Thinking About Information

Step In and Stand Clear

There’s a problem with subway car design, and it’s that the best place to stand is also the place where people get on and off the train. People stand in the doorways because it’s a really comfortable place to stand. You have something to lean against, you don’t have to touch anything with your hands, and you don’t have to hang over strange people.

I think either the spot needs to be made a worse place for standing, or there needs to be some kind of process for boarding trains. One door for boarding, one door for exiting, so there’s some kind of circular flow to things.

I know the reaction to that statement. I hear you saying, “You can’t get New Yorkers to follow rules! They’re New Yorkers!” But I don’t really believe that. New Yorkers follow rules every day, thousands of them. There are so many tiny social interactions each day that consist of a ritualized or structured set of calls and responses. Adding another one isn’t going to hurt. It just needs to have a dead obvious answer to the question, “What’s in it for me?”

You're Not That Important

People have been doing things the way they’ve been doing them their entire lives. The culture they learned how to do these things within has been doing these things for (much) longer. To think that your web page is going to change these behaviors is a dangerous idea.

The best thing to do is understand these behaviors, the contexts they occur in, and work to find ways to insert your web pages gracefully.

JetBlue T5 Trial

I went out to the JetBlue T5 trial this weekend, what amounted to a bunch of nice people all pretending to take a flight to see if systems and etc. were up to snuff. After a long week spent running people through usability tests, it was nice to be on the other side of the glass for a bit.

It all went well enough, and the new building is certainly nice enough, and clearly an improvement on what JetBlue presents as an “experience” currently at JFK.

I went mostly because I have a fondness for the old Terminal 5, Saarinen’s “TWA Flight Center.” It’s the place I went through taking my first international flight to Rome on TWA back in college, and TWA was always the airline for me, because I grew up in St. Louis in the 1980’s, during TWA’s heyday at Lambert.

I remember waiting at the gate, at one of those circular banks of seats, looking out at the parked 767 and the World Trade Center in the foggy distance. I had never been to New York and I wouldn’t be making it back for another 4 and a half years. And I was a sloppy college student, but it was all kind of glamorous standing there in New York City in this crazy building waiting for your flight to Rome. The building and its location and its function and its design all kind of forced you to imagine a future.

Unfortunately, the old building isn’t ready yet, but at some point in the near-ish future it’s going to be open and people will be able to walk through the tubes again. Of course, this time at the end of the tube you’re probably going to be heading Rochester instead of Cairo or Madrid of Tokyo, but we’ll all take what we can get I suppose.

And so walking around the terminal before my “flight” left, everything was clean and new and bright. The air conditioning was cool, the carpets were clean, the bathrooms were comfortable.

I think though that it’s clear, and will become more and more clear as time goes on, that this building was designed and built in a time when money was tight and air travel wasn’t particularly high on anyone’s list of things they’d like to be doing. The architecture is very practical and functional, and that’s fine, but I get the feeling that no one is going to be looking out at it wistfully in 10 or 20 or 50 years in the way I noticed some people looking over at Saarinen’s building. The way I do any time I’m out at JFK and the AirTrain comes around the bend and you get the first glimpse of the building’s “wings.”

Aside from the few mental design notes I made as someone who considers the design of things, mostly information, for a living, I found myself drifting into the future.

The televisions at the gate weren’t in HD, the bathrooms have actual paper towels instead of hand dryers. And sometimes when you’re either about to get on or have just gotten off of an airplane, the first thing that’s nice to do is rinse your face off. And that’s a particularly difficult proposition when the experience has to end with hand dryers.

So some details were nice, others maybe a bit conspicuous in their absense, like the HD.

But I couldn’t help thinking about how this place was going to adapt. First as JetBlue’s business changes and adapts over time, and second what happens when it’s no longer JetBlue occupying this building? I wondered how the carpet was going to age. The future this building forced me to imagine wasn’t particularly exciting. I kept thinking about what it’s going to look like when a few light bulbs need to be replaced, or how it’s going to work when there’s a ground stop and people are waiting at the gates, camped out, for 5 or 6 hours.

There was something kind of sad about looking at that bright blue and orange carpet. It reminded me of the purple carpet over in the abandoned Terminal D at Lambert. And as people were excitedly snapping pictures, and JetBlue brass from the CEO down to the guy who runs the web site were all chatting up the guests and press, the people mover over at Lambert was running, and being air conditioned, and the Paul McCartney Muzak tracks were playing lightly in the distance, but no one is thinking about the future there. The future already happened.

And so I wonder what this building is telling us about the future, and how that future is going to look to us when it’s time for something new.

Competing On Scarcity

It’s strange that the new search engine people are talking about is competing on information scarcity. It seems like search engines stopped competing on number of pages indexed a long while back.

It’s not really about you having more access to more information than your competitors. It’s about efficiently and appropriately directing my attention to the right information.

Instead of “Here’s a hundred trillion possibilities” it’s “Here’s what you’re looking for.” Which you may know as “I’m feeling lucky.”

This RFID Spilled My Coffee

“Some of the most common RFID gestures that have truly become part of everyday life are in contactless ticketing.”

RFID gestures · Touch

I see the opposite of this everyday going into my office building in Manhattan. Women turning their handbags this way and that trying to determine which side their key card is in, men reaching into jacket and pants pockets for their wallets. And this is just to get past the security gentlemen at the front desk, where there are only two places to scan your card. Additionally, the two places to scan your card are often obstructed by visitors signing in at the desk you have no idea that the desk they’re leaning up against is what all these people racing past them are trying to rub themselves up against, just so.

And then it happens all over again in the elevator, because you’ve got to scan your card in order to enter the floor number you want to reach. So as people cram into the elevators, they struggle again to get their bags and wallets positioned just so as people behind them are pressuring them to step in and move to the back so they can get in the elevator and just get to their desk already.

I don’t know what the answer is. Better and more positioning of scanners would help. But I imagine the response from building security is then that they can’t really control the flow of people as easily if they don’t all pass through the same point of entry.

I’d also like to see some personalization. If I knew I wouldn’t get some outrageous penalty for cracking open the $0.60 plastic card, I’d take the chip out and stick it to the back of my watch. That would eliminate the daily need to take out my wallet, twice, when I’m holding a bag and a hot coffee.

Things to work toward, I suppose.