Design Matters, Even (or Most Importantly) When It's Invisible

This may be old news, and I may be slow on the uptake, but look at this:

This is a screenshot from Apple iTunes showing the track listing of an album along with its cover. I was looking at this idly, waiting for another 2am concall, when it struck me that the colours used for the track info were a remarkable match for the album cover.  I looked at another album, and saw that its text also matched, yet clearly with a  different colour scheme:

Now, usually I listen to music on a separate iPod - not really paying much attention to what's on screen. This has floored me, though. Somewhere along the line, someone has decided that having nice fonts, cover art & whatnot is not enough - the entire visual effect related by the album's cover design should be used to cue the metadata associated with the music. Not only that, but that has been integrated with a reasonable clever programming effort to determine what the colour scheme of the album is, and how best to represent the text effectively.

Here's another example:

This whole thing is an example of concern about the complete design of an interface which seems, frankly, lost on a vast proportion of people. That isn't to say that people don't appreciate it - but rather that people don't even think about it, and may not have even consciously noticed the effect, although they may notice something "off" if it wasn't present, and may like the look of something without being able to explain why.   Architects (real ones - in the built environment) face this sort of thing all the time:  people often don't see the value in good design until they experience it for themselves.

Much as I love UNIX & Linux, in that world chances are the graphic design would go no further than placing the cover art in a bounded box, with the track info all in regular text with regular colours on a regular background.  Informative, maybe even reasonably attractive, but lacking the near-invisible design that makes this & many other Apple products such a satisfying user experience.

So maybe "invisible design" is something to aim for.

Changing Email Habits

A change of role & change of workplace introduces a whole bunch of disruption to your workflow, and I'm finding myself dealing with new laptops, new operating systems, new email & calendaring and so on (I haven't even seen yet what I'll have to deal with for travel & expenses...)

It also introduces the opportunity to try to make some workflow changes for the better. Ever since I started using "proper" email for work in 1995 (as opposed to the weird old internal messaging systems earlier in the past), I've always had an email client sitting in the background, popping up messages as soon as they came in and demanding my attention.

It's probably self-evident, but it turns out this is really bad for productivity - studies into the effects of interruptions, such as this paper by Loughborough University & The Danwood Group, and described by Ben Hammersley in this address to the RSA, show that people tend to respond almost immediately to notifications of new email, and that dealing with the interruption requires "recovery" time afterward. For tasks that require a "flow" to be  achieved (such as coding, writing or other creative activity), it can take up to 20 minutes to get back into the swing of things, so in cases where email is automatically checked and alerted on every 5-15 minutes (the default for Outlook), some people never get a chance to get into a flow.

So new workflow habit #1 - set email check times to at least 30 minutes.

I might move this out to 1-2 hours, later on.  Some people are disciplined enough to only check email once or twice a day (using an auto-responder to inform correspondents to expect a delay). This may seem extreme, but when you consider that business communication used to be via dictated & type-written letter, it's still comparatively high-speed, and leaves the receiver more time to concentrate - which in the end leads to greater efficiency & productivity.


On another note, I usually try to make my email subject lines meaningful & relevant, and it turns out this can have a significant impact on whether they are read or not. In Dan Pink's recent address to the RSA (where he asserts that everyone is now in sales), he notes research that shows that having an interesting subject line: something that either shows direct value to the recipient (eg: information about a topic that person is currently working on), or sparks curiosity about the email's content (the current classic example being Barack Obama's "Hey..." email during the 2012 presidential campaign), makes the message much more likely to be read than more mundane/nonspecific subjects such as  "Question"  or "Followup".

So new workflow habit #2 - [continue to] make sure email subjects are relevant & interesting.


Number 1 is going to be tougher than number 2 - and I may have to overcome and/or deal with expectations of others around me - so it will be interesting to see how it works out.