Affectiva to Tellart

I didnt realize it had been so long since my last post. So to all 5 of my readers, im sorry. Luckily this time it was not because I had nothing to post about, but because I have been doing so much, and many nights it came down to work or post, and I choose the former.

I have been doing a lot on the bildr front. I finally finished some things that I had been wanting to do for some time, but I will wait until another time to do show-and-tell.

Why the post?

Last month Tellart offer me a position at their design firm.

Im starting the new job in just over a week, and though I am leaving Affectiva, it is only in body.

When I started at Affectiva last year I was eager to be this hybrid of developer and designer and I hit the ground running. Soon it became aware that there was just too much work to be done, and we hired a full-time developer so I could focus on the interaction design, and visual design of the software. It wasn’t long before I realized just what 10 years experience and a degree in computer science could do better than my 1 year of dabbling.

Over the corse of almost a year we hired many more people, and soon, everyone had someone similar to themselves working there but me. I was still the only designer. During that time, I dissected many a UI element and reconstructed them in different ways to understand just what was it about the way the pixels align that pleased my eye. In the end, I found myself creating much nicer graphics, but very similar interactions.

This, mixed with the over 2 hours of driving for the job each day, was the reason for my departure.

After graduation I was not ready to stop learning, and in no-way have I. But things have slowed down on some fronts that I didnt expect. I still push my self to near RISD extremes, but without the teachers and classmates, I was playing the same note over and over.

Tellart is an experience design firm just a few miles away from my house. The ability to save 600 hours a year in driving, and be able to learn and work with a very talented group of designers was just something I couldn’t turn away from right now.

The unfortunate reality is that in doing so I am saying good-bye to Affectiva, the company I joined on the day we got phones for the office – before we had proper desks – before we had a logo, or a website. Affectiva is now 4 times the size it was when I joined, has a CEO and some major players. The products I worked on there will truly be ground breaking.

I had my hands in every aspect of design, and almost all of it to this point was by my hands. This is something I will probably not have another chance at for a very long time.

But for now, I focus on life, growth, and exploration.

Im Back. But not back

I was on vacation last week, and just got home. But sadly I brought sickness with me.

I had a long talk with a friend (ben) while I was gone that started with the same old question about the “value of software” but soon moved to value in general.

We were at the “The Art of Shaving” store looking at finely designed razors when I asked the saleswoman if I could take a closer look at a razor they had showcased behind glass. I was expecting it to be light aluminum (the finish seemed to be) but was delighted to feel the weight of steel.

So as Ben and I talked while walking around in search for ice cream and creps, and  I mentioned this razor we had seen earlier that day. I was telling him how I was in search of weight in software, (You know, that extra sensory-nudge that adds value to the product) when ben moved it away from software completely. Ben had me take a step back and unknowingly ask myself “why is it that the weight gives the razor value?”. He then went on about how value is only in the eye of the beholder, and is only in the context of your life. The things you associate with value give an item value. But the item itself has no real value on its own. Things you don’t know, have no value to you, and so on.

So the perception of value, right? The razor felt more valuable because it was heavy. But weight is no more valuable than color, unless through society we associate it with value.

So my wedding ring. I looked at a lot of rings before I decided on one. What I got was a very inexpensive tungsten carbide steel band. To me it had 3 things I was looking for. The color, shine, and hardness. I didn’t want  it getting scratched, and I really like the color/look of polished steel. But the cost of it compared to any other metal used is nothing. If I got anything else, it wouldn’t have met the goal of the ring. But it lacks one thing needed to give it a higher price, right? Of course I speak of rarity. Platinum and gold are much rarer, and therefore have higher value, even though they scratch easily, and so on.

But what about palladium? Palladium is a precious metal 30 times rarer than gold. It shines and looks similar to platinum, but is less than a third of the cost of gold. So what we have is something that on paper should be of a much higher value, but isn’t because people don’t see the value in it as they do gold. This is known by Dan Ariely as “The Fallacy of Supply and Demand”

Granted, the weight of the razor played to my memories of weight equating quality, but this is very rarely actually the case, and if we look in the consumer electronics area, it is often is the complete opposite.

I think what happens is that we build personal dictionaries of overly simple ways of determining value in the objects we interact with. It allows us to make decisions about what we want without spending too much time hashing over it. And even though these dictionaries are ofter wrong, and many parts are actually dictated by society, we knowing accept this because it beats spending a week to make each decision. I know that steel is inexpensive, but I still get the feeling of quality.

We as designers use these commonalities about the perception of value all the time when working in the physical world. They help us craft better experiences for our users. So may the problem is just that software is too new, and our dictionaries are just empty.

Then the question becomes: How do we help build the perception of value around software?

software as a status symbol

Tools impress me. Well… Great tools do. I love when my friend takes out the (new to him) antique micrometer that is precise to one ten-thousandth of an inch -Ill find my self measuring a book, just to see. Or a stand of hair. But as I was talking about yesterday, there is a lack of love for our software. Something I wanted to cover was this idea of being impressed or “status symbols” by software products.

When was the last time someone said “Oh man! You have Microsoft word?” As I noted before, precision tools make me happy, but why not Autocad? Surly any CAD software is 100 times more precise than any micrometer I have ever used. This seems easy to answer though. There is the lack of craft. Physical tools need to be made, and many times hand made, but software lacks this. Sure thousands of hours went into the original creation of the software, but we dont see that. And actually it could be argued that the best software hides it the most. People dont want to see the craft of software.

So what about status symbols? Usually these are based on price. “Hey there, check out my new BMW!” The point is that there is importance in someone that could afford such a car. Well there are software products that cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. But is that impressive? No, not to me at least. Maybe it is the ability to pirate it that makes it less impressive… after all, anyone could have it if they really wanted to. Maybe it is the lack of care of the product. After all who really cares about a $50K CAD system? But honestly, people are often impressed by art that costs a ton even if they dont like it.

Software seems to lack the ability to impress or seduce. Buy why? What is it that make us act so differently with our software products? Lack of perceived value? Is it the screen that keeps us from touching them, their intrinsic buggy nature, lack of human touch in an obvious way? Lack of space taken up in your living room?

—–Tacked on—-

Could it just be about the lack of perceived value? Often people complane about the cost of software, like it is a rip off… After all, all you are getting is a CD, how hard is that? What people often miss is the insane amount of time that went into crafting that. The really funny thing is that we have no issue with paying a thousand dollars for a machine to run it, but without the software it would just be a lame box.

But even though I work for a company who makes software, and I design said software… I still don’t feel the craft. And if I have this much of a disconnect… what hope do others have?

As I said good night to my wife just now… I asked her. “Do you find value in software?” She said she didnt. But she felt it was because of pirating. But then she said she does see value in music, that people also pirate. I wondered… Maybe it’s just that we find value most in things we want to use, and see little value in things we have to use.

So how can production software make you want to use it?

Wow… what?!? bildr Code is in alpha?

Ok. So after

• 7 months
• One complete redo
• 2802 lines of PHP
• 1370 lines of CSS
• 1726 lines of JavaScript

bildrCode is in alpha. I know, I know. It’s probably a lot to think about. You have been reading about this for such a long time, and it felt like it would never happen, but it’s true.

So… Without further ado, Lets see a video!

Happy New Year

Happy new year!

I just got home from vacation. Well back from visiting family, it was so busy Im not sure how vacationy it was.

I always try to read a book when I go away, and this time I read Emotional Design by Donald Norman. Good book. Norman is always a great writer, and after reading his best (IMO) “The design of everyday things” (DOET) a few years ago, this went on my list. Sadly, I think he could have taken the 2nd half further, but I understand why it changed tones when talking about robots. But I felt that DOET was a game changer, and the primer for interaction design. Emotional design was almost the primer for experience design. (Except that the term was used before this book was written).

I thought something was funny though. Im a huge believer in usability design. HUGE! And somehow people including Norman feel that aesthetics are not part of usability. Norman talked a bit about this, but without going into too much detail, he basically said that there is proof that people perceive better looking interfaces to be easier to use. They give a better experience.

Well yes, they do. But I knew that. But Norman said that without changing the usability of the product, and only making it look nicer, it was easier. Personally I believe this totally neglects the importance of several major things. First what about information design!?!?

By changing the way the interface looks, you ARE changing the way it works. The way an interface looks completely determines how a person sees it, and therefore changes the way they will think of interacting with it.

Id like to do this experiment myself, give me 200 people, and a confusing UI (with 2 skins (1 nice, 1 ugly)). let 100 use the ugly, and 100 use the nice. Video both. Im 100% sure that people will interact with them differently.

Also, by giving the user a better looking interface, the user approaches the system in a better mood. This alone as (Norman pointed out )is enough to change the way people think. When the user is happy, they see the forest, when upset, only the trees.

Last, but not least is what I tall people…

The hardest to use interface, is the one so-ugly people refuse to use it.

Sometimes I question, but alway reassured

error: failed to push some refs to 'git@github.com:ameyer/MooIndent.git'
To prevent you from losing history, non-fast-forward updates were rejected
Merge the remote changes before pushing again.  See the 'non-fast forward'
section of 'git push --help' for details.

From flash to Moo

As many of you know,  Matt Cottam of  Tellart was my mentor while at RISD. I worked with Matt for over a year and a half on may projects. And he was nice enough to hire me for an inter position one summer… The same summer I was learning actionScript for my multi-touch table. That Summer Tellart + Zango worked to design a beautiful new site for tellart. After all the design was done they allowed me to work on the programming of it in flash. I actually did quite a bit of it, but then had to leave to go back to school before it was finished. After I left, I think they noticed how bad some of the code was, and redid most of. Though I did see some of my code in there latter (very little). – That was summer of 2008.

Fast forward to spring 2009. Im reading the Mootools Documentation and found a class I thought I could have used to re-create the site in JavaScript. It worked. In about 50 lines of code I had made a mock-up that functioned very similer to original. It only took me a few hours. I sent it over to the guys at tellart to show them it could be done if they ever wanted it to. But why?

<rant>

So here is my flash rant. I love flash and ActionScript. But not for making web pages. 90% of the time flash is used on a site, it could have been done with out it. But many who say “Who cares?”. I do. And you should too.

Flash ruines page searchability, navigation, SEO, and a lot more. Not to mention that poorly done it is a CPU HOG!

</rant>

Then, just a few months ago, Matt asks me if I still had that code, and if I would be interested in completing it for their site. When am I not interested in more javaScript work?

So the deal was. The site needed to work on the iPhone, retain all the movies/slideshows, have all the portions be bookmarkable, and make it easier to add more content.

I did it. And my code is now in use on their site.

I kept all the flash for the videos and slideShows, and I used mootools to check for flash. If it was not there, replace all the flash, with jpg images.

I made all the elements on the page dynamically generated in PHP. Using some simple arrays, they can now add a new project with a single line of code. And it will resize everything, and create all the parts needed for it to work without modification.

I enabled bookmarking. This is a lot harder than it sounds. There is one page. One. So what do you bookmark? Well there are 7 projects and an info page with a lot of info. Each project position is boorkmarkable. So if you go to the link, the page will load, and it will auto scroll to that project. If you bookmark a person on the info page. It will auto scroll to the info slide, and do a nice ajax call to grab the info on the right person.

Another part was … if a user is watching a video on a slide 0r slideshow, and moves to a different slide, we needed to stop the current slide, and return to the teaser frame. Because the moving part is all javaScript, there a language problem. How do you talk to a flash movie from JS? With mootools. It’s Swiff class is wonderful (though incorrectly documented). I just had to render all the flash to include the JS connect. Worked really well.

It took a full weekend to do (I had thought less) but it came out really nicely. And on a javaScript friendly browser, it is actually a bit faster than the flash version.

Coming down to the wire

Just a quick note: I don’t  think most people know, but “down to the wire” actually refers to tires.

So tonight while working on the bildr video, I thought. This is kinda long, and it starts to change tone here. So I am splitting it up into 3 videos. So i should have it all done by tomorrow night. I decided to make a short 45sec one with it. It’s actually just the first part of the video, but it seemed to work so well on its own.

It took over 90 illustrations (many very small) to make this happen. But I believe the aesthetic came out very nice, and I think people will like it.

Let’s just hope it compels people to help make it real.

But bildrs’ not what’s coming down to the wire. In just a week I will be headed back to Tucson to get married. Wow did this sneak up on me. Ill be gone for less than a week, and im sure it will feel like the blink of an eye. I really just help it all comes together as well as I see it.

At work: I just hired a developer to take over the majority of that portion of my job so I can focus more on the design of the product. Right now it is so hard to know what will happen in the next few years, but I have a really rare opportunity for someone so soon out of school. Im in a position to really lead the design vision of a company. It’s a little scary in a way, but more liberating than anything. I hope years from now when I look back Im amazed at how much has happened and how much I was involved in. It’s been almost 3 months, and I already am.

I had no clue

I had no clue it had been so long.

Ok… so I have to say. I hate moving. Maybe worse is unpacking. Im here in my new place typing this in my own room. I call it the studio/ office/ lab. It’s pretty full of junk right now, but I think it is going to be perfect when im done setting it up. I may actually have real space to not only work on my design/web work, but a completely different table to work on electronics.

So the real reason for no update has been the move/ unpacking. The last 3 weeks have been dedicated to only that. Not to say that work hasn’t sucked the life out of me, but I managed to take some of it back, and it looks like most nights will be mine to work on my own stuff for once.

At work, I guess I can say, I should be able to at least, I am working on the development of the software for our product. It is being developed in adobe AIR so we can write once and deploy on what ever platform you want. It is basically flash for the desktop. So I have an application with a real icon who actually updates, opens ands saves files, and does everything an real application should do. It’s pretty nice.

Because of it, I have been learning a ton of new action script stuff, and if I ever get time to write some multi-touch apps again it should be much easier.

Once the product is out there I can tell you more, but we will be offering a product in the field of Affective Computing, AKA the ability for computers to interrupt human emotion. It’s a really cool field of research started by Rosalind Picard (who happens to be my boss) to expand the field of artificial intelligence.

People look at Spock from Star Trek as this perfect example of a perfectly logical human, and how smart they are. We often think of emotion as getting in the way of decision making, or at least messing it up.

Well, it turns out that people with too little emotion actually have a hard time making decisions. Imagine going to a restaurant, your favorite one. Maybe you look over the menu and see a few things you like, but end up going with a old favorite. Your emotion kicked in and helped with that choice. If you had been perfectly logical you would have considered 1000 things about the food (from taste, ingredients, health etc) before making a decision. Ultimately, you would spend more time and possibly end up with something you would like less in the end.

So if humans need a certain level of emotion to make better decisions, what about computers. If people want to make computers act and think more like people, then they too need to have some emotion. That is what this area of study is all about.

Im back!

Im back from my vacation in Europe and my mind is full of Ideas. I had never been out of the country before and doing so opened so many thoughts to my world of design. I spent time in England, Paris and Rural Germany, and each one had something completely different to offer.

I have now been on 7 different subway systems. Subways are something I really love. Public transportation in general, but especially subways. There are just so many pieces in making the subway work. From the ticket to the turn style to the train itself. When considering the design of the system I never take the stop locations into consideration because that is often something that just can’t be redesigned. But taking in everything else, I have to say Paris’s is my favorite so far. It just works so well. The new trains especially are very nice. It is like one long train with no doors between the cars, and makes it  incredibly quiet. But this brings me to something else… Baby carriages.

My brother and his wife went to paris with us, and they brought their 15 month old Hannah with them. So for 6 days we saw a ton of Paris and didnt make any compromised due having the carriage. So I got to know and really understand a lot about how they work/don’t in a big city. The carriage they have is big, and often too big (by an inch or so) for the subway entrances/exits. So we had to carry it over at times, squeeze at others, and all around test the boundaries of the two working against each other. If the wheels only could have folded in a little, it would have worked so much better.

There is so much I could say about the trip it is crazy. Especially about the food -> I know now, I would love to live in Paris, and I could never live in England. But that’s that and I wish (or not) that I could say I didnt slip in a little work while I was there, but I did.

I actually did a lot. I worked alot on my mediawiki extension, and wrote another. But then I started thinking  about how code would be stored on bildr. As of last writing I was intending on having the code stored/edited in the wiki, but I came across gitHub(social networking for code) and looked at using it as the code repository. I actually wrote one of the extensions to embed this.

But I thought that the main thing I want to do. I want one project that is written in many languages. This way a user can select the code they are most comfortable with among other reasons. But with using mediawiki and gitHub I would have to start a new page/ project for each language. So what do I do? Well I started a few days ago writing my own system. And I must say, I am going WAY overboard. Way… way overboard. But it is cool. I have never had the need to make a desktop like application as a website, but that’s what it is. It’s a little complicated, but if you want to see it (safari/ firefox only) go to code.bildr.org (pics below)

That’s all for now, but I do start work tomorrow, so I’ll have lots to talk about soon.