Author Archives: Jon Lowder

Why Design is Hard

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Okay, this has been bugging me forever. I've been trying to figure out why entering a calendar event on my smartphone or Google calendar or Outlook feels so…annoying?..

Now back to calendars. When I think of months, I reflexively picture a circle, with January 1st at the top and June at the bottom. That uses the spatial processing part of my brain. When I think of a day within a month, I picture a wall calendar grid with four horizontal weeks. That's a different spatial model. When I think of the time of day, I think of a round clock with two complete cycles for AM and PM. My smartphone unhelpfully adds another spatial model by making me enter times in a sort of slot machine interface with rolling windows, which causes me to imagine a tire shape, with the tire heading toward me. Meanwhile, the other options I need to click are spread around the screen and require a mental scavenger hunt, which is another spatial task. 

Add to this spatial overload that my calendar likes to present itself sometimes in a month format, and other times by week. Worse yet, on some of my calendar interfaces the months scroll in a left-right orientation, and on other interfaces the months scroll up-down.

When I read Scott Adams' post about his frustration with the Google and Outlook calendar interfaces and got to the excerpt I've shared above, what struck me was that his arguments helped explain perfectly why designing anything is so hard.  I don't think I could picture the items that Adams describes any differently than he does – to me a month is a block, not a circle and every reference to time (minute, hour, day) looks like a line, i.e. a timeline.  Now take the two of us and multiply by the millions of people who use those calendars and you can understand why it would be near impossible to design something that is comfortable for everyone to use.

Having spent years in direct marketing, print publishing, online publishing and nonprofit management I've had to spend a lot of time thinking about design and usability.  I'm no designer (God help you if you need me to design anything), but I have to utilize design almost every day to do my job. My number one rule of thumb is this – just because I like it doesn't mean that the majority of the intended audience will.  The important part there is "the majority of the intended audience" because even Steve Jobs couldn't design something that everyone would like, but he was able to design products that literally enchanted a huge percentage of the human population. To me the ultimate goal with design is to make it as attractive and usable for the most people as humanly possible and that, my friends, is incredibly difficult and why I have no problem tapping the experts out there to do it for me.

Complexity and Money

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Scott Adams (Dilbert) has a blog and on it he recently wrote about banks.  I found myself nodding when I read the following:

As a general rule, you can usually assume that someone is trying to screw someone else whenever you find these two elements working together:

  1. Complexity
  2. Money

Complexity is how evil schemes are hidden from the public. Complexity is what caused so many people to get mortgages they couldn't afford. Complexity is how hedge funds hide their treachery. Complexity is how the derivatives debacle was possible. Complexity is how your financial manager can get away with charging you for doing nothing. Complexity is why you don't know if you can get a better deal with another phone carrier.

 

 

United Republic

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Although I think United Republic would be a great name for a band for the purposes of this post it refers to a new organization that wants to get big money out of politics.  While I'm somewhat sympathetic to the Occupy movement, and very skeptical as to its actual effectiveness, I think that groups like United Republic offer more promise to actually do something to help fix our political system. Here's a short video featuring Larry Lessig talking about the new coalition:

Lawrence Lessig Welcomes Rootstrikers to United Republic from Rootstrikers on Vimeo.

 

Adams (or someone like him) in ’12

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Scott Adams, the dude behind Dilbert, says he's running for POTUS as an Independent in 2012.  You have to believe him because he wrote it in his blog which, as we all know, is how you know you're dealing with someone serious.  Even if he doesn't run I'd like to have a candidate who thinks like he does:

On the budget, I propose a plan to cut every Federal government expense by 10% and increase every Federal tax by 10%. I'd call that the default plan, meaning I prefer a better plan, but I wouldn't expect anyone to come up with one. The advantage of this plan is that it's bad for every American. That's a little something I call "fair."

I'd also call a public debate on the topic of supply side economics, to end once and for all the question of whether lowering taxes increases government revenues. I would host the debate myself, with a Judge Judy sort of approach, and decide the winner. If it turns out that my proposed 10% tax increase would reduce government revenue, I'd cancel that part of my plan the same day.

I'd propose capping the amount any one person can inherit per death at $50 million. Estates can choose to donate the rest to charities, distribute it to stockholders, or give it up in taxes. $50 million is more than enough to turn any offspring into a lazy, self-absorbed, drug addicted, douche bag. Any more would be a waste. That plan needs some fine tuning, but you get the idea.

As President, I would remain deeply committed to flip-flopping. If new information or better thinking changes my opinion, so be it. That's how brains are supposed to work.

I can also promise that I won't try to remember the names of other world leaders, federal agencies, or even my own staff. Only an idiot believes a president can remember all of that stuff. 

Textbooks

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I have a thing about textbooks.  As I've written before I think the textbook industry is basically a crock and that our school systems need to seriously consider blowing up the current system and looking at innovative ways to use technology to serve students rather than requiring them to carry around 50-pound backpacks filled with dead trees. As you might expect I'd love to attend the panel discussion on textbooks tomorrow (Thursday, November 17)at UNC, but sadly I won't be able to make it so I'm hoping they post video or a transcript of the session online.

Kicked When They’re Down

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While the banks might have abandoned their plans, for now, to start charging debit card fees they do have one group they're hitting with fees – the unemployed:

Bank of America recently aborted plans to charge ordinary banking customers $5 a month to use their debit cards in the face of national outrage. But the bank has quietly continued to mine another source of fees: jobless people who depend upon the bank's prepaid debit cards to tap their benefits. Bank of America and other financial firms — including U.S. Bank, Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase — have secured contracts to provide access to public benefits in 41 states. These contracts typically allow banks to collect unlimited fees from merchants and consumers.

In short, the same banks whose speculation delivered a financial crisis that has destroyed millions of jobs have figured out how to turn widespread unemployment into a profit center: The larger the number of people who are out of work and dependent upon the state for sustenance, the greater the potential gains through administering their benefits.