kip/bot/blog

Anyone who has spent time with Intel employees knows that Andy Grove’s influence on the culture there was deep and long-lasting. From conversations during my time with them as an agency person, I picked up two presentation edicts that traced back to Grove: 1) no laser pointers (apparently Grove can’t stand the sparkly diffusion when they hit a projector screen); and 2) ‘only show 4 “foils” per hour’ during presentations (”foils” refers to slides and the techniques for making them when the Grove culture was at its peak).

I love the 4 foils per hour rule. It’s Presentation Zen’s rule of “go broad or go deep” gone crazy wild Xtreme. It’s like turning it into go broad, go deep, or go metamega-deep. Imagine having a concept and/or graphic rich enough to warrant 15 minutes of conversation? What kind of mind-changing and engagement happens then? I realize that Intel is an engineering culture, so opportunities for these kinds of slides are more frequent there than in other environments. But consider Tim OReilly’s Web 2.0 slides from a few years ago:

They’re ugly and contestable to be sure. But these slides are deep and systemic and still useful. Whether you disagree or agree with some or all of it, you’re going to be smarter for wrestling with or, better yet, trying to improve them. Another slide from NextD describes different types of innovators:

Look at all the nifty things going on here: four types of people, who can be grouped in to two higher-level types, and who reach out into different areas in different proportions and who may or may not map to a company’s process. By arguing about the accuracy, relationship, edges and arrow directions for 15 minutes, you get much deeper into innovative cultures, management styles, and process than you might with a dozen slides. (Also, by discussing something for 15 minutes and digging into its richness, you have something more memorable, better internalized, more grokked by your audience. That is, of course, assuming you and your slide are able to command attention for that long.)

And you don’t necessarily have to do info-graphics, either. Take a look at a screenshot from Flickr this morning:

This is a sampling of Holga groups, people dedicated to photography with a cheap camera whose artistically flawed lens creates sometimes eerie, sometimes sentimental, always distinctive effects. From looking at this slide, you can talk about long tail, community, community-bulding and marketing, the redefinition of amateur and professional, co-creation of brands (Holga effects found their way into Photoshop filters), and help your audience go beyond the lame, puddle deep Business Week understanding of the photo-sharing, community, 2.0 phenomena within it.
So what would happen if we had a rule in design and marketing presentations: don’t show any slide that doesn’t warrant at least 5, 10, or 15(gasp!) minutes of explication and conversation. (Or, as a compromise or improvement: Don’t do a presentation that doesn’t contain at least one over-arching slide that warrants 10 minutes of explication and conversation.)

What it might do is force us to think deeply about our models, concepts or ideas and make sure that they are rich enough to warrant a conversation. It might move us beyond some of the label-making and phrase-coining that seems to drive so many presentations. By looking at a rich slide in detail and for an extended period of time, we’re forcing ourselves into systemic thinking which may, at the end of the day, be more persuasive.
That said, I also enjoy big pictures with three words in a brightly colored band as a way of grabbing attention and registering something emotionally. They’re appropriate for motivational and sales talks, talks in which you’re trying to reinvigorate principles or ideas which are familiar, telling a story, or for very short (especially funny) presentations.
Designers in the interactive space are caught in between two powerful forces when it comes to presentations. One the one hand, we adore Tufte, who in addition to teaching us to loathe chartjunk also teaches us appreciate and promote information density and richness of thought. On the other hand, we’re moving towards a narrative-driven, flip-book style of presentation that illustrates nearly every sentence with a visual. We need both, but might be forgetting how to do the richer, deeper slide.

I’m a fan of the XO — the project, the goal, the educational ideas behind it. More than that, I’m fascinated by it.

I have a hard time thinking of what mass-market product has been launched since the PC that is more complex. And I don’t think there’s ever been a product launch as transparent as the XO’s. What a case study: a revolutionary piece of hardware, innovative open source software, designed for a market that may or may not welcome it and an incredibly broad audience.

I’ve got a Flickr photostream, with a bunch of screenshots, but wanted to capture some thoughts on the blog.

First, the project is enormous:

- $100 laptop (it’s now $200, and OLPC hopes to get it to $150)

- for children aged 6 - 12. I think this is the biggest challenge. This age range covers pre-literate kids up through pre-teens, playing simple games through programming.

- Integrated into school curriculum, appealing to government agencies

- be a substitute for textbooks (the swivel screen and glare-proof monitor support its use as a Kindle-like device. Textbooks are scarce in the US, and almost completely non-existent or out-of-date to the point of useless in many of the XO’s target markets.)

- EXPRESSIVE - stimulate the imagination (art, computation, narrative)

- APPROPRIATE - sturdy, stable, long battery life, outdoor use, theft-deterrence

- OPEN - the OS and software must be easy to develop, easy to adapt/upgrade, NOT dependent on another company’s development cycle or staff

Designing something for kids aged 6 - 12 is a massive challenge in and of itself. This challenge manifests itself immediately and viscerally in the keyboard:

(Click for larger image and comments on flickr.)

A snap, but fair, judgement to make is that boy, there sure are a lot of keys: quick keys, amplifier keys (CTRL, FN, etc.), the keyboard itself. To make matters trickier, some of the keys have three values assigned to them. Finally, there’s an inactive slider bar on the top and two types of input devices at the bottom (the middle is capacitive, the outer two resistive). So did they get it wrong? Is it, to quote one designer “a shining testament to the disastrous effects of theory-driven- and designer-driven-design”? Let’s look at what the keyboard needs to do:

- be useful to a 12 year old, who will word process, browse the web, play games, draw, and hopefullly program

- support languages with complex character systems and constructions (more than the US qwerty)

- provide quick key, shortcut usage that power-users expect (unless we think 3W kids can’t be power users)

So is the keyboard poorly designed? If so, is it cuz it’s theory-driven or because it strives to do too much? It still comes back to the age range 6 - 12 year olds. In the states, we can buy our kids different electronic devices at different ages, and the market is awash with chip-driven educational/entertainment devices. But this one has to do it all.

The second big design moment that peole confront in the first minutes with the device is the home screen.

This takes a few minutes to figure out … at least for all my interactive friends. The black border area is hidden from the user’s view, until the cursor is move to any of the four corners — it’s like Expose on OSX. The top black band contains quick links to system things like the network, or the home page, the bottom band contains links to all the applications on the machine. The left and right bands, and I like this, is a clipboard area. Anything the user adds to the clipboard is available here. That’s means a user can collect text, sounds, drawings, photos (from the camera) and have them available in eToyz, an authoring program on XO that has a lot of resemblance to HyperCard of old.

This is a busy home page, after the user has opened several applications. (Notice that the black border is missing, when the cursor is moved out of the corners the full screen is restored.) The ring contains all of the open applications in the form of graphic links, and right clicking allows the user to close the app without having to switch to it. What I love about this part of the interface is the way in which it graphically represents a machine whose RAM is full. Rather than a system resources message, the young user can see that things are pretty crowded and that they might need to balance/fix the situation.

There have been some questions around whether the XO should have a cheap version of Windows. As noted above, there was an early decision to go open-source. Part of the reason for open source is cost — there’s a lot of software and talent that can be leveraged with a Linux system. The other reason is that, with Linux, it’s possible to create a light-weight, clean interface like the one above.

From Jon Burg’s Future Visions blog, a Y! employee twittering the mechanics and emotions of being “impacted” by the layoffs, and his last day on the job:

Y! layoffs today, I’m “impacted”. I’m heading into work to pack my desk, get my severance paperwork and hand in my badge…more to come.

Walking around saying good bye to some great people and good friends.

Let’s get this over with

Lots of whispered conversations. Like people are afraid to ask who’s gone.

Signing off from Yahoo!. Fade to black…