I was one of the suckers who pre-ordered The Complete New Yorker magazine. I am a long-long-time New Yorker reader, and the enticement was just too powerful — 8 DVDs filled with 60+ years of cultural commentary, quirky cartoons and cool cover art, all in a distinct highbrow-yet-practical-minded voice and scanned in at super-high-res? For a few extreme dorks, this was intensely exciting. Expectation-wise, it was like the release of a smartypants Playstation 3.
Upon arrival, it also resembled Playstation 3, in that it sucked, big-time. My experience improved slightly after The Occasional Scrivener posted a hack that allows you to copy issues from the 8 independent DVDs onto your hard drive. An extreme dork after my own heart. Many thanks.
The really big, un-hackable problem: The search tool is a house of horrors. Imagine that you’ve finally been introduced to a long-time idol, let’s say Bob Dylan, and he agrees to come home with you and sit in your living room and tell you anything you want to know. But then when you ask him to tell you the complete story of the “Judas!” show, you realize that he doesn’t speak English; he just sits there silently, impassive. That’s how this thing makes me feel.
The whole point of getting Complete New Yorker is to have your mind blown by the wealth of cool stuff in the older issues. Therefore, the challenge faced by the interaction designers is to facilitate getting at that stuff, i.e. MAKE IT EASY TO SEARCH for what you want. The shot below represents the Procrustean bed on which each searcher must lie.
The really egregious crimes have been documented elsewhere, but I would just like to add:
- Performance that reminds me of the 90’s. If this had been released in 1998, I could easily forgive the lag everytime a button is pressed or a search is executed. But really, when I type “white” into the general search field, and it churns for nearly 20 seconds, I don’t know, it makes me homicidally mad. Anger at slow performance is like road rage — once you’ve got it, you can’t get rid of it, no matter how much you avoid being in a car.
- Why the cruel and unusual search complexity? Searching is never made easier by surfacing every possible method of doing so right off the bat. Google — the world’s most popular search interface — seems like an effective guide here. Start simple, and reveal sophistication when necessary. There aren’t really even that many ways I could conceive of searching the Complete New Yorker — author, date article title, date range ... That’s about it.
- Wasted vertical real estate. Nearly 33% of the vertical space is consumed by tool chrome, those thick gray bars segmenting the screen. Combined with the often bizzare and mostly useless “Abstract” below, this leaves 11 rows for search results, the place where users (I) make decisions on what to launch in the viewer. Unforgiveable.
- What the heck is this thing called?. The fact that the search results do not contain a highly valuable piece of information — umm, the title of the piece — makes it a pain in the butt to scan (for instance) the stories of JD Salinger, the assorted work of EB White. Actually, pretty much every search is complicated by this.
I could go on and on, but I won’t. Here’s my suggestion for CNY 2.0: Consolidate the existing widgets into one widget with modest dynamic behaviors. The widget would have one simple initial menu that determines how you want to search — keyword, author, issue, department. This selection then determines the filters you’ll need — if you choose “keyword,” maybe you get “department” and “date” as filters.
In doing this, you buy back all of that chrome real estate, allowing more results to be displayed. Win, win, win. Of course none of this matters much if database performance isn’t improved, but here it is anyway:
[...] Scorcese uses X to mark the spot in The Departed “As an homage to Howard Hawks’ classic 1932 Scarface, Scorsese scattered Xs throughout the movie (some more subtle than others), using them as a symbol of impending doom.” [via GF] Eliot Noyes: “The Forgotten Pioneer of Corporate Design” “It is harder still to explain why the designer and architect, who died in 1977 at age 67, isn’t better known today, when the principles he championed — the notion that good design is good business, for instance, and the belief in interdisciplinary design teams — are now accepted wisdom. Every designer working in or for Corporate America today owes Noyes a debt of gratitude.” WSJ analyzes social bookmarking sites and says it’s a few power users that dominate links “The Journal’s analysis found that a substantial number of submissions originated with a handful of users. At Digg, which has 900,000 registered users, 30 people were responsible for submitting one-third of postings on the home page. At Netscape.com, a single user named ‘STONERS’ — in real life, computer programmer Ed Southwood of Dayton, Ohio — was behind fully 217 stories over the two-week period, or 13% of all stories that reached the most popular list. (Netscape, which gained fame with its namesake browser, is now owned by Time Warner’s AOL unit and operates a news site.) On Reddit, one of the most influential users is 12-year-old Adam Fuhrer.” Mingling with restaurant customers “My dad never seemed to be working at all. I’d look on as he mingled with diners, mostly making idle chit chat. With strangers he’d walk up to their tables as they ate and ask them how their meals were. At the tables of regulars he might sit down and share a drink, maybe even roll some dice. It was a fantastic excuse for a job. Or so I thought. It turned out that my dad had the most important job in the place. His endless conversations with patrons clued him into changes he needed to make on the menu. He was quickly able to comp a round of drinks if customers received slow service, nipping their frustration in the bud. They would often tell him how they’d heard about the restaurant, and possibly mention an upcoming party they were planning and did the restaurant do banquets? (answer: of course!)” Suggestions for improving the Complete New Yorker UI “Nearly 33% of the vertical space is consumed by tool chrome, those thick gray bars segmenting the screen. Combined with the often bizzare and mostly useless ‘Abstract’ below, this leaves 11 rows for search results, the place where users make decisions on what to launch in the viewer. Unforgiveable.” PowerPoint solutions that “move beyond bullet points” “The single most important thing you can do to dramatically improve your presentations is to have a story to tell before you work on your PowerPoint file. You’ll take Hollywood’s cue and write a special type of script that focuses your ideas and helps you figure out what you want to say and how you want to say it.” Information visualization and the debate over global warming “The most memorable moment in ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ is when Gore goes off the edge of the graph, rising up in a cherrypicker high above the stage to show what will happen if the present trends continue unabated. It’s a nice bit of theater — the message is dramatized as well as shown through the graph and described verbally. It’s also a crucial moment in the story Gore is telling.” “I did not know that yesterday!” provides answers to unusual questions What country drinks the least beer? How did the rainbow become associated with gay pride? What was the first thing ever sold on eBay? How did the tradition of placing candles on a birthday cake originate? Etc. “It’s just like a mini mall!” [via CM] [...]