cityofsound

Store layout and IA

Interesting comments over at Signal vs. Noise and their post on grocery store layout.

I've posted about this a few times, with reference to Liberty's of London, NYC Prada store (after Adam v2), record stores, and a layout of a London Sainsburys supermarket (which seems insanely popular with schoolteachers around the world - every few months I have to prune the comments from schoolkids looking to cut corners on their homework.) Much of my rationale for this blog is that we experience designers, interaction designers, and information architects can learn from these 'real-life' structures, flows, and lived experiences.

The supposed classic text on the way stores lay things out in order to achieve results is Paco Underhill's Why We Buy: The Science Of Shopping [UK|US], which sure enough soon crops up in the comments at 37 Signals. I've resolved to read it sometime, but I read a different angle on the book the other day, courtesy of Abstract Dynamics, in which Underhill's findings are contextualised by a hidden sexist agenda. Intriguing.

37 Signals: Shopping Around the Edges
Abstract Dynamics: Sex Slave to the Dataset

Apple and adaptive design

Steven Johnson asks some interesting questions of how Apple have achieved so many updates and upgrades across its software (OS and applications) in recent years, particularly as compared to Windows. He links to an Arstechnica piece on Panther, and pulls out a juicy quote. I find this bit particularly interesting.

"Mac OS X changes so significantly and improves so rapidly because it can. Whole subsystems are refactored, recoded, or resynchronized with work done elsewhere (e.g. FreeBSD, XFree86, OpenSSL, etc.) to a degree that would (and probably does) make a classic Mac OS programmer's head spin. For those who haven't been paying attention, this is the big pay-off for going with the Unix-based NeXT platform as the basis for Apple's new OS all those years ago. It gave Apple a modular Unix-flavored foundation that is well-understood by legions of smart developers, many of whom Apple quickly (and smartly) scooped up and put to work on Mac OS X."

Interesting, not because I'm concerned as to whether Apple is faster than Microsoft, but because the particular conditions that MacOSX enables are entirely those of adaptive design. Not just incremental improvements, but that combined with a modular approach which enables entire components to be refactored without affecting the whole; an architecture so flexible as to enable the differing layers of change fundamental to adaptation. Moreover, a distributed development community erodes the difference between designer and user - closer to Tom Moran's idea of the adaptor.

Steven Johnson: Apple On Speed

Rich tapestry

Lots of people have linked to the Urban Tapestries project. I'm encouraged to see the likes of Peter Cusack, Usman Hacque, and Josephine Pletts chosen to create content threads for the trial. Cusack curated the excellent Your Favourite London Sounds release, a perennial favourite on my iPod. Pletts Hacque gave an excellent talk at a London AIGA Experience Design session ages ago on architectural vocab - which still resonates today.

Mixed doubles

These 'mixed doubles' at things magazine are rather nice. Juxtaposition is a lovely thing when done well, and these are.

Bankers

Do banks do user research? The kind of research that would tell them that while offering a weekly account balance update via SMS is A Good Idea and A Good Product, that sending it at 4am (aka the middle of the night) every week is a A Bad Idea and actually results in A Bad Brand Experience? The kind of research which would look at a customer's relationship with their mobile phone, and that surely a significant proportion of mobile phone users sleep with said phone within earshot?

In my bank's case, presumably not. And so, every week, my sleep is broken at 4am with a sobering reminder of my financial ineptitude - which provides a tasty double whammy of both waking me up and pissing me off.

The bank in question here is First Direct, which I chose because of their decent track record in online and telephone banking and reliable backers, but mainly of course for the typography.

However, their sharply rendered website means jack when their designers aren't working with this wider user experience, and their notion of brand behaviour and brand experience is considered only in terms of nice ads and minimal layouts. And someone hasn't been doing their research.

Room 101

Rachel Whiteread's Room 101 sculpture is unveiled at the Victoria & Albert museum. Think I might go and check this this weekend. This is a plaster cast of the interior of room number 101 in the BBC's Broadcasting House building, supposedly part of the inspiration for George Orwell's Room 101 in 1984. I sought out this room as soon as I started working at BH ... but it was locked. Probably just as well.

As I've mentioned before, I live opposite the supposed inspiration for the Ministry of Truth, UCL's Senate House building. I'm hemmed in.

Sound of the underground

Also via things magazine, a site collating the sounds of Japanese subway stations.

I posted about the signature melodies that subway stations/lines have a while back (with a couple of nice comments) but it's great to actually hear them, alongside even more sounds.

"Every little noise has been carefully documented, from the tinkling information chimes, train accident announcements (rare, I’d imagine), door warning chimes, and Automatic Ticket Processing Machine Error Sounds. There are even sounds from private rail systems."

SOS: The Sound of Station in Japan
things magazine: Friday November 7th 2003

Sketching

Jonathan Bell, from the excellent things magazine, writes a column about Sketch, over at the equally excellent The Morning News (forming a temporary website supergroup or something - a Beck Bogert Appice in response to the recent announcement of the reformation of The Cream.)

I went to Sketch for afternoon tea a few months back, subsconsciously limiting myself to the tearoom, the space perhaps implicitly describing the limits of my social and financial caché. Either way it felt a far more reasonable thing to do than an expensive evening excursion - but I still felt slightly dirty and soiled afterwards (and not necessarily in a good way.) It's so ridiculously opulent. Utterly fabulous, but ...

Bell describes the launch party of Nigel Coates' Ecstacity [UK|US] brilliantly, referencing A Clockwork Orange but seeming to describe an aloof Ballardian excess as much as anything - it sounded truly dreadful, in a spectacular sort of way.

"Insulated beats thud out of the speakers, making us cock our heads at jaunty angles to counter horrifically compromised directional hearing. A grand horseshoe staircase leads up to a plateau on which rest about 10 white shiny pods, a visual quote from 2001. These are the restrooms. Suffice to say that the thought of strutting up to a white plastic egg, nonchalantly clambering in and doing one’s thing, while a perfectly tailored lavatory attendant loiters outside, doesn’t appeal. The designers have created a space that’s part Stanley Kubrick, part Chris Cunningham, a sleek robotic insertion into a classical environment that’s spoiled only by the blind indifference of the bobbing Eurotrash. The architecture geeks – here for the launch – are crawling over everything, in miniature ecstasies of their own, whispering about overheard menu prices."

The Morning News:Letter from London: An Evening Out

Fragment 12 (Whitney)

Still loud.

"A new online music service claims to have found a way to lure users away from illegally downloading tracks" says The Grauniad. And indeed, I wish good luck to PlayLouderMSP, as the offspring of two companies I produced much work for. I actually designed PlayLouder.com when I was working for state51 a couple of years ago, and while I wouldn't design it like that now, I'm still kinda proud that pretty much exactly the same design is still up there and working.

It's by the far the most punkass thing I ever made (appropriate to the brand, methinks): insanely harsh colour schemes, yellows and oranges as multiple focal points at once, to pull the eye all over the screen; big f***off background jpps of urban detritus which just deliberately drop out half way down the screen; deliberate rudery around banner ads; a 'we don't care' approach to screen real estate (below the fold indeed); and an almost totally unusable pull-out search thing in the left hand nav on a floating DIV. It's a bit of mess, but (half-serious) deliberately so, and due to the diligence and nous of the team behind it, is still around some years later - having seen off much competition. There is some quite nice IA/interaction design (imho) around the review section, but much needed looking at almost immediately post-launch. Which didn't happen. But the nice thing is that it's still up there, almost working well enough.

And good luck to them with the MSP thing - looks really interesting.

Media Guardian: Listening goes legit