Informational Geometry

About twelve years ago I didn’t really understand Climate Change but I was actually looking forward to it, sort-of like a good mystery I could become enthralled with.  At the time all I knew was I wanted a different lifestyle, and I thought, maybe Climate Change might make that happen? Maybe my life will actually be better because of it?  I had this fantasy about being a self sufficient bohemian gourmet, growing my own food harvested right in my yard. Mother Earth magazine seemed so bucolic. I wanted the opposite of my cramped apartment in San Francisco. In 2008 Climate Change was just an excuse to make changes, quit a job and move.   I moved East, close to my dad. I didn’t mention anything about Climate Change to my father, a total denier who was a meteorologist when he was in his 20s. There was no amount of practical data that would change his mind. He retired in ’93, with nothing to be stressed about so he simply didn’t care about anything but football, fishing a...

Every so often my husband will mention how he’s interested in becoming vegetarian. Yesterday he was telling me about Penn Jillette, the famous comedian from Penn & Teller. He had read how Jillette is now a vegan, saying with personal interest that Jillette said “he feels so much better now.” First I was perplexed, we are both Penn & Teller fans and as performers over the years Penn Jillette struck me as an unapologetic manly man, veganism seems totally at odds with his character. I also barked at my burger loving husband, “What would you eat if you became a vegan? What do you even like that’s vegetarian?” There was no reply because my husband leaves all the food decisions up to me and I am nowhere close to being a vegetarian myself.  I wanted to know more about this so I go online and Google ‘Penn Jillette Vegan’ and found this LA Times article ;  “At 6 feet, 6 inches and 330 pounds, he was hospitalized for his high blood pressure and a 90% heart blockage. Alr...

It was about this time 11 years ago that Facebook opened up to the world. It was Spring in San Francisco and I was working a little stint at prosper.com. The CTO and Product Manager were a couple of well connected Stanford guys, and one day we were driving down to Palo Alto to go to Facebook’s headquarters. I didn’t really get what was going on. Although some of my other colleagues were encouraging me to check out Facebook for it’s interface and interaction design, I had never gotten on the site. I didn’t possess a dot EDU email address, I was too old for that for RISD. So there I was cruising down to Palo Alto with two guys to go meet with Dave Morin not really knowing what the heck was going on. We breeze into Facebook’s office, greeted by Dave right away. It was a really cool office and people we met were young, and this was not the kind of start-up I was used to. Prosper's CTO had been my boss at a previous job. Facebook was effortlessly cool compared to that company my old b...

I'm sitting here writing this on my dad's old iMac realizing I could have done a better job helping him with technology over the past few years. I feel like a bad daughter, an interaction designer ought to do a lot better for their parents. My dad was very capable, and fiercely wanted his independence, so I didn't bother him.  Still, I was already doing "tech support" for friends and strangers, and I'm realizing now that I could have saved myself a bit of work after he passed me on his gadgets. So here's my advice to people who have an older parent or friend, even if they are not a luddite! Make yourself the Admin. Set up their gmail, give yourself access.  Give them their password, make sure it's super easy to remember but tell them not to reuse this password for any reason anywhere. Set up their iCloud, Amazon Prime, YouTube etc tethered to their new Gmail.  Yes, plug their credit card into these accounts, they're still independent! G...

Today is Columbus Day. I never gave the day much thought really, except it's a Federal Holiday and in the past few years it's been a paid holiday I get to take. A few years ago a friend of mine posted to Facebook about Christopher Columbus, in doing so she enlightened me about what a shit the guy was. I was in my forties by the time I figured out what a giant douchebag Christopher Columbus was. Seems like a lot of people are just figuring it out because now, all of a sudden, people are defacing statues of him. There's a lot of questioning of patriarchy in 2017. To me, I have to say, Columbus symbolized America, the inception of this place I call home, more than he symbolized patriarchy. And, let's admit that pretty much every European explorer in the 1700s was a prostitute of patriarchal colonialism. So why can't we be realists about the past? Why can't we just celebrate America and how Italians have made America great? With food? My mother was Italian Ameri...

Dear Uber, Here we are. You've finally canned Travis Kalanick, what took you so long? You used to be cool but that was like, four years ago. For the past couple of years it just feels like you've been coasting off of your success from the past. How much longer can that go on? I guess if I was being showered with VC gold I would be hanging onto those old victories too. But you're a tech company, you provide a service to consumers, haven't you learned anything from your neighbors at Apple and Google about delighting customers? I'm sorry but you need to try harder. Your vision needs to be much much bigger, and it needs to include people outside of the C suite or Uber won't last. If I may give some advice to your product, UX, and marketing teams it would be this: Build up your brand I know, I know, you think you did this already. But you didn't. I have never seen a single ad from Uber encouraging me to ride. No TV ads, no radio, no print ads, not even i...

Never transmit STDs - Software Transmitted Diseases I came up with this saying over 10 years ago. And today it's more relevant than ever thanks to Google Docs. Fortunately there are some simple rules I'd like to share and please feel free to pass this along. The rule is simple - NEVER click on a link emailed to you unless you can absolutely verify it is legitimate. Sub rule 1: If the email with link is from a business like your bank or from any online account you might have - Go directly to that website instead of clicking on the link in your email. Sub rule 2: Tell friends, family and colleagues not to send you emails that look phishy. If they must share something over email ask them to at least write a sentence or two along with the link to show that the email is legitimate. Sub rule 3: DO share with everyone these rules.

When I run for president, will people dredge up this blog? Will people even know to connect this, with me, and what will happen when that happens? Answer, probably a lot of crap I never expected to happen will happen. I used to think comments were the best thing to happen to the internet. Right around 2007, when Facebook opened up to the rest of the world I marveled at their interface. The interaction design was perfection. My photo sitting right there next to a little box practically making me reply to every little thing posted to Facebook. Compelling and sticky, the perfect User Experience really connecting people, with words. This type of interface had already been around, in the form of self publishing and "user generated content". I loved the disruption a decade ago, especially when in 2009 Gourmet magazine ceased and the editor, Christopher Kimball penned his gripes in the New York Times . "The shuttering of Gourmet reminds us that in a click-or-die advertisin...

I was only a little surprised to read yesterday during my commute about fake news. About a month ago I saw an advertisement online titled " Bigger Than Snowden " someone actually paid money towards an online ad campaign to purport that electromagnetic weapons are being used by the government to covertly target, monitor, and torture victims. Seriously. The link above goes to  google search results and you can see how this nonsense has been smeared around the internet as if it's true. Which it's not. Did fake news catapult It (I'm not saying It's name) into the White House? NYTimes seems to think so . And you know what, I think so too. As a User Experience designer I know how to pull the same exact tricks that creators of fake news pulled. Any of us web professionals could easily fool a lot of people with fake stories. Then I was a little surprised to read today about a group of college students who already solved the fake news problem in a hackathon. It t...

Happy New Years! One of my resolutions this year is to be more creative. And since it is now officially the New Year I thought, why not get off to a good start and write a post on the blog? I know, right? It's been too long. Last year, 2015, my resolution was to save money. Nothing like buying a fixer upper to put that resolution at the top of your list every year! It came time for a phone upgrade but as I was in frugal-mode (still am, frankly) I waited, patiently for Black Friday to get me a deal.  I used to have an iPhone 5c. A sleek little number with a candy like green plastic shell. It served me well on commutes to and from DC. I would see other 5cs on the commute and smile at complete strangers. Like, "yeah, I see you and your cool affordable iPhone. You know it. I know it. We're in the club." Mostly these people just ignored me. At last, Black Friday came, but the internet said there were no deals! How could that be? Maybe I had too much turkey? Saturday I ...

So in reading about the drought in California I was inspired to try to design some kind of solution. I guess I was frustrated after reading the plethora of news about the drought and seeing little to no solutions mentioned. Just NYTimes naggery and finger pointing and stuff about how California's agricultural industry simply does not manage water well. How California has never implemented drought measures that other parts of world has. And then, maybe it's because I'm a gardener and I recycle water that I actually see this drought problem easily solvable. So here's my little Temple Grandin moment! An "array" of solar stills floating like enormous doughnuts on the sea. It would make me really happy if some people in California would try this out. 

Confliction - A sickness of conflict between one political idea and another. The Measles Outbreak of 2015 We can't tell parents what to do with their own kids But we want to tell parents what to do But the Government has NO RIGHT to tell parents what to do But we really really really just want to tell parents what to do But we can't. It's not cool OK but seriously, some other kids are at risk, and we should just make laws NO, we can't tell parents what to do with their own kids. THAT is already law! How about we trot out doctors and be really nice about telling parents what to do? Yeah, but a lot of people understandably don't trust pharmaceutical corporations OK let's use statistics, numbers! Let the data convince the parents! BUT, the LAW says, we can not tell parents what to do with their own kids

I keep reading about new technologies coming out and hearing about the wearbales innovation. Seems like Silicon Valley is trying very hard to break into some new markets, and they're pushing into some unfamiliar territory to get there. Yesterday I was reading about apps that will tell if the person you're speaking to on your smartphone, is lying. Yup. I suppose there's some benefits to technology like that but here's why it's being developed.... to sell you more stuff . It's more Big Brother  advertising crap. What about just improving the good old stuff we know everybody loves and will buy? Where is my ultra high definition sound? Better than a CD, over the internet? This seems like a multi-billion dollar challenge, that is technically and commercially obtainable. The data storage is there, the marketplaces are there, god knows the cloud is there, and the consumers are there - what's missing is the high definition sound! All that takes is some more techno...

In my last post,  Don't Fear The User Part 1 - Empowering Software Development With Usability Techniques , we talked about what usability is. The practice of making software easy to use. And that you accomplish this by listening to your target end user. Incidentally there is a great post on Good Experience today where Mark Hurst mentions his tweet: Before you get customers involved, first you should probably check if the boss can handle bad news. This is important because before you try to do usability work your boss needs to be on board. If you're boss is fearful and can't handle bad news then it might be a futile effort. Instead usability should be empowering. It will resolve problems and can help an organization meet its goals.  Now I'm going to elaborate on how to do it. Step 1: Who is The End User? User Experience Designers when we go to work, we do this thing called "User Centered Design". And all this means is we try to focus on The End User w...

Usability is the practice of making things easy to use Usability is the practice of making products, especially software, easy to use .  If you can think of some frustrating website that just didn't work, or even a bad customer service experience, you understand how important usability is. The whole world needs usability. Here we are just talking about the intersection where humans and computers meet - software. Since software is exploding, the industry needs user centered design more than ever. As consumers we need our smart phones and apps to be easy to use. But professionals probably need more usability than consumers... just so they can do their jobs. And sadly, way too many B to B applications and enterprise software are unwieldy and difficult to use. There is a way to fix software so it's easy to use. Incorporating usability techniques into your development process accomplishes two things. #1 it allows you to focus on the goal of making your product work as best i...

The funny thing about internet marketing is the people who would benefit from it the most probably are the same people with limited budgets - Artists, writers, and musicians.  Independent creative people and students usually don't have an annual marketing budget.  If you fall into the Artist category pay attention, this post is for you. I reveal how to simply use social media. If you DO have a marketing budget then contact me and let me show you how to ROCK your internet marketing. Writers have already blazed a trail on the internet and there are many websites dedicated to helping writers . Since I have a Fine Art background and I think like a designer, I'll focus on artists & other kinds of small businesses like restaurants. DO: Get yourself set-up with a website or blog First you need a "hub". A command center where you can connect to all sorts of social media and networking sites. In case you didn't know a blog is actually just another kind of websit...

There's been a ton of talk lately about how people can use social media to grow their business. Thanks to the web you don't have to have an expensive marketing budget, you just need to create a few accounts to services like Facebook and Twitter. Last week I wrote part one about social media,  a success story about my client Kevin O'Malley. Next week I'll reveal more details on how to do this stuff yourself. Now I want to explain WHY you should care about social media marketing and explain WHO really needs to use it... How social media marketing works Yesterday on my favorite NPR show, the MidDay show , they had an expert speak about Social Media and Viral Marketing. Jonah Berger did a great job at explaining the "viral effect" and demonstrated that social media does indeed work.  But Jonah forgot to explain HOW to USE social media which I will reveal in part 3! Here's how it works - Right now millions upon millions of people are doing this... jok...

Nobody promotes themselves more shamelessly than my client Kevin O'Malley.  Kevin is a children's book illustrator and he literally walks around with a pad of paper in his hand, he's constantly drawing, at the coffee shop, in the park, everywhere. After Kevin cranks out another instant masterpiece (just like Picasso)  - he gives it away! Seriously. He gives away the drawing . Kevin WAS ALREADY a  walking social network and he didn't even know it. I must have mumbled a couple of things to him over time about the internet. We friended on Facebook where Kevin posts a lot of his drawings and works in progress.  I told Kevin that he should blog and maybe get on Pinterest - since he's already posting drawings to Facebook he mine as well post to a couple more websites.  Kevin took these suggestions but still... his website was out of date.  Kevin still needed a "hub".  So he  turned to us, and we made him a new website . Thanks to Kevin's incredi...