Yesterday was my birthday, and I took the day off. It was supposed to be a relaxing day. It began by making pancakes with my wife, then playing Skate for a while. Soon after I went to get a massage followed by some lunch. Lunch threw my day off. We went to a new-to-the-neighborhood (but not new to Chicago) fancy-ish, sit-down sandwich place called Jerry's. Their menu is gigantic. I thought deciding on what to eat would be the biggest problem there. I was wrong.

We ordered our food, and while waiting noticed three new tables seated at varying times. We also noticed that about 20 minutes had passed without food. Again, we're talking sandwiches. Soon after our waiter comes out to tell us that he's sorry, but our order was "stuck behind a giant take-out order". Injury noted.

Now a tangent on how my mind works...
If someone walks into a sandwich shop to place a giant take-out order, they can safely assume they'll be waiting a for awhile. If my wife and I sit down in a sandwich shop and order two sandwiches, we assume it won't take very long. If the kitchen would have understood these common assumptions, they would have realized that the length of time added for the person waiting for the take-out order by having two additional sandwiches made (ours), would have been minimal compared to their overall wait time. The take-out customer would likely not even notice. Instead, the restaurant left two sets of customers waiting for the same amount of time for two drastically different-sized orders. Scientific thinking in the kitchen doesn't always have to yield foam and/or crunchy, flavored air.

Back to the story. With the aforementioned injury noted, here's the added insult. After waiting for almost 45 minutes, the three other tables that were seated after us got their food before we did! WTF? Once the food finally did arrive, something interesting happened. It was so incredibly good that the frustration I felt for having to wait 45 minutes for a sandwich nearly disappeared. Nearly... hence this post.

They're important lessons for anyone who handles a product-driven, customer-service-related company. Know that simply having good products won't retain your customers, but they certainly help. The impression between product and customer is fleeting, while the impression between company and customer is long-lasting. Recognizing an issue on the approach is always better than reacting to it at the intersection. At that point, the damage has already been done. How creatively you think to avoid the collision is everything. Remember our server who apologized for the tremendous wait? He didn't make sure the customers waiting the longest got their food first. Back up your apologies with actions; don't apologize to your customers to make yourself feel better.

So, does this mean that I'll go back to Jerry's? Sure. Their product is amazing. Only next time, I'll get it to go. Also, the rest of my day was really excellent, so don't go thinking I let a sandwich ruin my day!

Last night I was roaming around online looking for places to get a large sectional couch for our new house. To not leave out any options, I headed over to the La-Z-Boy site to see what they have to offer. I assumed that if anyone knows how to make a gigantic, all-about-comfort, family-style sectional, it'd be them. That may be true, but what I found is that La-Z-Boy has no idea how to sell their couches online.

You go to their site, and you click couches. Then you click sectionals. What you'll get next, I thought was an error. 64px by 64px. That's the size of the images you're given to try to find a style you like. No options to make images larger. 4,096 total pixels. Take it or leave it. 100 pixels are equivalent to 1 inch in real life. What they're doing is the equivalent of printing a catalog where the images are just shy of 3/4" by 3/4". Are they trying to convince you to shop elsewhere? This is the brick-and-mortal equivalent of forcing their customers to look at furniture through the wrong end of a telescope.

It's amazing to me that when a company's sole purpose is to sell furniture, they can be so incredibly bad at doing it online and still stay in business.

According to this article on BBC news...

Online auction site eBay has said it plans to overhaul its feedback system and will ban sellers from leaving negative comments about buyers.

EBay said problems were occurring, and slowing down trade, when buyers left negative comments about sellers who then retaliated with their own views.

There's no question that I'm a community-minded dude, but I can't see how Ebay would consider their actions as a good idea. Did anyone think this through? Because a few sellers were giving retaliatory negative transaction ratings to buyers, all sellers can no longer warn other sellers of a potential bad transaction? True, you could argue that a seller could be wary of a buyer with minimal positive feedback, but that now puts pressure on a seller to give someone positive feedback. What happens if the buyer doesn't deserve positive or negative feedback? Without a completely balanced and open way of rating a transaction, the lack of response can (and will, I assure you) be misinterpreted as a negative experience.

It concerns me that either Ebay doesn't know or doesn't care that by tipping the scales in favor of buyers, they're poisoning the well of data, thereby potentially nullifying the purpose of ratings altogether. If it was me, I'd simply associate each transaction rating with the corresponding rating from the other party - whether it be positive, negative, or non-existent. I'd also publish the date and time of the rating, so a buyer or seller could assess for themselves what ratings are genuine and what ratings are revenge. But like I said: I'm a community-minded dude. I'd rather give my users the best data possible to make as informed of a decision as possible, and not let a few bad apples spoil the bunch.

The lines to get to the observatory at the Empire State Building are pretty long. This is what I learned from my first trip to the Renegade Handmade store in Chicago, the consignment shop spin-off of the Renegade Craft Fair. I learned this, because this is what the woman who sat at the counter was talking about on the phone while she ignored the four of us. We were walking around the area scoping out spots for our new Kids' store, and wanted to drop into Renegade Handmade not only to inquire about the area - but to buy stuff. The conversation that she should have been having was with the customer who was trying to get her attention to see what she could do to keep the six prints he wanted to buy from getting wet in the rain. And yes, that customer was me. One of us did buy something, and he managed to get a question in during checkout. The cashier didn't bother to put the phone down. Nice.

Mostly, I feel bad for the artists who trust Renegade Handmade to be an outlet to sell their goods. I hope they're not putting all their hand-painted eggs in one hand-woven basket.

Yelp.com really bothers me. It's not so much that it exists, it's that they make no effort to give one user the ability to seem more credible the next. Their system is so easily exploitable, it ruins the purpose of the site for everyone. Does Yelp not realize this, or simply not care? Either way, here's some free advice for the makers of Yelp:

1. Have reviewers tag a review as positive or negative before posting. Do a word count, then weight the usefulness of the review. Try to write a useful negative or positive in less than 10 words. "Dude! Best/worst pizza ever, whoa!" is noise, not a useful review.


2. Create a trust network. It's kinda like a social network, but not lame. Allow users to set how many degrees of separation they trust. Sure, it'll vastly decrease the content for certain users, but (1) they've chosen that so it's OK, and (2) it'll add a whole new facet of the site for users who just want to share/discover services with the people they know.


3. Let people quietly mark posts as suspicious. Just having a general "flag this review" doesn't do anything. It's entirely too open, so it's inferred use is "tell us if this is offensive to you". On a review site, offensive is the least of your worries. Harsh language in a negative review is exactly inversely proportionate to the type of language usually found in a positive review. This is no reason to flag. C'mon, who's steering the ship? Give your users options so they learn the different flagging reasons you're looking for. Receiving a flag from a user who's suspicious of a reviewer using a fake account is way more useful than wasting your time addressing an F-bomb.


4. "Was this review useful/funny/cool?". Oh, grow up! None of those things matter! Allowing users to review reviews without fixing the credibility issue is spiraling further out of control. Simply put: it's 100% exploitable. And "funny" or "cool"? You'd get more useful data by inviting your users into your co-lo facility and encouraging them take a dump on your servers.

In the end, the whole point of the site is ruined if it allows people to exploit the most obvious weakness of all: the fake account. Not only am I suspicious of the one shining review in a collection of tarnished ones, I know for a fact that business owners post fake reviews and/or encourage other people to do it for them. So, Yelp... in the interest of your users, the fake account issue needs to be fixed ASAP - but, I'm not giving the solution to that one away for free. Sorry, but I don't know you.

This morning I was thinking about pixels, and I realized that I had no idea where the term came from. I checked it out on wikipedia, and this is what I found:

A pixel (short for picture element, using the common abbreviation "pix" for "pictures") is a single point in a graphic image.

This information makes me thankful that the people in charge of naming had the good sense to consider "graphic" slang. Something tells me that web design just wouldn't be as desirable of a career if people were referred to as pickle pushers!

When I was a kid I remember reading Stephen King (as Richard Bachman)'s The Running Man - the futuristic story about the most popular TV show in the world where criminals play a life-or-death version of American Gladiators for their freedom. A lot of garbage on TV makes me wonder just how far we really are from that being a reality?

I recently started seeing commercials for a new Fox game show called The Moment of Truth. The premise seems simple enough: answer a few questions honestly for a chance at a half-million dollars. Before the show is taped in front of an audience, including the contestants friends and family, each contestant is hooked up to a polygraph machine and asked the questions they'll be asked while the show is being taped. This way the producers know what's true and what's not. Easy enough, right? Well, Fox being Fox, they wouldn't just make it that easy. In fact, they've managed to make the show downright sadistic.

The version of the commercial I saw showed three vignettes. The first was a man being asked "would you give your father a kidney to save his life" while his father looked on in horror from the audience. The second was a man being asked "have you ever touched a co-worker inappropriately" while his really-pissed-off wife shook her head in disbelief. The last was a young woman being asked "do you see yourself still being married to your husband five years from now" while her husband sat sadly waiting for the answer.

While participating on this show may not end a contestant's life, Fox is certainly promoting the idea of the possibility of ruining it. And for what? Money? Congratulations! You're an asshole. Here's your consolation check.

Sadly, millions of people will tune in for the promise of witnessing an emotional beat-down on "The Moment of Truth". Millions more tune in on a regular basis for the promise of a physical beat-down on the fastest growing televised "sport" in the United States, the UFC. I'm incredibly curious about how long it will take for life to imitate art, and for Stephen King (and tons of others, I'm sure) to say "I told you so!".

I was reading the Consumer Reports review on my car out of pure curiosity, and something bothered me. It got low marks for the controls not being designed intuitively. Being a designer, I'm certainly on "team intuitive design", but that's because the web is a place where intuitive design really matters. First of all, I beg to differ about my cars controls being counter-intuitive, but that's just me. Certainly a few things took some seeking out. I'm not seeing this as a big deal. Anything I didn't get right away, I learned quickly enough. It took me maybe 3 days to fully understand all the ins-and-outs of the car, including the navigation UI. Maybe CR is reporting intellectually to the lowest common denominator consumer.

I'm failing to see the use of reporting on how intuitive the controls are when there's no realistic expectation of fully understanding the whole car in 30 seconds. If you're purchasing a car, it's not beyond reason that you'll have the vehicle for at least 12 months. The whole point of something being intuitive is so that you understand it right away. This, for example, is very useful for the web because you have casual users coming and going. You make things intuitive so they can get around easily, resulting (hopefully) in a longer stay. In that case, intuition is something to consider.

As I see it, the only way having vehicle controls being counter-intuitive as negative is if you were renting a car. In this case, it could be argued that time spent in the vehicle, much like the time someone would spend on a website, is far more finite therefor it would be a larger issue if you couldn't just "get in and go".

For me, the decision to buy a car (or not) usually breaks down to about 75% passion and 25% usability. In many cases passion can (and should) outweigh usability. If a car is sexy enough, who really cares - for example - if the radio volume knob is under the seat. How long would it really take to get used to that? In the 90s, a Saab's ignition was part of the center console. That counter-intuitive design certainly didn't result in a shortage of those ugly bastards on the road.

In my humble opinion, information that should be included in the evaluation of a car should only be things that matter in the long run: gas usage, reliability, warranty, service records, etc. Whether or not something is designed intuitively seems to be purely objective. It makes about as much sense as scoring a car lower for being ugly.

Jen and I are off to Copper Mtn., CO to spend New Years with Jake and Shondi. Jen's never been to Copper, so this should be a fun trip... assuming we can even get there! It's supposed to snow 10" today and we're driving to Copper from Denver. Wish us luck! We're also spending a few days in Boulder afterwards getting some stuff done for our house and also hanging out with my brother Josh. He'll be in town for a day with my dad while they check out CU. Fun times! Until next year...

Last night as Jen and I were driving home from a friend's house, some ass hat started throwing gang signs at me as I drove by, just as we entered our neighborhood. At first I chuckled at it, but then I realized that I had the hood of my red hoody up. For f's sake, I'm so over our neighborhood. That incident made me realize that we have absolutely no business in a place where a normal personal has to remember to not wear their hood during the winter for fear of upsetting some dumb ass who strolls around the neighborhood at 11pm looking for trouble. Not that the whole neighborhood is like that, because honestly I've never had an issue there before. I guess it's just like the surfer who has their first encounter with a shark. You always knew they were there, but it's easy to let it slip from your mind when it's never been an issue. It's just really frustrating, and it makes me worry about my wife's and my own safety. I can't wait to move.

In other news, I got Sirius in my car and it's ridiculously awesome. I highly recommend it!