The Daily Interface

arch

noreply@blogger.com (DW) — Fri, 20 Mar 2020 18:05:00 +0000

While I'm on the subject of taxonomies, I walked by this fabulous chart at the local threading salon. I've never really thought of eyebrows as having styles. Especially since these are mostly different women and different eyes!

(I don't know how $10 per threading pays the rent in San Francisco. But that's a topic for another day.)

meme of the times

noreply@blogger.com (DW) — Wed, 11 Mar 2020 00:35:00 +0000

Are you sick of pandemic humor yet? Me neither.

We have nothing to fear but fear itself.

Rocky Horror hand washing? Why not?

Or another one. Create your own. Wash your hands.

stash the 'stache

noreply@blogger.com (DW) — Fri, 06 Mar 2020 20:52:00 +0000

You know how I love a good taxonomy. Here's a chart released by CDC on how to fit masks over facial hair. And names for all those groovy styles.

Or you could just shave.

Don't forget to wash your hands.

"NPIs can help slow the spread of flu"

noreply@blogger.com (DW) — Wed, 26 Feb 2020 21:00:00 +0000

The news and markets are filled with frightening tales of a potential pandemic. Meanwhile the Center for Disease Control (CDC) acting officials seem utterly unprepared, after the President axed their budget last year and public health experts resigned.

Someone posted this useful guide, written for an early global epidemic in 2017 during the previous administration.

It has some useful info, but throughout, I was perplexed by NPIs and kept looking for where they had been defined. Google wasn't much help.

Farther down the results page...

If you read very carefully or use the search command, you'll find the gloss in an inset in the table of contents, where they are spelled out once as nonpharmaceutical interventions.

There are several problems with this acronym and terminology, however accurate it may be. One is the length of those words and how they are not commonplace. Words with more syllables are harder to grok. This is even more true for non-native English speakers.

Have you ever heard someone say "NPIs" or "non-pharmaceutical interventions"? (Susan and Doug, you don't count.)

Then there's figuring out what it means. An NPI is like washing your hands but it's also like wearing a mask or isolating a sick person in a room away from everyone else.

It's the kind of jargon public health officials may be comfortable with. But shorthand isn't the best way to communicate during an epidemic. At the very least, they should spell it out more than once in a document that people are likely to scan.

How are you preparing for the coming flu season? Have you bought out the pasta aisle and stocked up on Parmesan and mozzarella like Italians have?

As financial markets tumble in uncertainty, I recommend cooking a big pot of soup. Staying home from work and school if you are sick. And washing your hands vigorously, like you're about to perform surgery.

* * *

If you're looking for a thoughtful approach to dealing with a global health crisis, informed by public health experts, without too many acronyms, check out the Warren plan.

can texting save America?

noreply@blogger.com (DW) — Sat, 22 Feb 2020 20:39:00 +0000

I don't usually blog about politics, but I am fascinated by the usability issues and content surrounding elections. I've been texting for Elizabeth Warren's campaign ahead of the Super Tuesday primaries, using two different platforms (Thru Text and now Spoke). Because of confidentiality, I won't share any screenshots, but I did want to describe the process.

I'll also note that I'm not a fan of phone banking. I never answer my phone unless I know who's calling, another reason Declan once called me "the world's oldest millennial." I've campaigned a lot over the years in swing states, especially in Nevada and Florida, where voters are saturated with nonstop TV ads and phone banking. I'd much rather knock on a stranger's door than call them.

But texting is a step back from interrupting their workday. Sure, it's potentially a better way to engage younger voters. But more important, it's by choice. People can ignore your text or decide to have a conversation with you or tell you off.

The texting I'd done for previous campaigns was strictly GOTV (get out the vote). So on election day 2016, I used a computer platform to send texts to registered voters reminding them to vote. They were genuinely useful information: the address of their polling place with the hours. Because people cancel mobile phones all the time, a lot of the numbers, which come from public voter rolls, are wrong. But it's a truly useful service, and it's hard, regardless of your political affiliation, to argue that encouraging more voters to participate is a bad thing.

Jump to 2020

My friend Larissa encouraged me to try texting for Warren. She said it was focused on issues and that as a policy wonk, I'd enjoy it. She was right.

When you sign up to text, there are trainings provided, and Slack channels where you request batches of numbers. This is all on a computer, not on your phone, so you don't see their phone numbers and they don't see yours. You open the dashboard, where you receive a geographic group. You send out the initial welcome message to everyone, and then wait to see who responds.

There are scripts for each topic, whether it's a wrong number or they've moved out of state or they prefer Mayor Pete or want to talk about disability rights. If they ask us to STOP or opt out, we do that. But otherwise, even if they tweet back MAGA 2020, we stay in the conversation. That's the most transformative part about this.

Here's what it looks like:

One day I texted voters in North Carolina. This was a voter ID project, so they were a mixed group of numbers. Some positive results, many wrong numbers, a few angry Trump supporters. (We'll come back to them.)

Another day, I got Latinx Democrats in San Antonio to tell them about an upcoming event; most were already big Warren supporters, and we were collecting RSVPs or trying to encourage them to volunteer. Even the people who said no thanked me for volunteering. In this capacity, we're simply doing work that otherwise a paid staffer would have to do. In our own homes, on our own time.

The most interesting are undecided voters. This is what I signed up for. The script has a lot of friendly relational language. You're able to edit each blurb. So if it says "I'm volunteering for Elizabeth because..." I can edit to highlight why I support her (fighting corruption, creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, student loan forgiveness, disability rights plan, support for LGBTQ rights). If the person I'm texting says healthcare is their top issue, I might respond and offer to link them to the Medicare for all calculator or Elizabeth's childcare plan.

In California and Washington, we're talking with a lot of progressive voters who like both Elizabeth and Bernie Sanders. On Twitter, those are often punishing, futile fights. But in the real world, people care about the issues and are just trying to make the right decision, without hours to spend splitting hairs.

As someone who loves talking to customers and conducting user research, I find the way people's rationale changes fascinating. One committed Bernie voter in NH said he was thinking of changing his support to Pete. I got a Bloomberg supporter who said Elizabeth and Bernie's plans were impossible to fund and not very well thought out. I was tempted to despair and archive the thread, but I stuck to it. I mentioned that prominent economists had weighed in on the wealth tax and found it sound. I suggested he might enjoy the policy details on the website.

The other surprises come from reaching across the aisle. We are encouraged to persevere with GOP voters, as long as it's reasonably civil. A lot of the men seem angry: their top issues are those "lying Dems" and gun laws and immigration. I doubt we're convincing many of them. And the texting account has a woman's name, which I'd guess makes them more aggressive. You have to take pride in sending a man who's been a complete jerk a friendly "Thanks for your time. Have a great day." message.

But I do feel like I've made progress with a few women. One woman told me how terrible the Democrats were, and I said I heard her, and asked a little more about her top issues. By the end, she'd thanked me for listening. One woman said she'd never heard of Elizabeth Warren, and was she one of those career politicians, and I took the opportunity to tell her about CFPB, which Warren created when she was still a law professor, and which has returned over $12 billion in predatory fines and fees to 30 million Americans.

Is texting more effective than TV ads?

Mike Bloomberg has spent over $300 million on TV ads since jumping sideways into the campaign. And I'm sorry to say that's working. Smaller campaigns, even those with high-profile members of the US Senate, can't compete.

This is one reason Elizabeth Warren gave in this week, after trying unsuccessfully to get her competitors to eschew ads made by SuperPACs, and didn't insist a group of women from Emily's List pull down the ads they were running on her behalf.

I suspect issues-based texting can work long term. I'm less clear how much it moves the needle on the current race. But it feels like the right thing to do. When the country seems so polarized and even people of the same party are fractured, what if we could actually choose to have anonymous chats with strangers about what matters. Could we find we had common ground?

Please vote in the primaries and in November. They're your best chance to change the world around us and put competent people in government. That goes doubly for local politics, where candidates who aren't billionaires really can't afford expensive TV ads. And be nice to volunteers, whichever candidate they support.

I'm due for another post soon on the Luddite's dream of "hand-marked paper ballots," usually promoted by people who have no secure plan for counting and aggregating 100 million ballots. But I'll save that for another day.

And if you have any election questions, whether it's about voter registration or working at the polls or you'd like to try out texting about the issues, you know where to find me. I'll be handicapping the Senate races in between reading plans on fighting corruption and increasing Social Security benefits.

map meanings

noreply@blogger.com (DW) — Wed, 19 Feb 2020 15:30:00 +0000

This annotated history of Portland neighborhood names showed up on my Facebook, shared by my friend Lee, who lives there.

It was posted and widely shared on Reddit, but the creator is Adam Aleksic, aka the Etymology Nerd. I learned a lot. Now tempted to draw one up for San Francisco or South Florida.

Who says all infographics are terrible?

More info on this map and Adam in The Oregonian.

go solo

noreply@blogger.com (DW) — Fri, 14 Feb 2020 19:49:00 +0000

What does TodayTix know about me and my plans for Valentine's Day? That said, I love going to the movies by myself.

ouch!

noreply@blogger.com (DW) — Tue, 11 Feb 2020 19:00:00 +0000

I mean, it's someone's idea of good content. Not mine.

what is this? part 789

noreply@blogger.com (DW) — Fri, 07 Feb 2020 09:43:00 +0000

I stopped by the Wolfsonian art deco collection when I was in Miami visiting my mother. They have a lot of fantastic items, from tea pots to industrial age-inspired furniture to fascist propaganda posters.

We weren't sure what this one was at first. (Answer below. Don't peek.)

I loved this boom box of its day: a phonograph with speaker in a shiny silver suitcase. It looks kind of heavy, like my first laptop luggable.

So what did you guess? It's a magazine rack.

"find happiness"

noreply@blogger.com (DW) — Sun, 26 Jan 2020 23:00:00 +0000

This makes me sad, even though I've occasionally yearned for a cone of silence. Maybe the solution is not having an open office, free from noise and distracting interruptions.

How would you reorganize your workspace? What's the optimal environment for your job?

chains of time

noreply@blogger.com (DW) — Sat, 18 Jan 2020 19:00:00 +0000

"Hard labour in a hard land"

I'm recently home from Tasmania, and I found much to admire in the way the national park service educates visitors on Australian history, including some of its least happy stories.

Tasmania was then known as Van Diemen's Land, and in the early 19th century, it was a penal colony, with prisoners shipped predominantly from London and Manchester. While some were accused of violent crimes, many were simply devastatingly poor. The industrial revolution meant a lot of hunger, displacement, and massive unemployment. People wound up in prison for being unable to pay debts or for stealing food.

Port Arthur was a large penal colony on the southern coast of Tasmania, facing the bleak Southern Sea to the Antarctic. Prisoners mined coal and cut timber, building ships. These photos are from a coal mine.

I was there by myself on a rainy day, exploring the remains of the mining camp.

The exhibits told stories of people, of time periods, of the land itself. They felt like a website, in the real world.

None of this was history I was familiar with before. We learned at the Port Arthur historic park that as dire as the situation was for prisoners, their average lifespan was longer in Tasmania than for comparable men in England. Clean air and water, better weather, and regular meals and medical attention, so they would be strong enough to work. They were still imprisoned though not permanently. Most worked off their sentences and then lived off the land.

The site encourages educators and visitors to learn more, whether it's the history or geography or wildlife that interests you. I appreciated that even at fancy estates, there are reminders that the buildings and roads were built by prison labor. It's a contrast to many of the US government structures like the White House and Southern mansions, built by slave labor without much acknowledgement. As with all good documentation, these signposts made me want to learn more. Here's a starting point.

Even a few potoroos.

shades of blue

noreply@blogger.com (DW) — Wed, 15 Jan 2020 01:19:00 +0000

I got this chart in an email from a political organization, about California's upcoming primary. Our statewide elections are non-partisan, so the top two votegetters, regardless of party, proceed to a runoff if no candidate gets over 50% of the vote. We're also a notoriously independent group, so many of us are registered "no party preference."

But regardless, none of that will help you make sense of this chart, with its mismatched, barely distinguishable bar chart colors and labels. It looks like NPP has grown in the past 4 years.

And I'm not even color blind! Reminder to test your designs and apps with people who are color blind. Many of them won't even realize they are.

Oh, and there aren't any values on these bar charts. Is the bottom number 5%? 20% No idea.

If it were up to me, I'd add values, use different colors, and overlay the years on top of each other, since what's being highlighted is the growth of NPP and decline of Republican registrations for this period. I might even animate it, if we could add in the data for 2017-2019, and flip the axis so the bars are vertical.

How would you redesign this chart to make it more useful and tell the story of California voter registration?

pantone test gardens

noreply@blogger.com (DW) — Wed, 08 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Wandering through the Royal Botanic Garden in Sydney, I noticed this pantone shades of grass.

It turned out to be a trial garden, where they test out new plants and flowers and trees to see how they'll do. Horticulturists experiment with design too!

For some reason, this made me very happy. I had just seen 25 kinds of palm trees and the fernery and the ibises. Design and testing in the real world. We should do more of it, especially in public settings.

They were setting up for New Year's Eve, and there were signs everywhere with directions if you got locked inside the gates.

Glad they included the phone number as well as the name of your current location. It must be something that's happened often to have this scenario so clearly documented.

planes, trains, and automobiles

noreply@blogger.com (DW) — Sat, 04 Jan 2020 04:19:00 +0000

I flew on Virgin Australia Christmas Day in Tasmania. It was a spectacular day, far from the fires in New South Wales where I was headed. The first thing I noticed was this ramp, allowing passengers with mobility issues, to walk up a ramp instead of stairs or be wheeled.

Their magazine even had an article for nervous flyers and finding your happy place. I'm not sure if anyone will find the story, but I like the idea of providing tools and as the article points out, accommodation. (I'm also not a nervous flyer; so I don't know how good their advice is. But I like the idea of wanting all your passengers to be calm and happy.)

Accommodations may not be something you personally need. But accessible design is good design: it's a sign that someone made an effort to understand different customers, not just a default "normal." Well done, Virgin Australia. I hope I'll have another chance to use your service.

let there be light

noreply@blogger.com (DW) — Sun, 29 Dec 2019 13:08:00 +0000

I was on the ferry from downtown Sydney to Manley when I noticed the lighthouse had solar panels! A lot easier than candles. Oh, yeah, I saw this too.

for sure

noreply@blogger.com (DW) — Tue, 24 Dec 2019 07:55:00 +0000

I'm in Tasmania, enjoying summer in the Southern Hemisphere, when I saw this sign.

(This is where it leads...to the blowhole.)

For more tales from the road, pop on over to my travel blog, One is a Wanderer.

boy girl

noreply@blogger.com (DW) — Sun, 15 Dec 2019 04:29:00 +0000

No comment.

Pepper gets a new job

noreply@blogger.com (DW) — Sun, 08 Dec 2019 23:27:00 +0000

It was hot in Melbourne today, as summer approaches, and I was looking for something cool to slake my thirst. But even I was surprised to find an old friend—Pepper the robot, last seen dancing with children at Valley Fair mail—scooping ice cream at a novelty popup.

Is this what Andrew Yang is trying to tell us? Of course I had to stand in a line, monitored by a human bouncer, to find out.

Here's the bad news: robots don't make the ice cream. They don't even really take your orders. You do this yourself on a touchscreen.

Ever service-minded, Pepper does make eye contact and assure you that was a good choice, on screen and by speaking.

(After reading this post, Declan noted: "The eyes are added so we psychologically attribute intelligence to them. She may be making contact, but she is not really seeing you.")

Now the waiting begins. There are two other robots. One scoops the ice cream, the other, sporting a bowtie but no legs, adds toppings and puts them in a locked door.

"He" does have googly eyes on the monitor. The real status info is on the monitor though.

Somehow I doubt this.

Ironically, this is a really slow process. The robots keep you entertained while you wait. But isn't the point of using robots to speed things up? You could use robots to avoid human contact or peanut allergies. Or to minimize repetitive strain injuries. Instead, they mostly function to transfer the work to the customer.

Finally my number comes up in Bay 3. But the door is locked. You have to insert your bar code to unlock it.

Not the automat experience I remember as a little girl with my daddy in Manhattan.

The end product is pretty good. A little sweet. Thanks to a favorable exchange rate, the price isn't too terrible.

I love Pepper, but I won't do that again.

gamifying college access

noreply@blogger.com (DW) — Mon, 02 Dec 2019 23:25:00 +0000

The deadline to apply to the University of California was Saturday, November 30. So this past week was the busiest week of the year at the ScholarMatch drop-in center on Valencia Street.

A photo from their Facebook feed

Usually lots of the students are from nearby Mission High, which has 500 students and 2 beloved college advisors. But this week, San Francisco public schools were closed for Thanksgiving. Students from Galileo and Balboa and Lowell were working on their 4 350-word personal statement essays on Chromebooks, enjoying snacks and wifi and free coaching until the doors were locked.

As many of you know, I volunteer as a college coach at ScholarMatch. This is my 3rd year. It's one of the very best things I do with my skills and experience as a writer and editor, paying it forward to the next generation.

When I signed up, I thought I'd be working with local students. Once upon a time, after I dropped out of the MFA program at UC Irvine, I was even a college application tutor. But I accidentally signed up for the virtual coach program, so my first two students (both valedictorians) were in Southern California and Texas. I met with them over Skype every week or two.

They are fantastic young women, now sophomores at Brown and Swarthmore. They didn't need help so much as encouragement. Doors opened. Feedback on essays. Listening to what they were saying and what they weren't about schools they'd visited and what they wanted to study.

Most students at ScholarMatch are the first in their family to attend college ("first gen" college students). Many are the best English speakers in their family. Not everyone has parents who went to Duke and Tulane or Aunt Barbara who drove me to Poughkeepsie for a tour. And they don't have financial resources to fall back on, so it's essential they attend schools that provide enough financial aid and support to ensure they graduate.

But as much as I love my virtual students, I signed up because I wanted to support my local community. So last year and this, I have one year-long virtual student (more amazing, delightful, brilliant young women) and I spend a few hours each fall at the drop-in center working on lots and lots of short UC essays.

Many of the local students are recent immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and Africa. They write about how hard it was to learn fluent English as teenagers and what it feels like to live up to their parents' expectations. They are terrific kids, thoughtful and mature and open. Some have families that have been separated by immigration laws. Most work part-time to help their families.

They write PIQs about all kinds of things from music clubs to internships at the VA hospital to surviving abuse. It is humbling to support them through the college application process; not clear to me which of us is getting more from the experience. I don't remember the students I grew up with at Beach High being so thoughtful, so kind. Or so appreciative. But supporting high school students eager to continue learning and contributing to their communities makes me hopeful about the future.

What you can do to support this work

If you are interested in democratizing college access, and helping talented young people attend great colleges and graduate, you can support ScholarMatch in many ways.

Facebook is matching donations this givingTuesday. (You can donate to local scholarships any time.) Any amount helps and goes directly to services, scholarship, and wonderful staff.
You can volunteer as a virtual coach or as an in-center coach in San Francisco or LA for a few hours a month. I'd love to tell you more about it.
If you need wonderful holiday gifts that support ScholarMatch, buy a copy of ScholarMatch founder Dave Eggers' delightful coffee biography, The Monk of Mokha. The audiobook is excellent!

You can also visit Bon Voyage tiki bar on Valencia and get a fabulous Uirapuru rum and chartreuse cocktail in a souvenir mug for $40. (Without the mug, it's $15 and one of the best drinks in town.) Proceeds benefit ScholarMatch.

The Bon Vivants, who own Bon Voyage and Trick Dog, and I read scholarship applications together this spring, which helped us all fall in love with local students and really understand the extent of the need. San Francisco has free community college and reasonably priced Cal State campuses nearby, but you still have to be able to afford rent in the most expensive market in the country. Plus it can be hard to get all the classes you need for a degree. So the Bon Vivants created a scholarship just for children of San Francisco service workers. Check it out here.

Finally, if you know any high school juniors and seniors, spread the news that drop-in centers exist in San Francisco and Baldwin Hills (LA). It's a friendly, informative, supportive environment, where anything is possible.

Learn more at ScholarMatch.org or donate here. Thanks!

"Tomorrow, you triumph"

noreply@blogger.com (DW) — Mon, 25 Nov 2019 21:05:00 +0000

My friend Martin sent me this one. The aspirational style is slightly undercut by the Title Case Capitalization. But more seriously, what does it mean?

You might assume that "Tomorrow You Triumph" means do not disturb. They had to add help text, which suggests the original wording wasn't clear. In fact it means: Please make up my room tomorrow. How you triumph is up to you.

On to the flip side. So what does "Tonight You Dream Big" do? Mint on the pillow and turndown service at La Quinta? Midnight sheets change?

No, this means please do not disturb tonight. I wonder how many people—including the many non-native English speakers passing through SoCal—don't get the service they're expecting.

we miss you

noreply@blogger.com (DW) — Mon, 11 Nov 2019 20:48:00 +0000

Some days, I feel like all I do is unsubscribe from emails and notifications. So I was surprised and delighted to find this in my mailbox:

Do the Bay lists fun local events: concerts, giveaways, club and restaurant openings. It's not a high-profile, high-budget website. But the events are well curated, and they're sincere.

I've spent countless hours discussing voice and tone and engagement for well-known brands. But this one actually made me smile. And the preheader made me open it.

They gave me useful links in case I'd forgotten about their site and what it was good for. They also told me how to get get fewer messages or unsubscribe. Subtext: you're in control of the relationship.

These days, that counts for a lot. Love. Doing it right, Do the Bay.

respect

noreply@blogger.com (DW) — Fri, 01 Nov 2019 13:30:00 +0000

I just noticed the Los Angeles Times put in a new commenting system, with a nudge toward better behavior online.

What do you think? Will this make trolls think twice before posting? Personally, I like the handshake. And of course I'd love to see the research.

that blows

noreply@blogger.com (DW) — Wed, 30 Oct 2019 03:46:00 +0000

Usually we think about usability as optional. If it takes longer to buy shoes online, the worst that happens is the company doesn't make as much money. But sometimes design can be the difference between life and death.

Here's a chart the National Weather Service circulated this weekend, as parts of California are consumed by fires, whipped up by gusty winds. The counties have been issuing evacuation orders at the same time that PG&E has been taking whole counties offline and into darkness.

So is it petty to focus on hard to read yellow type against a rust background?

The worst thing about this chart isn't even the illegible fonts. It's the sort order. The table is sorted by maximum gusty winds, but it goes across and then down. Quick: where is Berkeley on this chart? (That's a trick: Berkeley isn't on this chart. But Bradley is, wherever that is. And of course Windy Hill.)

Be glad you can read this at home, with your lights on, in clean air. On a full-sized screen and not sideways on your smartphone.

find a need and fill it

noreply@blogger.com (DW) — Fri, 05 Jul 2019 10:18:00 +0000

the place to be

noreply@blogger.com (DW) — Fri, 22 Mar 2019 16:30:00 +0000

I recently started using QuickBooks for Self-Employed folks, and naturally they invited me to check out the latest and greatest features.

Bookkeeping is maintenance, and like most forms of maintenance (going to the gym, sleeping, eating right), it's a lot better to build it into your routine than to wait until taxes are due and then hunt down receipts from last May, or try to lose those 8 pounds that creeped up since you last wore a bikini.

So what QuickBooks is offering is convenience. They'll talk to your bank and record all your transactions. (Cool!) They'll scan all your Amazon purchases and put them in the right category. (Okay.) They'll track your location driving to clients and record mileage. (Um.)

At what point does convenience become surveillance? Of course this is all consent based, and unlike many startups, Intuit isn't likely to go under next year and your data won't wind up on the dark web. They're less likely to be hacked than your ISP and more likely to tell you about it.

Still, I couldn't help feeling this was all a little too creepy, and kept the settings on manual entry. Maybe I'm just old school. Maybe I enjoy classifying business meals and purchases.

I do believe routine is best. But I feel more in control when I'm the one deciding what gets classified as a utility and what's an asset. Old habits are hard to break.