Archives For December 2007

The 0-1-N Fallacy

December 20, 2007 — 1 Comment

I don’t remember where I first heard the term “0-1-N Fallacy” (and Google doesn’t want to help), but I’m pretty sure I didn’t make it up. If anyone knows the source, please let me know so I can give credit where it is due.

 

The “0-1-N Fallacy” is a misguided design process based around the idea that if an application displays data records of some sort, it must handle exactly three cases – displaying 0 records, displaying 1 record, and displaying N records (where N can be any number from 2 – infinity)

 

The problem with the 0-1-N fallacy is that if you always design a product to scale to handle infinite records, you will invariably wind up with an overcomplicated user interface when N is a small number. In cases where N is almost always a small number, designing for unlimited scalability makes the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

 

One simple example is the usage of radio buttons vs. select boxes. Radio buttons are almost always preferable to select boxes when presenting a very small amount of choices – because the choices are always fully visible. If you absolutely must handle a case of unlimited options, you have to go with the select box. But if 90% of the time, you only have a small amount of options, you’ve made life much harder for the vast majority of cases, to handle the extreme outlying cases.

 

It may seem heresy to most engineers to claim that anything less than infinite scalability is good enough, but in UI design that is definitely the case. The iPhone, for example can only have 9 web pages open at once. It probably has the memory to hold dozens more, but if it held dozens, it would have to abandon the extremely elegant UI of “flicking” thumbnails to move between pages, and use a clunky list instead.

 

It may also seem heresy to apply semi-arbitrary limits on presented data but that’s why UI design is sometimes more of an art than a science. It takes experience and confidence to tell a developer “I don’t care if your search algorithm can present 1,000 options – presenting 5 is what’s right for the user.”

 

In Uncategorized
permalink

Advertising vs. Product Design

December 7, 2007 — 2 Comments

I used to work in advertising. Now I work in product design.Advertising is kind of like product design in reverse. You take a product that already exists – that may have gone through hundreds of incarnations and several changes of direction – and you pick it apart, asking yourself:

“What is there about this product that just happens to be different from all of its competitors? What Big Idea can we convince people was the motivating force behind this product all along?” 

Dunkin’ Donuts is a huge client for Hill, Holliday. Their idea is: “America Runs on Dunkin’”. It’s a GREAT idea. Dunkin’ Donuts stores are everywhere. People go to them when they need a pick me up during their day. An ad agency took a fast food chain that was selling a lot of coffee and donuts and saw it for what it really was: a gas station for human fuel.Dunkin’ Donuts didn’t even realize what it was until an ad agency told them. The ad agency extracted a Big Idea from an existing product. That’s quite a skill, and for that I hold talented advertising people in the highest regard.But advertising and its “idea archaelogy” strikes me as a tactic of last resort for a company that forgot to put the Big Idea in in the first place. And I’d much rather spend my time working with companies that need help putting their Big Ideas into new stuff, than with companies that need help digging Big Ideas out of old stuff.But that’s just me.

In Uncategorized
permalink

The Omni Future Almanac on Inflation

December 6, 2007 — Leave a comment

A while ago, I bought one of the coolest books ever – the Omni Future Almanac. The Omni Future Almanac was written in 1982, and its purpose is to describe what life will be like, well, now.An entire blog could be devoted to the contents of this book. Sometimes it’s spot on, sometimes it’s way off, but the most interesting parts are the ones where life could easily have turned out they way they describe if a butterfly flapped its wings in just a slightly different way.I’ve kept this book on a table in my office that I always walk by, and I’m constantly picking it up and perusing a random page. Today, it was about the effects of inflation. So, without further ado, here are the prices we’re looking at in 2010, three years from now (p. 158).

  • Hamburger (1 lb.) $22.71
  • Dozen Large Eggs: $18.00
  • Magazine: $30.00
  • Calculator: $50.00 (he he)
  • Postage Stamp: $2.25
  • Cup of coffee: $4.50 (OK, they kind of got that one right, in a weird way)
  • Three Room Apartment Monthly Rent: $10,000
  • Three Bedroom House: $1,000,000

Oh, but wait:

  • Gallon of Gas: $2.00

Well, the good news is that a factory worker will be making $197,000 a year to help pay for all this stuff (p. 159).

In Uncategorized ,
permalink