Category Archives: Business

Bookkeeping for Dummies

QuickBooksMy award for the worst interface in a best-selling, market-leading software application goes to Intuit’s perversely inelegant QuickBooks. This bookkeeping program is more or less ubiquitous among small-businesses, in spite of its opaque and unfriendly design, which I find to be really amazing because it’s truly, profoundly awful. As the finances at Behavior have gotten more and more complicated, I’ve been finding myself spending increasing amounts of time trying to figure out QuickBooks’ hidden corners and idiosyncratic organizational structure. For someone who has only a cursory understanding of accounting, I find that almost nothing I click on behaves as I expect it to, and it provides no clear metaphors for understanding how to navigate through a company’s finances. Even fundamental behaviors like scrolling and searches are unpredictable, having been half-heartedly implemented or incompetently reinvented by Intuit’s software designers. I just can’t say it enough: this program sucks.

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The ’Point I’m Making

PowerPointAs horrific an application as PowerPoint is, it can’t be denied that it’s achieving a kind of critical mass in our modern culture, if all the recent attention paid to it by the likes of Edward Tufte and David Byrne is any indication. I’ve been thinking about this because at Behavior, we’re working with a client to help craft their PowerPoint presentations by juicing them up a bit with some embedded Flash movies and other design trickery.

It’s not the first time we’ve been asked to do it, and painful as it is, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s clearly one of the best ways for a company to spend its design dollar. Given how unremittingly horrible are the majority of PowerPoint presentations given by businesses, one surefire way to hit a home run is with a lucid and visually stunning slideshow.

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Ghosts of Dotcom Bubbles Past

Rare Medium LivesThis will be of interest mostly to people who used to work with me at Rare Medium: the company, surprisingly, still lives, and not just in the perfunctory, diminished, managerial-only form in which it’s been limping along for the past two years. The old Atlanta office is actually still in the business of Web development and technology consulting, having bought all of that location’s assets from the parent company (at least, that’s what I understand happened) and adopted the URL RareMedium.net.

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The Skillz to Design the Billz

Bills, Bills, BillsThere was a stack of bills waiting for me on my desk at Behavior when I returned to work on Monday. It’s pretty amazing how quickly bills will accumulate even for a small business, and I wrote literally eighteen checks before the day was out. Paying vendors and utilities has been my responsibility since last fall, when we rented our office space and the monthly expenses started really racking up. In my dealings with countless of these statements, I’ve been keeping mental notes on the usability of invoices, what makes them easy to understand and easy to pay. Following is a sketch of an ‘ideal’ paper-based invoice.

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Better Browsers and Books While You Wait

Two reasons why I’m sure there will be another Internet boom (though hopefully one that is not as out of hand as the last one): the continued bursts of creativity in the browser space even in the face of Goliath-like domination by Microsoft, and the incremental yet determined progress of just-in-time product manufacturing. In plain English, I’m talking about Web browsin’ and book readin’.

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Food for Thought

DinnerSomeone I was talking to over the weekend was saying that he felt that design is currently “over-supplied,” meaning, I guess, that in this market there is an overabundance of available design services, talent and studios. I started thinking about what that meant, really, and I have a feeling that a lot of thinking and postulation about the design business relies too heavily on the idea that design is basically the same as a service business — like say McKinsey — or a product business — like say Nike.

But I’ve started thinking — and this theory is still less than a week old, and I have yet to properly flesh it out — that design is most like the restaurant industry, which is a multibillion dollar business, and which allows for the co-existence of multiple levels of success, from mass-market chains to speciality boutiques. The more I think about it, the more I like this model, because the restaurant business is highly varied, is not a zero sum game, and everybody needs to eat, just like everybody needs design.

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R.I.P. C&G

Casady & GreeneI have a soft spot for utility software — especially for the Macintosh — because the authors, engineers and publishers who work in this niche almost always seem to be real fans of the computing experience. The very nature of utility software — those little add-ons and enhancements that subtly or significantly alter the behavior of the operating system — is one of tweaking, of altering the way of things in a particular, sometimes obscure way so that the universe seems just a tad bit more in order… and it’s usually the most devoted computer geeks who will tweak.

Utilities make computing more efficient and personal, and especially with those programs written for the Macintosh, they make things more fun. Which is why I’m so sad to see longtime Mac utility publisher Casady & Greene shutter its operations.

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Consolidation without Representation

FCC Chairman PowellA major defeat for democracy is imminent at the FCC, which is just three weeks away from voting on significant changes to the rules that govern media ownership. FCC Chairman Michael Powell, the son of Secretary of State Colin Powell, has not only withheld information on these changes to the agency’s five commissioners, but he has also refused to make documentation on them available to the public. In all likelihood, they will relax these rules, allowing even greater consolidation of media control among the huge corporations that already dominate television and radio.

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Ubiquitous, Cheap and Out of Control

Compact DiscsThe problem with the record industry is not piracy, it’s that its primary product — the compact disc — has been completely devalued. There are some pretty convincing arguments for this that the RIAA obstinately refuses to acknowledge: principally, that the cost of CD’s is out of proportion with both recent inflationary history and the cost of competitive entertainment media like, specifically, DVD’s.

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