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More Articles by Michael Bissell
When did Google Start Policing the Internet?
Getting back to HTML basics, thanks to Apple
Inspecting my Navel Base
Quantum Entanglement and the Death of Radio
A shoebox vs. an online backup
Cave Man Distribution Networks
Dressing for Work
The team that hates itself -- Visionaries, Managers and Technicians
iBooks -- Creative Epicenter or Gatekeeper?
The Failure of Success
The Economy is Going to Get Worse, but that's okay
Time lost on Twitter
Common Sense of the New Economy
Twitter's back alleys and dark places
Social Media is NOT Advertising
On censorship
Microsoft Courier
Form (designers) versus Function (geeks)
Bad Restroom Health Sign
PDXBOOM -- The power of social media and the portland pipe bomb
China and Apple -- Different organizations, same management
The volume of screens
Logorama
Sleeping through miracles
Who needs an URL anyhow?
Transmedia
That magical little tablet
The complications of making coffee
How your website can be in two places at once
Masterpieces created by sheer volume
Suing over lack of originality
A Primer on Internet Fame -- dancing babies, hamsters, numa numa, and more...
The Lawsuit Lottery
Checking my messages
Another Random Night of Arts in Portland
Rules are made to be broken -- in a reasoned, systematic way
So many accounts, so few passwords
The Dali Lama of Hillsdale
Who really uses Twitter? 60% of Twitter's traffic isn't on Twitter
Riding the commute route on Saturday
Not everyone is like you
The Web is a Jerry Rigged Kludge
Portland Bike Plan: Too Expensive or Playing with numbers?
Twitter: Asleep at the Mouse Wheel
Where regulation is good: Google Voice and Vonage
How Facebook is (unintentionally) forcing programmers to piss off users
The Twit Cleaner
Perfect Secretary's pitch for @Adbroad (and the Youtube API)
The Emotions of Text
The Shorty Awards Scandal -- Manual Spam is still Spam
Google Analytics, the cloud and missing numbers #fail
Helen Klein Ross & Michael Bissell Interview at Adweek's Social Media Strategies Conference
The Internet is the New 60's
Getting back in the saddle (bicycle saddle, that is)
Ranting about Portland Drivers
Cougars from New Zealand (and I don't mean big cats)
Adding facts together, or why you can't charge your cell phone from wifi
Social Media and the Destruction of the World
Rabid Fans vs Passive Viewers -- The Coco vs Leno saga
How to tell someone to retweet (without using up your 140 characters)
You can't buy social media
A book unopened is but a block of paper
Building the LOST: The Final Season Sweepstakes
Holiday SPAM (or the lack thereof)
Archiving Twitter
Too Many Toolbars
Random Censorship with Google Adwords
Accessibility and Shopping Online
"Upgrading" my flight
Twisted path to customer service
Flash: Shiny objects blinding your audience
Twollow and other gold rush scripts
Arthur Miller's All My Sons
GPS in a Laptop computer
Thinking outside the box... There was a box?
Twitter was designed for Text Messaging
It's not the corporations, damnit
Entrepreneur or Dreamer?
Adweek Social Media Twitter for Brands Presentation
Socializing is more than Social Media
Generational Marketing is a Myth (or Who's your Daddy?)
Social Media is Just the Way We Use the Internet
Twitter Followers Don't Matter (ask the porn sites)
The Internet is Gooder than Books
Sometimes you don't want your campaign to go viral
Best Twitter Branding Campaign
A Good Explosive Recipe and other found knowledge online
Like flies to crap, Spammy Twitter Followers don't really go away
Video Projectors for your phone
iPhone SMS Security Hole
How Flipmytweet works
Cell Phones as Microscopes
Markie's Birthday
Digg is not the Hijacker -- You Are
Steve Ballmer -- the walking dead?
Twitter as an open mic poetry reading
Automatic Social [un]Awareness
New York, New York
First splash for United Against Malaria
New Media/Old Media and the CLIO Awards
Interview at SXSW: Mad Men Twitter And Tracking
Saturday Yard Work
We've got an App for that -- it's called the Web
Made it to SXSW in Austin
What is Conquent?
The trouble with Wordpress and other templates
Wayward Words with Baggage
Speaking at SXSW March 17th
The fleeting Memory of the Internet
It's okay to say 'I don't know'
Good Morning America, now Go Fight Traffic
More surreality in Portland
Nike Takes Over Conquent
Facebook owns this title
Excuses, excuses
A little on Social Media
Feeding on Content
Attack of the Bots
Irish Music in Oregon City
Landing on an Aircraft Carrier
Got Curry? And some bizarre art?
Web 1.0
Random Music and Random Life in Portland
To the dump, to the dump, to the dump dump dump
Flight Simulator
Cold night, hot fire, happy cat
Net Neutrality
Walking to work in the snow
A window into Moreland of the Past
Getting clever with data feeds
Big and Little Beirut
The Other Credit Crisis
The Broadband Inauguration
T-Mobile owns Magenta and Other Patent Stories
The Risk-takers, Doers and Makers of Things
The noise of 20,000+ Twitter Followers
Reflections on my DC Trip
Born Again American
30,000 feet, 500 MPH Suburban Strip Mall
Cellphones, toilets and the Inauguration
The wall of pissing
National Treasure/National Archives
My trip to DC so far
Everyone is insane
Getting ready for DC
The End of Days (of song): Microsoft Songsmith Example
The Very Model of a Modern Major General
Browser Bigotry
The Death of your Soul: Microsoft Songsmith
Creative Development or Developing Creatively?
Race to Witch Mountain
The Myth of Wikipedia (or the Wiki-1400)
Online/Offline Sales -- is it really that bad?
Is PayPal Tacky?
Old School Web Design Still Works
Domain Squatting
Christmas Fire
Green Chri$tma$
QA 101
Portland Snow
Get some return on that web traffic
I think they have a backup...
I'd love to have that problem
The [un]importance of statistics
Don't be a tool of viral marketing
CAT Scan!
Follow up to the shoulder injury
Emails, discussions, blogs, wiki and web content
Ironic Injury
On the Santa Monica Pier
You Designed for Print First
You let someone else register your domain name
You figured .biz, .info, .us would work fine
What's after the Integrated Circuit?
Intelligent life is out there (but it's bugger all down here on earth)
Subject Matter Experts Talking Other Subject Matter
The Totalitarian Regime of Apple
Oversimplifying how people work
crowdSPRING
Traditional agencies vs. the 'new model'
Creative Services for the New World
Reverse Anthropomorphism
The End of Time
Oil prices and birdsong
Watching Starship Troopers AGAIN!
Better Living Through Twitter
Lessons Learned From Apple
It's the Brand, Baby
Business Architecture vs. Web Construction
On Truth
You can't build life
Accidentally Drunk in Portland
Al Gore the Winner
Intelligent life is out there (but it’s bugger all down here on earth)
Aussie Rules Football
Trip to Nostalgia Land
I am such an idiot
Long day of travel
Miami -- as far from Portland as you can go in the US
Inverse Peter Principle
Random Knowledge
I'm fascinated with modern plumbing
Leaving Seattle (or why you should keep your ticket close)
On the Rails
The Hive
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Form (designers) versus Function (geeks)
2010-04-07 10:24:20
Shortcut URL: http://t.conquent.com/ZA00
I need to make something clear -- I don't actually hate Apple. They make great products, they have amazing branding, incredible marketing, and a loyal customer base.
I hate that the competition doesn't do better.
I don't mean the competition doesn't make good products, I mean that they don't care about presentation and care more about features than usability. Technology has been controlled by the geeks, and geeks aren't exactly known for their fashion sense. Add a sense of "first to market" desperation and you get the DVD players, phones, and hard-to-use crap we spend way to much money and time on.
Most companies that try to blend form and function fail miserably -- the function guys (geeks) don't understand why the form guys (designers) insist on that shade of ecru and figure dirty white is good enough. The form guys can't understand why the function guys can't just make it work.
Instead of calling a simple device "revolutionary and magical", the geeks present a really complex, obtuse interface that does millions of things and say, "read the fucking manual" or worse yet, RTFM, being cryptic, insulting and unhelpful all in one tight little acronym. It doesn't matter that Apple's "Geniuses" are nimrods, they're friendly and polite and you feel okay about giving them a hundred bucks to throw away your old iPod.
As long as form doesn't kill you, it will always trump function. Hell, it can even kill you from time to time, cigarettes being a great example of marketing over benefit.
Somewhere on the Form<------>Function dialectic, you find management going off on a tangent. They don't care or understand either extreme and just wish the geeks and the designers would shut up and quit bitching and get a product out the door, usually rushing so the design is ugly, and the functionality just doesn't quite work.
"We'll send out a patch post-release..." The consumer shouldn't even know what a patch is, let alone a "beta" version. If they get one thing that works, that they don't have to call technical support for, that doesn't need a seminar or a training course, the will buy it. The iPad being a case in point.
Apple has mastered the art of Top Secret R&D which buys them time to get the product working, make it look and feel nice, and figure out how to make everyone believe that the limitations are really cool.
Now, if we could just get the rest of the tech world to slow down, talk a little, and produce something that works and is pleasing, then I can stop ranting about Apple.
Bruce Dickson: Re: Form (designers) versus Function (geeks)
2010-04-07 14:05:44
Could not have summed up the dilemma better. Apple suck totally for their whole control the user philosophy but Microsoft - with all their resources (leaving no room for excuses as a result) - consistently fail both the function and design tests!! No room for betas and patches is nothing but the truth. But the whole truth is that the world in general TOTALLY undervalues the absolute necessity and significance of GREAT design and its primacy in everything that helps make life itself great as well. Functionality to me is just a take it for granted ...
Teagan D: Re: Form (designers) versus Function (geeks)
2010-04-07 18:53:50
Good post; one thing in specific stuck out to me though: "We'll send out a patch post-release"
This mentality seems to have grown in apparent acceptability in recent years, with increased internet availability; nearly every program now has a 'patcher', and every patcher wants to update itself every day.
Despite the obvious inconvenience (I really hate patchers) of running daily, waiting for it to download, check, install and start your new version, it's simply bad form; it indicates to me that companies (and developers, in fact!) have become lazier- there's no reason to check for all the bugs, because users can report the problems for them and they can 'just patch it'. The increased presence of bug tracking systems being made public to the end users of large projects almost seems to confirm this... though I'm not sure it's such a horrible thing, it shouldn't be abused.
No longer do developers seem to want bulletproof software developed, management practically insisting against it so the product can get out the door faster. It leaves us users with a bunch of bug reports to file before we can actually use what we paid for...
I do, however, see the value of 'patchers' for software like QuickBooks/Quicken, and for antivirus solutions, it can be important to have the patcher run more frequently to keep things secured; but this should be used as a way to protect against newly discovered exploits; not bugs that management & the developers were too lazy or busy to fix.
I don't feel as hypocritical writing this as I might a bit ago, I've gotten a bit better at QA ;)
Apple seems to have it right with this, though... at least partially. I'm not really a fan of Apple as their interfaces feel too 'dumbed down', and I greatly dislike most of their 'control' policies (locking everything down 'for our own good'); I do yield to their way of making things very simple, however, they seem to do it right the first time.
In certain other instances, I've noted that if Apple can't package a complete feature, they simply exclude it; it could be the wrong thing to do, but it doesn't result in things breaking in the user's hands; I would imagine things like system-wide copy+paste and application multi-tasking on the iPhone OS might be an example of this...
They also have the ability to bring certain technologies into the spotlight for the purposes of advancing the entire field- MP3 players are the most obvious example of this, and now I'm hoping the same thing will happen with tablet PCs; as I'm sure you might recall, I love tablet PCs- it's just a shame that it seems as though the whole market has been stuck in the same rut for years; the same designs, the same specs, no originality. Apple's design isn't terribly original either (which is to say: not at all), but they will jump-start the market like they did with MP3 players. I'm hoping, at least. If not, I'll settle for Microsoft's Courier, which if you haven't seen it: http://t.conquent.com/courier
Looks way cool, if it matches up to the hype... and I love the form-factor. A book as a PC; perfect!
Anyway, your blog brought some interesting thoughts to mind, thanks.
John Bissell: Re: Form (designers) versus Function (geeks)
2010-04-08 18:21:10
A couple of points (Maybe a few). Michael is right. The products in question require people who don't speak the same language and have no empathy for the other side (i.e. form v function people). Both think that their part is the most important, so why do I have to pay any attention to the other.
However, this is not a new thing that just applies the tech industry faces. Civil Engineering v. Architecture - Car Designers, vs. drive train designers, Doctors v. nurses.
That solution is in management, that includes production criteria, education and enforcement. I know this method works from first hand experience in the Civil Engineering industry.
I also don't think the release early thing is new in American Industrial Culture either. This is in fact the exact problem that brought down GM, while the opposite - fix it on the line and release no flawed product - is what elevated Toyota.
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