Brain Cloud

Kyle Gabler's home page charms me as much as his simple but fun and well-executed word association game: Human Brain Cloud. You play by typing in words you associate with other words, and he grows the network of associations on the fly. The graphs are pretty to watch, easy to explore, with great motion effects; and his page of stats on players is suprisingly extensive.

Also, I adore his cartoon art. :-)

Other viral, simple online games: the Free Rice game, Just Curious (answer a question before you can ask one), the ESP game (labelling images).

Colbert Bump for Books

I love this type of real world data analysis: Juice Analytics has done some data mining on book sales following author appearances on the Colbert Report, and finds that the more liberal folks get a bigger sales bump! Surprise!

Here is one of their graphs, normalized and aligned for when the authors so classified (by them) appeared and their change in sales figures inferred from Amazon rankings. They also cite an interesting academic study of whether used book sales cannibalize new book sales on Amazon, which finds they rarely do.

Two Weird Videos: Geckos and Remote Viewing

Here are two quick strange items for the long weekend:

Why is a bug feeding a gecko? Altruism? Friendship? Some kind of symbiosis not yet understood, most definitely. For those afraid of bugs, this one looks like a piece of tree bark, nothing buggy about it. The gecko is green and attractive. Watch it here on the BBC site.

Remote viewing is a supposed ability to see things from a distance, sometimes as seen by another. It has been reportedly studied by the US military and CIA. Here is an interesting video study purporting to show it working under a controlled circumstance. I find it a bit distracting that the subject who performs the feat is impressed and surprised, too, but it is still fun to watch.

Consumer Design is Easy?

Steve at tingilinde sent me a link to David Pogue's NYT piece on design flaws in digital picture frames. From the intro section:

"We learned deeply a few hard lessons," he said. "Consumer electronics is a very difficult business. It's difficult to get it right." ...

Maybe this particular guy is rightness challenged. Or maybe he meant that getting things right takes time, money and effort, which is true.

But it sounds like he's saying that it's hard to know what's right in product design, and he'll never convince me of that. A ten-year old could have identified the design flaws in the frames I tested this week.

I don't agree on all points -- Some of the design flaws he identifies are tricky "icing" on the consumer cake that it takes a clever designer and a budget to go after: like having a little pocket on the frame back for a remote control. Nice to have, but not mandatory, even for a good consumer experience.

But getting things right does take time, money, and effort; as well as "big-picture" design management of the sort lacking at all but few companies. Someone needs to remember the people you're designing for, and to represent that by stepping backwards out of the details of schedule and bug counts and putting into perspective: "...Hey, can your Grandfather use this for the baby pictures you're sending?" It's the responsible executive's position to make the call to change the schedule to accommodate the experience-breaker issues that will threaten you in a crowded market, and to champion processes like in-home user testing as part of the design cycle.

Kodak, who comes out pretty well for their frame design in his piece, hires interaction designers, although I don't know if they have a Chief Design Officer. So why hire an interaction designer instead of, say, a 10-year old? Because most 10 year olds aren't up to arguing with project managers and engineering schedules, and generally keeping their head both in the gritty details and well outside, for that important user perspective.

Pogue's piece is still good and also funny. As a former TiVo designer mystified by the crapness of most "consumer" electronics design, I especially liked this one:

Question 10: Which is the right way to label the jacks and buttons: White lettering on black (or vice versa), white on white (Momento), or with no text labels at all (eStarling)?

We did think of this at TiVo (of course), but I still wish we had added a little LED flashlight dongle to the back, since there's always bad light at the back of your cabinet!

Genetics and Environment: Are You Depressed?

A good, clear article on the role of genetic predisposition vs. upbringing and occurrence of depression lives at Psychology Today in The Identity Dance. Although there are genes that may suggest a higher chance of developing certain mental illnesses, including depression, your upbringing has a lot to do with how likely you are to succumb during trigger events.

The results were striking: 43 percent of subjects who had the short genes and who had experienced four or more tumultuous events became clinically depressed. By contrast, only 17 percent of the long-gene people who had endured four or more stressful events wound up depressed—no more than the rate of depression in the general population. People with the short gene who experienced no stressful events fared pretty well too—they also became depressed at the average rate. Clearly, it was the combination of hard knocks and short genes that more than doubled the risk of depression.

... Moffitt and Caspi have found a similar relationship between another gene and antisocial behavior. Abused and neglected children with a gene responsible for low levels of monoamine oxidase in the brain were nine times more likely to engage in violent or other antisocial behavior as adults than were people with the same gene who were not mistreated. Finnish scientists have since found similar effects on genes for novelty seeking—a trait associated with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Children who had the genes and who were also raised by strict, emotionally distant parents were much more likely to engage in risky behavior and make impulsive decisions as adults than children with the same genes who were raised in more tolerant and accepting environments.

The saddest part of the article is the alcoholic monkey, though.

Spoon Bending Parties

I had no idea people were still bending spoons with their minds, but apparently so-! Uri Geller was famous for this in the 1970ies, and is generally believed to have been a fraud. But now there is a new craze for this activity, with a lot of people claiming you too can bend your cutlery into very weird shapes with the power of concentration -- ideally, in a party atmosphere.

Jack Houck, a former engineer, hosts "PK" parties in which large groups of people bend ordinary cutlery. He has some instructions and a short video up on his site. His parties are covered in an article with good photos of twisted fork tines at Mind-Energy.com. One of the attendees, Dean Radin, succeeded (and wrote about it) and has even been invited to speak at Google. (Gratuitous connection to the software industry that you didn't expect...!)

Also on Mind-Energy, reader and bender Shannan Rohde posts video, instructions, and photos of himself bending a sad little spoon.

As usual, I wonder why people aren't doing more useful things with this skill. Lack of imagination? Too much crappy cutlery in their lives?

I gave it a half-hearted shot, but haven't succeeded yet. If you do succeed, post me a note? Or if you hear of a PK party nearby, invite me along. Perhaps I lack the right party mood, post-Superbowl!

Theo Jansen's Strandbeests

One of the excellent presentation's at SolidWorks World 2008 was the keynote by Theo Jansen, maker of strange tube sculpture creatures that walk on the sand, powered by wind. The man is brilliantly mad, and his obsession and philosophy are very interesting to see -- apparently for much of the geek world, given his press coverage in recent years (see Wikipedia links).

Worth the videos at TED 2007, and the explanation here on YouTube from ArtFutura for how they walk can be viewed in this Physics Engine demo of a model of one walking over obstacles.

A Look Inside SolidWorks

SolidWorks World, the annual user convention for SolidWorks CAD users, is going on now in San Diego. I'm consulting with the company, and have been doing usability research out here. (Rather strangely, I appeared in a photo posted by one of our blogger users here. The gentleman I am talking too was just made extremely happy by a brief chat with the founder of SolidWorks, who remembers his name every time he sees him.)

SolidWorks' latest release featured some major changes to the UI, which caused a bit of a ruckus among the experienced users. Matt Lombard, author of the SolidWorks Bible, is one of the ruckusers. Along with posting pictures of me (hah), Matt also just posted a YouTube interview with one of the best guys at SolidWorks and one of my clients there, Jim Wilkinson. To see some inside scoop on how the company works, you can watch it on YouTube linked from Matt's blog.

A final note: It's a credit to SolidWorks that someone like Jim exists there and has authority. Not only is he a good manager, but he's universally well-respected AND well-liked by everyone who meets him, internally and externally; and he's active in the user forums answering customer questions on top of his ever-expanding day job. Jim saw a need for a usability team long before most CAD companies found out such a thing exists (for the rest of them, that was only 2.5 years ago). Kudos to SolidWorks for having such great employees and managers. It explains a lot about the product success.

Tips for Solo Travelers

An unsolicited link sent to me by another blogger, thinking it might be of interest, and it was-! Don't you love the Internet? Here are 40+ Safety Tips for the Solo Traveler, with special ones for women travelers. I admit to not having thought of or heard of some of these myself. For instance, don't hang the sign outside your hotel door ordering a breakfast for one at 7am; this may advertise to unsavories that you're in your room alone and willing to answer the door at that hour without checking who's there.

The great thing about lists like this, that make you really paranoid, is that you can decide how far you want to go down the risk-avoidance path, and not go that far. Or, maybe, go there if you're in a nasty-looking hotel.

2007 in Review

One year ago this week, I quit my job and (after a bit of interviewing and thought) decided to consult for a while. It's been a good year! Some of the things I'm pleased with:

• Five excellent clients, and a couple of potentials I had to turn down because I was booked. Two web consumer startups, and one long-term established software company, whom I am still working with.
• Several opportunities to work on data mining: web log analysis, survey cluster analyses, and quantitative personas. Very interesting work! (I also took 2 classes from statistics.com to hone my skills.)
• A couple of web projects for which I provided the interaction design and project management actually launched in the same year, including the extremely successul NASA Tech Briefs Create the Future Design Contest site. (Winners will be announced this week!)
• Two publications by yours truly on the politics and skills of UI design: An article in interactions on the difficulties in practicing design today, and an essay in a new book, HCI Remixed: Reflections on Works that Have Influenced the HCI Community (MIT Press 2008). This book is hot off the press and a fascinating read.
• Incorporation for my consulting business, Ghostweather Research and Design, LLC. Followed by a crash course in accounting for small businesses. Who knew that credits were negative and debits were positive? And that Quickbooks is still a bit hard to use?
• I gave a handful of local talks at software companies, local design or usability meetings, etc, on design practices or online communities. Some of them are here on my essays page.
• Some technical fun: Opportunity to use Flash (so far just on small personal projects), Illustrator, PHP, mySQL, Excel with a database backend.

I did not do as much conference travel as I wanted to, but plan to go to CHI in Florence this spring, to help make up for missing it last year. I hope to see you there!

Fate Mag Online: Browse the Weirdness!

Fate Magazine ("True Reports of the Strange and Unknown") has a sample issue up online (it's a big but fast loading PDF). I went in to look at the werewolf folklore article, but ended up reading most of it, because it's just so fun.

There are articles in this one on "Do It Yourself EVP," a fascinating bio piece on Russian psychic-hypnotist-mystic Wolf Grigorievich Messing, and the usual write-in articles from people who believe they've seen the strange and undead. There's even a sidebar on a dog who can predict who's going to die in nursing homes, like the cat Oscar profiled just about everywhere. (Note the difference in how the animals behave. Typical!)

But what made me LOL was the classifieds: Amid sections called "Magick," "Earth Mysteries," "Ghosts," "Occult," "Pyramids," "Voodoo," etc, they still manage to need a section called "Miscellaneous." Equally entertaining are the ads for books and services, sprinkled throughout.

I don't mean to mock too hard, though; I really did enjoy it, and considered getting myself and a relative subscriptions.

Southwest Gets Design

I just booked a flight on Southwest, and had a wonderful experience. Skipping past the booking part, I got a nice email receipt, which was easy to read. It's nice to get something that's easy to read. I especially liked their large friendly confirmation codes that are actually visible, colorful, short, and at the top!

On the receipt was also a very visible (above the fold) link: "Where Will I Sit?" I clicked on it, and got a popup window with a very cute hand-drawn progess bar, so cute that I had no problem waiting through it just to watch it drawing itself. And then this even cuter notebook appeared:

I actually read the whole thing, because it continued to be so cute and even funny, with hand-drawn pictures throughout: There was a sweet little animation of people getting on a plane, and a diploma for people who finish the notebook (I filled in my name, yes). At the end, I looked at the page source, hoping to find something suggesting who created it, and discovered that they had even tailored the error message for people with the wrong browser support:

I was thrilled, but also a bit sad. Apart from TiVo, I have never worked for a company that cared this much about the details; was willing to take such creative risks with how they differentiate themselves; who understand that even the error messages tell people something about them and need consideration. That's design and branding done right, together!

ETA: If you would like to play with the notebook, it lives at Southwest's BoardingSchool.

Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club

I find from Steve at tingilinde that the Journal of Improbable Research is now online!

I see they also sponsor a Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club of Scientists with Said Hair. I find this very interesting. Not because I am a scientist with hair of this type, but because I would like to meet scientists with hair that flows (and is luxurious). Perhaps I should found a Fans of Scientists with Luxurious Flowing Hair Club. Here are some sample locks, a kind of hair porn shot, if you ask me:

Thoughtful of them to post their members' info!

Focusing for Self-Portraits

Consultants need to provide photos of themselves that look professional for speaking events and publications from time to time. Blogs and social networking sites also benefit from author photos; and if you're in the online dating game, you need to make your self-portrait a serious piece of work.

Here's a nice list of techniques for getting your portraits focused, if you're the one taking it on timer or otherwise: I'm Ready for My Closeup. I will admit that I hadn't thought of half of these!

As a bonus, if you aren't using your DSLR in manual or advanced modes yet and don't understand some of the terms above, you might read this article from Lifehacker: Master Your DSLR Camera, Manual Mode and More.

Designing Your Home Page

Kicking this one off, here's a good article by Joel Spolsky about the design of the product home page for FogBugz, which nicely spotlights the badness of committee decision-making in design. They tried to achieve too many things with too much input, the results frayed, and finally they [he] had to make the tough decision to start over and stick to a single unified vision with fewer "votes" on the matter. You can track this in the mockup screenshots.

Joel also makes a good point about the difference between the company page and the product page in terms of their goals. Nice willingness to go with entirely different styles, as a result. A brave decision!

I've been involved in a few home page design discussions the past year of consulting. They tend to be wicked problems (i.e., ill-defined, messy, and circular). Some of the reasons for this:

• There may be a difference between who you are and what you do, which may be important and hard to describe. Or hard to recognize.
• There may be a difference between who you WANT to be and who you are. This is hard to design for, because when you stray from what you are, you tend to confuse people.
• Conveying who you WANT to be in a clear fashion can only happen if you have a clear idea of who you want to be, and test your methods of conveyance on people to see if it flies. This is different from usability testing as usually understood.
• A bunch of company stakeholders who disagree on these things (who we are, who we want to be) can't communicate this to a designer very successfully. Design will then take a longer time, with more iterations, and may turn into a committee consensus nightmare.
• Design directions can be contradictory -- sometimes you can't say two or more complicated things, and you can't do both well enough to succeed at either. Let alone 10!
• If your business is confusing or going through a change of some kind, it's almost inevitable that the design reflects this, without a very strict control on it. No designer will succeed in clarifying confused input when the underlying problem is actual confusion. The designer may see this going on and be able to point it out, but that won't get it solved. The problems may be too high, too deep, and too wicked themselves. Solving them is much harder than the simple design problem at hand.

One client was working on a new project that was barely outlined in a development spec. He asked me "What do we do for our home page? We're really worried about that." It was premature for this, because most of the business plan didn't exist yet. The design input they REALLY needed was "Your business idea is a little too complicated right now. Can you simplify it first? Here are a bunch of others in your space with successful 3 bullet explanations on their home page. Can you meet that level of simplicity?"

Sadly, most designers aren't in a position to spur you to clean up your entire business plan. Or to make it clear that this might be needed because it's hard to make it sound simple when it's not. (At least, without lying.)

I think design is a strategic activity - requiring hard, brave, high level decisions in order to direct the minds and hearts of customers; and a creating a good business plan is therefore partly a design activity. To create a business that is clear and attractive to prospects, and therefore portrayable as such, requires high-level decision making inside a company. If more business leaders thought like designers, or more designers were in business roles, the execution of the home page would be a lot simpler.

Food for Brains

It's been a tough week - minor road accidents in snow, encounters with consultants that earn $2500 for a few hours of phone time [I don't earn this!] - so here's venty post on something that bugs me: People with bad memories. I don't mean bad in the sense of "I lost my keys again," more in the sense of "Weren't you going to schedule that meeting?" No, you were, you said you would! Why do I suddenly feel so defensive, when I did nothing wrong??

Any number of excellent books have been written about project management and scheduling, but few of them confront this phenomenon head on, and I've now seen it at a bunch of companies. Someone important, or even just useful, can cause a lot of damage by having a bad memory. If they're a manager, it might become their employee's second job to stockpile email in case they need to "prove" who's mistaken at review time. If it's a peer, they don't pull their share of the work because they conveniently forgot to do most of it and someone else has to, or some schedule slips. This might be passive aggressive (if they're not a psychopath or an asshole), but since it's the holidays, let's consider that it might be a medical problem. Maybe they're eating badly?

A few suggestions for coping: Start ordering in veggie platters. Take them out for sushi whether they like it or not. Leave them Secret Santa Ginkgo Biloba supplements by their monitor. And finally here's a list of some nice articles from Psychology Today on food for your brain, which I rather enjoyed:

• A Taste of Genius
• Top Ten Smart Foods
• Eat Drink Man Woman (on foods for long lives)

Happy holidays, and eat better! [Edited to add: Consider hiring a chimp instead if your team mate or manager can't remember things after eating better.]

Fan Videos, Redux or Three

There's been a sudden spurt of press about fan video creators recently, specifically New York Magazine's profiling of Luminosity, in Online Videos 2007. Henry Jenkins has a short writeup here, suggesting he nominated her work. And here's a coincidentally timed article in the Japan Times on anime fan music video, pointed to by a vidder friend of mine.

While I'm at it, here's a link to my older post about a talk I gave at IBM on fan video creators. LiveJournal is one of the main places they are hanging out now, and in that post and talk I showed some network relations among "vidder" groups on LJ. The anime vid crowd is very distinct from the other TV show vidding crowds. They have an aesthetic and interests that evolved very independently. (As a former fan vidder myself, I don't love LiveJournal and what it's done for and to fandom's communication, but it has certainly been a nice central point for many folks to find each other and also avoid each other if wanted. LiveJournal's prominence in online media fandom is also mentioned frequently in Henry Jenkin's Gender and Fan Culture discussion.)

And speaking of gender and academic studies, I have a minor peeve about the discussion of vidding and Lum's work in that New York mag article, and in Henry's writeup. I suppose this is also one reason I got disillusioned by the academic studies of fandom while I was on their fringes as a fan vidder and grad student. There's a bit too much focus on stuff like "feminist critique" of TV shows and other big concepts that seem to "legitimize" something that to outsiders probably looks goofy and crazy. (Unless they're active in sports fandoms, and even then, that's okay in a way that TV fandom isn't!) The very vids that were picked of Lum's to host on NY mag's site in a postage-stamp-sized, stopmotion playback fashion are kind of off-topic, to me. They aren't the emotional ones about plot and story and character, they're commentary with gorgeous images and effects. I don't mean this in any way to criticize her work, which is excellent as always; but they aren't the ones of hers that are best-loved by the fan consumers. She herself says she goes for the emotional punch; so to me this makes these vids odd choices for the story, perhaps ones that were thought to hold up better to outsiders?

And a few comments on the online video THING that bugs most of the purist vidders. It may mean greater access and easier distrubition being on YouTube or Imeem, but the playback still sucks. Big screen quality of experience, caliber of edits, timing, etc. are all important to fan vidders. These online sites don't support it, and that means a lot of vidders just aren't happy with them as a means of distribution. If you watch vids on YouTube, you aren't seeing the real thing. I'm just saying. It started long before the Internet, and still lives in parallel, despite what people having conferences about online video might say. To illustrate, here is a long list of vids made about the Professionals (a UK tv show), with dates and authors. Look at the dates lower in the list. Those were made on VCRs, the way many of us started.

Relevant other links: DIY video conferenece, covering fan video in part, in February 2008. (They have reviewed submissions for the ones they think are best, by their criteria, not community criteria, again? I know a fan or two is involved, but still, their conference site worries me.) Some friends of mine whom I used to vid with posted a sampler of vids, including one of my co-authored ones, announced here. If you want to see all of Luminosity's fan works in non-postage-stamp jerky playback, her list is here.

Compelling Travel Slide Shows

A link for my family, and anyone else in this situation: You've come back from the vacation of your life, and you want to share. Your vacation photos should leave them wanting more, not less, and definitely not caffeine. Read "The Ultimate Guide to Memorable Travel Slideshows."

Some tips: Choose one or two evocative pics, not 8 of the same thing. Mix up people with landscape, for variety. Insert movie clips occasionally, to spice it up.

Software to make this easy: Surprisingly difficult to make a simple animated slideshow, it turned out. I tried a few programs that were on my computer and finally got results from Photoshop Elements, which will export a nice slideshow movie to Premiere Elements for creation of the DVD itself. On the Mac, the settings and process was a little hidden and didn't offer the same control over the zoom/pan effect, but you can achieve the same results with iPhoto and iDVD. It seems that Picasa will do it (haven't tried). Some DVD authoring apps will, and any movie-making app, but you really want some tools built for slideshows to make it easier for yourself.

Disclaimer: I've definitely violated these rules too, so this was a good reminder to me, too.

Cayman Island Critters

I went to Grand Cayman for snorkeling, and while it was excellent, I saw a lot of unexpectedly interesting animals.

The Blue Iguana is indigenous and endangered, but there are lots of other green iguanas and little brown lizards running around. The retired ones sun themselves on rich people's personal boat docks and pose for you. The blue iguanas roaming at the botanic gardens sport blue bling, a sample shown here:

The sting rays at Sting Ray City were amazingly interested in people. I guess they know a good food thing when they see it. You are swamped by them when you drop anchor in the shallow waters. The story is that fishermen cleaned their catch out there to avoid mosquitoes on land, and one smart guy turned it into a tourist attraction, undetered by Steve Irwin's sad demise at the tail of one. (Here is an article on "sting ray injuries survived.") They feel mushroomy on their underside, and sandpapery on the top side.

Here's a romantic shot of them in the water, but for up close and personal, you need to go see my critter picture collection here. (There is only one underwater shot there, to show off their smile, and one of the sting ray kiss you get wrestled into when you visit them on the tourist boats.)

Finally, turtles are farmed for food and tourists there. I found the crowding conditions a mite disturbing, but it's undeniably an aesthetic experience to see all those shells and mottled skin up close. Also, undeniably expensive to get in. I did it for the photo opp, and the chance to snorkel in a private lagoon with turtles in training. Training for people like me touching them while swimming, I guess. In said turtle park were also pretty birds from the Caribbean, which you can see in the critter photos.

When I got home, I discovered a newly arrived National Geographic Traveler mag had an article reviewing destination islands, scoring them in part by how much tourism is affecting them. [I discovered I'd been in a few of their top 20 already, and added more to my destinations desired list.] They were pretty much on target about Grand Cayman: "Exceptional diving and snorkeling but banking defines the island. Tourism is heavily weighted to cruise ships." I'd add: with huge resorts, and retirement McMansions as seen in Florida. But it was the best walk-off-shore-snorkeling I've found yet.

Cayman photos here: turtles, lizards, birds, rays, beaches.

Adventure Travel

I've been delinquent in blogging, due to travel (Cayman Islands for water, pics coming) and a whole lot of work. Speaking of travel, National Geographic's Adventure Travel magazine site has a tool that offers reviews of adventure travel companies. Pretty cool. I'd spend all my time on these trips if it weren't for the money, of course.

For a more eclectic and perhaps affordable set of options, use the site a friend recommended, from which I found my trip to Morocco: Adventurecenter. They aggregate trips from many companies, and have reasonable search options including price. Airfare is usually not included, and you'll find that it's the biggest issue with most of the more interesting destinations (read: off-the-beaten track). If you're afraid of traveling to "exciting" places alone (as a woman, I am), this type of group travel can be really fun.

For other resources on cheap travel, I recommend this site: Worldscheapestdestinations. It's not pretty, but the info is good.