20/80 rule in an unban setting

here's what i came across when googling 20/80 rule:

In any nightclub in America you go to, 20 percent of the guys there are getting 80 percent of the action. The other 80 percent of the guys are usually too chicken shit to do anything but watch the hot girls dance while sipping on their drinks and getting horny.

Always remember the 20-80 rule when you go out.

Receiving Notification Off

back to the old days, when email just came to people's life, the feature of receiving confirmation was often built in the email system. So when you send out an email, you will get a notice indicating that your email has reached to the guy you are sending to. But we can barely find any email system still have this functionality working by default, because soon after people adapted to email, they were frustrated and overwhelmed by the number of receiving confirmation notices they got. They would rather assume that there is nothing wrong and turn that function off, just like what people do with the mail services.

But in retrospective, this function did help for people who use email for their first time and are anxiously waiting for results. We changed the system simply because we ourselves have changed. This is a typical story of evolution.

design, consistency, and...

the following text is a quotation from Scott Berkun:

At the heart of any design thinking is a series of trade-offs: speed versus reliability, ease of learning versus expert proficiency, global consistency versus local optimization. As Ron Fein once said, "Design is choosing how you will fail," meaning optimizing for one thing always means failing at another. The key to good design is knowing which characteristics of your Web site or product are the most important, and which ones you are willing to give in on. If you are clear on the goals, success will always come from planning enough time in your schedule to think through the trade-offs of a wide set of alternatives. Consistency is a potential means for success, but not success itself.

Michael McDonough’s Top Ten Things They Never Taught Me in Design School

I read this list a while ago but came across it again and found it still inspiring.

here you are:

The Top 10 Things They Never Taught Me in Design School
by Michael McDonough

1. Talent is one-third of the success equation.
Talent is important in any profession, but it is no guarantee of success. Hard work and luck are equally important. Hard work means self-discipline and sacrifice. Luck means, among other things, access to power, whether it is social contacts or money or timing. In fact, if you are not very talented, you can still succeed by emphasizing the other two. If you think I am wrong, just look around.

2. 95 percent of any creative profession is shit work.
Only 5 percent is actually, in some simplistic way, fun. In school that is what you focus on; it is 100 percent fun. Tick-tock. In real life, most of the time there is paper work, drafting boring stuff, fact-checking, negotiating, selling, collecting money, paying taxes, and so forth. If you don’t learn to love the boring, aggravating, and stupid parts of your profession and perform them with diligence and care, you will never succeed.

3. If everything is equally important, then nothing is very important.
You hear a lot about details, from “Don’t sweat the details” to “God is in the details.” Both are true, but with a very important explanation: hierarchy. You must decide what is important, and then attend to it first and foremost. Everything is important, yes. But not everything is equally important. A very successful real estate person taught me this. He told me, “Watch King Rat. You’ll get it.”

4. Don’t over-think a problem.
One time when I was in graduate school, the late, great Steven Izenour said to me, after only a week or so into a ten-week problem, “OK, you solved it. Now draw it up.” Every other critic I ever had always tried to complicate and prolong a problem when, in fact, it had already been solved. Designers are obsessive by nature. This was a revelation. Sometimes you just hit it. The thing is done. Move on.

5. Start with what you know; then remove the unknowns.
In design this means “draw what you know.” Start by putting down what you already know and already understand. If you are designing a chair, for example, you know that humans are of predictable height. The seat height, the angle of repose, and the loading requirements can at least be approximated. So draw them. Most students panic when faced with something they do not know and cannot control. Forget about it. Begin at the beginning. Then work on each unknown, solving and removing them one at a time. It is the most important rule of design. In Zen it is expressed as “Be where you are.” It works.

6. Don’t forget your goal.
Definition of a fanatic: Someone who redoubles his effort after forgetting his goal. Students and young designers often approach a problem with insight and brilliance, and subsequently let it slip away in confusion, fear and wasted effort. They forget their goals, and make up new ones as they go along. Original thought is a kind of gift from the gods. Artists know this. “Hold the moment,” they say. “Honor it.” Get your idea down on a slip of paper and tape it up in front of you.

7. When you throw your weight around, you usually fall off balance.
Overconfidence is as bad as no confidence. Be humble in approaching problems. Realize and accept your ignorance, then work diligently to educate yourself out of it. Ask questions. Power – the power to create things and impose them on the world – is a privilege. Do not abuse it, do not underestimate its difficulty, or it will come around and bite you on the ass. The great Karmic wheel, however slowly, turns.

8. The road to hell is paved with good intentions; or, no good deed goes unpunished.
The world is not set up to facilitate the best any more than it is set up to facilitate the worst. It doesn’t depend on brilliance or innovation because if it did, the system would be unpredictable. It requires averages and predictables. So, good deeds and brilliant ideas go against the grain of the social contract almost by definition. They will be challenged and will require enormous effort to succeed. Most fail. Expect to work hard, expect to fail a few times, and expect to be rejected. Our work is like martial arts or military strategy: Never underestimate your opponent. If you believe in excellence, your opponent will pretty much be everything.

9. It all comes down to output.
No matter how cool your computer rendering is, no matter how brilliant your essay is, no matter how fabulous your whatever is, if you can’t output it, distribute it, and make it known, it basically doesn’t exist. Orient yourself to output. Schedule output. Output, output, output. Show Me The Output.

10. The rest of the world counts.
If you hope to accomplish anything, you will inevitably need all of the people you hated in high school. I once attended a very prestigious design school where the idea was “If you are here, you are so important, the rest of the world doesn’t count.” Not a single person from that school that I know of has ever been really successful outside of school. In fact, most are the kind of mid-level management drones and hacks they so despised as students. A suit does not make you a genius. No matter how good your design is, somebody has to construct or manufacture it. Somebody has to insure it. Somebody has to buy it. Respect those people. You need them. Big time.

an old post on segway

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.03/segway.html

powerful brand, poor reliability - a new survey about Dyson

hey, just found this on core77.com

"Within six years of purchase 29% of upright Dyson vacuum cleaners and 22% of their cylinder vacuums needed repairing." Though it is the least reliable, it is the fifth most popular and often recommended to friends by users.

Based on 14,000 replies to a questionnaire sent out by British publication Which?, a designer might take away a few things from this finding: (cynically) it is form over function after all; (generously) early strong performance can carry a product-user relationship through the tough times, and/or (likely) strong brands tell us compelling stories that we favor over reality.

I guess it also shows that the conflicts between quality/reliability(engineering) and "cutting-edge" innovation does exist. We often see some brands started with an edgy image, but gradually grow into "mediocor" over the years. Maybe it's not because they don't want to be edgy, but the cost of losing quality is simply too high to take.

will China desperate enough to be innovative this time?

the April issue of Wired has an featured article talking about the hybrid and hydrogen car experiment in China. I like the ending:
"Does the hydrogen highway start here? Maybe. Maybe your future and mine is being created by people desperate enough to imagine it."

For the article, check out Wired web at
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.04/china.html

FW:Attentional Spotlighting in User Interfaces

Attentional Spotlighting in User Interfaces

February 11, 2005 by Mike Rundle

In visuospatial terms, a saccade is an eye movement from one area in the visual field to another, and usability testing using eye-tracking equipment tracks the timing and progression of saccades across a user interface in response to certain stimuli. These stimuli may include 1) the first presentation of the interface to the user, 2) the modification of the visual field due to animation (Flash, banners, animated GIFs, etc.), 3) the slow download of information to be presented, or any number of other things that can attract your gaze.

Unfortunately, where you are looking is not necessarily where you are paying attention. The spotlight theory of attention states that you can attend to a different section of your visual field than you are currently looking at. This means that even though you are currently looking at this line of text, your attentional spotlight could be on your buddy list to see who just signed on, or down at your Mac OS X dock to notice an application icon bouncing up and down, or even on nothing in particular because you are paying attention to a thought process going on in your head as opposed to what's happening on the screen. Ever read a passage of a book and then realize after the paragraph is complete that you don't remember anything you just read? That happened because your visual focus wasn't in sync with your spotlight of attention, thus your attention wandered and you missed the point of your reading.

User Interfaces and Spotlighting

Users who have no familiarity with the interface presented in front of them will pay more attention to what they are doing than if they are a seasoned user with hours of experience. I no longer look at the keyboard to open a new tab in Safari, I simply position my left thumb and index finger unconsciously and a new tab appears. Did I pay attention to the physical act of moving my fingers in a manner that puts them on top of the correct keys? Did I have to break concentration in order to remember the correct keystroke sequence to make a new tab? Of course not, because it is a learned response which requires no attention in order to perform it correctly.

Difficulties arise when performing usability tests on subjects who are very familiar with their scenario and can breeze right through it based on learned interaction sequences. When you stop attending to the interface you are using and simply go on subconscious learned activities, the usability testing (and eye-tracking) is now biased and altered. The interface's spatial cues are there to inform the user about possible interaction paths, but when your attentional spotlight is not focused on the task at hand, the interface's spatial cues are bypassed and you are not interacting with the UI in the manner it was designed. Your familiarity with the interface is effectively blocking positive interaction, thus usability testing needs to be adjusted.

Combatting Learned Interaction

When testing seasoned users is a necessity, think aloud protocol should be used in order to facilitate a full interaction with the interface. By forcing one to speak about their cognitive processes during testing it verifies that they are not using learned interactions. When both talking and doing at the same time, you are increasing the chances that their spotlight of attention is fixed at their gaze point instead of them attending elsewhere. Now that they are focused on the task at hand, they will pay more attention to the user interface in front of them and can turn back into a valuable usability tester.

And Now What?

People sometimes forget that the user experience industry has its base in psychology, and that knowing how information is processed in the brain helps someone become a better user interface designer.

stepping towards where?

the No.1 Chinese PC producer Lenovo(Legend) just announced its acquisition of IBM PC division. It would be very interesting to watch how Lenovo will digest something bigger than itself. It will be a case study in business schools no matter the new Lenovo will succeed or not.

the long tail that the new economy creates

the October issue of Wired magazine has an very inspiring article talking about how the new economy representitives like Amazon, google, Netflix are changing the way of doing business and making profit. The author has the idea that the new economy model based on Internet greatly increases the accessibility to documentary movies, rare books, small advertisers and so forth through user recommendations(Amazon), search(ad by google) and some other online services, and thus turn millions of niche markets from unprofitable markets to equally profitable markets in total as the mainstream markets. I'm not sure if I have made myself clear. Here's the link:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html?pg=1&topic=tail&topic_set=

Too much thinking damage your action

Here's somehthing i excerpt from John Maeda's webpage at MIT medialab. I thought he's talking a problem I think I have:
The power of creativity amazes me. My once mentor Tadashi Sasaki told me while I was just starting out, "You have the gift." I was surprised, "The gift?" Sasaki said, "Yes, the gift of creativity. Did you know it is also a curse?" I wasn't sure what he meant until many years later. What Sasaki meant, I think, is that it is a real gift to think of all kinds of things you can possibly do. Unfortunately, it can be a curse because it prevents you from ever doing anything at all. You can get started on something, and then immediately derailed because you start to see something completely new elsewhere. And then when you branch off to that, you get off on another tangent. If you are not careful, all you leave is a massive trail of unfinished work with nothing to show for. So the gift of ideas, is the curse of doing nothing.
Whenever students start to think too much, I try to warn them not to think so much, and just do. I wish that was my own idea, but Horace came a long time before me. It is not easy to warn students that they are thinking too much. After all, we are taught in school that it is hard to think. The profession of professors exist because we are thought to be able to think a great deal. So why should the student not think? Maybe what I mean is that over-creative students should not think, because they already think too much. They can waste too much time in the fascinating world of thought. "Doing" is outright dirty in the land of pure academia. There is a saying that supports this mindset with negative connotations, "Those who do, do. Those who can't, teach." I would change this to, "Those who are young, should do. Those who teach, should do too." Do not waste your precious gift while young and able. Do. And do not fear the curse of "the gift."

Koolhaas said something cool

I never thought the architect Rem Koolhaas was so good at writing. I feel the following words are very powerful and expressive:

in early 2002, my office received two invitations: one to propose a design for Ground Zero, the other to propose a design for the headquarters of China Central Television in Beijing. We discussed the choice over Chinese food. The life of the architect is so fraugth with uncertainty and dilemmas that any clarification of the future, including astrology, is disproportioantely welcome. My fortune cookie that night read: Stunningly Omnipresent Masters Make Minced Meat of Memory.
We chose China.

the three categories of users

Don Norman divides people's reaction to a product in three levels: visceral, behavioral and reflective. Let me borrow this idea to categorize users, or say, buyers:
V type users are people who use product without think too much. They buy products that attract them.
B type users comprise most of the consumers: they buy stuff for using. So these people care a lot: price, features, forms, colors, easy of use etc.
R type are scientists among buyers. These people do a lot of research before they buy something.

？？

欢笑中音乐响起
是悠扬的乡谣
挣扎中我遥看远方
夕阳漫过天边 


---in the sound of Vince Gill,
 

Apple losing its sheen?

according to Wall Street Journal(06/28/04), Apple's share of global computer market has dropping to 1.7% at the end of March, down from 1.8% in early 2003. Last year the whole PC market grew 12% while the shippment of Macintosh remain flat.

Is this because Apple has always kept a high price or because people are still abondoning Mac?

blablabla...

ok, got my blog. let's blablabla...