Design Sapling.com

A few months ago, I wrote about how to use Gmail as your To-Do list.

I just came upon some email innovation ideas from Lifehacker.com.

Good suggestions for better email usability.

CNN released this article about entrepreneurs featuring the Segway inventor, Dean Kamen.

It’s an interesting piece about entrepreneurship, with quotes from Kamen and popular entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki.

In brief, the article says entrepreneurs’ strength is their ignorance: they don’t know that the odds are stacked against them. They don’t know when to quit.

I think that’s a little off base. Knowing at the beginning of a project whether or not you have the passion to stick through it is hard. Seth Godin understands that knowing when to quit is a strength. And pushing through a project when the odds looked stacked against you isn’t evidence of a character flaw. It’s a sign of passion, guts, and creativity.

Godin has a name for those early days of the project when things aren’t fun and easy anymore: the Dip. In his book, The Dip, he shows readers what it takes to push through and the rewards that follow if you do it right. Like the rest of his books I’ve read, it’s well-written, concise and intelligent.

There’s a security hole in WordPress, the blogging platform running this site.

For the last two entries I posted, and probably this one, the comments somehow get turned off and there is a huge list of hidden links added to the entry.

My server host, Bluehost.com, seems to keep WordPress up to date. Not sure what I can do. I know next to nothing about WordPress.

If anyone knows of a solution, let me know in comments (if you can)!

I just received an email asking me to volunteer my time. I didn’t want to do it.

It asked for an RSVP “Yes” if you were coming; all you have to do is click a “Yes” button. The request was sent to hundreds of people; easy to ignore.

But this email asked that you also RSVP “No” if you are NOT coming.
Why would they need that? Whoever didn’t reply “Yes” isn’t coming!

The trick is, people don’t want to disappoint.
An explicit “No” option makes it less likely you’ll ignore the request since you can easily just click the RSVP button instead. It’d be rude not to respond.

But now you’re in the position of actively saying “No“. And you don’t want to be the bearer of bad news.

I don’t have any studies at hand that back this up, but I’m guessing the tactic they used increased response rates and increased the number of people saying “Yes” who would have otherwise ignored it.

[ For the record, I clicked "No".
They sent me to a page asking for a donation. ]

Grab your cellphone if it has a camera.
Take a picture of your location after you park.
Especially useful in multi-level garages.

I recently took a course on design communication at Cooper. Cooper is an interaction design firm. The founder, Alan Cooper, is one of the godfathers of interaction design.
Adobe TV has a video showcasing Cooper’s use of Fireworks. It’s a good introduction to the type of work an interaction designer might do after performing user research and developing a solid framework for the product.

I would consider interaction design to be a large sub-field of human factors. Lately, there has been a debate among some prominent interaction designers on the Interaction Design Association discussion board concerning the usefulness of UCD. In particular, the usefulness of observing users, developing personas, and using those personas to guide a design has been challenged by Robert Hoekman Jr., author of Designing the Obvious and Designing the Moment which advocate an alternative approach to Interaction Design called activity centered design.

Personas are a central part of Goal-Directed Design, a UCD process developed by Alan Cooper. Hoekman claims that, while personas may be good for understanding a niche market, it’s hard to apply that to something made for everyone. This is a valid point. The
creation of personas takes into account work environment, social factors, and personal preferences. There’s no common ground on those topics for the mass market. The solution is a process developed by Don Norman called Activity-Centered Design (ACD). Norman and Hoekman both claim that people adapt to technology, citing evidence found in our daily lives: using clocks, remote controls, musical instruments, etc… None of that is natural, and yet we learn how to use it without trouble.

Activity-Centered Design focuses on “activities”, which are comprised of tasks. Tasks are comprised of actions, and actions are comprised of operations. Norman’s uses a cellphone as an example in his article Human-Centered Design Harmful?. A cellphone can do many functions, such as email, voice, SMS, calendar, camera, etc… The “activity” for a cellphone would be communication. The tasks would be checking email or dialing a number. He then contends that the difference between Human-Centered Design (HCD) and ACD is that HCD only sees the opportunity for
technology to adapt to people while ACD sees the potential for people to adapt to technology. With ACD, products are designed to allow people to easily adapt to the technology.

Reading through many discussion on the Interaction Design Association discussion forum, I conclude that each method has its purpose depending on the situation. It’s better to gather many techniques from different methodologies than it is to choose one and stick to it dogmatically.