365 days in Oregon

I clicked on an intriguing banner ad on NYTimes.com and found
this Travel Oregon site with a cool Ajax splash page. It gives you detailed information on all the activities (in a very attractive layout!) and lets you create a travel journal.

My brother lives in Oregon - I'm going to visit next month - and I'm totally excited to find some fun activities to do with the kids. Too bad the pirates arrive after I do, ARRRRR!

Product design: back on track

Just as cars were starting to look like cockroaches:



And apartment buildings:


Toyota has come up with some really fun and stylish vehicles - the Matrix, Yaris and FJ Cruiser.

The RAV4 has evolved from a cute car to a beautiful grown-up auto (with an awkward teen period):


Check out their promotional films, they're pretty cool.


The RAV4 tagline is: Too intelligent to be categorized. No wonder I love this car!

Testing, testing, 1-2-3

There's no substitute for actually testing your product or interface with actual users. You can theorize all day long about how the product should work and how intuitive you think it is, but the people designing something know how it should be used. They focus on their own agenda and needs and often can't take themselves out of the equation to think of the user. This is why these positions have evolved: User Experience Designer, Interaction Designer, Information Architect, etc.

My mom works for the Navy and does most of her work for the DOD. About a decade ago, she was in charge of a project to evaluate the safety across the nation of bases, airports and high-level government buildings that might be vulnerable to attack. What they found was pretty shocking. The safety of our nation relies not on the technology of the machines but on the PEOPLE operating those machines. (Actually, in the worst case, the machines weren't even being used. They had been sitting in the basement of a local FBI building, unopened, because no one knew how to use them).

Turns out, our biggest weakness is that people are being paid minimum wage to operate a half-million dollar machine that's so complicated, they don't know where to start. The machine isn't designed with the user in mind and the user isn't trained properly so the machine is useless.

Apple was one of the first companies to design a product first and build it second. Function follows form. Not the other way around. The iPod was designed that way.

I'm a hobbyist user tester. When I first starting going to a gym that required scanning one of those plastic key chain cards, I tested three different ways to get in the door before I found the fastest.

First I tried handing the attendants the key chain cards BARCODE FACING UP to get in the door quicker. After all, the barcode is ready they just have to scan. But what happened time and time again is that they would take it and fumble around with it to FIND the right one - totally defeating the purpose.

I theorized that it was because they didn't recognize the gym's barcode, most of the time they're multi-tasking, so I starting handing them JUST the gym's key chain card LOGO UP. They took it, flipped it over and scanned it. Pretty quick but still not good enough for me. I did it this way for a time, while pondering a better way.

Finally it dawned on me, maybe the reason the first way didn't work is because I was handing them the WHOLE STACK of my key chain cards. They were thinking with their hands, not with their eyes. They felt the stack and didn't know the one they needed was ON TOP. Why would they?

So I started handing them JUST the gym's key chain card BARCODE UP. And it worked! They take it, scan it, and I'm in seconds later. This is a simple interaction and I'm a fairly smart gal so you can only imagine how many user experience mistakes are made by smart people who think they know. You don't know until you test.

Changing the course of capitalism

I watched "The Insider" again the other night. A great, inspiring movie at the beginning of what has become a hot topic: holding companies to a higher moral responsibility. A responsibility to not cheat their employees out of their retirements, to disclose how it is that CEOs make 400-700 times the average employee and to make their products safer for consumption and the environment. It's not enough any more to simply stimulate the economy; more and more, people are demanding responsibility. Fortunately, many companies are waking up to the economic opportunities of this kind of responsibility.

Most of my career as a marketer, I've believed that selling product inherently breeds bad behavior. In order to generate more profit, companies have to produce a product more cheaply. To increase market share their product has to be more addictive and/or necessary. And to sell a higher quantity, the product has to be consumed at a faster rate. I challenge you to think of a product that can be made more profitable or increase market share without damaging the environment, the consumer or some other poor creature.

(I tried to think of something that must be innocuous, like raising fluffy little sheep and shearing them for wool. This sounds really harmless but then I read this. Yikes!)

See, sometimes companies make something a customer wants, and then have to figure out a way to make it profitable. But many times, they're making something they've deemed profitable and then hire PR/advertisers to make people want it:

When the disposable razor came along, marketers only had to show women a picture of a naked armpit to sell razors to women wanting to be more fashionable. But they had a tougher time convincing them to shave (and bare) their legs. They tried for years without success until a very famous war-time poster came out featuring a very sexy Betty Grable with shaved naked legs and women were told it was their patriotic DUTY to wear shorter skirts and sheer nylons. And off the hair came! (We're still one of the only countries in the world where women regularly shave their hair off.)

Then there were disposable diapers, not a hit for the first five years. Then the PR people hired a pediatrician and cooked up a story about how damaging it is to potty-train children too early. It would make them "anal" to be separated by their poo at too early an age. Instantly, they extended the life of their product by at least a year as anxious moms allowed their children longer diaper time. (By the way, "disposable" diapers will take about 500 years to decompose.)

Sometimes, to make a product more profitable, they have to decrease it's shelf life.

Electronics and appliances have a shorter lifespan than they ever have despite our advances. It just isn't very profitable to make a device that lasts several years. And if you make them too cheap, it isn't profitable either. A CD player now costs let's say $60, which is cheaper than the $250 I paid in 1985, but it only lasts a year. Printers are now less than $100 but only last six months to a year! Cellphones? They're practically "disposable." (Like the diapers, the hunks of junk ends up in the dump when they stop working and probably never biodegrade.)

Sometimes, to make people want a product again, they have to lie.

Cigarettes and alcohol are addictive. Fast food clogs your arteries. How can you increase your market share without telling people otherwise? French fries aren't French fries if they aren't deep fried! Tell the consumer you're using a different kind of oil that isn't as bad. Tell them the alcohol has less calories and the cigarettes don't have additives so they're less harmful. They're all lies but how else can it be done? Since only 10% of smokers start after age 20, they have to get addicted young.

Sometimes, experts are used to show how the product should be consumed.

For the last fifteen years, we've been eating a higher protein diet. We've been told it's the way to be healthy and slim. It's not true. Eating vegetables is much better for you than meat but meat is a booming industry. When it's so cheap and yummy, how can we resist? (Inhumane treatment to animals, declining nutrition of the meat, increased sickness due to bad meat and pollution that was unheard of a few decades ago will eventually turn us off). Did you know that 80% of the ocean's contaminants come from ground pollution running into rivers? Now we can't even eat (what's left of) the fish!

So, our consumerism drives the economy but these products make us sick by ruining our health and the environment. We're running at an accelerated pace towards cheaper, more disposable goods but also stopping along the way the admire a new model of goods - ethically produced, better for the environment and maybe even more desirable.

Ultimately, the consumer has to DEMAND the products we want, produced the way we can be happy about, and the corporations will HAVE TO care as much about responsibility as profit.

While hybrid cars increase in popularity, so do Hummer sales. While we are more conscious of recycling, we also create more trash. While the oil industry is stepping up to be more green, they're also illegally dumping tons of toxic waste in the ocean. Are we going in two directions or one direction that's so complex, it has yet to reveal itself?

It just may be that we're finally seeing our modern way of life as barbaric: torturing and killing animals and each other, dumping crap into the ocean, burying our trash, paving over the earth, pushing products that kill people. We're capable of so much more and I think we're just now beginning to see our potential to rise above our filthy, greedy past to save ourselves.

Eyes, lips and hands

I finally finished Blink and nearly cried at the last story about the female French horn player being hired by the Met because they finally "saw her for who she really was." I think the idea of seeing people for who they really are is probably the most Utopian idea I've ever heard of. I'm sure that no one sees even themselves for who they really are, and we can never truly know another person, but even so, I am in love with the idea that we have a beauty within that can be freed from the perceptions of gender, race, nationality, financial status, height, weight, hair color, eye color, etc.

This is, perhaps, EXACTLY what's wrong with online personals. There's really no chance to see a person for who they really are. By the time you meet them, you've already made a million snap judgments based on how old they are, the way they look, where they live, what they do, how much money they make and how they filled out their essays. It's got to be the most inorganic way to decide whether we like a person. There are only three things I need to see to know if I'm attracted to someone: eyes, lips and hands. I swear. I can look at those three things and I do or don't want to make out with that person.

Now, compatibility is something more complicated of course, but I still don't believe it can be determined by filling out online essays and comparing notes. I think it's something much closer to the blind auditions that Malcolm Gladwell writes about because being attracted to someone IS like being blind. How many times have you said, "I never thought I would be attracted to... [fill in the blank]" and cease to see anything other than a person you love and really want to get along with?

If online personals can figure out a way to see show us only what we need to establish an attraction, they could actually work better than the old-fashioned way.

The bizarre world of blogging

I knew blogging was kind of a fad but I had NO IDEA how insanely popular it was until I started my own. Apparently, it's really important for blogs to link to other blogs but no one links to my blog. In fact, I think there are only about three people reading it (I ask them almost every day). And yet I still feel this enormous pressure to post at least five times a week. I get into these big essays and I'm not sure where I'm going with them and sometimes they take days to finish.

In between bouts of writing and editing, I look up other blogs just to see how they do it. One popular blog and I seem to fall down the rabbit hole of blogs. One blog leads to another and another and another. It's endless and my head is spinning. They're all referencing each other like they're in a big club. It seems like everyone and their grandmother has one! Who could possibly have time to read ALL THESE BLOGS? I can barely find the time to write, much less read, and all I keep thinking is: Are we going to get to a day when everyone is writing and no one's reading?

People aren't taking in more information are they? We've been reading, listening and watching for hundreds of years. So what are we getting from all these blogs? As it turns out, what we're getting are perspectives. It's like a diamond reflecting the light in a thousand different ways at the same time. It's the same light, we just have hundreds of views to choose from. Some bloggers are creating content (news, entertainment, advice) but most are just commenting on content already out there. This decade is all about having an opinion.

All aboard!

The epoch of the individual

A psychologist that I met (one of two brief relationships from my foray into online dating) explained to me that the reason we, "Generation X", were so much more self-aware (or self-absorbed, depending on the person) than our parents is because we're living in "The Epoch of The Individual."

Words of analysis have become part of our culture's vernacular. People commonly diagnose themselves as a neat-freak, controlling, passive aggressive, insecure, commitment-phobic, etc. I thought it was genius and asked him to explain further.

The explanation was brief and I have not been able to find any documentation on this theory but this is how I understood it:

When humans first lived on this earth, we had very little understanding of our world. Natural disasters, disease and death were terrifying and unexplainable. They were attributed to "gods" that for whatever reason were angry at us. As a tribe, we did what we could to appease these gods through sacrifices and rituals. This was the epoch of the tribe. Whatever the tribe demanded of a person, was to be obeyed, there was no individual will. Everything was for the collective survival.

As we gained more control over our survival, by building houses and growing crops, we were liberated from the stranglehold of the tribe. When the Jews wrote the bible and proclaimed that man could speak directly to God, we entered a new level of awareness. We entered the epoch of family. We formed societies of artists and thinkers. We amassed wealth and protected our own. Our actions, worth and sense of self were now determined by our place in a family and that family's place within a society.

With the industrial revolution, masses of people now worked for someone else and bought food instead of growing it themselves. Young people moved to cities, alone, to work and live. We were no longer defined by our family. We questioned our purpose in life, went to universities to engage in higher thinking and embarked on an individual quest. Thus began the the epoch of the individual. (During the 1950's when rock and roll was introduced, the teenager was invented and further prolonged this period of self-exploration.)

We live longer than we used to, so perhaps a longer life delivers that luxury. We don't have the biological need to reproduce as soon as humanly possible. Countries with a higher death toll (from war, disease, or poverty) are not ushering in the epoch of the individual with the same voracity. By necessity, many are still deeply entrenched in their tribal and familial roles.

So what's next in this "evolution" of epochs? For one thing, we're dividing the group into smaller and smaller units. Is there anything smaller than the individual? After all, scientists keep finding smaller units of matter that increasingly defy our known reality.

I'd like to posit some wild guesses as to what epoch is next:
The epoch of the virtual self - Like "Second Life" only better. Really LIVE a virtual life. Question: Would there be an "actual" life?

The epoch of the "ideal" self - We could pinpoint the places in our life where we think we went wrong, and change them. I put ideal in quotes because who knows if life would be better or just different.

The epoch of the present self - Higher reflection would afford us the ability to come to terms with everything in our past and live only in the present.

The epoch of the soul - We become "liberated" from our animal instincts and the primitive parts of our brain and instead live entirely in an enlightened state. We may not even need food or sleep!

The epoch of the collective - With the spread of democracy, more and more people get involved in government and governing policy. In the future, we'll be defined by our contribution to the collective.

The epoch of the other - Those who have had the luxury of choosing who to love, how to live and what to do with life, will have the responsibility to help others achieve the same freedom.

The epoch of earth - The focus is completely off of humans as we become caretakers of the earth as a whole. We are only one organism living on the ball of life, it is our duty to maintain it.

The epoch of life - The sanctity of life becomes more important than anything. Eating an animal is considered as barbaric as eating a person. Wars and executions are a thing of our horrifying past.

Nancy Pelosi is a rockstar!

The New York Times reports that she visited Syria "with a high-level group of lawmakers including Henry Waxman [of California]" (who also rocks, by the way - I've been sending him letters for years and always get a response back about his efforts in that area). They met with President Bashar al-Assad of Syria.

It's exciting enough to have a female Speaker of the House, the third-ranking elected official in the United States after the president and the vice president, but now she's basically advocating a different approach to diplomacy in the Middle East. She's showing the world that we are a complex government and President Bush doesn't speak for all Americans.

A side-by-side comparison of their views from the article:
PELOSI “expressed concern about Syria’s support for Hezbollah and Hamas,” to Assad and “expressed our interest in using our good offices in promoting peace between Israel and Syria.”

BUSH said the visit sent mixed signals to the Middle East and to President Assad’s government.

PELOSI and many other Democrats, as well as some Republicans, have spoken often in recent months about the value of increasing dialogue with Syria as a way to improve stability in the region.

BUSH told reporters that he saw little point in talking to Syria now. “Sending delegations hasn’t worked,” he said. “It’s just simply been counterproductive.”

A bureau chief for a leftist Damascus newspaper said "Pelosi’s approach represents a more practical policy; the administration’s policy over the last few years has been based on demands and ideology."

A shopkeeper in downtown Damascus summed it up perfectly: "She views the world through a different perspective than Bush. She’s more open-minded.”

See? Rockstar.

Who's delivering the message?

I was having breakfast with some ladies last weekend. A TV writer was telling me about teaching summer school algebra at an inner-city school in LA. She said there were two distinct groups of kids taking her class: freshman Korean kids who were hoping to get into a more advanced math class the next year and African-American seniors who were getting a last chance not to fail out of school. These kids, she made a deal with.

"I have no interest in failing you," she said, "it's in my best interest that you graduate high school." The only two requirements she told them, to passing the class are 1) Show up every day and 2) Don't prevent any one else from learning. They didn't do either of those things and almost all of them failed.

One kid, however, wanted to turn in his homework. He asked her if there was a way to do it without his friends seeing. See, it wouldn't be cool to turn in homework. They would accuse him of "trying to be white". In his culture, learning and doing well in school (and presumably getting a job and everything else that might follow) is equated with whiteness.

The Korean kids are raised in a Korean culture, here in LA, that has a very clear definition of success. Their definition of success does not threaten their culture, because it's defined by their culture and supported by their community in the United States.

Malcolm Gladwell, in Blink, talks about just how pervasive it is in our society to associate positive ideas with whites and negative idea with blacks. Even liberal, open-minded whites and enlightened, successful blacks are susceptible to the subtle associations between blacks and crime, drugs, and a lack of education.

In what I believe is a search for cultural identity, the kids failing out of school are rebelling against what they feel is an attempt by the dominant culture to absorb them. All they've done is develop a completely whacked definition of success that doesn't include getting an education or a job that requires an education and unless they have an entire community supporting them in some other type of endeavor, they aren't going to have a lot of options.

When this woman was telling me about her students, I thought to myself 'she got it all wrong'. She assumed if she set the bar so low, they couldn't possibly fail. But how can they rebel against the dominant culture when the dominant culture is constantly lowering the bar and expecting less and less of them? What would happen if a teacher demanded everything? Pushed them to succeed. Embarrassed them when they came unprepared and tracked them down if they didn't show. It's a lot of work, I know, and few want to do it but guess what? If you set the bar so high they can't possibly reach it, they can rebel without even trying and in the meantime, might actually turn in some homework.

A friend of mine who teaches in Jamaica, Queens, does just that. She's been attacked, her life threatened and kids in her classes have died - they live difficult lives that I can't even imagine. But she has students that have gone to Columbia and other universities because she tells them that they can and they should. She tells them they are wanted at those schools and the schools will pay them to come. She tells them every day because words have that kind of power.

My friend, like me, is white and although her message gets through, it's not easy because of who she is. Her school has several teachers who are graduates of that school and they, she said, are received very well by the students. They can say, "I'm you. I went to this school. I grew up this neighborhood. I'm not trying to change you, just give you options and a view into the bigger world."

I always say that everything is marketing and this is a perfect example. The three most important things to determine when selling anything are:
1) Who is your audience?
2) What is your message?
3) Who's delivering the message?
It's everything.

I love Villaraigosa!

The last time I was this excited about a politician was 1992, working for the College Democrats. I registered voters at my college to help get Clinton elected. We were so enamored of that man. But that was a long time ago.

Antonia Villaraigosa is the first Latino mayor for a city that is almost half Hispanic. But besides that, he is just an all around cool guy. Not only is he handsome, young, personable, well-spoken and a genuinely nice person (yes, I have met him), he is doing some incredible things for this city.

I swear only a year before we elected him, I said to myself "This city has so much potential, it's a shame that we spend our days sitting in traffic, choking on smog and looking at ugly strip malls." Then Villaraigosa came along. He's made a promise to make LA a greener and more beautiful city with the Million Trees LA campaign and The LA River Revitalization Program (this takes a little while to download, it's the actual plans): Making our river a real river (with water), building beautiful bridges, creating bike paths and parks, and incentivizing retail businesses to open on the riverfront.

In addition, he's building support for dismantling gangs, committing to improve our failing education system, fighting to get the money we need to relieve traffic and wants to make the city wireless.

It's no wonder he's a very popular guy these days and according to The New York Times, he may be a critical part of the 2008 presidential race. They're doing a four-part interview with him and you can watch the first part here.

The power of images

I've been reading Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. I loved The Tipping Point, a great marketing book, and a friend said I should read Blink. In it, he talks about how powerful words and images are, even in small doses on a short term basis. Someone reading angry words will become angry, a person seeing images of a minority group committing crimes will become disposed to distrusting that minority group, etc.

I live in Los Angeles and while I've often known that the entertainment industry is by far the most sexist industry in the country - only 7% of working directors are women (for reference, approximately 16% of federally elected seats are held by women - not exactly a bragging point to begin with).

Even so, I'm constantly amazed by the movie posters that I'm subjected to on my way to work. I won't even get into the "Black Snake Moan" poster that is just beyond bizarre, or the "Captivity" poster that basically showed Elisha Cuthbert being MURDERED (it was taken off of buses after protest).

I'll just mention the three movies being advertised now on every billboard and bus stop on my eight mile commute. See if you can spot the theme:

"Perfect Stranger" - Halle Berry looks terrified at a menacing Bruce Willis.

"Disturbia" - The tagline is "Every killer lives next door to someone" while a terrified female is both menaced by the shadow of a man AND watched by another man through binoculars.

"Fracture" - Anthony Hopkins looks menacing and the headline is "I shot my wife."

I know. It's not something we normally think about but what do you think the unconscious reaction to this kind of messaging is?

Give the customer what they want

It's surprisingly easy to give the customer what they want. First, think like a customer. Second, figure out what you, the customer, want. Third, find a way to make it happen.

I'm continuously amazed at how often businesses can't or won't do this. They defend their bottom line, they don't want to disrupt their current profit model, it's too much work they say, it's not necessary, or, even worse, they don't even know they aren't doing it.

One of the mobile projects I'm working on, was pitched by my agency, basically as a technology concept. It looks like a marketing concept or even a revenue idea, but it isn't. It's simply "we have the capability to do blah blah blah for you" and because "blah blah blah" is mobile, the company thinks we're hip and it's a cool idea.

Here's the stupid part. Instead of providing a MARKETING STRATEGY to justify the technology idea, my agency is allowing the CUSTOMER to dictate how this new technology should be incorporated into their product. How much sense does this make? The agency came up with the idea but has no backbone when it comes to making recommendations on how it should be executed. And the company, of course, has not the vision nor the guts to take a risk. But companies can be convinced, if you have a compelling argument. All you have to do is try.

So I wrote up an argument for how I thought this mobile app should be implemented at the theme park. It was so obvious to me when I heard it that there only one way that makes sense to the customer. Am I endowed with some kind of special power that I should know this and no one else does? No. It's just that I think like a customer, like a person, and not like an executive. I went online to find support for my idea and in a message board posting of a theme park, users were discussing exactly what I proposed as something they wished was available. Of course, we're not doing it that way.

Even worse, one of the posters says "They're probably working on a system now." Sigh!