Entries Tagged 'Everything else' ↓

It’s not often you get to see a completely new user interface come on the scene, but that’s what we have today with dual flush toilets. This affords us a rare opportunity to look inside designers’ heads as they figure out the process of making consumers comfortable and confident as they use the product.

A dual flush toilet has two settings that use differing amounts of water depending on what is being flushed. The designer’s challenge is a/communicating this fact to the user, who possibly has never seen such a device before; and then b/letting them know which switch is for which function. Let’s look at a few examples of how this challenge has been met.

The University of North Carolina installed a very institutional toilet with a handle that goes up or down depending. Since you don’t know which is which way does what they put up a sign to explain. I would say this is not very good user interface design: if you have to include instructions for a toilet handle, it’s non-intuitive and too complicated.

A couple of companies offer retrofit kits that add dual flush capability inside your existing tank. To make this work, they replace the operating handle on the outside of the tank. Dual Flush also has a handle that goes up or down, and they include a decal in the package that you can stick on the toilet next to the handle to educate users.  Again, not ideal but we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt since this device is a lot cheaper and more environmentally friendly than buying a new toilet.

Another retrofit kit comes from Flush Choice.  This one has two handles, a little one for a little flush and a big one for a big. I think I would figure this out without a guidebook, but it would look a little circusy in a home bathroom and might not be sturdy enough for institutional settings.

Other designers have abandoned the handle and flush the toilet with an entirely different mechanism: buttons. Making such a radical change in the interface is pretty unusual, and it can only work because people really, really want to flush that toilet, and will take the initiative to figure out how. Buttons can be attractively designed, and they’re sturdy because they connect directly to a plunger in the tank. And in fact, all the dual flush toilets I’ve actually seen in the wild have buttons.

Of the three photos here, the big wide buttons are from a toilet in a public restroom. The buttons are of equal size but they have images on them to tell you which is for which. The image of the solid circle implies “all the water” but it also reminds of solid waste. Maybe too graphic? And using same-size buttons for different-size flushes doesn’t seem like an elegant solution; the designer missed an opportunity to communicate by making the buttons also different sizes.

That’s what was done with the new-moon shape, which is my favorite. It hearkens back to outhouse doors and once you study it, it’s clear that one button is larger than the other and I think most people would figure out that small means less. I kind of wish they would make the “less” button green but maybe that calls too much attention to itself to be a successful home décor product. (Interestingly, the plunger underneath this inside the tank IS green; also interesting, the home fixit guy who installed it got the parts reversed so the green low flush plunger ended up on the high flush side. In the end, some human errors can’t be solved with design.)

The much, much more subtle split circle is from the same manufacturer, Kohler. This toilet is much more expensive than the one above and works a lot better. And I can easily see what went through the product manager’s head when they saw the new-moon configuration: “I’m not putting a picture of an outhouse in MY customer’s bathroom.” But it would have been an improvement.

Gotta go.

I’m wondering why I and so many others were so ga-ga about Twitter at SXSW earlier this year. Maybe it was the new TweetDeck app that allowed us to chirp back and forth about the session that was happening in front of us in the same room. But anyway, I was expecting Twitter to change my life and it hasn’t.

If you want to make money with Twitter, what marketers are realizing is that it’s a great platform for communicating with your EXISTING customers—the same discovery we all made about email. Example: the Korean taco truck telling followers where it will show up next. A company letting its best customers in on a “secret” sale. And an organization like Zappos which has discovered Twitter is an effective vehicle for internal communications. I guess this isn’t really making money per se… rather, you’re saving money or expanding your base with an efficient means of targeted communication.

Best way to make Twitter relevant in your own life: go through your tweets and ruthlessly unfollow anyone who tweets frequently with info that is not fantastically interesting. If you are disappointed with what you read in Twitter, do this immediately then replace the unfollowed by going to http://wefollow.com/ and following a few media sources or people that seem interesting. Repeat on a regular basis, unfollowing those who aren’t interesting after all. Yes, this is work, which is the antithesis of what Twitter is supposed to be.

Twitter founder Biz Stone calls it “curating” your tweets, as if we all had a roomful of Hundertwassers instead of inane tweets about needing to go to the gym. Okay…

My fellow blogger Daniel Berman is a former San Francisco ad guy who, like me, found himself in upstate New York through a twist of fate. We met on Yelp through our reviews chronicling the quest for good food in Albany and environs. Daniel has now taken this a step further with a quixotic campaign to persuade Albanians to chef up and be more like Austin, a city of comparable size. He’s been driven a bit mad by observing that “Our top food blogger is promoting free beef and cheddar sandwiches at Arby’s. And our top food critic is spending her time in converted pubs and pizza parlors.” This sturm und drang caused me to reflect on what my own food experience has been since moving here.

As all things should, we’ll start at the track. One of the wisest and most economical things you can do in the Capital District is go to Saratoga Racetrack early on a summer morning and watch the horses exercise while the dew melts and the steam rises off the grass. It’s free and you can sit in a box seat which will subsequently be occupied by a celebrity or racing nabob, while you sip your coffee or nosh on the breakfast you’ve picked up on the way in.

They clear the grandstand at 10 am and you have to go out, pay, then come back in again. On the way out you will see: most of the tables in the $3 picnic area already claimed by folks who have brought in coolers and tablecloths and will return sometime before the 1 pm post time. I personally can’t think of a better way to spend the afternoon since you can watch the horses and jockeys go by in the paddock, on the way to the races, see the races themselves on closed circuit TVs everywhere, stroll over to a betting station, and potentially splurge by spending a big $2 additional to see the races live by moving to the clubhouse.

So my first look at a quality Saratoga dining experience consists in peeking at what’s inside my cooler. It is this: half a pastrami and swiss on seeded rye with Saratoga chips and Cole slaw from Ben and Bill’s deli, accompanied by a can or more of Genessee Cream Ale.

Ben and Bill were the original Golub brothers, a distinguished Jewish family which owns the Price Chopper chain of supermarkets upstate. Their descendents chafed at the lack of local deli food and resolved to create the best deli between New York City and Montreal, which happens to be placed inside a supermarket in a strip mall. No matter: the pastrami is lean, the cole slaw is excellent and the included pickle is authentically fluorescent. They’ve licensed a few things from Carnegie Deli such as the cheesecake and the gut-busting Woody Allen mile-high sandwich but the $5.99 half sandwich special is really all a reasonable person needs to eat.

This includes a generous bag of potato chips which, as Wikipedia will tell us, were invented right here, across the Northway at Saratoga Lake:

The original potato chip recipe was created by chef George Crum at Moon’s Lake House near Saratoga Springs, New York, on August 24, 1853. Fed up with a customer who continued to send his fried potatoes back complaining that they were too thick and soggy, Crum decided to slice the potatoes so thin that they could not be eaten with a fork. As they could not be fried normally in a pan, he decided to stir-fry the potato slices. Against Crum’s expectation, the guest was ecstatic about the new chips and they soon became a regular item on the lodge’s menu, under the name “Saratoga Chips.”

Ben and Bill’s Saratoga chips are fried up fresh each morning and are miles apart from the uniformity of a bag of Lay’s. Some are burnt, some are a bit flaccid, but that’s the idea. Each one unique, these chips are made to be noticed and savored slowly over a race or two till the bag is gone.

The ideal liquid accompaniment for this would be a growler (64 ounce jug) of IPA from the ever-changing tap at Eddie’s Beverages on Excelsior, except that the track does not allow glass containers to be brought in. On a warm summer day, the light, refreshing and slightly sweet Genny Creme is a fine substitue. It’s a benefit that many upstaters regard this as a working person’s brew, a bit déclassé, so I’m rarely (actually never) asked to share my stash.

When I go back to San Francisco, my treat of choice will be a special from a Chinese lunch place, most likely shrimp in garlic sauce from Taiwan in the Richmond. Except with great difficulty, I’m not going to find anything like that here. Nor will I get Texas brisket or a perfectly simmered pot of turnip greens. But my trackside lunch works well enough, and I feel proud and resourceful regarding my competence in foraging in my new haunts.

The lead story in the Specialty Foods newsletter today really caught my eye. “Some 52% of consumers are monitoring the amount of sodium in their diets and 26% read labels for sodium.” This seems simply incredible on the face of it, especially in the context of my new home in upstate New York where 77.8% of the populace pays no attention whatsoever to what goes into their gullet.

Seeking understanding, I follow the link to its source — Mintel, “a leading global supplier of consumer, product and media intelligence.” Here I find out that:

• 22% [of consumers] restrict the amount of salt that they add to food, but don’t watch the much greater amount of sodium that is in foods and beverages
• 18% say that “food and beverages low in sodium are one of the three most important components of a healthy diet”
• 26% read labels for sodium, and may make some decisions based on this info, but they are not following a regimen to control sodium in their diet
• 34% do not pay attention to sodium

Except for the last stat (which seems low), none of these numbers seems at all credible to me on a seat-of-the-pants basis. Do they to you? Perhaps this is some research from a survey that is skewed to make a particular marketing point? So let’s look at the original source material, the verbatim comments from the survey. Oops, they aren’t available. Instead Mintel offers a link to a webinar where we can learn about “Sodium: The Next Trans Fat?”

High school debaters learn that with a little digging, they can find a “statistic” to support any point of view. Perhaps in the Mintel survey, and I’m stipulating that there was one, they asked people “do you ever think about the amount of sodium in your diet?” and 52% said yes. That would still be a high number, but I’d accept it. Then maybe some creative marcom copywriter changed it to “monitor” which recasts the same stat as alarming or fascinating news.

One of my earliest bosses promised he was going to teach me to “lie with statistics”. I didn’t last very long at that position and don’t know what happened to that boss. Hmm…

I recently completed a pretty intense cross-country move. I rented a 24 foot Budget truck (that’s the size of the box, not counting the cab) and when it still wasn’t big enough I shipped an extra container of stuff with Door To Door Movers.

I was amazed at the price differential. The Budget truck cost half what I was quoted by U-Haul. And on a square foot basis Door to Door was 60% of the price of a competitor, Pods.com.

How come the disparity? I don’t know enough about the pods type containers to have a strong opinion, but when it comes to trucks it’s definitely MARKETING. Every U-Haul truck or trailer on the road is emblazoned with ads about how easy it is to load, to drive, etc. If I’m thinking about a move, I sure am going to notice those free ads… being driven down the road by customers like me. And sure, I’ll check U-Haul first. But I assume most consumers go no further, or they couldn’t charge this kind of premium.

As a mover, I’m glad I took the extra time to find the low priced spread. But as a marketer, I’m pleased to recognize advertising that seems to be working so well.

Have you ever watched a janitor replacing fluorescent light bulbs? They change all of them, whether or not they are burned out. The opportunity cost of climbing up on that ladder is high enough that it outweighs the time remaining in the still-working bulbs (which is probably short since they were replaced en masse last time).

I thought about this when I rediscovered my Googie side lamps from the 50s which had been stuck in the attic during a remodel. Soon after I acquired these, the rawhide laces in the shades were starting to fray so I went to Mendel’s in the Haight and got replacement laces. Foolishly, I replaced only the laces that had broken. Now the rest of the laces are shot and I have no idea where the rawhide went, so I’ll have to buy more and this time I’ll be smart enough to replace everything.

A parallel lesson comes from Keith Campbell, who was my client and president of the Federated Group of home entertainment stores back in the day. Keith never went to college but he knew that when he found something wrong in a store–say, a sloppy warehouse of A/V equipment that makes it difficult to find what a customer wants–it is typical of a larger problem. A manager wouldn’t be careless about that and careful about everything else. The whole system needs to be taken apart and examined.

Think about things as a system, not a series of one-off events. You may discover some problems… or, opportunities… in your own marketing.

Early in my career, I was lured to advertising’s “dark side”.  I stopped in to see a department store client and was told that, while there were presently no freelance copy assignments, the direct marketing manager had just quit and I was welcome to apply for the job. Thus began a five year journey that culminated in a position as account supervisor at a national agency before I ran screaming into the sunlight on Wilshire Blvd. and ceremonially buried my suit in my back yard.

Creative colleagues kid me about my poor judgment (in taking the job, not losing the suit) to this day. But this experience actually provided valuable lessons that have sustained me throughout my freelance career.

The first lesson was the relationship between what I wrote and the financial success of the company. Previously, I’d written more or less for my own amusement and maybe to impress the girls in the office. My perspective changed when my boss at Broadway Department Stores, Marketing VP Jan Wetzel, took me for a store tour on the first day of a big sale so I could see people lined up to products which up to now had been copyblocks and production art. Now, I realized they were buying at least in part because of the creative presentation.

My learning was reinforced when I later had a job as ad director at a company that sold tools on the phone; prospects called an 800 number in response to a mailer I would send out. When there was an excess of incoming calls, they would overflow to the receptionist at the front desk. I soon learned that when she was too busy to say good morning, we had a successful mailer on our hands. Aha, creative presentation makes a marketing difference (along with some list testing I got to play with)!

Another lesson was a corollary of this one. I discovered, because the creatives now working for me did not always do it, how important it was to honor schedule and budget commitments and to treat the “suits” with mutual courtesy. I can still see a TV art director at a large Detroit-based agency looking me in the eye and explaining away a mediocre script for a :30 retail supermarket spot because “Otis, there are only so many good ideas.” And when I returned to the creative side I initially found it hard to find work because creative directors figured if I had done account work, my writing couldn’t possibly be any good.

Pay attention to P&L. Honor schedules and budgets. Treat your client with respect. This is stuff they don’t teach in cub copywriter school. I’m glad I have the opportunity to learn it.

A good writer quickly learns the importance of developing a voice for his or her writing. Readers get more involved when they feel like a real person is writing to them. And over time you know what that voice is for a particular genre or publication and you fall into it like an actor playing a familiar part.

The author of otisregrets, for example, is somewhat professorial, a bit stuffy, yet tries hard to be approachable and takes extra care to explain what he means if it’s not immediately clear. While Otis M writing on Yelp is very different. That author is about 10 years younger and something of a wise guy. He uses catch phrases and occasional puns and enjoys going off on tangents in his reviews.

I know both these writers well and so do my readers. These voices haven’t always been there, as you can see from reading some early posts in either forum. I didn’t set out to be that person, but rather evolved into it over time.

All of which is my preamble to a theory on why I haven’t developed a habit of Tweeting frequently: I can’t find a way to develop a voice in 140 characters (which I try to keep to 120 for retweetability). By the time I say the bare minimum I have to say, I’m close to the limit.

After I realized this I started looking at other people’s tweets to see who had a voice I can recognize. @the_real_shaq has a voice, but he’s one of a kind. (Shaq’s eulogy for former NFL quarterback Steve McNair, who was shot to death yesterday: “Rip steve mcnair Roo roo q dog”) @broylesa has a voice, but she is nearly always writing about food in the Austin area… maybe very specific subject matter is a key.

Everyone else in my tweetstream is sticking to the facts, unless it’s personal. Here’s @heatheranne who works in advertising which is probably why we follow each other: “Trying to get glass out of my now-jammed garbarator. Oh my…” Now that is good writing, a vivid word picture plus a made up word and comment that makes you feel what she is feeling. I am going to go for adjectives and a personal aside next time I tweet and see what happens.

My venerable MacBook died today. (No condolences necessary, it wasn’t Black.*) Which brings to mind the issue of how freelancers should deal with technical glitches when talking to clients.

Should I have called my clients and said “my computer died, so I won’t be able to read any emails you send me till I get a new one”? Um, no. I have webmail for my email so I can check it from any public computer with web access by going to http://webmail.otismaxwell.com . Halfway through 2009, not being able to exchange email with your clients is simply not OK.

Should I have warned those same clients that “since I’ll have to check email on my iPhone till I get a new computer, I won’t be able to download your attachments like the marked up deck or PDF”? Unless they have iPhones themselves, your clients will think this excuse is ridiculous which actually it is. (Steve, are you listening?)

This is why you need a backup account on gmail or yahoo. If you can’t get attachments at your primary email, ask them to forward to your alternate. Awkward, but better than blowing a deadline… or losing a client.

* With the new generation of Mac laptops we seem to have bid farewell to the Black Mac, a laptop which cost $300 more primarily because it had a matte black finish. I only know one person who bought one, a consultant to publishers in South America. He called on a VIP who said, “S__, you say you respect me yet you show up with a white MacBook!” The next visit, S__ had a black one.

It appears that the purveyors of fancy foods, and the consumers who buy from them, are ready to lead us back to fiscal health. The Javits Convention Center, which two weeks ago was so deserted you could picture yourself getting mugged during DM Days, was today so packed it was hard to make it down the aisles. Both exhibitors and attendees were delighted.

There’s always a big trend that emerges at the Fancy Food Show and this year it was, as one possibly might have guessed, fancy chocolate…. the stuff that soothes us and feels like an acceptable treat when life is hard. There was single origin chocolate (lots and lots of that), high end chocolate with handsome packaging, chocolate to eat with wine, even chocolate sushi. Runner up trend: tea, in both liquid and dried forms.  Also the broad category of things you can make at home that feel like currently unaffordable restaurant meals: pasta sauces from Rao’s or Mario Batalli, premade soufflés guaranteed not to fall, spice kits with a recipe card etc.

Flavored water is still a strong category, while celebrity foods, energy drinks, artisanal salts, salsas and specialty vinegars—each a trend at one point—were hard to find at the show. Most surprisingly pervasive single item: sun dried tomatoes. Most popular booths among attendees on a New York summer day: anything serving iced desserts, or slicing prosciutto or Serrano ham.