Themeword for 2011: “fitness”

16 Jan 2011 – 20:40

My #themeword for 2011 is fitness. In fact, it’s Chris’ themeword too!

I decided that fitness would be a good themeword for me as I was walking into work one day in early January. Of course I need to focus and work hard this year (especially being at an early stage startup without a lot of resources). Of course I want to continue to connect with the wonderful community and groups of friends I’ve made in San Francisco in the past year. Of course I want to keep up with my gym routine — which has proven to be wonderful for my body and brain since I began going last October. Of course I want to (continue to) have a great relationship with Chris — and maybe this is a year to focus on that since we’ve got a house, and life, and work routine now. I certainly don’t want to take our relationship for granted!

And it dawned on me that “fitness” would be an appropriate theme that united all these goals. Fitness in the sense of:

  • workplace fitness
  • professional and social fitness
  • physical and mental fitness
  • and relationship fitness

(Chris does a good job of spelling out in more detail what each of these “fitnesses” mean).

So after several week of searching for the right theme for 2011, I was pretty excited to have settled on “fitness.” I texted Chris immediately!

To my surprise, Chris replied back: “That’s great! Fitness was actually a runner-up themeword I was considering myself!”

We’ve never had the same themeword before but it occurred to me that it was appropriate to do so, especially since several types of “fitness” we are trying to achieve are shared together. Our relationship is an obvious one. Our social life is another (we are trying to go on at least one “friend date” a week, and HealthMonth is helping us make sure we do!). But our physical fitness is a third.

Back in October, neither of us had been to the gym in…oh, years. We definitely hadn’t been to the gym since we’d been living together in SF (a year and a half). We stay pretty slim from all the walking we do in the city (often 30 miles per week), but we knew that we didn’t have the best cardio health. However I knew that I’d only really change my routine if it was something we did together. And so we started going to the 24Hour FitLite on the corner of Church & 24th — about 2 blocks from our apartment.

(Sadly, Chris has now joined this fancy schmancy gym at Google so I rarely have a gym buddy anymore. I’ve got good ol’ HealthMonth to keep my act in line for fear of losing a “life point”…and so I actually have been going to the gym every week!)

Anyway, Chris and I decided that sharing a themeword this year would motivate both of us. It certainly has motivated me so far and I hope it helps him, too. Either way, there’s only moving forward and there’s only good things that await in 2011! Cheers to that!

By brynn | Posted in personal | Tagged , , , | Comments (2)

Tummelvision recap: On social interaction design

5 Aug 2010 – 19:38

I just signed off Tummelvision, a weekly podcast/videocast (in some cases) led by Deb Schultz, Heather Gold, and Kevin Marks, where we had a fascinating conversation about designing for social interactions. I was a lucky guest along with Julie Hamwood from Adaptive Path.

The conversation was really stimulating, and wound in and out of perspectives about social interaction design (sxd). At first we were discussing Google Wave’s demise and Google’s inherent lack of social understanding, and then moved onto Facebook missing the mark with Facebook Questions. My take on this is that Facebook already has users asking and answering each other’s questions every day — and effectively at that — but in their status messages. What Questions appears to accomplish with its wide open format is merely to generate data for some presumed search platform later. I’m not convinced the data will be any better than Yahoo! Answers, and, as users, we’re certainly not compelled to answer (or read) questions by people who aren’t in our friend group. It’s the chicken and egg problem if Facebook wants to grow their database to search on later; so a better strategy, in my mind, would be to target questions to the right friend groups. Context matters.

This brought us to a discussion about fundamental differences in the way Twitter and Facebook are designed. Facebook is a network where relations are the social object; while Twitter is a network where information is the social object (although emotion and play are also social objects at times). Yet, with all of Twitter’s openness, it brings with it a sense of presence of who you’re talking to. It doesn’t feel like you’re tweeting into a void, whereas using Facebook Questions does. We also discussed, here, that relationships that form around content sharing (e.g., Twitter) develop into the sort of network where this openness can be supported. But privacy still reigns in the Facebook networks where the only glue is, in many cases, a former relationship.

Of course, this led to asking whether there are rules for designing effective social interactions. The short of it is no. Twitter created a versatile platform by using only simple rules for engagement. But these rules cannot be carbon copied, replicated elsewhere, and expected to work in another system in quite the same way. Things like context, culture, and personalities (among other sxd considerations) change the way a given feature will be used and adopted by the community.

Instead of developing rules or principles of social interaction, a better approach is to think of the questions we can ask when designing for social. Who are our users? How do they think of themselves? Who do they want to connect to? Who do they want to connect to tomorrow? Why? What’s the point of the network in the first place? Where are they when they’re using the network? What is the outcome of an interaction? What’s the role of strong versus weak ties in the network?

We didn’t have any glorious resolution to our discussion but instead emphasized how we need to keep trying to understand how social interactions play out — which includes doing research into social and developing case studies which illustrate principles that we can take to our clients and product teams.

A few references related to social interaction design include:

By brynn | Posted in sxd | Tagged , , , , | Comments (3)

Reflections on the betacup design challenge

16 Jun 2010 – 8:08

I kinda can’t believe how far we’ve come with the betacup project. One year ago, I was at Overlap ’09 where I met Toby Daniels and his craaaazy idea to change the way we drink coffee. I hopped on board, brainstormed at Overlap, wrote a little blog post…and suddenly here we are today, announcing the winners of a Starbucks-sponsored betacup design challenge! (Well, no announcement until tomorrow, technically).

I am honored to be a judge and advisor to this little product of ours, and I must admit I was skeptical we’d get such great community submissions from our call-to-action on jovoto!

Now, I didn’t feel like we had any one blow-away submission that by itself would address the paper cup waste problem. But the submissions were clustered in certain theme areas, that — if combined — might really start to make a difference, not just with reducing paper cup waste, but also with visibility into sustainability issues more broadly. Which was a goal of the project all along!

Plus, there were 400+ submissions on jovoto from people all over the world! How did our modest project garner such attention and concern from the community? I’m quite impressed, not only by the quality of the submissions but also by jovoto as a platform.

So, here’s how I saw the submissions clustering around a few themes:

  • Change the cup, not people’s behavior. We know that people get stuck in habits that are hard to break or unrealistic to try to change. So one solution is to let people keep doing what they do, but solve the paper cup waste problem along the way. To me, the best way to do this is through affordable biodegradable cups (period) — not through a redesigned travel mug.
  • Incentivize people to bring their own mug. Part of the reason we’re having this design challenge is that people forget to bring travel mugs with them for to-go coffee.
  • Encourage people to purchase drinks “for here”. The idea here is to reduce waste by using ceramic mugs at coffee shops — but I don’t believe this will work at scale, especially with people’s hectic, rushed, multitasking lives. Sadly, we drink our coffee t0-go.
  • Move to a borrow and deposit model. This was a popular theme — that we could borrow a reusable mug from one shop, carry it with us, and return it to another shop when we’re done.
  • Provide smart rewards card (e.g., embedded in RFID chips, bar codes). We’re adding technology to all other parts of our lives — why not to our coffee too? But really, the idea here is that we incentivize people to move to a different model of to-go coffee if, say, the cup remembered your favorite drink, had your debit card, and automatically “punched” your reward card. And maybe tweeted and checked you into Foursquare on your behalf too!
  • Share the community’s behavior publicly. This could be done by creating some visual of how other people in the community are contributing to less waste (from an art installation to a chalkboard with a tally of paper cups saved per day). Another interesting idea was one where your free coffee comes after 10 other people have brought travel mugs with them today. So you benefit from the community’s good behavior — in a pay-it-forward model.

And from all these awesome ideas I had to vote on my top three! It was a difficult task, but I was looking for solutions that would work across coffee purveyors (e.g., not just for Starbucks), for a wide audience of people with different backgrounds and daily habits, and that would encourage sustainable behavior beyond just coffee drinking (like through providing visibility into community efforts to recycle, reduce, reuse.)

I was just one judge among many (about 15-20), but altogether I feel good that we decided on winners that captured the spirit of the contest. The winners will be announced at our awards ceremony in NYC on Thursday, June 17 at 3:00 EST (21:00 CEST). Join us live at http://bit.ly/betacuplive where we’ll be announcing:

  • the top 5 ideas as selected by the community
  • the top submissions and overall winner as selected by our jury

As always, thanks for your support and, please, drink sustainably!

By brynn | Posted in betacup | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (2)

User experience of the iPhone vs. iPad

15 Jun 2010 – 18:31

My company, Bolt | Peters, recently conducted a user experience study of interactions on the iPhone vs. the iPad using a mobile payment system called Square. The most important take-away of this study to me is how social all our technologies are becoming — and how important social is as a design consideration. (We saw this with the iPad.) I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again…

But for now, you can read the article in UX Magazine. Or the brief write-up by ZDNet. Or watch the video we created:





And here’s a look at mobile payment transactions (using Square) on the iPhone versus the iPad:

By brynn | Posted in sxd, userexperience | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

Facebook vs. everyone

26 May 2010 – 22:55

It seems like Facebook is in the news constantly these days. People are concerned about privacy, security, and general trust of Facebook. So to address those issues, today Facebook announced new privacy controls.

I can see both sides of the issue, so I decided to draw a comic: Facebook vs. Everyone.
 In it, basically General Zuckerberg is saying: “patience, my children”, and the mob is doing what mobs do — complain, gossip, and play Farmville!

is where my comics live!

By brynn | Posted in comics | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (3)