designswarm thoughts

Speaking of ecologies of service, I bought a bike a week and a bit ago. Not an easy task in a city that’s just swarming with them, they’re usually overpriced and demand is high, and so for the few weeks that I have in this lovely city, I didn’t want to invest 200 euros. I went online to a aggravatingly badly designed dutch website and with the help of my friend Laura, bid on a woman’s bike that a woman was selling in the North of Amsterdam. Eventually she agreed to the low low price of 45 euros and I went to meet her. Took a bus at Centraal (to be pronounced as if you had a potato stuck in your mouth with a long hiss for the s and a long drawn a) and 30 minutes later, in a weird look-alike of american-suburbia in Amsterdam- Noord, I waited at the bus stop for Rebecca, the bike owner. Turns out the bike had a flat tire and so, i grumbled a tad but remembered seeing bike pumps at my flat and after having convinced a bus driver to take me back even if it was against the “rules”, I walked my bike home happily.

Flash forward to back home where the bike pumps end up not working as befitting more elegantly a mountain bike rather than my city bike. I remember that there are 2 bike shops by my place and decide to go there to get the tires pumped. These little stores have, however a very north american schedule of 10-6, which also correspond to my work hours. Flash forward a week, I wake up on Saturday morning, decided to deal with this “issue” and get a the tire fixed once and for all, I step out my door, and freeze. Nothing. My precious bike with an already rich history was stolen! As i turned to my local friends here and cry out in outrage, they just shrug their shoulders and go “yeh a week is too long, it’s bound to get cleaned off”… what! There has to be a service solution somewhere in there… a 24h bike store anyone? a dropoff anytime/repair/get it back the next day service? a call this number and we’ll deal with the problem 24h? RFID on each bike to locate it back? If North America has the CAA for example, what’s the equivalent here?

Yes, I’m just bitter and miss my bike… god only knows what happened to my precious Tulipa bike that I left in Milan. Sigh.

Reading Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand these days, I was struck once again by her vision of society and what part the “people” as a concept play in it. She believes, and I am completely paraphrasing and interpreting here, so please don’t quote me on this that one should not follow what is socially acceptable, but one’s own voice. Her characters are very ego-centric (not to be taken as a bad thing) strong minded people who will go against popular beliefs, and public opinion to pursue their objectives. In reading a completely different article on the Global curse of Comic Sans i couldn’t help but be reminded of Miss Rand.

“None of this, however, stops the public from loving it. In Typophile’s online forums, a designer rightly observes that the vast majority of laymen love Comic Sans. “Why do you think it’s all over the place?” he asks. “No ‘decent’ corporation cares what a minority of specialists thinks.”

And he’s right. Who cares if a small minority of deeply principled letterform diehards care about the wanton proliferation of a font that single-handedly throws typographic evolution back, say, a few thousand years or so?

Clearly, there’s no accounting for taste.”

So where does that put us as designers? Keeping in mind user-generated content and user-centered approaches are capturing the imagination of a number of business, when we listen to users, how carefully do we have to listen ? More importantly should we follow what they feel they need, or seek for the nuggets of untold stories and opportunities that lie in their tales of discontent, critique and apprehension?

Sometimes there is power in being the first and only. As i look at the Web 2.0 revolution, I wonder if we would be building all this, if it weren’t for the active 1% of the population? Should businesses concentrate on analyzing what the 86 % that just view content wants? Or look at their own products, cease the opportunity to do something radically different and let the 86% follow. It’s about radical innovation versus incremental innovation of course and we all know which one is the more dangerous.

As Steve Jobs says:
“I understand the appeal of a slow burn […] but personally I’m a big-bang guy.[…] The risk with a fast burn,” he continued, “is that it exposes you to your enemies. You’re going to need a lot of money to fight thieves.”

I’m sure he’s read the Fountainhead.

A very cool map… so far I’ve lived and visited 15 countries (visited 7, lived in 8 of them ) and on my way to visit another next month…new zealand!!!

Create your own visited countries map

Ok now I’m really freaked out… I found someone else I know on a dating site…arghh… the world of design is just too small.

Ok coming back to it, now in Amsterdam, a friend of mine is also using online dating and I tried to get some feedback from her as well. She’s dutch, in her mid 30’s and has been on about 6-7 dates so far, which I personally find really cool, seeing as I haven’t “dated” in about 3 years and have somehow lost the notion of what that means. Her biggest criticism of the site was also to do with the pictures, she said that they never match and are always a disappointing aspect of the date…

I find this a bit confusing, I mean, I’d rather be honest about what i look like online while there is still an element of anonymity, absence of judgment, and so I’m sure that whoever wants to meet me isn’t disappointed when we meet, starting the date on the wrong foot.

But apparently, because we like to kid ourselves into thinking that looks aren’t everything (they’re not of course, but seeing as 80% of our understanding of the world is through our eyes, they’re pretty damn important), we lie and cheat our way into airtime with a person who will ultimately be disappointed at first sight… I guess that’s why they call them blind dates…

So in the world of dating, so far I’ve found this very uselful blog by Gordon Smith about the online dating industry at large. He talks about MatchActivity an online dating service in California (so far, it’s in Beta still) that makes people meet over activities that they post up. Kinda like eBay for people… I want to take a walk in the park…5 people answer, who’s gonna be the chosen one? Bah…not convinced about the approach. Then of course there are sites like Match.com which make me sick, i mean, its like a shopping list of people…

There has to be a web 2.0 of dating… it would be really useful… hmm something to think about over the weekend as i sit in Vondelpark and read my book.

Ok this whole internet dating thing is really creepy…I’ve gotten, in the span of less than 24 hours an impressive amount of “fans” in their mid to late 30s and already 3 messages… arghhh…I’m deleting my profile, this is too creepy. I think I’ll go back to walking around town on my own…

Off to Amsterdam tomorrow for an undetermined period of time in the company of Blast Radius.

Having a chat with my friend Jude while looking for a knob for her dresser on Portobello Road, we were catching up and we started talking about internet dating. Since I’ve been out of that loop and kindof stuck in the IDII bubble for so long, I wanted to know more. When I was in Montreal 2 years ago, internet dating was something you talked about in a half-apologetic hushed voice over coffee with your friends on a cold winter afternoon, so I was interested to know what a 28 year old working professional in London thought of the scene.

She’s been using Guardian Soulmates for a few dates. I thought it was interesting that in a way reading the Guardian and therefore using that particular dating site, you’re also making a political and social statement as to who you’d like to meet.

The homepage boasts: “Soulmates is a unique service so you can be sure that you will be part of a group of like-minded people” so already I guess you’re talking to people with similar political views although i pointed out to her that this wasn’t necessarily something that was a given seeing as you don’t have to prove to the site that you read the Guardian… although that would be funni, to have a secret question that you could only find in the Guardian as a security question to have access to the site…: )

Anyway, she’s been on a little more than 5 dates with different types of men and these are some of the things that she mentioned which could perhaps lead the design of better online dating services:

- The pictures posted are completely inaccurate, some men post pictures at weird angles, old pictures when they were younger and more athletic, the level of accuracy plays a lot on whether a woman will choose to meet someone in real life, so why delay the reaction? Let’s be honest here, men expect us to look great at any time and to show it all, why can’t men do the same? Maybe this could lead to using people’s webcams or cellphones… ie take a picture of yourself now and send it within the next 3 mns to this email adress or phone number…

- She ended up meeting people with completely different objectives, so what someone is actually interested in is something that needs granularity… check boxes are boring… “im looking to someone to write to” defines nothing at all and “let’s see what happens” sounds more like “let’s see what you are like in real life and then we’ll decide”… sigh… clarity is king!

- Jude actually met other women who were on the network as well and they started chatting about the men they met and quickly realized that they had actually dated the same men and so started discussing them and giving each other advice. Is there opportunity here for a community-aspect to this online dating thing… reputation? commenting? how many people on the network has that person “favorite”? I’m sure there have to be design opportunities here. Just like life…

So of course after this conversation I really had to give this thing a try, and see what the online interactions were. I really enjoy reading the Guardian and I think they’ve done a really nice job for their website recently but this was ridiculous…I really felt like i was filling in a shopping list of requirements and personal criteria. People don’t post up that many details about themselves and they’re actually little that would make you choose between one guy or the next apart from the picture! And of course this comes back to my first point…accuracy is key. The navigation is very poor and to be honest, information like “so and so is a 85% match” with blue ticks next to each item of the shopping list are really not helpful. The only items which seem to translate what a person is like are the photos, the voice message (but what exactly does one record on these…”testing one 2 one 2, this is my voice”?) and the personal rant entitled “why i would be a good pick”… there’s so much missing here…

So I think what I’ll do is stay on this service and use it as user research if i should ever actually find someone to go out for coffee with. I think it would be a great design exercise for the Guardian to reconsider this service and actually design it properly. They could actually become innovative in their supposed desire to “bring like-minded people together”.

Oh my god, I just saw the profile of someone i know! Gulp!