network they are going to enable OpenID consumer and provider functionality in the next version. This way they will have a way of distributed authentication both within their network of sites and throughout the rest of the internet.

anyMeta and the rest of the web

Having solved the problem of information exchange between anyMeta sites, they would also like to play along with the rest of the internet as far as that is possible. Being able to share public information with the rest of the internet in a logical way is also on the agenda but not so straight forward.

Making public profile information available using hCard and related microformats looks easy enough. Problems arise however because the templates are made by different people and that is the location of the microformatted markup. This means the template authors have to be educated on the subject of microformats.

Whenever I advocate the use of microformats, I always have to fight against the blank looks and criticism about the aplicability of the technology. It’s a solid Catch 22 that has to be taken on with real life use cases and benefits to extoll the virtues of a dirty semantic web. For hCard there are various uses cropping up over the internet, but for the others it is a lot more limited. Having microformatted data on sites and being able to parse that using browser plugins is a first step and essential groundwork for the real use cases and richer interaction that we all want to have.

Another plan they have at Mediamatic is to first enable the sharing of information between their sites and make plugins for some of the bigger CMS’es out there (Drupal, Joomla) so they can also exchange information with those systems.

In these use cases and in the case with the internet the issue of fidelity comes up again and again. How much information can you exchange reliably and what do you do when stuff is missing? This is an important and valid question with no ready answer; though mine would be ‘get what you can, and ignore the holes where possible’.

Other stuff

I am currently not implementing anything relating to OpenID and Social Networks but I think I would like to. One idea was to make a Facebook front-end site which uses the information in Facebook to offer you a microformatted profile. There already is an hCard application but extending this with XFN, hReview and hResume would be a real winner.

Yesterday on the O’Reilly event I heard about Yme Bosma who’s job it now is to drag Hyves kicking and screaming into the world of Open Social Networks. I wish him a lot of luck as that would be a good thing to have. I have started my own work on scraping the Hyves site but that hasn’t been as simple as I would have liked.

Palm announced a new device today with the name Foleo and I think it might be one of the first good things Palm has created in years. It is a “small mobile companion”, that targets user with the need for more in a phone and less in a laptop. The device reminds me of something I have been thinking about recently, as I was thinking of what next device Apple had to make for me.

Ever since I switched from a Windows desktop to a Mac laptop, I have been thinking of how this changed my lifestyle. I used to have a PC at home, and when I traveled around I actually used to use other people’s PC to remote desktop to my own PC at home. Although easy, this method depended on my internet connection at home and the internet/workstation availability at the location I traveled to. I love the fact that I now have a laptop with me at all time that has my data (recently upgraded to 160GB) and settings. But I think there is a market for a different device.

And this is where the Palm Foleo comes in. The Foleo offers a real companion to you mobile phone, and has a nice 10.2 inch screen and a full size keyboard. The targeted market for this device is clearly people who really want to send emails and browse, but don’t like telephone interfaces. I admit, even with my N95 I only use the Wi-Fi to search for hotspots, and once located I get my MacBook out of my bag. With the amount of people carrying around fat mobiles with horrible interfaces, and others carrying around heavy laptops in order to access their email, I started thinking of a product that would be far easier.

Imagine that Apple would make a device like the Folio in the form of a “MacBook Mini”, allowing you to easily access your data on your iPhone and syncing at home with your nice iMac. I think a Folio-like device would do for on the road as I never need a dvd/cd drive, could really do with a solid state hard drive, and would really not mind a smaller screen. There are some hints that Apple is going in the direction of an even smaller MacBook, as many PowerBook 12″ users haven’t switched yet because they are missing an ultra-portable model.

I hope that Apple understands the trend of our society and uses its powerful experience in syncing to make the world a better place.