The final out.

The New Yorker’s Roger Angell even mentions the flow in a blog entry about the game:

Pitching his no-hit, 4–0 masterpiece against the Cincinnati Reds last night, the Phillies’ ace Roy Halladay restored the smoothing, almost symphonic sense of pleasure that lies within the spare numbers and waiting possibilities of every ballgame. Even from a distance, at home again in your squalid living-room loge, you felt something special this time about the flow of pitches, balls and (mostly) strikes, the inexorably approaching twenty-seventh man retired ...

And of course the Philly fans were deeply engaged throughout the game. In the later innings, each strike was cheered, and Reds batters received hearty, cascading boos each time they asked for time to try to disrupt Halladay’s rhythm.

This guy brought the right sign to the game.

The remainder of the post-season will have to be pretty remarkable to out-shine this unique achievement. (And I personally hope that the Giants are up for it).

This clustercuss is the redesign. (I can’t find a picture of the “before,” but it wasn’t really too different, to the casual observer).

The real problem: The redesign isn’t radical enough.

It simply shifted content around — a sure-fire bet to piss off regular readers. The redesign doesn’t address bigger problems around findability, readability, navigability, whatever you want to call a lingering sense of not being able to get around easily. It also breaks from a common blog convention: homepages that includes lengthy content for each post (UPDATE: they’ve changed this). The biggest change is that they’ve moved away from individual blogs as linear, ever-expanding solo narratives, which I think is interesting. What they’re moving toward is less clear.

According to spirited commentary by the Atlantic writers, the redesign was driven by the arcane calculus of advertising. I won’t pretend to know how online ad placement works in a place like The Atlantic, but what I do know is that someone told them to spread their fresh content around, and it’s kinda half-spread.

I am a big Atlantic reader. I subscribe to the print edition, and I regularly read three of its bloggers — Ta-Nehisi Coates, James Fallows and Andrew Sullivan. I subscribe to their feeds, so I don’t go to theatlantic.com unless I want to comment on Coates’ blog, or read comments, which means I’ll head there a couple of times a week, but when I get there I’ll be deeply immersed in a thread.

To me, the true opportunity was to leverage the sprawling, smart conversations that these writers continually create — to create a sort of salon among the readers and writers. To Klein’s point above, you’d think a virtual salon would be exactly the kind of thing that would “re-center” the brand. Breaking out of the conventional blog model is a reasonable first step. Blogs are long threads, and maintaining individual threads needlessly inhibits wider-scale conversation. So they’ve taken that half-step away from threads (which are a helpful organizing principle for readers), but the salon is nowhere in sight. And this is a problem.

A community of practice. The practice of finding deals.

So, some industrious, deal-seeking shoppers have created LiveJournal communities in which shoppers can band together to save shipping costs from online retailers. These so-called “sprees” usually correspond to global shipping deals offered by a retailer, and they’re available until certain criteria are met — minimum amounts for the shipping deal, or whenever the spree-launcher decides to take care of the order.

In the above example, the spree is for a retailer called “Apparel,” it’s open, and there are 35 “comments,” many of which are actually “orders.” That’s right, you submit your order in a public space, so that others can see how close the spree is to being filled.

In order to build trust among their users, the community above provides a way to give feedback; they’ve created a separate community called “spreefeedback” where users leave comments about the trustworthiness of the users who launch the sprees. Hacky, but apparently effective. Pretty cool, huh?

On related notes, Jane Fulton Suri’s Thoughtless Acts?: Observations on Intuitive Design is filled with intriguing examples of everyday hacks in the physical world. Last summer, I wrote about my friends Kristen and Rob and their Flickr UI navigation cues that helped the non-savvy folks in their family find their wedding photo albums.

During one editing session, one of the Dickmans recalls an interview with former American poet laureate Mark Strand in which Strand cautions against relying on “clusters of words” that pop into your head ... This sounded to me like a good rule of thumb for writing. (It also added fuel to the fire of my dislike of Twitter and Twitter-like tools that encourage people to offer half-cocked, cliche-ridden mini-opinions about everything.) I plundered the Internet in search of the interview.

Turns out that he was referring to a 2003 piece in Post Road Magazine. It was conducted by writer Michael O’Keefe. The relevant bit is the last passage from Strand, but the context is helpful:

Mark Strand: Nobody wants to arrive because that’s the end. One wants to have openings constantly before him so there are places to go.
Michael O’Keefe: Do you believe that sometimes words can get in the way when you write?
MS: Words do get in the way when you have heard them used in a particular manner before. When you write all you’ve got are words but they both get in the way and serve as a salvation.
MO: Do you avoid using any kind of combinations of words that you could remember easily?
MS: Yeah, I mistrust them because it means that they existed in that way before. The idea is to use a modifier-noun combination that may never have been used before. Otherwise you may be just quoting others or quoting yourself. The excitement comes when you have done something that was unthinkable before.

Amen, brother. Mistrust ease. Seek the unthinkable.

In my digging, I also found some excellent Strand resources, including a nice interview in a 1975 issue of Ploughshares and a very helpful page at the Library of Congress that eventually led to my discovery of the above interview.

Bill DeRouchey recently mentioned the ingredients that, for him, trigger a state of flow: “Brian Eno [ed: I’m guessing his music here, rather than, say, seeing him on the subway], Koyaanisqatsi soundtrack, isolation, old rocksteady/ska and (yes) the LOTR trilogy.” There was an ensuing #flowstate discussion on Twitter.

David Halberstam’s book about the late 70’s Portland Trailblazers, The Breaks of the Game, contains a nice description of former Blazer Bill Walton’s pre-game ritual:

[Walton] loved the day of a game, particularly an important game. It was a time which belonged completely to him, a time pure in its purpose. On the day itself, he did not analyze the game, he had done that the night before, thought about the team and the player he was going against in the most clinical way possible. The night before was the analytical time. The day of the game was different, it was an emotional time. He always took a nap on the day of a game, waking up two and a half hours before the game ... This was the time in which he felt the rhythm and tempo of the game, almost like feeling a dance of his own. He played his own music, from the Grateful Dead ... and the music helped, it flowed through him and he thought about the tempo he wanted to set and how he could move. He would sit in his home or his hotel room in those hours and actually see the game and feel the movement of it. Sometimes he did it with such accuracy that a few hours later when he was on the court and the same players made the same moves, it was easy for him because he had already seen it all, had made that move or blocked that shot. He loved that time, he had it all to himself, he was absorbed in his feel for basketball.

An ingredient to Walton’s secret sauce: The Grateful Dead. In the same jam family, I would say, as Bill’s Phillip Glass go-to, Koyaanisqatsi.

All of which of course made me think of my own flowstate triggers. The more I think about it, though, my most reliable trigger is running, but a glass of water and the Baseball Encyclopedia also can do the trick. Music is not as essential to me; sometimes silence is better, sometimes I need some Animal Collective. For Reverend Green is pretty reliable.

What we have here is both a failure to communicate and an ingenious workaround. To Kristen & Rob: Kudos.

Part one of two: The home page. It’s where the “navigation” is. There’s no keyword search, no “categories.” Just you, the name of each mix like a sticker on a cassette tape, and the sense of rooting around in a cryptic virtual shoebox, popping a mix in, listening for a little while, striking gold, or not, and moving on. It’s a really lovely and evocative of the simpler, more mysterious times.

Part two of two: The “player.” It’s genius. No “friends” or “people who are also listening to this” or “messaging” or “you may also like.” Just the songs, links to buy them, and an indication of which track is playing.

For the record, I don’t think it needs much else. Whatever happens, I really hope this stuff is NOT added:

• Search. Please, no search. Of course search would make it easier to find mixes that “match” your keywords, but who wants that? Well, I did, at first, but after I poked around I realized that I was having way more fun exploring, letting go of the way that I normally explore. We need more non-keyword-oriented ways of exploring! Seriously! It’s way more fun to roll the dice than to look for what you think that you want, and it’s somehow more appropriate to music
• Any kind of “profile-generating.” The madness must be stopped somewhere, sometime. A way to connect with mix-makers would be nice, but no names, birthdays, pictures, blogs, or any of that.
• Any kind of more “predictable” homepage. Please. Just show the random stuff. Let people start here. It’s scary and frustrating and annoying at first, but it becomes fun, magical. Perfect! Done!

This was in Sunday’s interesting pool, and it’s a pretty strong example of the “Flickr style,” i.e. heavy-handed, post-processed and much-adored by like-minded members of the community. Photo: James Neely

I don’t patently dislike post-processing, but I find that the photos deemed “interesting” frequently have a creepy unreality about them, a flatness, an obsessive visual “perfection.” The result is that many of these photos seem like scenes from Dune, or Lewis Carroll, or a Bjork video, or a Thomas Kinkade landscape. Everything is in focus, perfectly lit, tightly composed. In short, I dislike “interestingness” because it feels like a sort of Pixar-ization of photography. (I love Pixar). But I don’t like that CG-esque feel creeping into a medium that, for me, derives its essence from its simplicity and imperfection.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m down with post-processing and unreality

I just appreciate when post-processing supports the natural aspects of the photo, when it adds layers to the scene. The photo below is called “The Flooded Grave,” and the photographer is Jeff Wall. It’s a montage of 75 separate photographs from two separate graveyards and Wall’s studio. Why all the cutting, pasting and blending? Well, If you look closely, you’ll see that there’s actually a small coral reef growing at the bottom of the grave.

Wall says, “I worked with oceanographers to create a momentary fragment of a real undersea corner. I didn’t want an aquarium display, a cross-section of sea-life from the area, or anything like that. I wanted it to be a snapshot of everyday life at a certain depth of sea water.” Read more at the Tate Modern’s online catalog.

So where does the Flickr style come from?

I’ve been excited to talk about Virginia Heffernan’s article in last week’s New York Times, Sepia No More. She addresses the disconcerting popularity of high-dynamic range cheesiness in the Flickr style, and she strikes at the heart of what is emerging as a formula for popularity on Flickr. She discusses Rebekka Gudleifsdóttir, one of the Flickr style’s “leading proponents:”

[Gudleifsdóttir] discovered ... how to create images that would look good shrunk, in “thumbnail” form; and how to flirt with the site’s visitors in the comments area to keep them coming back. As perhaps is always the case with artists, Gudleifsdottir’s evolution as a photographer was bound up in the evolution of her modus operandi, a way of navigating the institutions and social systems that might gain her a following and a living.

Creating images that look good shrunk

I’m intrigued by the interpretation of the UI’s effect on the Flickr style, i.e. that the Flickr interface for browsing thumbnails informs the way in which people compose and upload photos. It makes sense to me. The browsing mechanism is tightly-tiled matrix, so photographers are going to want to craft individual elements that look good when they’re (a) cropped to be square, (b) shrunk down small, and © snugly packed together.

Here’s an example from a photographer I like, a nicely differentiated matrix with some intriguing juxtapositions. Photos: Feedbacklove.

Is “Flickr style” a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Maybe the early users and founders were graphic designers? Maybe they really liked glossy, vivid stuff that often looks like the background of beer billboards? Whatever it is, I feel like the “Flickr style” is much less free-form than most may think. The formula behind “interestingness,” as stated on the site: “Where the clickthroughs are coming from; who comments on it and when; who marks it as a favorite; its tags and many more things which are constantly changing.” Interestingness as a function of the community actions makes sense. Tagging, assigning photos to groups, favoriting, commenting — all of these things seem like useful vehicles. But my sense is that everything that’s being folded into “interestingness” is coming from a fairly closed system, a group of like-minded people with similar tastes promoting the same stuff again and again. Back and forth, forever. ))<>((

Un-interestingness

I’ve got a list of my own “un-interesting” photographers, mostly gleaned from the group I Shoot Film. I also follow the feeds of a few Flickr photographers — This Is a Wakeup Call, Feedbacklove, and Last Leaf, to name a few.

Still, it seems like most interesting stuff still lives outside of Flickr. I look at SUCKAPANTS and The Constant Siege pretty often, both of which can be NSFW, by the way.

If The Wire had a literary analog, this would be it, not only because it takes place in East Baltimore, but because it presents a morally complex view of the relationship between law enforcement and the citizenry with whom they interact (mostly poor people in desperate circumstances). It also adds academic underpinnings and a truly excellent set of footnotes that provide avenues to a variety of interesting sources, one of which led me to one of my all-time favorite New Yorker articles, a 1998 installment of the Cop Diary called "The Word on the Street" about the language of NYC cops. The author, the pseudonymous Marcus Laffey (actual name: Edward Conlon) recently wrote a memoir called Blue Blood, which is going on the list for sure.

I really appreciated his discussion of research methods because it puts in high relief some of the challenges that any researcher (e.g., one who is trying to understand how people use high-tech tools) interacts with their interview subjects. So much of it is very un-objective, and Moskos addresses his skeptics early on:

Some will criticize my unscientific methods. I have no real defense. Everything is true, but this book suffers from all the flaws inherent in ethnographic work ... Being on the inside, I made little attempt to be objective. I did not pick, much less randomly pick, my research site or research subjects. I researched where I was assigned. To those I policed, I tried to be fair. But my empathy was to my fellow officers. Those nearest to me became my friends and research subjects. My theories emerged from experience, knowledge, and understanding. In academic jargon, my work could be called "front-and-backstage, multisited, participant-observation research using grounded theory rooted in symbolic interactionism from a dramaturgical perspective.

You can read more in an excerpt here [PDF], and he’s got a blog that discusses media coverage of the book here.

It’s kinda strange (and thrilling) to browse through the many alleyways and avenues of Flickr and suddenly unearth a photo of ... yourself. Just now I came across this picture of myself and a shadowy figure, who I suspect is UX it-guy Jan Chipchase taken last summer during UX Week. My hazy recollection: We met and hung out during a late-night trek through the Mall to the Washington Monument, a epic walk that included UX Week speakers, the entire event staff, and the multi-talented Maggie Mason of Mighty Goods (and, more recently it seems, Mighty Junior), who recorded the journey here. We left late, got back *really* late, and somehow Jan looked none the worse for wear during his keynote the next morning; epic, indeed.

As I’ve always been curious about what he does in his role, and the structure of the NYT.com UX department, I was glad to see that someone went there right off the bat:

As the design director, my responsibility is to oversee the creative aspects of these continual improvements. Each one is a project of its own with some range in scope, from very short and discrete to long and drawn out over many months. And each project requires one or more of the members on my team: information architects (who are charged with organizing the features and the flow of information so that people can make use of them most intuitively), design technologists (who do the actual coding of many of these sites, using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, etc.) and/or visual designers (who handle the overall look and feel, including layout, typography, color, proportion, etc.).

You could say that all put together, the final product of our efforts is the user experience, or the sum total of the content and the framework as it’s used by visitors to the site. Of course, it’s not true that my design group is the only team responsible for creating this experience; it’s really the result of contributions across the board, from editors and reporters to project managers and software engineers and many more.

More here.

My own person Jan Chipchase experience: Walking through a back alley in Bombay, from my trip there to deliver design training to GE engineers.

First, what’s the title all about?

It’s called “Can the Cellphone End World Poverty,” but it’s really a profile of a researcher rather than an economic analysis of the effect of mobile technologies. And Jan’s research — if his blog and conference keynotes are any indication — focuses on the ways in which people in developing cultures *use* and *adapt* the technology, not about the ways in mobile technology can effect macroeconomic change. It’s a quibble, really, but it seems strange to describe market research as an effort to “end world poverty,” and to cast Nokia in an altruistic light when what they’re doing is really identifying and understanding a unserved market and potential customers:

... No company churns out phones like Nokia, which manufactures 1.3 million products daily. Forty percent of the mobile phones sold last year were made by Nokia, and the company’s $8.4 billion profit in 2007 reflects as much. Chipchase seems distinctly uncomfortable talking about his part as a corporate rainmaker, preferring to see himself as a mostly dispassionate ethnographer ...

I also sympathize with Jan. It would be impossible to do the kind of research he does without a higher purpose, and I know I’ve spent a lot of time rationalizing some our client work (which is always about the benjamins) with what I imagine the greater good to be. It’s easy to say that Nokia’s stock will benefit from tapping the billions of people below the poverty line, but it also seems possible that mobile technologies and connectedness in general could effect positive change. Nevertheless, I really think that the article should be called something like, “How the developing world sees technology,” or “What the developing world tells us about technology,” or something way less catchy than ending world poverty.

What methods are used to gather input from folks in developing nations?

I was most curious to hear anecdotes of what exactly he was asking people, how exactly he was gathering information, whether he was simply observing or conducting surveys, or what. (He has a number of interesting entries on “field research” on his blog, but none that give much insight into his methods).

The article has an interesting description of the outcome of an exercise in which people around the world were asked to draw their ideal mobile phone:

[Jan’s researching cohorts] said they’d found ... [that] the phone represents what people are aspiring to. “It’s an easy way to see what’s important to them, what their challenges are,” [a cohort] said. One Liberian refugee wanted to outfit a phone with a land-mine detector so that he could more safely return to his home village. In the Dharavi slum of Mumbai, people sketched phones that could forecast the weather since they had no access to TV or radio. Muslims wanted G.P.S. devices to orient their prayers toward Mecca. Someone else drew a phone shaped like a water bottle, explaining that it could store precious drinking water and also float on the monsoon waters. In Jacarèzinho, a bustling favela in Rio, one designer drew a phone with an air-quality monitor. Several women sketched phones that would monitor cheating boyfriends and husbands. Another designed a “peace button” that would halt gunfire in the neighborhood with a single touch.

Hmm. I can see how some of this stuff could be helpful in aggregate. People see the phone as a platform — and perhaps there’s a sense that it’s somewhat magical — a “peace” button, a landmine detector, a cheating boyfriend monitor, etc. (Maybe?) But does the person in Liberia really want a phone, or does he want a land-mine detector? I wonder about this.

¹ Not I.T. guy. It guy, like it girl. It’s sort of amusing to me that it’s totally clear what is meant by the words “it girl” but that the words “it guy” just seem to relate to the guy who fixes your internets.

It was a car ad — for the Lincoln MKZ — and it featured Microsoft Sync, a voice-activated technology for use in the various limos, grandpa-mobiles and ghetto sleds produced by Lincoln. The voice-over assured us that when Microsoft and Lincoln “join forces,” “all things are possible.” From what I saw, though, the only thing that was clearly possible was the GUI being ugly as hell. Maybe the whole point is the voice-activation, but I’ll say this: It better damn well be usable by voice, because it does not appear to be usable by brain and finger.

It’s true: I haven’t actually used Sync yet. So I really shouldn’t talk. I’m just disappointed that this interface gets prime time.

Is it safe to assume that the R&D money was spent on the voice activation part rather than the GUI-specific interaction design part?

My question: Why would Lincoln feature the GUI in the commercial? Have the people who made the commercial seen the iPhone? What about software interfaces like, say, Office 2007? Do they not realize that there are standards here? Expectations? I guess there’s a remote possibility that some marketing consultants found that Lincoln customers have very little overlap with people who desire elegance (related to technology anyway), or that some some stodgy federal body regulates console interfaces (NTSA?), preventing the implementation of elegance in the interface. My suspicion: Lincoln just doesn’t know or care about interface design, and that Microsoft bickered internally and churned out the lowest common denominator.

(Lastly, I’m not trying to lay on the Windows Hatorade. Every computer I own runs Windows. My phone runs Windows. I’m up to my ears in the stuff.)

Yes, I appreciate Flickr. After all, it allows me to store my photos online, share them with others, and display them on my website. Yay. Thanks for that. Still, it frustrates me daily. Here’s why:

Sequence of photo display is set in stone

If I drag a dozen pictures into the Flickr Uploadr, God only knows the order in which they’ll appear on the site. But I care about the order in which they appear on the site, because the LAST photo uploaded ends up being at the top of my Flickr homepage, and in that position of prominence it says something about me. It annoys me that I can’t control this more.¹

Little control over homepage layout; no way to make stuff sticky

So, if I can’t control the order of uploading, can I control what’s displayed on my Flickr page? No. Can I make a set sticky, so that it stays at the top of the list? No. Can I display only sets? No. Of course, Flickr has introduced new layouts, but all of them are simply ways of arranging the most recent stuff. Not helpful to me.

No concept of new-to-a-user

I’m thinking of my grandparents here. Wouldn’t it be nice if a meta-set (or something) was created of stuff that’s new to the viewer? I could just create a bookmark here, and they could check for new stuff.

Tagging is a royal nightmare.

Maybe no one has totally solved this yet, but here’s something that would work for me: I usually upload multiple related pictures at a time, and these pictures tend to share a lot of the same tags. So I’d like to create small groups of tags for a groups of pictures, and then quickly drag and drop, or multi-select and apply, a tag to a subset of those pictures. del.icio.us’s tagging interface is rudimentary, but it’s vastly more helpful than Flickr’s:

The navigation confuses everyone except geeks and experts

Collections? Sets? Archives? What’s the diff? As my mom once asked me, “Where are the albums?” At the risk of sounding irretrievably old-school, this particular set of grouping concepts is a frustration to cognition. (Also, if the distinction is made in this navigation area, why aren’t the things (sets) in the right column labeled as such?)

No record of blogged pictures?

When I create a blog entry from a picture, why isn’t there some kind of record that the image has been blogged? A link? This just seems so basic to me.

¹ Interesting side note: I bumped into some Flickr people at CHI, and I asked them about this. Their rationale: The photostream is what Flickr is all about, and the strictness of the sequence is a useful governing principle. Umm, yeah. Flickr people may think of uploading as a continual stream, but I upload photos in clumps — I don’t always think about my photos in the terms of the last photo uploaded, I often think in terms of the last group. I feel like I should have control over the way those clumps are displayed. If you force me to always show the most recently uploaded individual photo, shouldn’t you also give me some control over the order of upload in your Uploadr?

The UX Week program with my lucky cat.

Breaking it down

The sessions came in three varieties: (1) products and interface implementations; (2) design tools and processes; and (3) ideas and inspirations. Sarah Nelson at Adaptive Path organized the conference, and she recruited speakers who were not the usual talking heads.² The mix of backgrounds, experience, and subject matter kept things lively. I especially appreciated the discussions of process by AP folks like Indi Young, Kate Rutter, and Jesse James Garrett during the panel discussion of CNN.com. All of these opened my eyes to new design tools and techniques, and exposed the fact that there is a lot of innovation going on out there. In terms of the flashy products on display, I’m inherently too inquisitive and skeptical to believe what people tell me during product demoes — I need to get immersed in them myself, and ask: How did you get there? Where did that come from? What need is that addressing? How did the design evolve? Because I’m a nerd.³

Design is story-telling

As Leisa Reichelt pointed out during our panel, a lot of speakers addressed the topic of story-telling in one way or another. Kevin Brooks of Motorola Labs led a workshop on storytelling techniques; the folks behind the recent redesign of CNN.com described the way in which they crafted the story that they told their internal stakeholders; people from BestBuy.com and Sachs discussed the use of videotaped customer stories to make a case for a redesign. Of course, story-telling and design are intimately intertwined — two strands of a businessy double-helix. I was inspired by the variety of ways in which designers are telling stories about the problems to be solved, and the techniques and nuances involved in their approaches.

UX is real

I go to fewer conferences than I should (so I may be a bit sheltered), but I’ll say this anyway: at the conference, I got the feeling that UX was much further along to becoming an actual profession. UX practices are no longer outposts in the Wild West of digital products; our work is now identifiable territory in the business landscape. Not long ago, there were very few things that wouldn’t be considered within the purview of user experience; now, the boundaries of our problems are a little more clear, and our experiences as practitioners have more commonalities than differences. I feel like Tom Hanks in Big.

Now, if only I could explain what I do to my parents ...

¹ From one of my favorite movies of all-time, Freaks, i.e., one of us, one of us, we accept you, one of ux.
² Okay, except Jared Spool, but it’s always good to hear what he’s thinking.
³ I admit: The interface for One Laptop Per Child is elegant and intriguing, but I’m politically ambivalent about the project itself. I’m fascinated by the possibilities of creating an information pipeline the developing world, but I guess I’m not enough of a tech evangelist to believe in the idea that distributing laptops is better than distributing more immediate aid. Maybe I’m not thinking big enough.

If points A & B are always subway stations, I wholeheartedly approve. As seen in snippet form below, the redesign much more clearly presents information that is relevant on the subway.

Eddie Jabbour’s proposed redesign trades geographical accuracy for readability

But a subway trip is always part of a bigger logistical process. You’re not just trying to get from Atlantic Avenue Station to Astor Place Station. You’re trying to get from an apartment on President Street to the place where your friend cooks near Washington Square Park. And often the optimal subway route is not available to you; the line you want to take is extremely delayed; another line is not running; another is express past 9pm; another only runs to this station on Sundays; etc; etc. The reality is that you need to be able to improvise when you’re in the subway system, and a map that is not geographically accurate inhibits your ability to adjust to the realities of the system.

Which brings me to the London A-Z. London can get away with a representative subway map because it has a companion book that allows you to figure out stuff like that. So the Circle line isn’t running? Trusting the Tube map to go to the next nearest station may be disastrous, but you can always find your destination in your trusty A-Z, scan for another station nearby, etc. Moreover, magazines and newspapers often place the A-Z grid location next to an event listing.

Removing geographical context from the NYC map may make it easier to scan, but at this point, I feel like it’s perhaps prematurely reductive. On the other hand, a reduction of information on the subway map may simply underscore and highlight (and italicize and capitalize) the need for a NYC A-Z. Or perhaps the MTA itself just needs to be more predictable. Or maybe everything should stay the same so every traveler can have that special scary feeling of being stranded in Brooklyn at 2am on a weeknight.

UPDATE: My friend Jonathan Gabel, a New York resident for the last 13 years, had some interesting thoughts on the matter:

The current map is a total fabrication of geography anyway — Manhattan is made fat and short, and Brooklyn and Queens lose all of their length. In fact, the L line through Williamsburg and Bushwick is actually more accurate in the changed map, as it makes a radical zig-zag through the area. For instance, the L train runs: Lorimer, Graham, Grand, Montrose. From Niki’s house, 8 blocks north of the Graham stop, to meet our friends who’s live 4 blocks East of the Montrose stop, we often walk to Manhattan Ave, one block West of the Lorimer stop because it is half way between our houses. Figure that one out.

I have never seen the London A-Z but I looked at one of the NFT (not for tourists) guides to New York and found it wasn’t really helpful, specifically because it doesn’t really help you find addresses. Even the addresses of things it is telling you about — like restaurants. Say you want to find Snacky’s in Williamsburg. It shows you a map of the general area, and listings of all the restaurants and other things by street address, next to the map of the area. The map is bullet-riddled with little icons to tell you where all bars/ restaurants/ laundromats/ clubs/ sweatshops/ motorcycle-repair-shops are — but every bar/restaurant/laundromat/club/sweatshop/motorcyclerepairshop is only labeled with the sign for b/r/lc/ds/mrs and no number. So to find your Snacky’s you have to look at 20 r’s and try to figure out which one it is, and ignore 40 b’s, 20 l’s, 5 c’s 50 s’s that are covering all the names of the streets. It’s like that interface you described for the New Yorker — it takes all the pleasure out of cartography. I would like to see a guidebook that makes discovering one’s way pleasurable.

Amen to pleasure.

I visit your site every day, multiple times a day. Today, I decided that I’ve had enough. You need to stop. Whatever you’re doing, just STOP.

Years ago, ESPN.com was a useful collection of online sports information. It was relatively easy to navigate, scan and read. Today, it is a dark, sprawling information apocalypse — the Blade Runner cityscape of websites. Remember that early scene in Blade Runner, where Deckard is reading the newspaper while the ad blimp circles overhead, repeating the words: “A new life awaits you in the Off-World colonies”? That’s how I feel when I’m reading ESPN.com. The barrage of ads, news, tickers, scrolling content widgets, opinion, commentary, analysis, whatever it is that Scoop Jackson writes, and teasers for upcoming events on your cable network is an absolute mess, the kind of mess that makes CNBC seem Tufte–esque in comparison.

Where did you go wrong? Years ago, you plastered that huge banner ad across the top. This was annoying, but plenty of sites (used to) do this and I learned to ignore it. Then there was ESPN Motion — or, as a friend refers to it “ESPN Suck-tion.” It’s a video player that periodically demands that you stop reading to deal with a video ad or SportsCenter clip it has just begun broadcasting. Over time, you added more and more flashes and distractions — another banner ad above the content, two levels of tab navigation, multiple areas of periodically refreshing content, and links in the masthead (!). Finally, you modified your pop-up ads so that they defy pop-up blocking software (most of it, anyway).

I have to ask: DO YOU REALIZE THAT THEY ONLY OTHER WEBSITES THAT DO THIS ARE SELLING EITHER PIRATED SOFTWARE OR PORN? Did you guys raid Astalavista to hire your current online product manager? Actually, maybe it was MySpace or CollegeHumor. To be fair to CollegeHumor, though, it could teach ESPN some things about layout and navigation.

Now, for anyone out there who wants to take the first step toward making ESPN readable again, I suggest the following:

1. Download and install Firefox.
2. Install the Adblock add-on
3. Restart Firefox, and subscribe to the first item in the Adblock list of filters
4. Navigate to ESPN.com, observe that all ads have been removed. As the SportsCenter anchors would say, “Victo-ree!”

To the editors of ESPN.com, I simply request that you (a) kill the pop-up ads, (b) tear the homepage apart (and re-assemble it with the idea that it should facilitate access to content, rather than prevent it), © take a look at what the NYT has been up to in terms of integrating textual and multimedia content, and (d) don’t try to cram every conceivable product onto every page. Simple, right?

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:

The NYT just rolled out a beta of something they’re calling MyTimes. As a daily reader of both the print and online editions, I’m intrigued by new developments and ideas at the NYT, and I’ve been pleased with their recent site redesign. MyTimes, however, strikes me as somewhat misguided.

First off, the name MyTimes sounds like a portal, recalling the confused era when every company wanted to make a my-prefixed version of their site. Unfortunately, it also evokes the subsequent realization that what people really wanted was not control over layout and content, but greater system intelligence — smarter defaults, recognition of the things they normally do, a clever way of pointing them toward related things. The portal-sounding name wouldn’t even be so bad if MyTimes didn’t look and act like portal. Alas, it’s got all sorts of crap to add and move around and modify, allowing the reader to add RSS feeds from anywhere on the web, view movie times, weather, Flickr images, whatever. To me, the problem is that the NYT isn’t “whatever.” It’s the authoritative source. So why all the other stuff?

A better question: What problem is MyTimes supposed to be solving? What is the user goal is it addressing? One would do research to answer these questions, but — to be self-referential — my own goals in reading the NYT: Get the authoritative answer, enjoy great writing, forumlate opinions on complex problems. A major problem of MyTimes is that the NYT is trying to be both the authoritative source, and the delivery mechanism of any other source you might want.

So, my advice to the New York Times ...

• Bring related information to me. Focus my attention to the news of the day, but make it easy to navigate to related things. These things may be within the NYT, or outside. Use what you know about me — from observing my behavior — to point me toward related things. Think Amazon, not Google Homepage or MySpace. Amazon remembers what you like, points you toward related stuff, tells you what other people have looked at, etc. It knows you; you don’t HAVE to tell it anything.
• Don’t create a separate place that requires configuration and expect that I will go there and wait for the information to start rolling in. The established framework works: Start at the homepage, drill to the detail. Why create another starting place?
• Integrate the good things from MyTimes — the journalist pages, for instance, are a cool idea, and they are most appropriately accessed within the existing framework. Localized content like weather and movie listings are fine, but I don’t understand why this needs to be separate from the existing framework of the NYT pages. Basically: Integrate the reader into the NYT, don’t create a separate place for him/her. Learn my zip code, remember it, push relevant local content to me. End of story. (And just because Flickr has an RSS feed doesn’t mean it’s worthy of your brand. You’re the New York Times! You’ve got the best photojournalists in the world! Get rid of it!)

While I’m on the subject, two additional things I’d like to see ...

• More exposure to the Times’ excellent archival journalism. Why not plumb the back catalog, and expose some of it to the readers? Many articles about current events refer to past events. Why not provide a list of related links to previous articles more often? Of course, I’d expect that this content would be free — not only because I’m a cheapskate — but because I would think it would pique people’s interest in seeing more of it, which would of course cost money.
• More journalist blogs and discussion. The Public Editor’s column has become one of my favorite parts of the paper, and he blogs about interesting journalistic issues as well.Here’s a great one about Nicholas Lemann’s article about citizen journalism in the New Yorker.

In any case, there are roughly one thousand web sites offering up customizable info widgets, web-wide RSS feed aggregation, and so forth. The NYT should continue to focus on the content, and leave the aggregation to someone else.