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On Ghostery

October 8, 2015 /

With all the recent industry fuss over ad trackers, I got responsible and reinstalled Ghostery on my browser, and I activated many of its blockers. This has had several interesting effects.

One is that active tracker blocking is invasive in its own way. I’m creating hardships in my own browsing experience that privacy hard-liners don’t mention. If I block optimization schemes too aggressively, I can break essential functions once in awhile, including a site I manage at work whose navigation is mboxed for Adobe Test & Target tracking. Visiting Monoprice with Ghostery on, I discovered today, gnarls their top nav, too, and their search box disappears. And so on.

Another is the level of awareness that Ghostery creates in the end-user. I know about ad networks and trackers, of course I do, I’ve been in this industry 20 years now. But I didn’t actively think about them all that often.

Then I turned on Ghostery, and I visited copypastecharacter.com, a humble little type-geek website that allows for quick unicode character finding. And in finding my ✔, I also found 87 trackers. Eighty-seven! I no longer wonder what purpose the site serves beyond its builders’ nerdy satisfaction: it’s a robust ad engine. As are many other websites for whom users unwittingly expose their usage details.

The full list, behind the jump, for posterity’s sake.

On spin

October 6, 2015 /

Re/code, this morning: “Some Uber passengers said they’re waiting to buy a car because of the ride-hailing app,” was a finding from a new report. “CEO Travis Kalanick has said the company’s real competitor … is the auto industry.” The report was commissioned by Uber.

The auto industry, last week: “New-vehicle sales soared a stunning 16 percent last month to 1.4 million cars and light trucks. … Practically all automakers reported double-digit percentage increases.”

We tell the story we want to tell.

A list of musicians of some renown that I did not know were still active but are, and have gigs at the Foundry in Athens, Ga., this summer and fall

September 9, 2015 /

Shawn Mullins
Shuggie Otis
Drivin N Cryin
Denny Laine
Albert Lee
James McMurtry
Loudon Wainwright III
George Winston

Either the Foundry is a fascinating music venue, or the old rock n’ roll hands are going down fighting, or maybe I just need to get to a show more often. (I’m thinking a bit of all three.) Also, the Foundry is a pretty cool joint. Good choice by the UX STRAT folks and their sponsors for the happy hour there.

This is a roundabout way of noting that I’m speaking at the conference tomorrow, on the subject of customer experience and how to successfully embed the discipline within a product hierarchy. I’ll post a link to the video here or on Twitter if one becomes available. Very good conference, by the way—highly recommended if you’re a UX professional.

Hey, Master DJ

August 31, 2015 /

As the parents of two perceptive and opinionated children, my wife and I grant a substantial amount of self-determination in their young lives. So when, on a lengthy road trip, our seven-year-old son asked to control the iPod, I saw no reason not to hand it to him. We stretched the cord as long as it could go, I handed over the iPod—a Classic model, with 17,000 songs on it—and he started exploring from the back seat.

The result, blasted into the car after a minute or two of silence: AC/DC’s “Caught with Your Pants Down.”

This track immediately became the soundtrack to our vacation. “Can I DJ?” followed by a big guitar riff and, roughly a minute later, lots of laughter at the chorus.

Our story would end here, with a smirk, were it not for our four-year-old, who, of course, also asked to DJ, and who, it should be noted, is a very good reader already. The first time he got ahold of the iPod, he clicked into albums, directly into Genesis’s “Abacab” (thanks, alphabetization!) and landed on “Keep It Dark.” Nice choice. He decided he liked the song and played it several times, not least because he knew how to find it.

His second track: “Rape Me.”

We’re thinking on the next road trip we’re going to have to bring the kids’ iPod with us.

An Apple Watch update

July 21, 2015 /

You haven’t mentioned your Apple Watch much since your tweetstorm on June 1.

Update: I’ve been wearing my stainless steel 42mm Apple Watch for seven weeks now.

Do you like it?

Yes, I do, very much.

How’s the battery life?

Better than my iPhone 5. I have a fairly sane amount of notifications coming into my watch: texts (via iMessage, Facebook and Twitter), calendar alerts, reminders from Due, and not much else. No email, news, stock quotes, or extraneous things that would interfere with my day.

As a result, I rarely use more than 40% of the battery in a day, and I routinely charge the watch every other night, not nightly. I’ve only had one day in this routine where I had to switch to reserve power. Of course, I did have one experience where something drained my mostly-full battery overnight, and I spent most of a work day without a watch, which felt kind of ridiculous. But then, it’s not unlike a quartz watch’s battery dying and your not noticing until after you’ve left the house wearing a watch stuck on 3:19.

What do you use it for?

A whole bunch of stuff, actually. Text messaging has been great, from the one-tap canned replies to the occasional voice recognition reply. I’m getting meeting alerts without having to dig into my watch or look at my laptop, and I enjoy checking (and dismissing) incoming messages by glancing at my wrist. I love how the Due app is set for the Watch; it reminds me of to-do list items daily. It’s just Bluetooth on a minimized screen, but each of these apps has worked beautifully. I’ve asked Siri a bunch of questions, although those are disappointing, because Siri usually prompts me to switch to my iPhone for the answer.

Not actually me. I also make the occasional call on it, which has worked well every single time, whether freeing my hands around the house or allowing me to answer the phone with minimal distraction while driving. The speaker is quiet but serviceable; the microphone has yet to prompt someone to ask me if I’m on my watch and not my phone. The Dick Tracy gimmick has proved to be useful, nerdy and delightful all at once.

And, a bit surprisingly, I’ve embraced the fitness tracking. I get annoyed at myself if I don’t meet my activity goals most days, which is a nice way to keep me on my feet and moving. (I also get annoyed at the stand-up reminders, which I may turn off.)

So you’re happy owning an Apple Watch?

Very much so. I was a bit ambivalent going in, as previously noted in this space; I didn’t quite see the point. Indeed, I got the watch in part to find that out.

What I wound up with is a great little gadget. It’s part fashion piece, part conversation topic, part functional tool, part toy. It has reduced the number of times I grab my phone over the course of a day, which is a victory. Frankly, I get a kick out of it.

So should I get one?

If you think it’ll be fun, then yes, particularly if you’re tired of peering at your iPhone all the time. Do you need one? Not yet, no. It’s not doing anything your phone (and, to be precise, your bluetooth headset and your FitBit) isn’t doing already. But it’s definitely an entertaining, high-quality product, and an amazing piece of human ingenuity.

Hey Mr. Conductor

June 22, 2015 /

While I was standing on a virtually empty subway platform at Houston Street at lunchtime a few weeks ago, an out-of-service train pulled into the station.

I was surprised when, rather than roll slowly through, the train made its routine stop, and the conductor of the out-of-service train launched into the usual station-stop routine. He opened his window; he pointed at the striped bar on the ceiling.

He then opened the two doors closest to his location, leaving the rest of the train shuttered and out of service. A handful of uniformed MTA employees were in the cars surrounding the conductor. The conductor announced the station per usual, seemingly for the benefit of his coworkers: downtown 1 to South Ferry, stanclearaclosindoors.

I was standing a directly in front of one of the open doors, a few feet from the conductor, and I gestured toward a uniformed man just inside the train.

“Training?” I asked.

“Yep.”

The conductor closed the doors, looked deliberately up and down the platform, then watched, window open, as the train’s driver released the brakes.

Smiling, I gave the conductor a showy thumbs-up. Nice work, I wanted to express, good luck in your new career!

Instead, the conductor looked right past me. Didn’t even acknowledge my presence, despite my standing maybe five feet away, the only person in that area of the platform. Off he went to the next station on his training run, focused on his responsibilities like a racehorse wearing blinders.

I suppose the core job skills are taught right away. Even the unwritten ones.

Day 1 with an Apple Watch

June 4, 2015 /

I’m on Day Four wearing my Apple Watch, and I like it very much. I’m finding it useful, attractive, comfortable, interesting and fun.

Of course, my first day wearing it was something else entirely. And while reviewers intentionally give new products some breathing room, I thought I’d take a stab at quantifying the first impressions of a Watch wearer. This is a product with a learning curve—does it create impediments? Frustrated expectations? Or would it all be part of the fun?

So I live-tweeted my day getting used to the watch (to the chagrin of my friends on Facebook, where my tweets cross-post). I’m a few days removed from the experience, so they are presented below as-is. All in all, it was a very good first day.

Job hunt best practices

May 18, 2015 /

We’ve been doing a fair amount of hiring at the office of late, and my reputation as a stickler for detail has rapidly resurfaced. Colleagues are amused at how I’ll give my head of research a hard time for interviewing a candidate with a pair of typos in his or her resume and how I’m parsing the grammar on thank-you notes.

I stand by my practices, because the printed form says a lot about a person: attention to detail, communication skills, drive. The same holds true for the interviews I get to take, where I can spend more time gauging someone’s intellect, curiosity, and enthusiasm for the position (even though I think Seth Godin is onto something, and my interviews typically run 40 minutes).

So I was going to do a write-up on resume and interview best practices, and then I remembered that I did this already, way back in 2000. The tips contained therein are still accurate and sound. Well, maybe not the note about avoiding italics for fax machines, but the rest of it.

If you’re on the market, or will be soon, take a read:
How to Succeed at Getting Hired (and Lots of Ways Not To)
Good luck with your search!

Twenty years of tinnitus

April 16, 2015 /

March 22, 1995. That’s when my ears started ringing, give or take a day. It was just shy of my 22nd birthday, and I was a senior in college, sitting in a chair in my bedroom, doing homework, when I got one of those random high-pitched tones in my ear.

Except this time, instead of fading out after a few seconds, the tone didn’t leave.

After five or ten minutes I began freaking out. I played in rock bands; I went to a lot of shows; I blasted the car radio on my three-hour drives from home to school. I knew exactly what I was experiencing. I took out the pad I carried around for journaling and notes, turned to a blank page, and wrote to myself, in all caps:

YOU MAY NEVER AGAIN KNOW SILENCE.

Sadly, I was right. With a couple of random, fleeting exceptions, my tinnitus has persisted for twenty years now, an anniversary I’m pleased I didn’t remember last month.

Tinnitus is a disappointing thing to live with. I rarely go to live concerts anymore, and I can’t blast music very often, whether in a car, on a stereo or with headphones.

I’m That Guy wearing earplugs at social functions like weddings and bar mitzvahs. I cover my ears when the express train rumbles past and cringe when fire engines and ambulances race by. At night I can’t fall asleep without some ambient noise in the room.

That said, I’ve gotten used to my tinnitus. Protecting my ears has kept my hearing sharp—I test above average when I get my ears checked—and avoiding loud noises does minimize the ringing. And I stumbled into Earplanes a number of years ago and it’s made my air travel infinitely more comfortable. On par, I’m doing just fine, thanks.

Numerous Ideapad posts over the years have discussed my tinnitus in various forms; if you want to explore, I’d suggest reading “The ringing,” from February 2004, and proceeding into the archives from there.

A review of the watch-ness of the Apple Watch, by a longtime watch-wearer and Apple product user who got to play with the Watch for 10 minutes at an Apple Store today

April 10, 2015 /

I went to the Apple Store in Soho today mostly to check out the Watch from the perspective of a watch-wearer.

I’ve been buying first-generation Apple products since the 1990s, so buying the Watch is sort of a fait accompli for me. The product is apparently a personal one with a learning curve, so outside of toying with it for a minute, I didn’t try too hard to use it.

But that’s because this is a different kind of purchase—it’s fashion, it’s luxury, it’s apparel and accessories, it’s 30 different default combinations of Watch and Watch Sport sizes, colors and finishes. From that angle, it’s a far more complicated product to order than just picking the amount of memory for your iPhone, and choosing white, black or gold on the back.

Which is why I shouldn’t have been surprised when I was asked to make an appointment to view the Watch with a specialist. The front of the Apple Store now resembles a Tourneau: lots of product quietly tucked away, available for sampling only when handled in a 1:1 customer interaction. There are plenty of watches on display for tinkering with the UI, but to try one on, one gets personal assistance—and security oversight.

It took Apple all of two minutes to get me to a specialist, who had gotten to the store at 4 a.m. and was understandably not in a real salesy mode. She let me play with every style of watch, though, and helpfully showed me how certain physical components worked. My impressions:

For anyone who thinks about fashion, it will be hard to buy the Sport over the Watch. The stainless steel looks, well, like stainless steel, polished to perfection and with the right heft for a watch of importance. The Sport is fine for casual and sport usage; it looks plenty nice on its own. But it’s a matter of context. The Sport won’t look quite right under a suit-sleeve or French cuff. I have long worn a watch for fashion purposes, and I’m going to be hard-pressed not to pay the extra $200 for the stainless.
There’s a substantial difference in the screen real estate, and thus areas for interaction, between the 38mm and 42mm models. As someone whose thumbs often miss the letter targets on the iPhone keyboard, I’m glad I can buy the larger one and have it fit my wrist.
I really love the basic sport band. The material looks and feels terrific. It’s soft and comfortable on the wrist, although clasping it will take some getting used to. I thought it looked nice enough to carry the watch face in style.
The leather bands didn’t do much for me. Mind you, I’m not really a leather-watch-strap guy, historically, so I didn’t expect them to.
The metal bands were really disappointing to me. The Milanese band, which I’ve long admired on Skagens, was thin and narrow, and I could almost see my wrist through the gaps in the mesh. The link bracelet, meanwhile, reminded me more of a $30 Casio than my Breitling, which is not the impression a thousand-dollar watch should give.

This last point is where Apple’s pivot is going to really have to accelerate in the coming year or two. The craftsmanship behind these accessories is obvious. However, it’s a technical attention to detail at work, and not yet an emotional one. I’d love to have a handsome link watch from Apple; perhaps I will wind up with one through a third-party watch band seller. In the process, though, I came away a little disappointed with the fashion side of the Apple Watch.

That said, the product is an exciting one; the screen is gorgeous, the tapping mechanism borders on cute, and the innovations to come in the next couple of years is too great to ignore. Check this space again come summer when I can report on what it’s like to own one.

Update: “Trying on the Apple Watch” mirrors my in-store experience pretty well and captures some of what I tweeted in the moment but missed in my write-up. Apple doesn’t know how to do personal, wearable luxury yet, and it’s going to be a little while before they get the rhythms just right. In the meantime, we’re stuck with non-functional watches and salespeople that lean toward geeky technical expertise rather than the emotional, tangible experience in which a watch purchase traditionally relies.

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