Things what I writ

I sometimes write nonsense about things to try and sound clever

Are We Ready Yet?

Web ready? There must be some simple process to make sure that all this product data is stored somewhere, so that we can access it it when we’re rendering product content on sun.com? No? Ah. But there is a process. There’s a few.

Designing interactivity based on product taxonomies is really interesting stuff. There’s a number of ways you can slice the data which enables you to present compelling experiences that drive to conversion. It’s even more interesting when you’re designing on an assumption of what those taxonomies look like, rather than what they actually look like. There is a point up to which you can make sensible design decisions, based of top-level and subcategory branching, for example, but there does come another point where, without the data, you really don’t know whether you can entertain alternate experiences, through, say, filtering across common product attributes. If you don’t know what attributes there are, you don’t know if they are common.

But designers like challenges. The challenge is often to get folks to lust after the design so much that they’ll give you whatever you want. I’m asking for the data.

Listening Post: Public Image: Public Image

Select/Deselect

Or maybe that’s Unselect, although that’s obviously not a real word, but when does that stop us? As I try and complete a design specification for a product finder, only interrupted by my writing about trying to complete a design specification for a product finder, I notice that its the subtle nuances that really take the time to figure out. I know what a table looks like. I also know what a drop-down list of comparable subcategory products looks like. I even know what a Products By Category: Subcategory Listing: Filtered: Single Attribute product list item looks like. But I don’t know whether the 508 label for a button that allows you to uncheck a range of checkboxes should say ‘Unselect All’ or ‘Deselect All’.

Actually, I do know that its ‘Deselect All’, but I only know that because somebody told me. I’m sure someone here who can quote the style and editorial guides complete with page references and footnotes off the top of their head would have been able to point out to me the grammatical and semantic reasoning behind that decision, notwithstanding the fact that unselect isn’t actually a word, even though I thought it might be, because my vocabulary necessarily contains a mixture of English, US English, and web terms, which means I’m never quite sure these days when I write an email or comp a blurb that I’m making any sense at all. Much like as I’m writing this.

The thing is, however long I agonize/agonise over the relative placement of a product image and whether the attribute listings should be bulleted or repeat the attribute names, or what labels we give to information architecture in context with other category pages, the thing that will take 20 minutes to resolve, in a meeting where you’ve got 15 minutes to present the design specification, of which that component appears on 2 pages which should take 2 minutes to cover, will be the annoying label for the widget. So I’m sorting that out right now. I’ve probably missed an entire interaction flow as a result, but that label is now correct, right?

Listening Post: Teenage Fanclub: Commercial Alternative

The Secret Is Out

There’s no magic bullet for design, no one-size fits all, or cross-market, cross-audience component set that captures unique customer needs across your entire audience. But there is some cream.

It’s worth investing 7 minutes of your life watching the video to discover what you probably already knew – customers really do know best when it comes to design. Designers are just here to do exactly what you say.

In noting this approach to making your design customers instantly happy, I’m considering making a purchase. As we wind down to the holiday season, we’re winding up on deliverables on a few design projects that should see the light of day early in 2008. I could really do with some Information Architecturizer Spray to instantly organize some category page frameworks. If anyone knows where I can get some by Wednesday, that would be great.

But seriously. No, hang on, that was seriously.

p.s. Happy birthday, Martin

Listening Post: Iggy Pop: Nightclubbing

New Team Home

For any of you have been following the Sun.com Customer Experience and Stuff blog, you’ve probably realized it’s no longer Martin Hardee writing it. Since Martin left Sun to go and customer experienceizate Cisco.com, we’ve been running that blog as a team effort and it’s probably about time we got ourselves a new team home. There’s no particularly good reason for moving, except that the blog’s URL is a personal one – blogs.sun.com/martinhardee – and we wouldn’t want to misrepresent Martin, or give a false impression of who’s writing for it.

Actually, that’s not 100% true. It sounds good in a corporately responsible way, but actually, the reason we’re moving is that this new blog is MINE. ALL MINE. Well, its the sun.com design team’s, so we’ve given it an abstract URL identifier so that its not associated with one person. We’ll probably lose 80% of our regular readership that linked to the old URL in a feed reader or added a link in their del.ectab.le bookmarks or just have it favorited, but I’ll be sure to put an enormous blinking message on the old blog, to try and redirect folks here. If nothing else, it’ll show us if people actually read the other one, rather it being popular through automated referrals.

We will endeavor, of course, to make this an interesting place to come, so hopefully, if you’ve never even read the old blog and are reading this because you thought ‘New Team Home’ might have something to do with football, then we’re already reaching out. As a point of interest, even though I might say something like ‘favorite endeavor’, I’m actually in the UK, so when I say ‘football’, I really mean ‘soccer’, but I’ll let you interpret it as it makes most sense to you, which is probably more sense than it makes to me. Most other contributors to this blog are in the US, so when they say ‘soccer’, they probably mean ‘football’, if you’re reading this in London. Not that they will. They might say something like ‘community’, though, which will refer to our programs to engage with specific audiences to build a relationship, not to a block of flats in Hackney.

We’ll be posting thoughts on web design, customer experience, usability and letting you know what’s happening on sun.com and associated sites. I expect we’ll post completely irrelevant things too, but we’ll try and make them sound relevant by adding a web design tie-in in the last paragraph. You can let us know what you think, or maybe just quietly agree/disagree. Either way, we hope you’ll find it a worthy distraction for a few minutes and maybe we’ll even be interesting or useful. That’ll be a first for me, but there’s more cleverer people on the design team, so if I can somehow bribe/blackmail them into breaking their blogging duck, it should be an interesting web experience.

Listening Post: Chris Morris: Radio Show 27/07/94

travelogue 23

travelogue 23
travelogue 23 by Tim Caynes

bathroom restroom toilet lavatory stand up sit down hang about get out faucet tap manbag cool neat ready all set large gaps small gaps unisex gents ladies men women ally mcbeal ally mccoist football football iwork flex flexible reservation camp tim caynes

nice to put a name to a face at last. sorry, a face to a name. so how often do you come to menlo park? all the time? oh. so where are you? right. I’ve got a meeting with x at 12 and then I”m heading all the way to the other end of the campus because I think that’s where building 18 is, but I’ll realize that it’s actually at the other end and it’ll start raining and I’ll wonder how everybody else gets from one end to the other round here only to discover that you can walk around the edge like a rat scurrying through the connecting doors between each building so as I had my pass in my jacket pocket all the time because this is the only time I wear this jacket when I come out here that’s just what I do and we’re sitting here talking about Q1 and how many countries there actually are in the world and I’m thinking about the way everybody has maps on the wall over here but they’re only maps of the US at least in the offices I’ve been in.

tonight I’ll install second life on the ferrari and buy a shirt from an alternative store in the south west corner for L$49 only to realize that what I obviously should have bought is an enormous penis as I erroneously teleport to someplace in the top 20 to see what the fuss is about.

travelogue 22

travelogue 22
travelogue 22 by Tim Caynes

after granola and danish I headed to menlo park, via stanford and page mill road, for some reason. you know I only come out here to drive around in circles. as it turns out, there was still snow at the top of page mill and so I threw the chevy cobalt into a left-hander and hand-braked into someone’s observatory where a cowboy was practising whipping himself in the sunshine. I figured I should probably go to the office.

halfway down the hill I get flagged down by chips and pull up at the end of a short line of SUVs with bumper stickers saying things like “sunshine country” and “the neverending sunshine state” and “I love my sunshine county” and “if you can read this, we’re not related” and poncho gets me to wind down my window, which obviously I don’t know how to do, but eventually just step out of the car instead. it seems there is a small pile-up in the middle of the road and I can see over poncho’s shoulder that a 20-something baseball cap is standing by his wrecked honda and nervously eyeing a 40-something handbag who’s pulling the wings from his wrecked BMW. some old blokes are scratching themselves and doing shoulder laughs at each other. I’m going to be late.

just then, mr bleasby calls me on my cellphone, which almost has me jumping into the path of the tow truck. nobody ever calls me. where do I want the ferrari sent? menlo park or broomfield? I dunno. the UK? you’ll want it while you’re here, right? er, I guess. are you in the office? I’m on page mill road. what? um, I guess we should send in to broomfield and I’ll throw some trousers away or something to fit it in my suitcase. is it 64-bit? etc.

about 30 minutes later and we’re snaking back down page mill, with me at the back of the snake, thankfully, lest I get intimidated by the locals and careen off the roadside into a swimming pool. I have to meet neal at lunchtime. it’s not lunchtime. it’s alright. I know I’ll take the wrong turning and end up in redwood city or something

by the time I’d gone about 5 miles on middlefield and ended up in redwood city, I was approaching lateness. I mean, redwood city is nice and everything, but I’m supposed to be 5 miles THAT WAY. where’s the freeway. ah. there. left lane san francisco. right. no. left. hang on. NONONONONO. screeeeeech. I hold up my hand to the carnage behind me because that makes it alright that I’ve just crossed 4 lanes at a 90 degree angle. san jose. let’s rock.

it doesn’t matter which campus you go to, everyone seems to be hiding. they’re all at home now, you see. if you’re going meet somebody, you have a provide a google earth file to find which flex office they’re in. as it turns out, it’s 2143 or something. lunchtime. ooh look. jonathan schwartz.

jonathan schwartz salad stalker

if I stay here for another couple of hours the curtains will open themselves and small angels singing gretchen peters albums backwards will flutter among us tipping tofu over the duvet and delicately turning the pages on the ski magazine I will of course never read while cate blanchett wafts through the walls with USA today on a stick and all you can eat in the poolside grille. after that I’ll have a shower and stuff. ok, I’ll do that now. hey, where’s my angels? I’m paying a hundred bucks for this. well, no, of course I’m not paying personally, but like Neal says, we’re all paying really.

4 hours later and I’ve spent a good 10 minutes in the rental chevy cobalt LT which stands for Like Treacle just waiting for the rain to stop because I’ve not transported a nice wool jacket all this way just to end up smelling like a dead sheep by the time I get to the lobby so it’ll have to stop before I move from here. right. good. I’m at MPK 14 because I can count that far but I’m meeting at the iwork cafe in 10 minutes so let’s take bets on how many times I walk around the entire campus looking for it before I actually go into a lobby and tell somebody I’m english and so they take pity on me and ask me if I know the queen and how many oscars I’ve got before they tell me I’ve just walked past the place I’m supposed to be in and they were watching me all the time because I look like I have no idea what I’m doing which I don’t even though I’ve been here about 20 times before but still apparently can not orient myself after I walk through a security door and a small campus becomes a mysterious labyrinth full of strange mortal creatures with huge cups of water with permanent straws and the only way I can escape it is to find the keeper of the key which will obviously mean at least a couple of hours in a badly lit warehouse crawling through pipes and stuff until I meet a talking marsupial who dictates the meaning of life to a peasant dressed like oliver twist and upon seeing me scarpers into the night talking the key with him which isn’t a key at all, you see, it’s just an alegory. the key is me. I am the meaning of life and if I just stop and discover myself I’ll also find Neal in the cafe. oh, there he is.

as I’d had the ‘healthy option’ breakfast which is pretty much just 3 gallons of coffee with cream, a strawberry, and then 17 croissants with an extra bagel, I was only interested in a ‘light option’ for lunch, which I figured might be something like chicken pasta, but with 3 pounds of cheese and a gallon of cream and a bit of brocolli, so having been shown the salad bar I took a plastic bowl and started shovelling leaves like it was the middle of october. ooh, a bit of that green stuff. and another. ooh that looks nice. this bowl isn’t bit enough. hmm, what are those?

it’s at this point that jonathan appears from some secret trap door or something and he’s right in front of me with his own plastic bowl, tongs at the ready. I mean, he’s pushed in, which is a huge affront to an uptight middle class englishman, but I’ll let him off. as he goes around with the tongs, he’s talking to somebody who’s kind of over my shoulder somewhere about really important stuff, but all I’m really interested in is seeing what pulses he scoops up and whether balsamic caesar is the dressing du jour. I want my own jonathan schwartz salad and so I’m going around the salad bar picking off everything he’s picked off and trying not to look like a weird food stalker but failing but he’s so fast he’s already in a meeting in santa clara by the time I’ve picked up an apple from the fruit stand so I’ll never really know if I got it right. I look at my bowl and I don’t even know what half the things in there are, but I’ve got mental picture – I considered a real picture but I would have weirded even myself out doing that – and so when I get back home next week I’ll try and recreate it and then sell it on ebay. I was also saying hello to Martin and Sean as I was putting the salade de schwartz together, so I probably got a couple of things wrong. I don’t think he used french and balsamic together. eeuw.

thus spake consolidation monkey

from a cosa nostradamus type moment of epiphany while making photoshop 5 eat layers of pasta did spew forth the penetrable missive from the future of the potato of business proposition:

You know what it’s like. Got eggs all over the place. This egg is your marketing egg. This egg is your commerce egg. You’ve even got eggs for partners and suppliers. But what you really want is to make a great big omelette with all your eggs so your customers can sit down at one big table and stuff themselves. You want Spanish omelette. You want French omelette. You want a Service Provider omelette with dynamic mushrooms and on-demand data parsley garnish. Well, the solution is here. Sun Dynamic Egg Consolidation and Omelette Rendering enables you to leverage all your enterprise eggs in one great big virtual frying pan. I tell you, it’s f**king great. My Mum’s got one already.

No change there then. So taaake mee in your aaarrms agaaain, I’ll sell my soooul, what is it wooorrrrth?

shark of three fives

burn and turn man, burn and turn. I don’t know what that means but I did it anyway and apparently beating a pair of aces with three fives three times in one night is just not cricket. Jennifer repeatedly says I’m a shark but honestly man, I just stepped of the plane from the old empire and all I know about is gin rummy and triangle sandwiches. I can’t help fleecing the web design team, even it Chris does eventually win after buying back in, which I think is a moral victory for me, but I can’t be sure. I personally blame Martin for having a gaming table with extra strong people magnets hidden inside so that every time you go to his house you get sucked unwittingly into the basement to start flipping around with his chips and fingering the edge of your cards like you’re on one of those programmes on the telly where the cameras are underneath the table spying on your cards.

I think it was a straight that did it in the end. that’s better than three fives, right? what about four? five?

damien hurst pringle selection

travelogue 14
travelogue 14 by Tim Caynes

ah, right. that would be, well, it’s not so bad in real money. I am rather peckish. I don’t know what that is, or that, or that. that looks like some kind of evil granny biscuit. 2 quid for a snickers. I don’t even think I could bring myself to claim that back. hang on, what’s this key for? ooh. I see. nicely hidden under the tv like it usually is except it’s locked like it usually isn’t so it must have something really special in there. it’s got a nice little window at the top. never seen a window on a fridge before. ooh, look. they’ve put the very thing in that window that you’re likely to have an uncontrollable urge for after 18 hours of travelling having missed dinner and feeling like you have a mouthful of gravel and a brainful of lint. that’s right. sour cream and chives pringles. only a small tube mind. it’s hardly a tube at all, more like a tub. or maybe a tu. but it’s got pringles in and they is the sweet nectar of the gods of corporate hospitality, divine in their scallopness and at the same bewitching in their potatoiness. you can literally trip over the delicate crunchiness of those 32 holy cheesy wafers and immerse yourself in their soft duvet of saltiness. without doubt, you can expire and elevate to the paradise beyond this life after popping the last one.

but I’m not paying 4 dollars for them. you can swivel. I’ve still got a fruit bar I stole from British Airways.

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