SensoryMetrics: re-inventing the User eXperience

Here’s a wonderful quote I found on College Humor

I wish I lived in Alabama so my state was at the top of drop down menus. No other reason.
-Travis Morton

Ain’t it the truth… Drop down for country or state selection are mostly atrocities! Huge vertigo-inducing lists! The worst offenders are sites that have restrictions on where subscribers are registering from (say only US and Canadian residents). They then offer the entire world on a country drop down. Some drop downs are better organized, like placing most common subscriber locations at the top. Others use cascading menus, organizing countries by continent.

Drop downs could be smarter still by using the user’s IP to initially guess where they’re from and placing them in the menu.

Meanwhile, Alabama remains the best place to be if you’re a North American subscriber. (UI-wise, anyhow)

This 1910 song Alabama Shuffle, written by Roy Barton was the inspiration for the modern drop-down menu: A Rag Cakewalk-Glide-Two Step.

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Here’s an interesting branding exercise… Brand Tags flips you a bunch of international brands and asks you to type the first word that comes to mind. It assembles everyone’s results into a collective tag cloud.

For example, Dell clearly has some work to do repairing its brand: Dell Hell, Boring, Broken, Poor Service…

Meanwhile, back in Dublin… Guinness stays true: Delicious, Dark, Creamy, Rich, Brilliant, Yum, and the occasional Yuck.

OK. Maybe comparing a PC brand with beer isn’t exactly fair - but the people have spoken!

On the other side of the branding rainbow comes a wonderful project called The DeBranded Home. It has started to offer simple yet elegant containers for bathroom items like shampoo and soap. If you don’t want to portray yourself as an Irish Spring fanboy (or girl) - then go unbranded!

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i guess Microsoft has given up on the youth demographic who prefer Mac and Ubuntu… Young twerps!

Taking its cue from Readers Digest’s Big Print Edition, the Ballmer Corp decided that an “old person’s OS” was its future. this was announced last week at the Digital Inclusion conference in London.

The PC will come with software that allows users to manage prescriptions as well as simplified tools for everyday use, such as managing photos. The machine, which it is developing in partnership with charities Age Concern and Help the Aged, is one of several projects the firm is working on.

This version of Vista will feature major changes - the error dialogs will be twice as big!

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What was Dell thinking? Where are they getting their industrial designers??

The European versions of the Vostro laptops feature a really big shift key. Dell’s reasoning - bigger shift = better shift. Unfortunately, the Bunyanesque shift key shifts the bottom row of keys over one character. So instead of the Z key being located in between the A & S - it’s now moved downtown, in between S & D. The catastrophic result is that touch typists all over Europe are now writing gibberish!

Apparently Dell was reluctant to declare this a flaw - as opposed to a design feature. Finally Dell agreed to fix the feature by eliminating the Z key altogether. Apparently, the new owners of the Ottawa Rapidz are not happy with this proposed solution!

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Yuck is right! London-based microbiologist James Francis swabbed some keyboards at a typical workplace and found them to have as many germs as a public toilet! One in five keyboards had 150 times the acceptable level of bacteria. This level is high enough to make people seriously ill.

Fortunately for Apple fans, Macs are immune to viruses. For PC fans, better get out the Raid!

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Filed under: Environment, User Experience | No Comments »

If organic carrots are good for you, this must be better!

The micro-brew industry has had a lot of ups and downs in the past few decades: intense consolidation and killer-legislation. As with all types of products on the long tail, producers can offer innovative products to a mass of consumers, without the costs and logistics of channel development. Same goes for beer. Organic beer seems to be taking advantage of that trend.

A great example of Long-Tail-Beer is Beau’s Brewery - a family operation out of Vankleek Hill, Ontario (near Ottawa). The power of the web and the public’s thirst for local / organic products works for them.

The scarcity of the product works against them (and for them!…). Luckily, today I found myself a bottle of Lug-Tread! This is fantastic packaging - a beautiful ceramic bottle. No light pollution here! I’m trying to see through the bottle here….

and the beer? My bottle came out of the Beau assembly line on April 27… assembled by hand by the family. It was still boxed up on the floor of the LCBO. It’s fresh and great tasting.

Tuesday night’s taste test: a great product, super marketing!

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The CanAm Baseball League announced a new team for Ottawa this winter. They featured a great logo, incorporating Ottawa’s whitewater river. The name was also appealing in both of Canada’s official languages: french and english (featured below).

It came as a surprise this week that before the team had even played a single game, it was already sold. The buyers are the founding members of Zip.ca, a Canadian version of Netflix. Ok… You’d think they’d have better business sense. To match their business’ cozzzy “z” name they switched the team’s name to the unilingual rapidz (in french, the plural “s” is silent). Because nearly half of the Ottawa region’s population is french, they’re missing out on a huge addressable market. This is especially important for sports merchandising.

To add more insult to injury, the Rapidz logo was transformed to a cheap cheesy “welcome to Canada’s capital” souvenir-style brand. That’s all the tacky made-in-China branded crap that tourists buy when shopping on Sparks Street (shown on right).

I do wish success to the team. We have a great stadium. Hopefully this season won’t become the baseball snozzzefest that the previous team had become. Go Rapidzzz, go. er… Rapidz!

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When designing new corporate logos, it’s wise to see what the thing looks like from different angles. Such diligence was missed by The UK Office of Government Commerce when they unveiled their new logo this week. According to the OGC

The new identity has been extremely well received, as it presents a very clean, uncluttered and modern identity…and is not inappropriate to an organisation that’s looking to have a firm grip on government spend!

The Register reports that the logo will look especially “nice” when place on mousepads with this lovely sideways orientation.

What does Frosty the Snowman think about all this?

Thumpetty thump thump,
Thumpety thump thump,
Look at Frosty go.
Thumpetty thump thump,
Thumpety thump thump,

Gotta love those Brits, huh?

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A few days ago I stopped by Walmart to buy some pool chemicals. I also picked up some bacon… Being in a rush I checked out using one of the self-serve stations. I bagged my jugs of chemicals, and bagged my bacon in a separate bag. After paying the friendly robot, I grabbed the bags and left. At home I realized I forgot my bacon… my forgotten, woeful bacon. The next day I dropped by again (you guessed it) to buy some more bacon. Half-jokingly I asked the friendly lost & found attendant if anyone had returned my lost bacon. Her response - yes they had my bacon, but suggested that I grab a fresh pack since they didn’t how long mine had been abandoned.

kudos to Walmart staff, and boos to Walmart robots. Since these robots are equipped with sensors to ensure you’re scanning and bagging accurately, they should sound an alarm if you walk away leaving a bag.

Speaking of bacon, and following a previous theme of meat flavoured drinks… Diet Coke with Bacon comes to us via Land’o'Lulu

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For our Ottawa readers: SM friend Ian Graham has confirmed that the next Ottawa DemoCamp will be held on Monday May 26. Unfortunately, our cherished Clock Tower Pub is now too small to hold the growing mass of participants. So DemoCamp is effectively homeless for the time being!

I suggest that attendees arrive an hour early and we’ll build ourselves a traditional nomadic building on the lawn of the Museum of Civilization! Please state your hut preference on the DemoCamp wiki: High Altai, Yurte, Ger, Tshum or Summerhouse. Architectural plans available here .

UPDATE: No need to drag along those sticks and sheepskins… DC9 is now booked for The Velvet Room (69.5 York Street in the market)… This is going to be a pretty swanky camp!

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Filed under: Events, Web 3.0 | 1 Comment »

When you’re a pirate, the most dangerous thing out there is other pirates.

Symantec brings us this wonderful story on their blog: the Russian creators of the “Zeus” or Infostealer.Banker.C. malware are including a license agreement for those who purchase their code. Should you be in violation of this EULA, you’ll lose tech support. Underground malware developers have tech support??? Maybe they’d consider locating their call center in the soon-to-be-vacant Dell center in Ottawa!

Symantec kindly has translated the Zeus license agreement (don’t be gettin’ any ideas now!)

The Client:
1. Does not have the right to distribute the product in any business or commercial purposes not connected with this sale.
2. May not disassemble / study the binary code of the bot builder.
3. Has no right to use the control panel as a means to control other bot nets or use it for any other purpose.
4. Does not have the right to deliberately send any portion of the product to anti-virus companies and other such institutions.
5. Commits to give the seller a fee for any update to the product that is not connected with errors in the work, as well as for adding additional functionality.

In cases of violations of the agreement and being detected, the client loses any technical support. Moreover, the binary code of your bot will be immediately sent to antivirus companies.

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