Nothing quite speaks to the arrival of the holiday season like the Macy’s Day Parade. Here’s a photo I took from the office building across the street during last year’s parade (2007).

I was reading an article at the online version of Wall Street Journal. A survey window descended asking if I would take a couple of minutes to answer some questions. Unless I am really pressed for time, I usually take a few moments to provide feedback to companies that request feedback via the web. The problem was that it was a survey about banks, not a survey about WSJ. It was a standard “how do I feel about brand X” type questionnaire. I quickly abandoned the survey, as I was willing to provide the WSJ feedback, not some marketer gathering feedback on another company.

Kudos to the US Postal Service on their Automated Postal Centers (APC). These self service kiosks have been installed at some office locations. My experiences with the ever growing amount of self service kiosks have often been less than ideal, but this was shinning example of an efficient and simple process. The USPS has done a great job. The interface was simple and clear. The steps were clearly communicated and lacking any of the trappings of complexity that one might associate with a process requiring a similar breadth of options (to insure or not to insure, postage, weight, etc.). The machine has a scale built into it, so you can ship virtually any size package. It accepts either debit or credit cards as payment and will easily guide you through the process of printing stamps for several packages. 

The new video section of the NYTimes online is yet another example of exemplary design by the news organization. The updated design leverages a gray background to more clearly focus the user’s attention to the video.

This new design works much better than the previous one which employed a white background. While the white background is fine for reading text, the gray does a much better with the video. The Times has long used the gray background for picture galleries, but it’s nice to finally see them extend this to the video page.

The reason this approach works so well is because of how computer screens work. “Paper white” is a pigment, meaning it absorbs light. Monitors actually emit light making the color white much brighter than that of paper. You wouldn’t want to read in a dark room, but watching movies works well.

By removing all that white from it’s page, the NYTimes has made the experience of watching their videos all the more enjoyable

Another nice touch is how the text in the area in which you hover changes to a brighter color to facilitate making a choice.

Kudos once again to the excellent design team at the NYTimes.

After a recent flight, Jet Blue sent me a survey. There were several problems with the survey. For one, it was poorly written. It asked me a series of questions and asked me to provide responses on the old sliding scale, from “less than expected” to “better than expected.”

Given that I am a relatively active traveler who flies Jet Blue extensively, most of my answers are naturally of the middle of the road, “as expected,” variety. I have come to expect a quality experience from them, as compared to say Spirit Air.

The final straw in the proverbial hat was the overall length of the survey. While I am often willing to provide my feedback to a vendor (understanding how important it is to my own business), there is only so much time I will dedicate to this task. The survey was extremely long. It dynamically updated the questions based on my responses, and the page continued to grow in what felt like an exponential manner. This was the survey that felt like it just kept growing and growing and growing.

While I clicked on the link in the email with the best of intentions of providing feedback to what I feel is a superior airline company, the experience was so horrendous that the survey began to be more of an intrusion than was worth my time. In addition to all this, there was not even an offer for some basic, menial coupon, with some insane restrictions, that I would never use to help lube the process.

Lessons to consider: Be conscious of who you target for surveys. Ask relevant questions that demonstrate some basic consideration of the usage patterns of the sample population. Be brief and respectful of that participants time. Provide some incentive to reward the participants for their time and feedback.

Oh yeah, crazy amount of javascript code in surveys to enable the dynamic display of questions … provably a bad idea. The company fueling the survey, Market Metrix.

I normally edit photos using Photoshop. However, I understand the average user is not going to spend the money, especially in this slowing economy, to obtain a professional photo editing tool to edit their everyday photos. In that spirit, I want to begin messing around with more accessible photo editing tools. Here’s my first pass.

Note: I highly recommend you click on the images and check out the larger versions of the images.

First the original,

And then the edit,

I tried to bring out the greens and darken the water a bit. I increased the contrast to bring out the detail in the gravel. The goal was to add some dimensionality and depth to the image. Here are some detail shots (original on the left, edits on the right) …

iPhoto did a nice job with the photos. However, I really missed being able to mask pieces of the image.

paraphrased …

“Think of yourself as a museum curator. A museum curator’s job is to say no. If their job was to say yes, they’d manage a warehouse. Don’t be a warehouser. Say ‘no’ to more things that you say ‘yes.’ Build a curated collection of features.”

CERN’s Hadron Collider (LHC) has been turned on! While many expect this machine to bring us to whole new levels of understanding our universe, let’s not forget the indelible impact CERN has already had on mankind. In an effort to facilitate the sharing of information amongst researchers, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau birthed the World Wide Web. It was all done on world’s first web server, a NeXTcube. NeXT was a company founded by Steve Jobs … yes, that Steve Jobs. The work done at NeXT also provided the foundation for Mac OS X.

Here’s to the future fruits of this endeavor having as significant an impact on society as those to which we have already been witness. Here’s to game changers and visionaries!

- Kevin Kelly, EG conference (2007)