Accused by Amazon

You can tell someone in the family is doing a PhD - just got one of those messages from Amazon saying:

"We've noticed that customers who have purchased or rated Education for Critical Consciousness (Continuum Impacts) by Paulo Freire have also purchased Art Education in the Postmodern World: Collected Essays (Readings in Art and Design Education Series) by T Hardy."

But we're rescued from Pseud's Corner by this other one:

"We've noticed that customers who have purchased music by Dolly Parton have also ordered Me & Bobby Maghee by Kenny Rogers."

It was ironic, honest.

Builders in my life

I don't mean to complain, but one of these photos is the view from my office, and one is the view from my house.

A bit off-topic and personal for this blog, I know, but my excuse is to point out the continuous set of labels that are being buried on top of 11,000 volt cables outside my office. They tell a future digger operator he is about to fry.

Saying what it is on the tin

Which one of these is a pink grapefruit? It's the one that doesn't say it is.

More titles to choose from

While I'm twitting the Coventry Building Society (nice old-fashioned phrase, that - not the same as tweeting, although you could do both: you could tweet a twit on twitter) here's their choice of titles. They obviously do well with the RAF and the Royal Artillery, and not just the officers. But not as posh as Harrods etc, obviously.

Grumpy old man's thoughts on channel strategy

Companies who deal with the public have something called a channel strategy. One effect is that you can go online very easily to add stuff to your Sky TV package but not to cut it back. To do that you have to join a phone queue, press buttons, listen to the Four Seasons and finally talk to a specially trained crack salesperson who knows all your weaknesses and trains their finely honed neurolinguistic programming weapons on you until you relent.

I 'joined' Experian to get a copy of the file they had on me, but it seems I have to call them to cancel. They have a machine that read my email and spotted the word 'cancel'. So now I have written again, mis-spelling it - the automatic reply now says a human being will deal with it in a day or two. We'll see.

When we moved house recently I wrote to BT, but they ignored my letter and carried on charging me. I thought writing things down was the safest way, but apparently not. I called BT and was told 'der, we are a phone company you know'.

By the way, 'der' isn't a mis-spelling of 'dear' but my attempt at spelling that word teenagers say: derrh? de-ergh? Any suggestions?

Two pictures of the ground

No information design in this post - just a couple of photos of the ground. After burying a new sewer pipe, the contractors have carefully restored the double-yellow no parking lines in our car park, in spite of the fact the rest of the line is completely worn away.

After building this new ramp, someone walked through the wet cement leaving big boot marks. I love they way they have been carefully filled using cement of a different colour. Now there’s no missing them.

Thought for the day

Paul Luna twitters on a scriptural theme:

“God as usability guru? ‘We have never sent a messenger who did not use his own people’s language to make things clear for them’ Qur’an 14:4”

I counter with Ecclesiastes 12:12: ‘Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.’

Google street view melts car

Google has launched street view in the UK. I love the side effects of their car-mounted cameras - this car looks like it's programmed Australia into its satnav.

Musical forms

Following an earlier post about information design in rock, John Willmer tells me he reckons the only musical arrangement of a government form is Frank Zappa's wonderful 'Welcome to the United States' from the album The Yellow Shark. Do you know otherwise?

I suppose you could argue that Rowan Atkinson's schoolmaster is a performance of a bureaucratic process, but while perfectly timed it's not musical.

Dear Lord Customer

I bought a shirt from the Boden catalogue at the weekend, and was flattered to be offered the choice of not just Mr or Ms in front of my name, but any number of aristocratic or military titles, including Field Marshall Lord. A couple of minutes with Google suggests to me that there may only be one of these extant, and only a handful at most... and that there is one person with Field Marshal the Rt Hon Lord in front of his name. Unfortunately he is unable to look forward to a delivery of underpants with his full title on the label.

He is also unable to shop with full dignity at Fortnum & Mason (the green one below) or Harrods (the yellow one). Sure enough, they are expecting the posh set, but I fear they are only scratching the surface. I remember a car insurance website years ago that included 'Chief', 'Mother Superior' and 'His Holiness' (I may have made up that last one, but only just).


I've been trying to work out the organising principle of the Harrods list - is it alphabetical, or based on protocol? I think it may be 'cast in order of appearance' which explains why the Wing Commander has somehow got between the Lord and his Lady.

Gourmet stroop test

Rummaging through my student son's larder I discovered the bottle on the right. If you're not from the UK you won't know that the Tesco Value range consists of absurdly cheap but basically OK basics - things like bread, beans and biscuits. Not Balsamic Vinegar Of Modena. That comes in posh bottles like the one on the left.

Now I have heard that the Value range is largely bought by the middle classes - the genuinely needy target market being too proud to be seen to be buying the cheapest. May or may not be true, but perhaps it explains the incursion of this resoundingly middle class vinegar.

Photo of tree

Nothing to do with the topic of this blog, I know, but around the corner from the last photo was this Christmas tree. It appears to have been put out for the bin men, but left behind when the rubbish was collected because it blends in so well with the other trees in the street.

Agreeable?

I've asked a number of conference audiences if anyone has ever read the small print you get shown when you install software. One person has put their hand up, out of several hundred people. I don't particularly mind saying I agree with something I haven't read, but I don't feel comfortable saying I have read it, and even less comfortable saying I have 'read and understood' it. After all, I thought I'd read and understood my chemistry O level textbook, but look what happened.

I propose an alternative:

The book - tech support

This wonderful YouTube clip from a Norwegian comedy show was doing the rounds a year ago or so, but in case you missed it...

Stop, stop, please stop

Martin Evans has sent me this link to a nice video: what happens when marketers brief an agency to design the stop sign.

You will only remember 10% of this, apparently

Every now and again you see a claim that we remember 10% of what we read, 20% of what we see, 30% of what we do... I forgot how it goes, and so I should since it is entirely spurious. In one place, I found it reported with much more plausible precision: 9%, 17.5%, 31%, etc. But it was still rubbish, it turns out.

Some years ago I saw this stated authoritatively on a BBC web page, even attributing it to 'recent research', so I wrote to ask for the citation. They replied that they had got it from the British Dyslexia Association, so I wrote to them. They in turn replied that they had read it somewhere, but they hadn't got a source. It's still on their website, and is typical of similar quotes on other websites of distinguished institutions who should know better:













Hunting for the source, I posted a query on the Infodesign Cafe, which put me in touch with Michael Molenda of Indiana University, who was on a similar hunt. He eventually published a short paper with his findings. He traced it to Edgar Dale's 'cone of experience', published in the late 40s. Dale used a schematic diagram (below) to illustrate his view that increasing richness of experience would lead to greater learning.























Somewhere along the way, someone has added the figures, and these have been repeated endlessly ever since, deeply embedded in the teacher training curriculum.

Tony Betrus and Al Januszewski of the State University of New York have published a collection of bad cones.

It seems unlikely that a 'quotation' like this would have survived for so long unless there is some truth in it - in other words, it chimes with people's experience in some way, just as a saying such as 'a picture is worth a thousand words' does. Perhaps this is just a modern version of a proverb – it's just that these days we need statistics. The Education department at Cisco Systems have looked into the evidence that actually does exist, and produced a useful metareview .

Diagrams and irony

There are various websites around that collect data graphic interpretations of pop songs - they're good for a chuckle until you tire of them. One that's been doing the rounds is this nice graphic from Evita (credited to brianmn).



To be literal minded for a moment, I could point out that the song doesn't actually suggest that anyone should 'cry for me' – because, after all, 'I never left you'. Or perhaps it is ironic and suggests that Argentina should actually be crying. But of course, diagrams don't do irony very well.

This next one (credited to sftekbear) shows another limitation of its chosen format. There are in fact fifty ways to leave your lover, only a few of which are specified in the song, and they are not given comparative frequencies as implied by this chart.

However, a professor writes:

In fact, although Simon (1975) is often quoted as identifying ‘50 ways to leave your lover’, we must treat this figure with caution. Reviewing the primary source, we find that Simon speculates that there ‘must be’ 50 ways, but does not present supporting data, nor does he claim 50 as an exact number.

Only four ways are detailed:

Just slip out the back

Make a new plan

Just drop off the key

Hop on the bus.

Simon makes 2 additional proposals concerning the manner of departure

You don’t need to be coy

You don’t need to discuss much.

A major theoretical problem arises from the lack of a clear categorial distinction between the 4 ways. An alternative view is that these are simply 4 stages of a process model: that is, in combination they describe only one way to leave your lover: 1. Make a new plan; 2. Drop off the key; 3. Slip out the back; 4. Hop on the bus.

However, this view is easily countered by further reference to the original data: Way 1 (slip out the back) specifically applies to a named individual (viz. Jack), whereas Way 2 (make a new plan) is specific to people named Stan. Since the principle underlying the allocation of method to individuals appears to be rhyming, we may reasonably speculate that Way 1 would also be appropriate for persons named Mac, or Zak, while Way 2 is also appropriate for persons named Dan. On this basis we may proceed to a more accurate calculation of the different ways to leave your lover – that is, it must correlate with the number of available names within the population, with allowances made for duplication resulting from homophonic terminal phonemes.

We may, then, posit a direct relationship between available forenames within a particular language, culture, or discourse community and available options for terminating amatory relationships.

This leads to the conclusion that the number of available amor-terminatory strategies is directly proportional to the number of available personal nomenclature allocation options. Some cultures (eg, the UK) permit an infinite range of options, with no rules for spelling (viz, Agnes, Agyness), while others (such as Portugal) require parents to choose from a prescribed list. In Sweden, there is no prescribed list, but parents can be prevented from choosing unusual names. It is therefore tempting to hypothesise that divorce rates in regulated countries should be lower than unregulated countries, since there will be correspondingly fewer ways to leave your lover. This is indeed confirmed by the statistics: UK – 2.7 divorces per 1000 population; Sweden – 2.4; Portugal – 1.9. Of course, this figure should only be properly calculated using data adjusted for the frequency of matching terminal phonemes (which reduce the lover-leaving options within some language groups). And further we may speculate that in unregulated societies, parents may opt for names that, having no suitable rhymes effectively insulate their progeny from the risks of divorce: this may have been the motive of the Swedish parents naming their children Lego, Metallica or Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116 (see Daily Telegraph, 7June 2008).

We may conclude that further research is necessary.

etc, etc.

Petitions for all occasions

I have to confess I had not heard of the Type Museum, until I received news of a petition to stop its collection being dispersed. Judging by its website, it looks really good, although I believe it may already have closed. You can sign the petition at http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/typemuseum/.

Having signed the petition, I explored this site for more causes I could lend my esteemed name to. It contains hundreds of petitions to the Prime Minister and it's comedy gold.

Only three people have so far signed the petition to 'use a lie detector on retiring prime ministers'. Pity. Whereas 293 have urged Gordon to 'Prohibit the use of the names North and South Humberside'.

I'm neutral on that one. But there are quite a few requests that focus on clearer information. Unfortunately they have only been spotted by a few people. For example:

'Make it Law, that mobile phone companies inform contract customers of their balance' (3 people).
'Make all references to digital tv to state that only a freeview box is required not a new TV' (3 people).
'Urge companies to stop discriminating against people without internet access when charging for paper billing' (6 people).
'Stop HM Revenue & Customs wasting paper' (7 people).
'Investigate mobile phone operators underhand practices' (8 people).

In the absence of a comment facility, some people have taken to using the signature field of the online form to give their reaction to the petition. Personally I support the petition to 'Make all tv companies to turn volume down when there is an advert break', but it has evidently been signed by someone called 'do you really want the PM dealing with this? what a nation of bone-idle idiots. Get a grip people.'

There's me told then.

Unknown at this address

Speaking of direct mail, Tiscali have just sent a letter to our house that obviously needs redirecting to Donald Rumsfeld.

You can read Donald's poetry here.

Molesworth and personalised mail

People of my age and background may have spotted the Molesworth reference in my last post. I nicked this image from the St Custards website.
As a boarding school pupil I loved the Molesworth books* which normalised my odd experience of childhood. Our hero, Nigel Molesworth is at an archetypal prep school, St Custards, that I was convinced was modelled on my own.

His letters home start off as detailed accounts of his school-life, gradually homing in on test marks received, the latest school football match and the present he would like to be sent. Finally they come down to a form letter: (a) Maths 3/10 (b) St Cakes 4-0 (c) water pistol.

When my son Alex was about that age we were able to take advantage of modern technology to build a simlar mail merge system for his Christmas letters: the mail merge table contained a column with 'Granny, Aunt Marjorie, etc', another with a choice of suitable adjectives ('nice, interesting, great, brill') and third with a choice of gift ('cheque, book, WHSmith token', etc). It worked very effectively for several years.




*Written by Geoffrey Willans and illustrated by Ronald Searle, they were written in the mis-spelled voice of Molesworth. They are the origin of the Private Eye catchphrase 'as any fule kno'.

The correct form of address

I just looked up the postal address for information design consultancy and/or/if (they are former colleagues and very good). It is:

and/or/if,
Oakridge Barn,
Plum Park Estate,
Watling Street,
Paulerspury,
Towcester
NN12 6LQ
England
Great Britain
Europe
Earth
The Universe

I repeat it in full here not just to make my plug more complete, but to remark on the sevenlinesness of their address.

They do a lot of design for personalised laser-printed documents, and one of the things you have to do in that line of work is to test for worst-case examples. Long names or addresses for example. Years ago we worked on documents for BT, and found that their customer database required us to allow up to eleven lines for the name and address.

I suspect and/or/if deliberately chose their address so they could themselves feature as a test scenario. Expect one of them to change their name any minute to Lieutenant-Colonel Richard Trumpington-Verylongname.

Memory load and internet security

Following the loss of citizens' banking and personal details by HMRC, we're getting a lot of advice about internet security. My bank, Smile, tells me that 'each password should be unique and unrelated to any of your other passwords.'

They go on to advise: 'You shouldn't write them down, and you shouldn't share them with anyone, even your best mates... Strong passwords use combinations of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and punctuation, they aren't usually found in any dictionary. For example using 'river' would be a weak password, whereas 'r!V3r_78' would be much stronger.'

So strong it wouldn't even let me in, because I wouldn't remember it. Many of us have accumulated dozens of relationships with banks, retailers, social networks, and other sites that want passwords. There is absolutely no chance of dreaming up unique, strong passwords for each one and not writing them down.

Smile's advice doesn't work. Poor information is no information.

More silly questions

Further to my recent post, I've been helping my elderly father-in-law manage his online bank account with the Nationwide. It asked us to choose four security questions and give answers that we then have to remember at any point in the future. What age do they assume their customers are? Does anyone over 7 years old actually have a favourite colour? How about some questions suitable for people over 50? Such as 'how much did Mars Bars used to cost?', 'what do you hate most about online banking?', or the reliable 'where were you when you heard that President Kennedy had been shot?'. But best to stay away from 'what did you come upstairs for?' or 'where are your car keys?'.

Favourite questions

Registering on a website today, I was asked to choose a security question from the following options:

Problem is:

• Don't know, and seems a bit late to ask now.
  
• If I pick one at random, would I pick the same one when I'm asked again. And, heck, it was 50 years ago.
  
• Heck, it was 50 years ago
  
• Heck, it was 50 years ago
  
• Heck, it was 200 years ago
  
• Which grandfather?
  

Your home may be at risk...

As I write there is a run on the bank at Northern Rock, the mortgage lender that has had to call on Bank of England help following the sub-prime lending problems in the USA.

Pundits are appearing on TV, commenting on what they see as irrational herd behaviour in customerswho are queuing to take their money out. They seem oddly baffled that risk averse people (that is, the kind of people who keep their life savings in a savings account, not the stock market) are in fact averse to risk.

What risk? Well, we shouldn't forget that financial information routinely accompanies warm reassurance with alarming disclaimers - simultaneously enticing customers with promises of enormous returns, while pointing out in the small print that nothing is guaranteed, and that they could lose their homes. Even though this time I haven't heard any disclaimers by the experts and politicians, perhaps people just assume them.

Anal about correct spelling

According to their website, publishers John Benjamins aim their Document Design Companion series at "text analists" among others. I don't know why I've never noticed the anal in analysis before, but this spelling just seems to bring it out.

Tom Fishburne's met our clients

In our studio, when someone spoke of the client as 'barking', they didn't mean mad – they meant 'you don't buy a dog and do your own barking'. But then we found Tom Fishburne's classic '8 types of bad creative critics'. He's identified the full set of favourite client types. We have met every one of these clients, and could give you their names.



Tom has a brilliant collection of marketing and branding observations at his Brand Camp website. You can buy this cartoon on a mousemat, T shirt or mug at his website.

Note to current clients: none of you are like this. Never.

The Law of the Penultimate Solution (it's always better than the one you end up with)

Someone reminded me yesterday of a talk David Lewis and I gave at one of the Information Design Conferences in the early 90s. We likened the information design process to a lens. Information designers take requirements and constraints that were previously uncoordinated and unrelated, from different parts of an organisation, and focus them in a single design solution that is coherent and usable by customers.

Then, as we consult and amend our perfectly-focused solution, it shifts just slightly out of focus before it's implemented. The final solution is never as good as the penultimate one.

And finally, there's often a stray photon that arrives from nowhere, completely bypassing our lens. The marketing director's twelve-year old son has drawn a great logo (it's happened); someone has read that italic is always illegible; someone doesn't like green.

How to operate the shower curtain

Lovers of instructions will appreciate this article in the New Yorker:
How to operate the shower curtain.

And speaking of bathrooms, does anyone know the history of that card you get in hotel rooms worldwide. The one that starts "Dear Guest. Imagine the amount of detergent..." and ends "Towel on the floor means 'change this towel'" .

Even the poshest hotel rooms have this card, which never says "Dear Guest. If you really want to save the planet, take your holiday at home next year".

Force 7 confusion forecast

It would be nice to have a version of the Beaufort scale or Richter scale for information. The Beaufort scale is the one for wind, that starts with '0. Calm. Smoke rises vertically' and ends with '12. Hurricane. Considerable and widespread damage to structures'.

So I've had a go.

0. Calm. Ideas rise vertically from page to mind.
1. Light difficulty. Slower reading. Dictionary pages rustle.
2. Moderate difficulty. Reader lightly swaying; visible perplexity.
3. Difficulty. Head shaking, audible groaning.
4. Severe difficulty. Loud muttering, and music heard from helpline queue.
5. Very severe complexity. Foaming. Abrupt movement about room, with swearing.
6. Storm. Whole documents in motion, from table to floor.
7. Brainstorm. Considerable damage to conceptual structures.
8. Typhoo. Reader flattened in darkened room, with cup of hot sweet tea.

If lifts were invented now

I pressed the wrong button in the lift this morning, and realised that there was no undo button. That would be unthinkable in any interface designed today, but lift controls are virtually unchanged since the 30s or whenever they dispensed with lift attendants operating levers.

If lifts were designed now they would have:

• a cancel button
• executive prioritise button (takes boss to boardroom penthouse, then goes back down for the rest)
• themed chat suggestion display (weather, cricket score, office gossip)
  
• personal login with preprogrammable functions (go to my floor, visit boss, go to staff restaurant)
• replay function (enjoyed that trip to floor 7 - let's go back down and try it again)
• slow speed function (for when that elevator pitch is taking too long)
• wireless network so you don't lose a moment of precious work time
• personalised follow-me musak
• mood lighting for those brief encounters
• virus checker.
  

Open University ends broadcasting

It was announced on the Today programme this morning that the Open University is to stop broadcasting programmes through the BBC. This was attributed to the growth of new channels such as podcasting and the web. That's true but, actually, broadcasting at the OU was always a lot more prominent in the public eye than it was in students' lives. It may seem incredible now (in fact it was slightly odd then) but in the early years it was decided that a telly was a luxury that not everyone would have. Because students who could not afford a telly were not to be disadvantaged, no exam question could address material that had only been covered in a broadcast. That spelled doom for the TV and radio programmes, as astute students soon realised that to pass the exams, you need not listen or watch, but just read the correspondence material. The heart of an OU education is still reasoned argument presented in book form on paper.

When I first joined the OU there was a committee to look into the replacement of paper by microfiche. Looking back, it was obviously ridiculous to think people would be happy studying sitting at desks staring at machines with small backlit screens.

Brandling

Some perfectly good words go wrong when unintended graphemes leap out at you. For example when TV trailers promise that a programme will repeat 'weeknights at 7', I just can't stop myself reading it as 'wee knights'. It's quite common to hear the word 'biopic' (as in biographical picture) pronounced to rhyme with 'myopic' (as in short sighted, or in practical terms unable to see wee knights in the distance). And the other day I actually heard someone on the radio say 'mizzled' (misled).

So when I saw the expression 'brand-led' broken over two lines:
brand-
led
I reassembled it as 'brandled' (rhymes with 'handled'). A great word - somewhere between branding and footling.

Reading a room

An architect came to our house, and kept using the word 'read' about architectural features – as in "when I came in this room I immediately read its height", or "there are too many beams – they prevent you reading the shape of the roof".

We need a similar way to talk about reading a page. Not reading what the words say, but the fact there are three equal columns, that it's divided into two sections, that a diagram relates to a panel with a caption on it.