design

Why Photography Matters: an Airbnb Case Study

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This is a superb read on one of my favorite start-ups, Airbnb, and how the company was able to double its revenues after a critical decision was made: get professional-looking photos of the listings.

At the time, Airbnb was part of Y Combinator. One afternoon, the team was poring over their search results for New York City listings with Paul Graham, trying to figure out what wasn’t working, why they weren’t growing. After spending time on the site using the product, Gebbia had a realization. “We noticed a pattern. There’s some similarity between all these 40 listings. The similarity is that the photos sucked. The photos were not great photos. People were using their camera phones or using their images from classified sites.  It actually wasn’t a surprise that people weren’t booking rooms because you couldn’t even really see what it is that you were paying for.”

Graham tossed out a completely non-scalable and non-technical solution to the problem: travel to New York, rent a camera, spend some time with customers listing properties, and replace the amateur photography with beautiful high-resolution pictures. The three-man team grabbed the next flight to New York and upgraded all the amateur photos to beautiful images. There wasn’t any data to back this decision originally. They just went and did it. A week later, the results were in: improving the pictures doubled the weekly revenue to $400 per week. This was the first financial improvement that the company had seen in over eight months. They knew they were onto something.

This was the turning point for the company. Gebbia shared that the team initially believed that everything they did had to be ‘scalable.’ It was only when they gave themselves permission to experiment with non-scalable changes to the business that they climbed out of what they called the ‘trough of sorrow.’

Here’s the takeaway:

Gebbia’s experience with upgrading photographs proved that code alone can’t solve every problem that customers have. While computers are powerful, there’s only so much that software alone can achieve. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs tend to become comfortable in their roles as keyboard jockeys. However, going out to meet customers in the real world is almost always the best way to wrangle their problems and come up with clever solutions. 

Read the rest here.

 

On Business and Design Considerations of 1st Class Airplane Seating

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David Owen, writing in The New Yorker, in a cleverly titled article “Game of Thrones,” describes the business and design considerations of seats in modern-day airplanes. While the economy seating is fairly routine (cramped), there is a lot of creativity involved in how 1st class and business seating is designed and built:

Airplane interiors are even more tightly regulated. Nearly every element undergoes a safety-enhancing process called “delethalization”: seats have to withstand an impact equal to sixteen times the force of gravity, and to remain in place when they do, so that they don’t block exit routes or crush anyone, and they can’t burst into flames or release toxic gases when they get hot. Doing something as simple as slightly increasing the thickness of the padding in a seat cushion can necessitate a new round of testing and certification, because a more resilient seat could make a passenger bounce farther after an impact, increasing the risk of injury caused by turbulence or a hard landing. Delethalizing some premium-class seats—in which a passenger’s head and torso have a lot of room to accelerate before being stopped by something solid—requires the addition of a feature that many passengers don’t even realize is there: an air bag concealed in the seat belt.

This bit about how expensive video-back video screens is fascinating:

In economy, the tight spacing of the seats makes air bags mostly unnecessary. But seat-back video screens and the hard frames that surround them pose a safety challenge, partly because of the potential for injuries caused by head strikes, and partly because the computers and the electrical systems that serve them have to be both fireproof and fully isolated from the plane’s—so that crossed wires in somebody’s seat don’t allow a ten-year-old playing a video game to suddenly take control of the cockpit. Largely as a result, in-flight entertainment systems are almost unbelievably expensive. The rule of thumb, I was told, is “a thousand dollars an inch”—meaning that the small screen in the back of each economy seat can cost an airline ten thousand dollars, plus a few thousand for its handheld controller.

1st_class_seat

The article mentions but doesn’t link to the TheDesignAir’s Top 10 International Business Classes of 2014 (it’s well worth a look).

Jony Ive on Philosophy and Authenticity of Design

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One of the things that’s interesting about design [is that] there’s a danger, particularly in this industry, to focus on product attributes that are easy to talk about. You go back 10 years, and people wanted to talk about product attributes that you could measure with a number. So they would talk about hard drive size, because it was incontrovertible that 10 was a bigger number than 5, and maybe in the case of hard drives that’s a good thing. Or you could talk about price because there’s a number there.

But there are a lot of product attributes that don’t have those sorts of measures. Product attributes that are more emotive and less tangible. But they’re really important. There’s a lot of stuff that’s really important that you can’t distill down to a number. And I think one of the things with design is that when you look at an object you make many many decisions about it, not consciously, and I think one of the jobs of a designer is that you’re very sensitive to trying to understand what goes on between seeing something and filling out your perception of it. You know we all can look at the same object, but we will all perceive it in a very unique way. It means something different to each of us. Part of the job of a designer is to try to understand what happens between physically seeing something and interpreting it.

I think that sort of striving for simplicity is not a style. It’s an approach and a philosophy. I think it’s about authenticity and being honest. Not just taking something crappy and styling the outside in an arbitrary disconnected way.

–Jony Ive, via this blog post titled “Jony Ive is Not a Graphic Designer” (per this PR document, Ive is in charge of Human Interface at Apple).

A Profile of App Designer Loren Brichter

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Jessica Lessin has a nice profile of Loren Brichter, creator of one of my favorite apps on iOS, Letterpress:

Mr. Brichter, whose design aesthetic is inspired by information theorists like Edward Tufte, a proponent of minimizing extraneous information in graphic designs, says he thinks up new features for apps based on how people move objects in the real world.

“Everything should come from somewhere and go somewhere,” he says, adding that he’s irked by apps that have menus that pop up or collapse on themselves because the interactions aren’t real. “The most important thing is obviousness. The problem is overdesign.”

Loren Brichter was the first developer to create the “pull to refresh” gesture in some of the iOS apps, particularly useful for Twitter.

“You” vs. “Me” in Social Apps

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Dustin Curtis begins his latest blog post with a question:

A question that inevitably comes up very early in the process of designing a new app is this: should the interface refer to the user as “your” or “my” when talking about the user’s stuff, as in “my profile” or “your settings”? For a long time, this question ate at my soul. Which is right?

It’s not something I thought about until reading his entry. I like his conclusion:

If we think about interfaces as literal “interfaces” to tasks (like how people are interfaces to their ideas), instead of as tools themselves, it makes sense for the interface to take on a personality, and to become a “you” to the user. Thus, it would make sense for the interface to refer to a user’s stuff as “your stuff,” because the interface is just a medium between the user and what she wants to accomplish or find. In a way, the interface takes on a social characteristic, and becomes a humanoid assistant by utilizing existing functions of the human brain’s social systems.

After thinking about this stuff for a very long time, I’ve settled pretty firmly in the camp of thinking that interfaces should mimic social creatures, that they should have personalities, and that I should be communicating with the interface rather than the interface being an extension of myself. Tools have almost always been physical objects that are manipulated tactually. Interfaces are much more abstract, and much more intelligent; they far more closely resemble social interactions than physical tools.

The answer for me, then, is that you’re having a conversation with the interface. It’s “Your stuff.”

Interesting.

The History of the Escape Key

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The New York Times provides some fascinating history behind the “Escape” key, ubiquitous on computer keyboards:

The key was born in 1960, when an I.B.M. programmer named Bob Bemer was trying to solve a Tower of Babel problem: computers from different manufacturers communicated in a variety of codes. Bemer invented the ESC key as way for programmers to switch from one kind of code to another. Later on, when computer codes were standardized (an effort in which Bemer played a leading role), ESC became a kind of “interrupt” button on the PC — a way to poke the computer and say, “Cut it out.”

Why “escape”? Bemer could have used another word — say, “interrupt” — but he opted for “ESC,” a tiny monument to his own angst. Bemer was a worrier. In the 1970s, he began warning about the Y2K bug, explaining to Richard Nixon’s advisers the computer disaster that could occur in the year 2000. Today, with our relatively stable computers, few of us need the panic button. But Bob Frankston, a pioneering programmer, says he still uses the ESC key. “There’s something nice about having a get-me-the-hell-out-of-here key.”

Will the keyboard come with computers in ten to fifteen years?

Oliver Reichenstein: “Good Design is Invisible”

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Oliver Reichenstein is the founder and director of Information Architects (iA), the Tokyo, Zurich, and Berlin-based design agency. The company has found recent success in iOS and Mac app development. Writer for iPad is a minimalist text editor (I have it installed on my iPad, and highly recommend it), and per The Verge, “its focus-enhancing combination of sparse visuals and refined typography” has since made the leap to OS X and the iPhone.  Reichenstein recently took the time to answer some of questions on design and development with The Verge:

On invisibility of good design:

To give you an idea, with the new Retina displays we had to optimize the typeface so it looks like it used to look on the iPad 2. To do this we had to grade the typeface, producing subtly different versions for each class of display so they have the same visual weight.

To the user the type looks exactly the same on the retina display as on the iPad 2. This required a lot of tweaking from our side (to find the right definition), and the deep professional knowledge of Bold Monday. Users don’t notice this, but they don’t need to. Good user interface design takes care of irritations before they appear.

Good design is invisible. Good screen design happens in the subatomic level of microtypography (the exact definition of a typeface), the invisible grid of macrotypography (how the typeface is used), and the invisible world of interaction design and information architecture. Minimum input, maximum output, with minimal conscious thought is what screen designers focus on. And just as type designers and engineers we do not try to find the perfect solution but the best compromise.

On the origin of iA Writer:

There were so many instances leading to it. I designed my first text editor in the early eighties. I even created a pixel font on a 5 x 5 pixel grid for the text editor. I did all that so I could see more text on the 256 x 192 resolution of my Dragon 32. Some of the ideas came from earning my philosophy student living as an informatics teacher in the nineties teaching MS Word and informatics, desperately trying to get pupils to stop fumbling and to start writing.

The biggest motivation to build iA Writer came from the mad idea to create our own hardware. A digital writing machine (the German word for typewriter). Apparently it is not that hard to produce hardware anymore if you have the right contacts in China. It is still madness for a small studio though. But months after our first sketches Apple presented the iPad, and then producing our own hardware was not necessary anymore.

The Mac version happened because the iOS version was such a big success. We tried to duplicate the same user experience in a completely different environment, which took a fair amount of time to do — and only a couple of weeks to copy.

The interview is also worth reading to get an idea of how Japanese and Western design differ in concept and execution.  As Oliver notes, Japanese web or app design is not comparable to Japanese art, graphic design, or architecture.

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Note: this blog post on the iA blog about how to correct Twitter errors is excellent. Highly recommend it.

An Interview with Designer Jonathan Mak

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You’re probably familiar with the student artist from Hong Kong named Jonathan Mak Long. Last October, shortly after the death of Steve Jobs, Mak dreamed up a little tribute—an Apple symbol subtly embedded with Jobs’s silhouette, seen below:

Jonathan Mak with the now iconic Steve Jobs tribute logo.

Recently, Mak interviewed with Evan Osnos at The New Yorker. It’s a great interview:

I am twenty years old, was born and raised in Hong Kong, and seldom travelled. (My current student-exchange program in Germany marks my second trip beyond Asia.) My mother is a teacher, and my father works as a translator. They do not have a background in visual creativity, but they are the main reason for my interest in language, which has been tremendously helpful to my growth as a designer.

Like almost everybody else, I loved doodling and making things when I was young, but I never quite left that phase. I continued to create, such as writing a class newspaper, trying my hand at songwriting, and even recording my own podcast. Graphic design began as simply part of my compulsion to create, but, as I got increasingly comfortable with the medium, my love for it grew, and it has not stopped since.

The bulk of the interview is focused on design in China:

Discussing Chinese design is tricky. On one hand, you have the cream of the crop—contemporary graphics effortlessly combined with just enough Chinese motifs to differentiate them from the West. But at the same time, we have countless adverts that are flamboyant, sickly sweet, and just hyperbolic all around, often with jarring color combinations and tragic abuse of effect filters. “That is so ‘mainland,’ ” a Hong Konger might snort in derision. I am sometimes guilty of this reaction, but I am trying to see the other side of this issue.

Click through the interview to see the design he made for Coca-Cola, China.

 

Money Can’t Buy Taste

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Marco Arment offers an excellent rebuttal to this Seeking Alpha article about Apple’s eventual downfall. Marco has two major points: time and taste. This was my favorite part of his argument:

Most people don’t have great taste. (And they don’t care, so it doesn’t matter to them.) They usually like tasteful, well-designed products, but often don’t recognize why, or care more about other factors when making buying decisions.

People who naturally recognize tasteful, well-designed products are a small subset of the population. But people who can create them are a much smaller subset.

Taste in product creation overlaps a lot with design: doing it well requires it to be valued, rewarded, and embedded in the company’s culture and upper leadership. If it’s not, great taste can’t guide product decisions, and great designers leave.

No amount of money, and no small amount of time, can buy taste.

Spot on.

Jonathan Ive on Design

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Jonathan Ive is Apple’s Apple’s Senior Vice President of Industrial Design. In Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, the late Apple co-founder explained that Ive has been left with unparalleled control at Apple to design products as he sees fit, with little to no guidance and reporting to management. In the latest issue of London’s Evening Standard, Ive was interviewed about design:

Q: What makes design different at Apple?

A: We struggle with the right words to describe the design process at  Apple, but it is very much about designing and prototyping and making. When you separate those, I think the final result suffers. If something is going to be better, it is new, and if it’s new you are confronting problems and challenges you don’t have references for. To solve and address those requires a remarkable focus. There’s a sense of being inquisitive and optimistic, and you don’t see those in combination very often.

Q: When did you first become aware of the importance of designers?

A: First time I was aware of this sense of the group of people who made something was when I first used a Mac – I’d gone through college in the 80s using a computer and had a horrid experience. Then I discovered the mac, it was such a dramatic moment and I remember it so clearly – there was a real sense of the people who made it.

Q: How do you know you’ve succeeded?

A :It’s a very strange thing for a designer to say, but one of the things that really irritates me in products is when I’m aware of designers wagging their tails in my face.

Our goal is simple objects, objects that you can’t imagine any other way. Simplicity is not the absence of clutter. Get it right, and you become closer and more focused on the object. For instance, the iPhoto app we created for the new iPad, it completely consumes you and you forget you are using an iPad.

Q: What are the biggest challenges in constantly innovating?

A: For as long as we’ve been doing this, I am still surprised how difficult it is to do this, but you know exactly when you’re there – it can be the smallest shift, and suddenly transforms the object, without any contrivance.

Some of the problem solving in the iPad is really quite remarkable, there is this danger you want to communicate this to people. I think that is a fantastic irony, how oblivious people are to the acrobatics we’ve performed to solve a problem – but that’s our job, and I think people know there is tremendous care behind the finished product.

If you come away thinking that Ive’s responses are a bit (or a lot) shallow, you aren’t alone. This sentence says it all for me: “We struggle with the right words to describe the design process at Apple.”