Washington Post: Why NBC’s Olympic Coverage Doesn’t Mention Who Designed the Bird

Ratings

4 of 5 stars
What’s this?

“During the fantastic opening ceremonies, as well as many hours of broadcasting this week, I never heard NBC mention the stadium’s architects, the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron… If a story concerns a building but not its design per se, then journalists generally assume that their audience has no interest in knowing who designed the building, especially if the designer is not well known. Design authorship is usually considered factually irrelevant.” Sniff.

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That Old Time Software

Not long ago I downloaded a new productivity application that recently emerged from a prolonged beta period. Finally, the 1.0 version had arrived, and I was eager to get my hands on it, play around with its features and see what it had to offer. But, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to use it.

To be fair, this application, which shall remain nameless, had clearly been designed with great attention to detail. Its interface is not unattractive and its fit and finish is commendable; you wouldn’t be remiss in regarding it as a completely professional product.

However. I kept staring at it, and kept clicking on interface widgets and pushing buttons, but the more I explored, the less likely it seemed that I would ever really master it. I’m sure that its workflow makes sense, that with some investment in time, a user could realize some significant benefits from it. I just had a hard time thinking that one of those users would be me.

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Why Apple Doesnњt Create ЉConceptњ Products

Ratings

2 of 5 stars
What’s this?

“Although Nokia and Microsoft gave us an endless supply of concept products over the years, they haven’t produced, for example, anything like the TiVo, the iPod, the iPhone, OS X, the iTunes App Store, or created brand new user experience paradigms, transformed calcified markets, captured the imagination of people, and so on. They didn’t have the organizational and intellectual discipline to go from concept to product.”

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Messaging and Location, Location, Location

I’m already on the record about how I believe email can be a powerful interface to other applications. A large part of what makes that possible, for me, is Internet Message Access Protocol, or IMAP. I’ve been accessing my email account via this method for a few years now and it’s made the whole concept of email drastically more useful to me, primarily by liberating me from the specific location where I might have sent or received an email. It works so well, in fact, that now I want it for all the other kinds of messaging that I do too.

For those unfamiliar with it, IMAP leaves messages on the server as well as storing copies locally on your hard drive. It basically gives you the same in box (and sent folder, trash folder, etc.) on any computer you use regularly, or even when you access your account via webmail. Especially for receiving and replying to email from both the office and at home, it’s a huge improvement over its predecessor, POP, which can’t reflect a message sent or received from one computer onto another. What I’d like to see is an extension of the IMAP concept, if not its specification, to similarly manage all the other various kinds of messaging in which I engage regularly.

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Highly Demographic Language

In a recent blog post, my friend Chris Fahey raises the question of whether or not an interface designer is a salesman. In a way, he’s tackling more seriously a subject that I wrote about three years ago in a post titled “Window Dress for Success,” in which I only half-jokingly inferred possible marketing motivations from the then-proliferating varieties of chrome in Mac OS X applications.

In his post, Chris cannily argues that it’s the designer’s job not only to create a solution that is easy to use, but also to create a solution that looks easy to use. He writes:

“A designer who neglects marketing concerns and designs a product that the target audience sees as undesirable (because, for example, it lacks a sexy list of features or a glossy interface) is just as bad as a designer who neglects production concerns and creates something that is prohibitively expensive and time-consuming to build (to manufacture, program, whatever).”

With some qualifications, this statement about the role of designers — and especially, from where I sit, the role of interface designers — strikes me as insightfully true. As I somewhat cheekily suggested in that June 2005 post, it’s my opinion that interface is marketing, and unavoidably so.

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