kip/bot/blog

Just spent a very fun hour on BaseballBoss, a fantasy-like service that people have been predicting for years. It allows you to create teams, drawing on players from all eras of baseball. Here’s a sampling of potential team members, using the baseball card metaphor:

The explanation at the top is part of a nicely crafted guided tour — a good blend of sparse text, tight navigation, and what so far seems to be an experience crafted well enough to not require much explanation. When I got my first 40 cards, I was tickled to see old timer names like Cotton Minahan and Pug Bennett:

(I was also happy to think how happy Cotton would have been to pull down $1MM. Probably wouldn’t have been bitter that Batista was getting $5MM).

After setting up my team — The Vishniak Sting — my first challenge was with the 1906 White Sox. BaseballBoss calculates the results of every at bat (presumably pitches as well, but can’t tell yet) and gives you a very entertaining score card.

I was crushed to see the Sting get crushed - 6-0 - but check it out. Ed Walsh, a 1906 pitcher who still holds the record for the lowest career ERA (1.82), pitched the full 9.0 innings! It’s an honor to lose to an ironman like that.

You can also read a highlights play list:

What a dream come true for real baseball fans this must be. I managed to find (through Google Book Search) a Roger Angell passage I remembered about the beauty of the box score for true fans. Rather than text, I got a pic of the page:

I am oddly moved by this whole thing.

Biking past PS 22 in Crown Heights, I saw some cool fence decorations. From a distance, they looked like old guild symbols, and I thought perhaps this was a magnet school around science and technology. On closer inspection, they were much more: twisty lines of metal text suggesting shapes aspiring to be objects that thought they might be something else.

This shape reads: “Look at the short pants acting like binoculars dreaming of a hand drum.” This was my favorite, but there were more and they were interconnected, check them out on my flickrstream.

TechCrunch, while writing about something else (Flowww, a visualized RSS feed algorithm), backs into a critique of the Apple cover flow mode:

The other issue I have is that, while the site is pretty, the Cover Flow metaphor just doesn’t work for me as a navigational tool. It is too slow and it forces you to look at the pre-selected sites in the order that the algorithm (or Zotter) picks them. If you want to read the middle story, you have to flip through all the previous ones to get to it. I’d rather pick my own stories from a list of headlines, thank you very much.

Over the last several years, I’ve seen many versions of this pop up in designs for client work.  I’ve never liked it — the rate of information transfer is slow, the visuals rarely sit together nicely or in a way that allows for easy scanning, there’s a lot of guess work in locating yourself somewhere along the spectrum (and maddening to re-find something after you’ve moved away from it).  I don’t like it, but I keep my mouth shut, usually.  After all, Apple does it, and they . . . well, Apple does it!

The techcrunch writer asks for thoughts and a conversation is starting.  It would be nice to have some data or real learning about this.

The most artistic thing about theatrical [and] advantage of the small theatre is that you are looking through a small window. Has not everyone noticed how sweet and startling any landscape looks when seen through an arch? This strong, square, this shutting off of everything else, is not only an assistance to beauty; it is the essential of beauty - GK Chesteron, 1909

My friends Tom and Donna take me to all sorts of lo-rez, lo-tech, junk-tech performances: puppet shows, performance art based on slide-shows (literal slideshows — with carousels, film-strip projectors, unsynched sounds, live music), and toy theater.

Last night, I went to St Anns Warehouse’s 8th toy theater festival, produced by Great Small Works. It consisted of four shows:

• a traditional Indian story told through one singer and a partner moving toys around various tableaux;
• an Isaac Babel short story performed in a toy theater with Chagall-like backgrounds with accompaniments on clarinet and fiddle;
• a Stalin-era Russian SF novel (in the traditions many of us know through Stanislaw Lem), performed by three voices and a narrator who was also operating an analog synthesizer. (The synthesizer with its weird beeOOOOOOs and staticy sounds was the perfect aural accompaniment to Cold War era, concrete apartment towers, and emerging realities after the bomb. Tom wryly noted that only people from MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies would consider an analog synthesizer to be as lo-tech as stick puppets)
• a story of the devil destroying the world and orgy that precedes it, done with amazing sound and a devil with cool led eyes and the dance moves to rival Terrence and Phillip in Uncle Fuckah

As a digital designer who tracks CG for improved hair and water effects, it’s fun to watch powerful stories emerge from <1 fps, 0-fidelity, 0 apology to artifice media and find them even more engaging than the adventures of Niko and Roman.

One of the cool things with St Anns is that they usually have theater and festival memorabilia on display around the warehouse. So I got a lot of (crappy iPhone) pics of small toy theaters, an art form unto themselves.

The Viking Penguin Bookclub has promise as an idea: a publisher curates its offerings, supports it with a blog, and allows users to do book club like activities around it. It starts out with a nice highlights/selections interaction:

(On a design note, I started out liking the entry note: tab key-accessible entry fields, with good coloring. But it kind of fell apart. For the second field, seen above, I forgot what field I was entering, and without a label, discovered that my fingers are used to entering passwords after the name, not email. I was also bummed when the tab-accessible state pull-down, didn’t support up and down arrows or first letter.) Starts out promising, highlighting three books that you wouldn’t find on the bestseller list and emerging authors.

But then, it got stupid:

This is an slightly shrunken image of a browsable bookshelf and, I fear, the future that I will be facing in Flash design meetings. These titles, with the exception of the (excellent translation of) Anna Karenina and (somewhat overrated) Collapse are unbrowsable. When you rollover the book cover, you still get precious little information:

I still can’t make out what the book is.

I can’t tell if the interface above is “pictures are always superior to text” or “recreational of physical reality always rocks users”, but I know that, as a CD/CD manager, I’ll have to suit up and deal with a lot of sad, silly, stupid, sucky interface ideas like this.

Link found via Konigi.

Our current Apple-besotted climate has focused many conversations on the critical, almost singular, importance of innovation in the success of an offering. My recent and regular struggles with Office/iWork, iPhoto/Aperture, Entourage/Outlook, skitch, and brightkite are making me think that we’ve fetishized innovation to the point that we’re overlooking more powerful dynamics that drive the adoption of new technologies or switching from one product to another.

EverydayUX has a post about how much web2.0 we can handle, which highlights a couple of adoption dynamics:

The biggest challenge is not only finding the ones that work best for you (or quickly recognizing the ones that don’t) but also trying to predict the ones that are going to be around for the long haul and stand the best chance of getting some uptake with your friends that might not roll in the same techno-circles as the Scobles and Winers of the world.

As I keep adding services to my day-to-day life, the challenge of integrating new ones becomes greater as they invariably begin to overlap (see dodgeball and brightkite).

Here, Alex highlights some key points:  will the product you’re considering be around; does the slight, even subtle difference between two products with overlapping features warrant a move?

I think there’s an interesting freako- micro- economic dynamic worth looking at here — in grad school, I learned it as “sticky downward.”

Mainstream economists love their maths (I love saying that) and they love smooth curves in graphs.  Smooth curves mean smooth tranfers into and out of self-equilibrating markets, the holy grail of economic policy.  Neo-classical economists like to kink those curves by reminding us that people aren’t perfectly rational price-seekers, and that many other dynamics drive even the simplest market choices.

In labor economics, a great deal of time has been spent arguing that smooth downward sloping labor demand curves are inaccurate.  In grad school, I had to learn multiple arguments against this shape, BUT the interesting one here is the argument that labor demand curves are “sticky downward”.  Take a look at the typical supply and demand curves (and ignore D2, that’s not relevant to this argument).

D1 implies that as the price of labor (P) goes down, the quantity demanded (Q) goes up.  Conversely, as the price goes up, the quantity demanded goes down.  The smooth, continuity of the curve implies that, in large markets, even the smallest shift in the price of labor will cause people to be hired or fired.

But companies don’t work that way, they are responsive to price in very lurchy, semi-rational fashions.  Many factors contribute to a ’stickiness’ that keeps people from being fired even as the cost of keeping them on increases: managers become socially connected to employees;  there are significant but hard to measure replacements costs; it’s just a hassle to can this person; no one wants to do the deed; you already have overhead; morale for the rest of the team etc. So, yes the increase in the price of labor creates a downard pressure on demand, but there’s a stickiness with labor that you don’t have with impersonal commodities like loaves of bread, widgets, screws, etc.

So what?  There’s a sticky downward dynamic for adoption of high-consideration, comlex products.  While I am sick of talking about Apple, my experience with the iPod highlights the sticky downward adoption dynamic.  I owned four MP3 players before finally buying an iPod. The hours I had spent ripping my CDs and labelling the tracks (80% of my music is classical or jazz, the worst parts of CD database information), were a massive stickiness factor. All my stuff was here, and I would have to move it there . . . is the iPod really that cool, the wheel really that nifty, the thing really that much better? In the end, I moved because iTunes seemed to have hit critical mass in its catalog and I tested a bunch of my classical CDs on a friends’ iTunes installation and saw that their CD database was much cleaner (and easier to clean) than any others. To drift into an innovation conversation for a moment, this does highlight Bill Buxton’s point that the success of the iPod goes waaaaay beyond our adulation of Steve Jobs and Sir Jonathan . . . it’s also the lawyers who negotiated the contracts for the music and the wonks who cleaned up the messy German names of composers and pieces, the complicated Kochel and Opus groupings, and the inconsistent movement notation, the people who made the data transfer faster, etc.

The point, though (I dream of the time when I can go a day and not talk about Apple or the iPod) is that the switch was very sticky . . . it took months to decide, and then weeks to actualy complete that switch, and it was a sticky, messy switch to make.

As always, the point must be made that this isn’t new. We’ve been aware of switch dynamics for years (and those of us in marketing and advertising are used to briefs that highlight whether this is a switch or join message). But there are a few notions embedded in stickiness  that make it useful for designers and design thinking people:

- sticky implies a tugging, ripping away process. It acknowledges the pains of those switches

- sticky gets us out of rational actor thinking and acknowledges the long, multi-centered process of decision-making
- sticky elevates the conversation back up to perceived value of the overall product experience rather than a mapping of individual features to something’s success

- sticky is a user-centered phrase, where innovation isn’t. To say that something succeeded because it was innovative isn’t nearly as informative, rich, or empathy-inducing as understanding how stickiness was overcome

I’m thinking of switching to a Nokia — partly to connect to the ways the rest of the world is connecting, but partly cuz I’m no longer convinced of the awesomeness of the iPhone.

I bought the iPhone about three months after the release. I had resisted the urge until I unpacked my bag for work and saw an iPod, a phone, a camera. I went and bought the iPhone and dumped the other stuff from my bag, a savings of two devices, charging time and hassle, and some carried ounces off my back.

Today, however, I’m back to three devices. The iPhone camera sucks too much even for me; I tend to load it up with so many boingboing TV, TED, coolhunting videos, and the occasional West Wing for late or bleary subway rides, that I seem to never have the right music on hand for work; and the hassles of email with entourage/exchange/whatever plus my continued non-adjustment to the keyboard leave me calendarless and hesitant to answer work mails (since replies go to gmail). Yes, that last will be fixed in June (as apparently, will be the mideast problem and global warming, if you listen to the more energetic Mac rumors), but I think I’ve lost too much love for the iPhone to hold onto it.

And, oh yeah, EDGE sucks.

Is it possible that Apple, usually so well-known for providing more to customers by doing less stretched itself too thin? I don’t think I’ve ever had an Apple device that so infrequently delighted me (I mean delighted me, like making me say Nice!) and so frequently frustrated me.

The other half of the abandon iPhone equation is professional. As non-touch screen phones become more important in people’s lives (due to price point, durability, and, in developing countries, non-theft-worthiness), I feel out of touch with emerging design sensibilities and mobile behaviors. I’m not ready to go back to a crappy phone, but, seeing that the N-Series is the direction cheap phones will go rather than the iPhone, I may make yet another expensive shift.

Technology Review ran an article about blogosphere and social network traffic visualizations which featured pretty and interesting pictures as well as insights into what’s worth measuring in social networks. (The full article isn’t yet available to non-subscribers in its full format.)  The picture below visualizes a number of things including, apparently, the relative ego size/socialness of political junkies and designers.

The two regions are held together by popular blogs with ties to both subject areas. The size of the ­circle representing a given blog is proportional to the number of other blogs linked to it. Hurst notes an apparent difference in culture between the two regions: pink lines, which represent reciprocal links, are much denser among the political blogs than they are among blogs focused on technology.

Just saw this while ordering some forgotten/hidden/kooky New York books.  It’s a customer review for Lost New York:

HBR has another good article breathing new life into stale concepts (the first one is blogged here).  Right now, it feels like that the “MFA is the new MBA” is stuck in a squishy or puddle-thin space.  For some, it’s a call to be a right-brained thinker — take a drawing class, learn an instrument, write a short story!  A little more intelligent, but kind of thin, is the argument that the MBA teaches you decision-making, the MFA teaches you synthesis.  Not bad, but it doesn’t unpack into actionable ideas.
Katherine Bell, who got an MBA, worked in business, and then got an MFA at the highly selective Iowa Writer’s Workshop, has a “conversation starter” that gets deeper into the skills and attitudes that MFAs can acquire.  It goes deep enough, in fact, that it feels actionable.  Her points, which are also covered in the ideacast, are:

• the workshop is an important management tool and cultural goal in a business that thrives on ideas — Bell’s MFA is in writing, and one of the biggest adjustments she had to make was to the workshop:  a class where your fellow students look at your work and critique it along with your professor.  Everyone has to develop skills for an effective workshop:
• the author needs to learn to accept criticism about very personal things, how to sift good feedback from bad, and how to incorporate it into her work;
• the students need to learn how to give useful feedback.  This one is particularly interesting because it goes beyond “don’t be negative” into “don’t give executional feedback.”  This is something a lot of design shops, clients, and companies trying to be more design-focused have trouble with.  Comments should be “the colors are feeling kind of flat to me, not as energetic as this”, rather than “can you make it more red?”
• the professor needs to set the right tone for the workshop, facilitate the critiquing, and give measured, but strong comments. 
  

• by writing fiction, you learn empathy — Bell spends a lot of time talking about how writing fiction forces her into her characters’ heads and out of hers.  Being able to get so far into a character that it acts in ways that surprise you is one of her litmus tests for empathy.  But she highlights that management is all about understanding who you’re talking to and feeling empathy with them.  (It’s also important for design, and Adaptive Path’s Subject to Change has a terrific chapter about what empathy is and isn’t and how to focus your work on building empathy).

Even if you can’t go to a workshop or don’t bother writing fiction, it’s a useful read and think as it highlights parts of work and types of thinking that MFA==MBA inclined managers should dig into.