Kizmo

These young women waiting for a cab at a nearby hotel served as a testament to the value of viral marketing in its most subtle form. And made me laugh.

With the same shoes, jacket, and purse in different colors, they pulled off looking eerily coordinated without crossing the faux pas of exact duplication.

I laughed at my friends and I for the same thing a few weeks ago. Affinity marketing is a hot topic these days, and occurences like this one are a reminder how powerful influence can be when it comes from those most similar to yourself or to whom you relate closely. The execution of this influence is so ingrained in those affected it goes unnoticed, though is often extremely clear to outsiders.

On Tuesday, Peter Merholz announced that four years after its original publication, their report, “Leveraging Business Value: How ROI Changes User Experience”, is now available for free (previously, it cost $395). As Peter notes, despite being four years old, many of their conclusions are as valid now as they were four years ago. Check it out (PDF).

The act of buying a BART ticket is, well, difficult. I will save that for another longer, more studied entry. But I need to comment on my experience from the other day of getting a change for one dollar so that I could get on MUNI.

The default screen for buying tickets has green type in the bottom right corner that says: “Press “H” to get change”, so I put my dollar bill in the slot. Then, without reading the screen again, pressed the “H” button. And my dollar gets spit out. I’m very confused, so I read the screen again, to determine that I had pushed the correct button, then put my money again, and went to push the “H” button. But this time I read the screen. Now in red type it said, “To cancel press this button” pointing to the “H” button. So the same button I used to get change, now becomes the cancel button. How confusing. Changing the action of a button in the middle of a transaction (and on top of that, making it cancel out the process) is not a consistent interaction model. There are at least six other buttons to choose from that could become the cancel button. Why not dedicate one of them to always being the cancel button?

Something fun for Friday: Test your “color IQ” with this test.

(via Todd Warfel)

Clay Shirky has been out talking about his book “Here comes everyone”. Recently he spoke at Web 2.0 Expo SF 2008. The main point of his talk is the idea that the world has a cognitive surplus. With the free time we now have in our lives, we would be more productive if we didn’t watch TV. He uses building a Wikipedia project as an example - people coming together to create and build. So, I did a little calculation: if I averaged just 1 hour a day of TV watching for, say, 30 years, that comes out to 10,950 hours. That’s a lot of hours. I’m sure some were wasted and some were worth it.

What Clay is really getting at is the shift in media, namely hat participatory media is much more interesting and valuable to people and society. What are you participating in? What are you creating?

Google’s announcement of “Chrome” (yet another web browser to compete for your surfing hours) is a big point of discussion this morning. More interesting to me at the moment is the comic created by Scott McCloud to introduce the browser to journalists and bloggers (Google Book version and PDF available here).

At Kizmo, we’ve discussed and used comics as a means of expressing complicated interactions in many of our documents. For example, storyboarding interactions in a functional specification is usually far more effective a description than a pure-text effort.  Of course, with a creative director who’s a former comic book artist, visual story-telling runs in our company DNA.

McCloud’s panels do a great job (in my humble opinion) of expressing some of the technical concepts and features of the new browser, as well as the reasoning behind them, to the target audience. While Valleywag takes a different view, I think the complaint that the material is over many people’s heads misses the probable intended audience. I wondered why the comic was created and for whom it was intended, and then saw that McCloud, in his handy mini-FAQ, says that it’s intended for journalists and bloggers. Presumably, these are the same journalists and bloggers who’d be likely to cover the launch of a new browser, and I think the comic does a good job of covering some technical concepts to people with some, but possibly not a lot, of technical knowledge. Ever tried to explain a virtual machine, or protected memory?

Check out the comic. There are a couple of places where I had to think for a minute to get the picture, but there are some neat illustrations, too. Literal sandboxes, phishing illustrated, and on page 25, a reference to a meme from which I used to derive great amusement were some of my faves.