capcloud | Martin Polley

Sir Ken Robinson Gets Animated (RSA)

I’m a big fan of Sir Ken.

Dodgems

I’m pretty chuffed with the way this photo turned out.

The Importance of Vision

I just listened to an old episode of The Conversation, where Dan is talking to Garrett Dimon, Cameron Moll, and Faruk Ates about how you know when an application or design is done.

Garrett Dimon said something that particularly stuck with me. He talked about the importance of having a vision for what the thing is going to be like two years from now. You use this to help decide what new features to add to your product, but perhaps more importantly, what not to add.

This ties in with something that Jared Spool has mentioned on many occasions—one important characteristic of successful teams is a vision of what the experience of using the product will be like five years from now.

Anyway.

Don’t Touch the Controls!

One of the dubious benefits of having a leased car is getting to drive a different car whenever it has to go to the garage for something. (This time, a cracked windshield.) The one car I actually enjoyed was a Prius. All the others were meh, including the Toyota Corolla that I have at the moment.

One of the more annoying things about this car is the gearbox. Automatic transmission has been around for many years. The interface is pretty much standard by now, and car manufacturers need a pretty good reason to mess with it. One such reason was the addition of tiptronic gear changing (which the Corolla also has). So why has Toyota gone and changed the interface from the usual Park/Reverse/Neutral/Drive/1/2/3 pattern?

For starters, Park seems to have been removed. And “E” seems to have replaced Drive. (Any idea what “E” stands for? Me neither.) Reverse and Neutral are still there. And M with plus and minus is pretty standard for tiptronic shifting. The numbered gears have gone. No need for them when you have got tiptronic shifting. (And this transmission has five gears, so this is a good solution.)

But the most mysterious thing is the big button marked “M-MT Es”. Pressing it does not have any obvious effect. Nothing lights up. The behavior of the transmission seems unchanged. In fact, it is impossible to tell if it is on or off. For all I know, it may have more than two states. (The label seems to suggest that this is the case.)

If you know the answer to this mystery, please tweet or mail me. I am genuinely curious about this. (One possible explanation that I can think of is that maybe here in Israel we get cars with localized labeling for some non-English-speaking European country…)

This is just a test to see if I screwed up my blog -> Twitter thing…

Better vs Familiar

While reading #1 here (which recommends using familiar user interface paradigms for learnability), I couldn’t help thinking about Loewy’s MAYA principle (most advanced yet acceptable) and this from Dieter Rams:

Things which are different simply in order to be different are seldom better, but that which is made to be better is almost always different.

We need to strike a balance, but would should keep Rams and Loewy in mind as we do so.

Sensible Defaults to Save Energy

Our new office building has dimmable lights that each person can control for their own cubicle. Originally, you could set the dim level anywhere from 30% to 100%. Every morning, the lights would be reset to 100% brightness.

But recently they changed the defaults. Now you can set the dim level from 0% (off) to 100%. And the default (which the lights reset to every morning) is 0%. So now when someone is out of the office for the day, the lights above their cubicle are off instead of on. Which is already a win.

But lots of people have either not noticed the change (and are using the default “off” setting) or (like me) prefer the lower light levels. I wonder how much electricity such a simple change is saving…

My iPod Is Ignoring Me (and I Like It)

I just noticed that sometimes, my iPod Nano ignores my commands.

The play/pause button plays or pauses when you press it. A long press of the same button turns the iPod off. But what if my press is not quite long enough?

Well it turns out that the iPod is designed to ignore my ambiguous command, rather than risk doing the wrong thing. Did I mean “pause”? Or did I mean “switch off”? Interpreting this wrongly could be quite annoying.

So ignore me. It’s a good thing sometimes.