From the “Design and ERGOnomical” Dept.

Just wanted to spread the word about a few things that I have been reading of late. The first is a good article in Business 2.0 by Robert Partks entitled ““Great-Looking Product (Too Bad Nobody Wants It)—Why good design is not always good business”. Interesting read whereby he lists three rules (citing real-world examples) that companies often make when designing and bringing a product to market.

They are as follows:

• Design is often put on a product as an afterthought
• Design does not fit the brand
• The company does not back the design with a strong marketing push.

While the article has some valid points, it is rather limited in scope. I think it neglects to mention some obvious tenets of design: “Does the product work? Does it work well? Does it enrich the user experience?” If there isn’t a need in the market, why bring a complicated, unusable product to market?

Example: The CueCat

In this interesting piece of hardware, a company known as DigitalConvergence, mailed out thousands of these small, cat-shaped barcode readers to a random sample of magazine subscribers. The company expected users to plug in the scanner and aimlessly scan barcodes while sitting at the computer. Internal software would read the barcode and send the user to the product’s website or a special website whereby users could compete for prizes. Not much of a business plan, but the company would also keep track of what users scanned, creating an index of products for marketing research. Needless to say, the company no longer exists and it is currently in receivership. Ironically, you can still find articles proclaiming the sheer brilliance of this product on the Internet.

The second article is about the passing of the encryption program PrettyGoodPrivacy (PGP). In a telling analysis of the demise of the PGP encryption unit, Gartner analysts Vic Wheatman, John Pescatore and Joyce Graff hit the bullseye on why PGP failed:

Gartner believes the failure of commercial PGP likely resulted from Network Associates’ [the parent company of PGP] past organizational problems…..most importantly, Network Associates’ failure to make PGP easier for enterprises to use and manage.

Ideally, all Internet messages, be it email, VoiceIP, or instant Messaging, should be encrypted—especially in the workplace. However, in most cases, email encryption is often too cumbersome (via the use of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) solutions offered by such companies as PGP, Verisign, or Thawte) for most people to user efficiently. By that, I mean Easy to use, fast, and hard to screw up. There is also the risk that the receiving party may not be able to decode the message—but that’s another story that I’m not too clear about. Here’s a telling quote, “The entire process—assigning, distributing and managing keys and finding compatible software for both ends of the exchange.“

Finally the last article I read is on a really cool technology that aims to make reality more palatable. It’s called Augmented Reality, and the best way that I can describe it is to imagine a contextual overlay ontop of everything we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell.

The article can be found at the Popular Science Site.

I would love for this kind of stuff to be available, but it’s obvious that careful design is needed for this to work. Not only is there a huge Information Overload threat, but the computer would have to be context sensitve. Whether a computer can successfully determine the type of information that I want to see, and whether or not it knows when I want to see extra information….wow.

Cheers,

Tai