Light Up The Rain

Ke$ha, South Yorkshire and keyboard usability

March 21, 2010 · Leave a Comment

I gushed too much about Ke$ha’s debut single last year to write more of the same about her follow-up, Blah Blah Blah.

Except that – against all odds – it really reminds me of an early 90s clubbing classic from my Sheffield days.

I pose the question… Could the doyenne of “I’m a drunk mess” pop have once been a regular at Occasions nightclub, behind the BT offices in Charter Square? It was, after all, the home of the bleep scene.

(Reality check: She would have been five years old at the time. So probably not.)

Here’s Ke$ha’s new, erm, masterpiece.

And here’s that early 90s clubbing classic, Testone by Sweet Exorcist – one of the first releases on Sheffield’s seminal Warp label. Can you spot the similarity?

Sweet Exorcist was Richard H Kirk (Cabaret Voltaire) and Parrot (later of All Seeing I); its video was directed by none other than Jarvis Cocker.

As noted here, the Blah Blah Blah video makes prominent use of Nokia’s X6 handset. Presumably Nokia have paid for this, given the enormous size of their logo on the phone.

Is it just me, though, or is Ke$ha really struggling with that on-screen keyboard? At 0:51, all she’s trying to type is repeated exclamation marks, but even that seems to be a tricky, hesitant process, with the very real danger at all times that she might hit the backslash key instead.

And at 0:23 – well, I would never have imagined texting What a mega douche MASTER!!!!!!!! could look so awkward and unergonomic.

Maybe she could release a branded stylus?

(NB – This isn’t one of the music production posts which I so blithely promised yesterday would be “next” on this blog. They’ll be, erm, next.)

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Music · Nostalgia

Warning: I am going to bore you with pop

March 20, 2010 · 4 Comments

I love hearing photographers talking about their work, and the technical choices that went into making it.

One of the main reasons I love it is this: I know absolutely nothing about photography.

I know what I like (pretty much), but I couldn’t even start to identify why one use of lenses, or exposure, or f-thingy is different from another. I am a photo dunce.

My understanding of music is very different.

I don’t mean music composition – I almost failed my music O-level, and never ascended beyond the dizzy heights of Grade 1 theory.

But music production, I get. I know the tricks, I understand the techniques – I can immediately see how it all hangs together and why. Where records are concerned, I’m like that irritating Dad in the art gallery, lecturing his kids on exactly how Picasso layered his paints to make the vanishing point a bit more pointillesque. (NB: I know as much about painting as I do photography.)

You might think this would be enough to spoil my enjoyment of pop music. Interestingly, this isn’t the case.

However, via the wonders of my blog, it is enough for me to spoil your enjoyment of pop music.

Because over the next few posts I’m going to talk about a small number of pop records – actually, about bits of a small number of pop records – in the kind of forensic detail men normally reserve for car engines and power drills.

Why have I decided this now? Well, I’ve been inspired by today’s Twitter hashtag #dynamicrangeday.

It flags up an event designed to highlight the unpleasant but undeniable fact that commercially available music has (for years now) been losing its volume peaks and troughs. The quiet bits, in other words, are getting noisier until they’re pretty much identical, volume-wise, to the supposedly louder bits. It’s a process that’s been dubbed the Loudness Wars.

Like many other creeping changes to the world, few people are conscious of it, realise why it’s happening, or understand why they should be bothered. In a future post I hope to put your mind at rest on all of these factors, and much much more. Whether you like it or not.

If you’re interested in finding out more about the Loudness Wars in the meantime, you might want to listen to this short radio feature from America’s NPR.

→ 4 CommentsCategories: Music

MS Outlook vs Inbox Zero: There can only be one winner

March 16, 2010 · Leave a Comment

For a few months now I’ve been an evangelist for the Inbox Zero philosophy.

Inbox Zero is all about keeping your inbox clear by dealing with e-mail quickly and – above all – efficiently.

One of the key lessons I’ve learned along the way is probably one of the simplest: to avoid e-mail clutter, make sure nothing redundant gets into your inbox in the first place.

That hotel mailing list you signed up for by accident? Those offers you get sent every week by that e-tailer you used a year ago? Don’t delete each one by hand – instead, take a moment to unsubscribe once and for all.

So far, so good. But the real power in attaining e-mail Zen can be found in filters – or as MS Outlook calls them, rules.

At work I belong to dozens of distribution lists. Some are 100% useful. Some are partly useful but need human intervention to sort the wheat from the chaff. Rules can’t help with those.

There are several d-lists, however, which regularly send me messages of a predictable nature which will never be relevant to me. And given enough predictability, even a dumb old computer can figure out what’s important (i.e. needs to land in my inbox) versus what isn’t (i.e. needs sticking into a folder, or just deleting altogether so it never troubles me).

Over the last few weeks I’ve slowly been accumulating these automated rules.

Some are simple (if an e-mail arrives with subject line “x”, delete it immediately). Some are more complicated (if an e-mail arrives from address “y” whose subject isn’t “z”, forward it to a chosen person, move it to a selected folder and mark it as read).

The result is that my work inbox has been gradually, perceptibly quietening down. The important stuff is still there, clear as day. But the noise is receding.

Sometimes there’s a curveball which means I have to fine-tune my filters. Maybe person B has sent out an irrelevant e-mail which person A normally sends out. No problem – just edit the appropriate rule accordingly.

This process has continued to the point where – as of this morning – I had 27 rules diligently working away on my inbox, around the clock.

Today, I tried to add the 28th. And got this message from Outlook:

One or more rules could not be uploaded to Exchange Server and have been deactivated. This could be because some of the parameters are not supported or there is insufficient space to store all of your rules.

Confused, I searched Outlook Help for assistance. I found this:

The storage limit for your rules is 32 KB. If the total size of your rules exceeds this limit, some rules may be disabled. To reduce the size of your rules, do one or more of the following:

  • Delete rules you don’t need.
  • Combine rules when possible. For example, if more than one rule moves messages to the same folder, combine the rules.
  • Use a shorter name for your rules.
  • If one of your rules moves e-mail messages to a Personal Folders file (.pst), move the .pst file to a location that has a shorter path. For example, instead of using C:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\MyFolder.pst, use C:\MyFolder.pst.

What?!

This is the stupidest thing I’ve read in a very long time.

I’m using the world’s more prevalent enterprise e-mail solution (Outlook/Exchange). My archived e-mail alone clocks up 1.03GB.

And I have to arse about changing the names of my rules, moving my archive folder somewhere with a shorter path, or – the most likely option – deleting rules and forgetting about adding new ones altogether… because Microsoft has allocated an arbitrary fixed limit for rules which is lower than the RAM of my 1982 ZX Spectrum?

Pathetic.

I gather, from searching online, that there’s no patch or workaround for this – at least not without installing third-party add-ons (and that’s never going to happen in a locked-down IT environment).

Thanks, Outlook 2003, for preventing me from properly streamlining my inbox and working more effectively. You suck.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Computing

Modern packaging drives me nuts: Part 4

February 22, 2010 · 1 Comment

I’ve just read an interesting take from Russell M Davies on my long-running pet hate – overly matey language on packaging and marketing materials.

Writing in the latest Wired UK, Russell says:

I get loads of phishing spam; messages from my bank advising me that my security has been breached and that I should log in immediately to resolve the situation. How do I know it’s spam? Mostly because of the language, because every email gets the nuances of English usage slightly wrong. It’s not necessarily the grammar, it’s the deferential tone.

The phishers are too polite, assuming that banks have Honoured Customers and are Greatly Pleased to be Doing Business with us. They’ve not understood that most banks have decided not to be our servants, but our mates. They’ve ditched fake formality for faux friendliness. Which is worrying, because all the phishers need to do is hire a decent copywriter, or any English graduate with a reasonable ear.

That’d be a good alternative to the TEFL year wouldn’t it? Sit at home, proof-reading phishing mails, tightening up the language to match illicitly obtained brand guidelines and sound a bit like the back of an Innocent smoothie bottle. Just think – all that sits between us and enough embezzlement to force the total collapse of the global finance system is the laziness of English-literature students.

Davies is right, of course – even banks are at it these days.

The primary example is Barclays, who revamped their signage and literature in 2006 to adopt a new, friendlier tone of voice. Not such a bad idea, except some of the results have been clunky to say the least (you can read Charlie Brooker’s less measured thoughts here).

Take this example – a Barclays pen dispenser.

No quibbles with the first line. But all that “your place or mine” stuff? Just plain weird.

I understand, of course, what Barclays are trying to say with this wording (mainly ’cause I recall the revamp being sold in the press at the time as “an end to pens on chains“).

So how about this instead?

Need a pen? Be our guest.
You can keep it if you like.

It’s simple, it’s graspable in the split-second you’re likely to spend putting your hand into the box, and it’s still friendly. But I’m sure it’d be rejected by the client as quirkless: lacking the all-important Innocent factor.

I’m not sure whether or not this is the company which helped Barclays create these results, but Afia are “tone of voice specialists” who name Barclays as one of their clients. On their page about the bank (I’d link to it, but the whole site is in Flash, so I can’t) somebody (who isn’t named) has this to say:

There are a variety of activities that we can employ to get the tone of voice used throughout the organisation. I think of them as top-down and bottom-up, or air strike and ninja insertion.

I promise I’m not making this up.

→ 1 CommentCategories: Branding · Packaging · Retail

Election night 1974: Latest analysis

February 20, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Last Friday, BBC Parliament cleared its regular schedules and ran February 1974’s election night coverage instead. Not just the highlights, but pretty much the whole thing.

If the idea of sitting through that fills you with horror (or incomprehension) then please click away now.

If the idea thrills you, on the other hand, you may be a political scientist – in which case, sorry, this won’t be the blog post for you either. The historic political events of that night have been analysed thoroughly elsewhere.

But if, like me, you’re just unnaturally fascinated by the look and atmosphere of 1970s telly – well, I’m happy to say I did all the hard work for you, and ploughed dutifully through it. (Not all at 30x speed, either.)

Here are a few visual tasters from the BBC’s coverage. I’ll let most of the pics speak for themselves.

Note how the female results-takers are in uniform: grim, brown smocks reminiscent of Sainsburys uniforms from the 1980s.

David Lomax is in Cobberton, North Devon, outside the house of Jeremy Thorpe MP. Is the Liberal leader around for a few words?

No, he isn’t.

Meanwhile, Penrith’s count seems to have been transported back to the 1920s.

Southampton hasn’t quite reached the colour era yet, either.

This guy’s speaking live from The Hague – so the monochrome is perhaps to be expected. He appears to be taking the RECOUNT AT BODMIN news hard.

There was a fashion in 1974, it turns out, for announcing results on the balconies of grotty council buildings.

I have to (sincerely) pay tribute here to Sir Alastair Burnet’s outfit on the night.

Especially considering this is 1974 we’re talking about, Burnet’s combo of mid-grey suit, pink shirt with cutaway collar, black watch, tie with plum dots and – brilliantly – dark plum pocket square has barely dated. Fine work.

As you’ll have spotted, the biggest winner of the night was Letraset. I imagine art suppliers in West London had to helicopter in emergency supplies of Helvetica Bold during the election period.

We’ve now found Jeremy Thorpe, who’s on the phone…

…to Cyril Smith MP, who is at the Liberal party press conference, smoking a cigarette.

And here’s the complete studio set in all its majesty. You can’t see in this screengrab, but each pundit’s chair came complete with a chrome ashtray on a tall stand. Class.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Journalism · Nostalgia · TV

Watch these amusing TV commercials

February 12, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Sometimes you just have to let the work speak for itself. These ads are by Wieden & Kennedy, Portland US.

Obviously if I’d ever made it in advertising I’d be producing spots as good as these. Ahem.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Advertising · Interwebs · TV

Il fait trop beau pour travailler

February 9, 2010 · Leave a Comment

For anyone who thinks I’ve blogged too much in the last few weeks about air disasters…

From 1964, I give you Les Parisiennes (avec l’orchestre de Claude Bolling) with an awesome promo which will make you feel a whole lot better about flying. Flying Air France, in particular.

In that era I think they’d have described this as “lively and gay”.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Music · Nostalgia

Why easy is the hardest thing of all

February 9, 2010 · Leave a Comment

This might seem like a strange statement from someone who’d write and publish 891 words about a specific model of railway ticket machine.

But I love punchy, concise writing.

It’s one of the reasons I fell in love with print advertising when I was a kid – and decided I wanted to be an advertising copywriter when I grew up.

The writing that inspired me most wasn’t flowery fiction or purple poetry (though I worked my way through plenty of that in my teens).

It was thrillingly economical prose like Bill Bernbach’s VW ads of the 50s, 60s and 70s.

The ad career never materialised, but a writing one did. And that’s when the sobering truth struck home. Writing as sparingly – yet effectively – as the likes of Bernbach did is hard. Really hard.

So when I come across someone who can do this, and do it well, I’m filled with a mix of admiration and (yes) jealousy.

My latest find is a guy called Ken Rockwell. He runs a photography website filled with tips, suggestions and product reviews. I stumbled across it while looking for more details on a camera we’ve recently acquired at work.

I think Ken’s reviews are terrific online writing: taut prose with zero fat.

Most importantly, they read like they were super-easy to produce. Which is – as we’ve established – the trickiest thing of all to pull off.

Read Ken talking about the Canon G11, and see what you think.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Advertising · Interwebs · Magazines · Nostalgia

Goodbye Johnny Dankworth

February 7, 2010 · Leave a Comment

Sad news today of the death of Sir John Dankworth.

Though I’ve always been a fan of certain types of jazz, I can’t pretend to know much at all about Dankworth’s legacy.

But here’s the thing I most associate with his name – the original title music for Tomorrow’s World. It’s brilliant – and impossible to imagine even being considered as TV theme fodder these days.

Here’s the full version in stereo for your further enjoyment:

And finally, for good measure, the short version on piano.

“Complex” and “approachable” aren’t always easy attributes to combine in music – but this is a textbook example of how that formula can work. If you’re a bit of a genius, that is.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Music · Nostalgia · TV

Rage against the machine

February 7, 2010 · 3 Comments

Recognise this thing?

I certainly do – in fact I seem to spend half my life looking at it, jabbing it with my fingers, or swearing at it.

Yes, it’s a ticket machine. But not just any ticket machine. If we’re being anal (and we’re all friends here, so why not?) it’s a Scheidt & Bachmann Ticket XPress.

There are apparently over 700 of these things around the UK rail network. At least seven train operators have deployed them. (If you really want to, you can spent €4,600 doing a four-day course in Germany on how to nurture, cherish and repair them. You get a certificate and everything.)

But you know what? I’d like to propose an urgent maintenance programme for these machines, involving the business end of a large axe.

The Ticket Xpress, you see, does my head in every time I use it to collect tickets I’ve ordered online. Read on and I’ll explain why.

—–

Screen 1

So here’s how the ticket collection process starts.

I’m guessing this welcome screen is the only part of the machine’s look and feel which East Midlands Trains can control. It’s quirky and fun.

It’s also consistent with the company’s stylish use of three stock graphic elements: a palette of light blue, dark blue and light grey; tightly-tracked white Futura type; and a red dot. *

Looks like collecting our tickets could be a friendly, visually-appealing experience, right?

Screen 2

Uh-oh.

I count 114 words on this screen. This begins to make me very annoyed.

For one thing, I don’t need to see about 110 of them. If I’d been given the simple options Buy tickets or Collect tickets to begin with, the machine would’ve realised I didn’t need to see any of the fare options at all.

(One of the most popular alternative machines, the Shere FastTicket, has exactly this binary choice on its opening screen. It’s way simpler to use.)

For another thing, why split out each of the six listed destinations into two separate buttons? The different ticket types aren’t explained, and the prices displayed are wrong for anyone except adults paying full fare – hence the sexy caveat Railcard and child discounts can be applied later in the ticket selection process.

Why not just let users drill down to the correct ticket type – then see the fare?

Also, why have one button which says More Popular Destinations and another which says Any Destination? Are we supposed to be able to guess if our destination’s popular?

As if that wasn’t enough, those randomly-sized buttons look like I designed them on Paint. Not a good look.

But let’s push on through, and tap the Collect Pre-Paid Tickets button.

Screen 3

OK. At least the word-count has dropped significantly now. We insert our card into the slot and await further instructions.

The next thing that happens is the LCD panel above the card reader displays the message Card authorisation declined.

Uh? What was it trying to authorise? I thought the card was just for identification purposes? And yes, that is indeed the case – the machine just displays that message by default, every single time it goes through this process.

Why? Who knows?

Screen 4

Now, I know the QWERTY keyboard isn’t the be-all and end-all. And some would argue a typewriter-style layout on a public kiosk is potentially unfriendly for less tech-literate folks.

But really. On balance, is there any defence for an alphabetical display like this? Especially when the Z is left stranded to the side of the, um, otherwise really-well-thought-out 5×5 matrix of letters?

And the first usability checklist for kiosks I found online ranks “Keyboard has QWERTY layout” as number 1 in its list of vital attributes for input devices. Too right.

Screen 5

This is where I really start to get irritated.

These are the tickets I’ve ordered – so now I’m given the option to Print All Journeys. As opposed to what? Print some of them? There’s no other button!

And how about that matrix next to my tickets, kindly outlining their details? Adult(s) and Child(ren) – OK, understood those.

But AAA.(s) and Supl.(s)? What the hell are you talking about? What are they, and why are you showing me them on this screen?

Screen 6

Finally we get to the printing stage. We know this because there’s a little picture of an inkjet printer under the sexy legend Print State. Get on with it!

Screen 7

Oh look. The first thing on this list is a Type SGL. The second is Type SPL. Glad we cleared that up.

Screen 8

Tum tee tum… The fact that my seat reservation is COMPLIMENTARY is very useful information at this point – to differentiate it, presumably, from those paid seat reservations we all make these days. Were the designers of this interface paid by the word?

Screen 9

Finally the usability steeplechase has been completed, and we conclude with perhaps my favourite screen of all. In a metaphysical sense, aren’t we all at some point taking our receipt, yet waiting for it simultaneously? I know I am.

So there you have it. Ever used a worse public computer interface than this one? I’d love to hear from you – if only so I can avoid unfortunate displays of rage by steering well clear of it.

—–

In ads elsewhere this red dot has been everything from a car headlight, to an olive, to the middle of a  - presumably very rare – joint of beef. This time around it’s some Space Invader-type dude’s head. Peculiar, but each to their own.

→ 3 CommentsCategories: Computing