It seems laughably obvious that this supposedly cutting-edge voting device will feel positively ancient in only a couple of years. It already looks like a cheap peice of crap to me, hardly something worthy of being integral to the American democratic process. And believe it or not, this photo was taken in 2004 — even though it looks a lot more like it’s from 1994 (think Windows 3.1).

In 2004, Behavior worked on a web site for the Smithsonian Museum of American History’s special exhibition Vote: The Machinery of Democracy. The exhibition focused on America’s “voting patchwork”, the broad range of voting technologies used state by state, county by county. It was an enlightening experience working on the project, and I encourage you to visit the site to learn about how we got to where we are now.

The current range of voting technologies in use today includes:

• Paper Ballots
• Gear-and-Lever Voting Machines
• Punch Cards
• Optical Scan Ballots and Readers
• Direct-Recording Electronic Ballots

It’s widely assumed that the most modern technology available is obviously the best option — that is, that we should be using touch-screen direct-recording electronic voting machines. But maybe this isn’t the case — counterintuitively, perhaps an older technology is the best approach. MORE…

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I am an extreme multitasker. I usually have at least fifteen windows open on my desktop at any given time, often as many as thirty. I usually have several Firefox windows open at once, too, each with a dozen or more active tabs with pages I either intend to read or need to use as a reference.

Of course, this degree of multitasking is unhealthy. For the most part, each window in front of me represents an unfinished task on my plate, taking up space on my desktop and nibbling away at CPU cycles. Some windows will just sit there for days, untouched and neglected.

At best, these piles of opened windows act as a kind of “to do” list for me, reminding me of my unfinished business. In fact, it’s a pretty safe bet that my goal each day is simply to close all the windows. Usually, however, the clutter just prevents me from finishing any one task by tempting me to revisit and make incremental changes to many other ones.

So whenever an application crashes on me and closes all of its windows or tabs, or even more dramatically when the whole computer crashes, it’s sometimes a blessing in disguise. It is like a splash of cold water to wake me up and force me to take stock of what was really important to get done — and to allow the less important stuff, and the wasteful stuff, to simply fall away and bubble to the top later on when it’s really important, according to a real plan.

I have over the years cultivated many good habits that make normal computer crashes (it’s sad that crashes can be considered “normal”) pretty harmless: I save often, and I save multiple versions of important documents. I even compose my comments for other peoples’ blogs using Outlook (which autosaves email drafts) before finally pasting them in the blog’s comment field. So when my computer crashes, it’s almost never disastrous for me at all. In fact, it’s usually quite nice. I usually gain more than I lose. Does that make me a sicko?

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Behavior is the featured studio in the latest edition of Design Interact. It’s a nice short-and-sweet introduction to Behavior, showing the diversity of our work and providing a little of the feel of how we work on projects.

The profile includes some mini-interviews with me and my partners about some of the sites we’ve launched in the past year, including The Onion, ResortQuest, Odilon Redon (for the MoMA), Country Crock, and HBO.

As we approach our 5-year anniversary in a few months, and as we grow with more new faces and new clients, it’s nice to see ourselves through another set of eyes and to even feel a little proud of what we’ve accomplished.

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This is not an Aeron chair.

I’m quoted in the September 25 issue of New York Magazine about my thoughts on the Aeron chair. Because, you know, I’m an expert and all.

It may not be clear from the article, but I’m really not among those who find the Aeron to be the world champion of chairs. In fact, although I sit on one all day long at Behavior, I actually prefer simpler, armless chairs and constantly wish there was a way to remove the arms from my Aeron.

My favorite chair, the one I sit on in my home studio, is Vitra’s Meda Chair, pictured here. While the Meda chair has some similarities to the Aeron — the mesh back, most obviously — it lacks the sleek XR-71 Blackbird-meets-H.R. Giger biomorphic curves of the Aeron. It’s basically made of two simple planes: one curved with a stretchy mesh and one flat with a thin layer of padding. But somehow it suits my aesthetic — and my body — far better.

As ergonomic as the Aeron is, it is designed for only one sitting position, i.e., sitting up straight as the ergonomists and our mothers have always told us we’re supposed to. A friend said today that the only thing missing is a seat belt to complete the Aeron’s strict posture-enforcement. My Meda Chair, however, in its simplicity permits me to sit the way I want to: to cross one or both of my legs, to sit on the chair sideways, to lean back pretty darn far, to throw my arm over the back of the chair. Encouraging good posture is great and all, but sometimes I want to express myself in the way I’m sitting, and dammit the Aeron just won’t let me do that.

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New York design firm Giampietro+Smith hits a little information architecture home run with their design for the magazine the revealer, a very interesting web site about media and religion. The problem of how to structure the presentation of breaking news, current-ish articles, and “evergreen” always-interesting material is something information architects face all the time but never seem to get right.

Using only three simple (and neatly alliterative) words, G+S nailed it:

When Behavior was working with the AIGA on the redesign of their Design Forum a few years ago, we at one point pictured an almost identical structure to the revealer’s, with three columns of content that each had a different “pace”. I imagined the three columns sliding vertically at three different speeds, like Stewart Brand (pictured here at the 2003 IA Summit in an awesome photo by Mike Lee) describing his Clock of the Long Now, in which different types of knowledge and understanding move and evolve at different speeds. We didn’t end up using that design concept, and I wonder if it wasn’t in part because we never quite envisioned it with just the right words for the three columns.

It’s great to see plain old fashioned English used to make information architecture work elegantly. All too often a seemingly-great IA or user interface design strategy falls to peices when you finally get down to nomenclature. Which is why I think it is essential for information architects to be excellent writers with large and strong vocabularies — if you can’t think of a way to take a 15-word button description and reduce it to three, if you can’t think of the one word that succintly describes the twenty types of content in a single section of your site, then you’re missing a critical tool from your UXD utility belt.

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Research-based design is a noble and widely-admired approach to building good products, especially in the web design field.

Like a great many other user experience design firms, at Behavior we conduct research whenever possible, to whatever degree our clients’ budgets and timelines will allow. Our projects frequently involve usability testing (both lab-based and informal), card-sorting exercises, stakeholder interviews, user polls and quantitative analysis, direct ethnographic studies and contextual analysis, and/or secondary market research.

In short, we try to know as much as possible about our clients, their customers, and their competitors, and we use this knowledge to inform our design process.

Many web designers and consultancies, however, feel it’s not enough to use research to inform their design process. They go further: they try to make “scientific” user research the very foundation of their design process.

I use the word “try” because I suspect that the ideal of empirical, science-based user-centered design is something that we aspire to but never reach.

That’s me being generous. The cynic in me would not have used the word “try”. The cynic would say “pretend”, as in “many firms pretend to use scientific user research as the foundation of their design process”. I don’t want to seem like I’m taking petty swipes at competitors, but honestly there’s no way to say this without being plain about it: I suspect that a lot of user research in this industry is a sham.
MORE…

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“Scope Creep”, also known as “Feature Creep” and “Creeping Featuritis“, is the tendency of development teams to constantly find opportunities to add new features to a product. It is widely considered to be deadly: It’s obviously destructive to project schedules, but adding new features also has an enormous impact on much more than just the time and cost of the project.

Apple has recently posted an excellent page on their developer resource site that sums up these larger costs of Scope Creep quite elegantly and succintly. It’s worth a read if only to have these talking points handy for your future meetings:

When making design decisions regarding features in your application, it’s important to weigh the costs, not all of which are financial, against the potential benefits. Every time you add a feature to your application, the following things can happen:

• Your application gets larger.
• Your application gets slower.
• Your application’s human interface becomes more complex.
• You spend time developing new features rather than refining existing features.
• Your application’s documentation and help become more extensive.
• You run the risk of introducing changes that could adversely affect existing features.
• You increase the time required to validate the behavior of your application.

Of course, the part I’m most interested in is the third bullet about complicating the user interface. Where a feature is supposed to help some users, it may make life more complicated for far more users. MORE…

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Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActiveCorp is building a new headquarters on Manhattan’s west side in Chelsea. And it’s a Frank Gehry building! This is exciting news, and there’s lots to see and talk about even now, long before the building is even completed.

New York’s Architectural Draught

We’ve all seen Gehry’s signature works over the last decade or so. He’s put his distinctive mark on the skylines of Bilbao, Seattle… even little old Weil am Rhein, Germany’s got their own Gehry landmark. But New York City, no dice. In fact, there’s been very little truly interesting and innovative landmark architecture in New York, period, for several decades. There was talk about five years ago, during the dot-com boom, of Gehry building a Guggenheim outpost in the downtown/South Street Seaport area, but despite the excitement those plans seem to have been put on hold.

So when it was announced that IAC was going forward with building a Gehry-designed corporate headquarters in Manhattan, New Yorkers were super excited. We can’t wait to see it completed!

But here’s the great part: We don’t have to wait until the construction is complete to appreciate Gehry’s remarkable architecture. MORE…

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Gotta clear out some final SXSW loose ends so I can go on with my life!

At least they wont ever change this one, I guess.

• Virginia Murdoch suggested the creation of a Society for the Preservation of Paul Rand Logos. I could not agree more. I have a message for companies currently sporting a Paul Rand Logo: You Do Not Need A Redesign. If you do it, it will suck. I still can’t beleive that any design firm would have the audacity to actually accept such an assignment.
• We went to see a show at Austin’s Harry Ransom Center entitled “Technologies of Writing“… It was a fantastic show, with comprehensive examples of writing tools and technologies from around the world and through all of history, including: mysterious Mesopotamian pre-cuneiform objects, Linear-B decryption documents, a Gutenberg Bible, Gertrude Stein’s exquisite stationary, a sample page of Charlotte Bronte’s insanely tiny handwritten manuscript, a vitrine dedicated to the history and techniques for the manufacture of pencils, an early dictaphone, and so much more. It’s a tour de force, really, and anyone interested in information, communication, and even just writing, should pay this show a visit. Many kudos to the curators: I hope it goes on tour.
• I had the great pleasure of meeting most of the members of the crew from Pixelworthy, a talented web firm from my birthplace and hometown, Philadelphia.
• I thought that the SXSW Web Awards show was a little boring, but perhaps that’s only because Behavior didn’t win either of the awards we were nominated for! Still, there was one highlight: After one winner thanked God for his professional success, the very next winner solemnly thanked… the Giant Spaghetti Monster! The audience roared with approval. Bravo!

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This is my face.

I’ll be at SXSW in Austin Texas starting this Friday afternoon. If you’ll be there, look for me: I’m the guy with this photo (right) on his badge.

I had such a great time last year, my first year attending the conference, that as a result I’m bringing two of my partners from Behavior with me, too; Ralph Lucci and Jeff Piazza (links require SXSW registrant logins).

If you’ll be there, please leave a comment below so I know to look for you and say hi. I look forward to meeting ya!

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