I was recently replacement-part shopping for my broken grill, when I saw just how many different grills there are to choose from. And choice is good. Right?

When it comes to trivial choice, I’m not sure it’s good. In the US when you go to elect a president you get 2 choices. When you go to buy a grill you get dozens of models from dozens of manufacturers from a dozens of retailers. This picture is of the 16 nearly indistinguishable Weber grills available at HomeDespot.com.

While a good steak is obviously important, I’m not sure it’s in the same league as choosing a national leader.

Political absurdities aside, this got me wondering about waste and cost. What are the incremental costs associated with designing, manufacturing, assembling, delivering, retailing and supporting such an unnecessary variety of products? How much cheaper would my grill have been had the manufacturer made only 3 models?

Are there really so many contexts for grilling that this variety really is necessary?

Take Apple’s merchandising for example. In virtually each and every one of their hardware products you get three choices: small, medium and large. And it seems this is quite enough to keep all their customers happy.

Granted most of the components used to assemble each grill are probably identical across product models with some minor variations. But material costs are a small fraction of the cost of goods sold—and it’s all these other costs that scale with the variety of models. Everything from assembly lines, to training, to packaging and shipping scales with variety. Retailers need more complex systems to handle the variety, more space to show it, and again more training to ensure staff know all the subtle differences.

This leads me to my big question:

As the west bleeds manufacturing to China due to cost, couldn’t manufacturers (of everything, not just grills) keep more production here and closer to consumers by cutting unnecessary costs like those inherent in offering too much trivial choice?

A few months back Victor posted about the difficulty of getting approval to do design research in a project. This reminded me of Don Norman’s post last year about realizing that research actually does not belong in design.

Vic is right–Its hard to convince managers to okay research. His commenters though are wrong. Euphemisms are not a solution. Whether you call it “research” or “split pea soup”, management still won’t pay for a fishing trip–they want a solution.

Norman knows research does not belong in design. Management knows this. Designers don’t.

Gasp! What am I saying?!

Reflecting on my own work I realized that I have always separated research and design, problem modeling from problem solving, diagnoses from treatment. Often this means separate research and design projects, with separate proposals, plans and bills.

Coupling the two is dangerous because they are so very different from each other.

Since management holds the purse-strings design has to stop navel-gazing long enough to understand management’s perspective reconcile design and research needs for management (after all we are supposed to be professional problem solvers, not professional whiners).

Here are three simple suggestions:

• Have a small ongoing user experience research effort that is funded outside of any particular project. Every project can then pull from and contributes to this body of knowledge, which is immediately available, always growing, and never needs to be rediscovered.
• Treat research and design as their own projects with their own goals, budgets, resources, deliverables and schedules.
• If there is no time or money to do research then document the nature and magnitude of the risks, and then just do what you can with what you’ve got. Be sure to conduct a project post-mortem to see how these risks and their consequences have manifested themselves.

The “username” and “password” fields are required. Yet the the instructions are to absolutely NOT fill out these fields. So “username” and “password” are both required and prohibited.

This is the the UI equivelent of Jacques Carelman’s “Coffeepot for Masochists.” Well done guys!

A couple months ago John over at Brand Autopsy posted a series of simple images from Zag Book that brilliantly illustrates the differences between advertising, marketing, pr and branding.

Your brand is your story, your myth. At its best your brand captivates and fires the imagination, it inspires and seduces people, it marshals markets and makes them hunger for you. A great brand, like a great story, is frighteningly powerful; and maddeningly volatile. Indeed, just like the author of a story, you don’t control your brand–we do.

Sure the post-structuralists and deconstructionists and guys with super cool Serge Gainesbourg accents may have gone a little far with many ideas, but I think they were mostly right with the idea of the author’s death; the idea that after writing a story, the author is no longer relevant and all of the power to make meaning of the text now resides with the reader.

Indeed this is what made the medieval church authorities so terrified to have the bible written in the vernacular: it would allow people to read the text free them from an orthodox intermediary interpreter and construct their own meanings. In this case, the death of the author meant the death of the church, of faith, of God. That is the power of the reader, a power that has terrified thinkers from Aquinas to Darrida, and a power that you need to learn to manage and embrace if you want yours to be a great brand.

So while the reader may have no control over the artifacts of your brand, they have complete control over their interpretation of these artifacts’ meanings—and it is the meanings not the artifacts that captivate, fire, inspire and seduce.

Treat your brand as an author does a story, not as an ad-man flogs a soundbite.

Related posts

• Design Must Relinguish Control (10/16/06)
• Metaphors for Design part I(02/27/06)

I recently had a request from a loyal reader about my attempt to make a custom closet. So here it is…

I’ve been slowly working on renovating my condo. One of the big issues for the reno is maximizing storage space, because there ain’t much of it. So I invited 5 closet builders to show me how they’d redesign the closets and how much it would cost. These builders were:

• California Closets – expensive, and unresponsive–we had to ask them twice for the quote
• Canadian Closets – the cheapest bid, but we hear they use lower quality hardware
• Metropolitan Closets – had hard time listening to what I wanted, then told me they wouldn’t do what I wanted
• Original Closet Warehouse – decent price, but inefficient design
• StoreMor Closets – had to ask twice for quote after they visited, and they ignored each request

My first lesson was how hard it is for people to think beyond where they’ve thought before. Indeed Metropolitan Closets told me that they would not take a job that required them to think beyond. And none of them managed to design a closet system that maximized the space, because the space is unusually large such that thier standard modules and assembly practices wouldn’t work for the space.

In other words thier thinking was entirely restricted to the standard modules they carry and the standard ways they use them.

Well standard wouldn’t solve my problems so I had to do it myself. Fortunately I had the whole thing designed in Sketchup and all I needed to do was go buy the pieces and assemble them. Of course I had more lessons to learn.

My second lesson was once you have a plan stick to it, don’t improvise. When you’re in the design phase you’re free to do what ever. But once you’re in development, stick to the plan. I ended up with exactly what I planned out, but only after trying a couple of mid-project improvisations that didn’t work out, requiring a lot of back-peddling, and forcing me to waste hours and hours of time and near countless trips to the hardware store. Ready, Fire, Aim simply does not work.

My third lesson was once you have a plan and know all the matials you need, buy all of the materials at once, in fact buy more than you need, and don’t start building till you have all of the materials. Do not go off half-assed.

And the biggest lesson was get it done right, the first time.

I have learned these last three lesson before, doing other home improvement projects and rebuilding an old 73 BMW 2002. I guess it just takes a while for lessons to sink into my head.

This is a great example of how seeing should no longer be believing. The power to manipulate images translates directly into the power to manipulate what you think and feel. Check out just how much power we have these days to effortlessly maniupulate images and your feelings of self worth.

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There’s a post over at medgadget about how searching google for “vaccination” turns up mostly anti-vaccination “moonbats”. One of the reasons is the medical industry’s preference for the word “immunization”.

So doctors say “immunization” while regular people and moonbats use “vaccination”. The lesson here is in a world run by Google, if you don’t speak like regular people, regular people will never hear your voice–even if you’re a doctor.

I live in a part of Vancouver you’d probably call skidrow. It’s denizens are beggars, junkies, strung out prostitutes, the homeless, and the mentally ill. Most of these folks own nothing and have no income. And most of them depend on the neighbourhood’s various social services for bare survival. Most Vancouverites shuddler at the thought of coming to Main and Hastings. But despite the area’s deep social and moral problems, it hardly lives up to (or down to) its reputation. Indeed most of these sallow wandering souls are harmless and pass right through you on the street.

My neighbourhood lies right on the edge of a spreading downtown gentrification. Vancouver’s isn’t really the planned-and-scheduled-land-developer-mega-project sort that most cities buy (I saw this in Dallas recently, and it felt about as natural as a snowy Christmas tree in Tucson). Rather, Vancouver’s is a more organic gentrification, the kind that happens as the city’s physical core fills and expands pushing its edges out slightly further with each year.

However my neighbourhood might not be gentrifiable. All of the social service the homeless and desperate need are right here. So it will be very interesting to see how the tension between the homeless clinging to the few entitlements they feel they have and the aspirations of a new neighbourhood wanting to realize its larger, cleaner potential.

I bring this up as a paralell to what seems to be happening in some Indian cities when information age riches clash with stone age poverty over the right to live in the same place. In Mumbai developers who take land to build fancy new condos have started to set aside some of the land to build homes for the shanty dwellers they displace–a strategy that would find more than a few supporters here.

However its not all milk and honey in India’s free-homes-for-the-destitute experiment. The new living arrangements apparently destroy the intimate social connections that grew like weeds in the old shanty–connections that in many ways were the only things of value those people had. Well the old shanty dwellers ain’t exactly thrilled with their new digs as a results.

This is interesting because…

• its a great lesson in unintended consequences
• its also a great related lesson in the limits of design and human intentionality
• and lastly it makes me wonder about how any similar homes-for-the-homeless plans might work out here

Do check out the slideshow

I nice intro to Don Norman and his work. Whether you’ve only heard his name or you one many of his book, this is a nice short intro to Norman and his rather common-sensical work. Thanks to Niti for this one.

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To carry the original analogy into music, Frank Sinatra is a stylist, while Tom Waits is a designer.

Sinatra was a marvellous stylist. He was able to take virutally any song and make it sound like his. But he never wrote the lyrics, and he never wrote the music. Creatively Sinatra was barren, all he did was put his signature on other people’s work. He didn’t make anything new. But he did make songs sound way cooler then they ever had before.

Waits on the other hand is every bit as cool and distinctive a vocal stylist as Sinatra, soaking each song he touches in sweaty hot bourbon. But Waits also writes the lyrics, the music, and the identites that sit somewhere in front of the songwiter but behind the voice in the song.

Ok, I’ll try to stop harping about this (…for a while).