Bob Wertz

Long Posts

Sep 29, 2015 ∞

You get what you test for…



This post was originally posted on September 29, 2015 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.

A few years ago, I stopped at a fast food restaurant in rural, upstate South Carolina where a car was circling the drive thru over and over and over. She’d drive up to the ordering station and wait a second. Then the car would drive to the window, pause, and then drive around again. This happened a couple of times. It was very strange.

When I walked in, I nodded toward the car at the window and asked what was going on. The woman shrugged, obviously embarrassed, and said “Just improving the drive thru wait times…”

Lots of people wonder how something like the Volkswagen ¹ emissions test scandal can happen. It’s actually very simple:

1. Set a specific goal.
2. Figure out a test to measure it: a survey, a timer, a standardized test, etc.
3. Make sure everyone knows how important the test is.
4. Provide rewards for people who achieve the test objectives. And penalize people who don’t meet the test objectives.
5. Smart people will eventually figure out how to do well on the test, even if it now has nothing to do with the original goal.
6. Management pats themselves on the back for great test results.
7. The test no longer reflects reality.

This cycle is everywhere in business today and manifests itself in different ways. Most of the time, it doesn’t involve fraud and cheating. But this process is why:

1. Engineers design products (cars, cell phones, etc.) that meet specific test objectives, but not real life usage.
2. Customer service reps in banks, car dealerships and retail stores remind you over and over to answer “highly satisfied” on a random survey.
3. Teachers teach to the test.
4. Managers make short sighted decisions to stay under budget.
5. Advertisers make really annoying online ads to improve click through rates.
6. Fast food workers fake drive thru response times.

If you connect success on a metric to an employee’s financial well being, that employee will change their behavior to meet the test objectives. And yes, sometimes, if the pressure is great enough, they cheat.

I’m sure those fast food workers wanted to have good drive thru response times to make their boss happy. I doubt there was a financial incentive. Maybe if the boss was happy, their life would be easier. Or perhaps they were afraid of being fired. Whatever the reason, they cheated to meet their test objectives. They lost sight of — or more likely, were never told — the reason for the test.

The test itself isn’t the problem. Testing and evaluation is a key part of management in a corporate environment. But today, it’s really easy to test and measure everything. Over reliance on metrics in management makes the test more important than the goal. And that never ends well.

You’ll simply get what you test for.

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Bob Wertz is a creative director, type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.

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1. I’m a VW owner. My car is not a diesel, but I doubt that I’ll buy another Volkswagen even though I’ve been happy with my car… ↩︎

May 14, 2015 ∞

B.A.R.E. (Bad Acronyms aRe Everywhere)

This post was originally posted on May 14, 2015 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.

Why are so many people and organizations obsessed with acronyms? Especially acronyms that spell another word. From small nonprofits and churches to schools and large corporations, really bad acronyms are everywhere.

NASA’s Messenger Probe crashed into Mercury after a long and successful mission. And as I read CNN’s account of the mission, I was stunned by the fifth paragraph:

Messenger (an acronym for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging) was launched in 2004 and traveled more than 6½ years before it started circling Mercury on March 18, 2011.

Wait. So the Messenger probe is actually M.E.S.S.E.N.G.E.R.? Or is it Me.S.S.En.Ge.R.?

NASA designed a space probe to fly to a planet named after the messenger of the gods. And NASA feels like they need to construct some bogus acronym to justify the name “Messenger.”



Acronyms are fine if they really help people remember and understand the program or product name. But in most cases, the acronym simply becomes a name and slowly loses all connection to the meaning.

And the worse case scenario is that you are so obsessed with creating an acronym, that you select a poor name in the process. Avoid creating acronyms just to be clever or just to justify a name choice.

Your best bet is always to give products, organizations and programs strong, appropriate names.

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Bob Wertz is a creative director, type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.

Aug 5, 2013 ∞

Fuzzy PowerPoint Math

This post was originally posted on August 5, 2013 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.

A little math problem for you…

One 15-minute PowerPoint¹ presentation has 5 slides. Another 15-minute PowerPoint presentation has 15 slides. Which presentation is shorter?



Obviously, both are 15-minute presentations. They are the same length.

But time and again, I talk to people who reduce the number of slides in their PowerPoint because they want to make the presentation “shorter.” They think that if they have fewer slides, they will talk for a shorter amount of time. Often, they don’t take material out, as much as they condense it on the remaining slides.²

That’s completely the wrong way to think about it.

Next time you have a presentation, think about how long you have to present and build your story to fill the allotted time. Then create an appropriate number of slides to support your presentation. You may have more slides and move through them quickly. Or only a handful of slides.

But remember that the length of your presentation has almost nothing to do with how many slides you have.

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Bob Wertz is a creative director, type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.

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1. This applies to you even if you are using Keynote, Prezi or a PDF. ↩︎

2. I’ve seen people cut slides and have their presentations grow longer, rambling as they try to squeeze in all that they’ve “cut.” ↩︎

Nov 12, 2009 ∞

Soup, Spoons and Social Media

This post was originally posted on November 12, 2009 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.

I went to Subway last week. I don’t typically eat at Subway, but there is one by my office and I didn’t have much time for lunch. As I walked in, on the door, there was a window cling encouraging me to order soup with a combo. When I got in line, I looked up and there on the menu was an ad encouraging me to order soup. At the register there was another sign.

So I ordered soup.

I grabbed a seat. And realized I didn’t have a spoon. I looked up by the straws and napkins. There were forks and knives, but no spoons. So I asked the woman behind the counter – the same woman who sold me the soup – if they had any spoons. After asking another employee, she confirmed that they had no spoons in the restaurant.

The big picture

It seems both silly and odd that a franchisee would go to all the trouble of putting up all the signs and ads and then mess up something as simple as having spoons.

But I think this type of thing is very common in business. Often, we see people obsess over seemingly insignificant details, only to completely overlook a major issue. They work on the details and lose sight of the big picture.

As designers, we see this a lot.

Clients spend time and energy critiquing minor elements of a design, but often forget to shore up the logistical issues that support a campaign. Marketing and design are critical, but so is customer service and support. Think about my Subway story for a second. The marketing worked. I entered the store. And I purchased soup. However because of a minor – but critical – oversight, I was a dissatisfied customer.

Social media and a lack of spoons

Right now, social media is all the rage. Everyone seems to be talking about how social media can help their business. Worrying that they’ll be left behind if they aren’t on Twitter or Facebook. Consultants are aggressively selling social media services.

But I fear many of these folks are losing sight of the big picture. Social media is a tactic. And yes, it can be an effective and powerful tactic. But as companies develop their social media plans, they cannot forget that it is just the beginning of the customer relationship. Strategically, you need to think through the entire customer experience. What are you going to do with your customers after you reach out to them through social media? How do you want to engage your customers on a continuing basis?

I’m not saying social media is bad or that it isn’t important. There are absolutely uses for social media in business and marketing. Just remember that the social media tactics are only the beginning. You and your company need to prepare for a long-term customer relationship.

Or in other words, when you decide to sell soup, make sure you are ready to provide spoons.

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Bob Wertz is a creative director, type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.

Jun 1, 2009 ∞

Evolving Screen Design: Star Trek and the Viewscreen

This post was originally posted on June 1, 2009 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.

One of the defining design characteristics of a ship in the Star Trek Universe is the forward viewscreen. And in the J.J. Abrams reboot of Star Trek, the entire concept of the viewscreen has also been reimagined.

By looking at how our vision of the future has evolved, we can often learn more about how we as a society have changed. And I think by looking at how the concept of the viewscreen has changed over the last four decades, I think we can draw some conclusions about how we have changed as culture and where we are going.



The Original Viewscreen

In Gene Roddenberry’s original Star Trek TV Show, the view screen was primarily a giant screen showing the outside. Very rarely, the screen would be used to show scientific data.



At the time, in the late 60’s, that concept was enough to seem futuristic. TV’s were still a relatively young technology. A screen that size providing live pictures with the ability to show content from the ship’s computer… That was the future. Computers were room-sized devices with limited capabilities. The whole concept would have seemed very advanced.

The expectation was that interaction with a large viewscreen would be passive. It was something to watch, more like a TV than a computer interface.

To the big screen and back to the small screen

When the Star Trek series moved to the big screen in the late 70’s and into the 80’s, the viewscreen concept was only slightly refined. The expectation was still that the viewscreen provided a passive experience. Some odd touches were added, like a digital clock over the screen.



With the success of the movie franchise, Star Trek: The Next Generation launched into syndicated television. Because the series took place even further in the future, they took the established concepts and “enhanced” the technology. The viewscreen evolved, but only from a technical level. The screen was now “holographic.” (Note: I’m assuming this means the images were more realistic.)

The way the crew actually used and interacted with the screen was still passive and static. And through the three series that followed, the viewscreen never really did much more than provide pretty pictures.

Reimagining the Viewscreen

When Abrams and crew started work on the reboot, they faced a challenge of honoring the style of the past and while projecting a modern, futuristic feel:

We had the weird challenge of having to take a 43 year old vision of the future and make it a current vision of the future. I wanted the movie to feel as tactile and tangible and as real as possible, but given what our computer interfaces are like now, its preposterous to assume that hundreds of years from now there won’t be some version of holographic screens and things that seem almost ubiquitous now in science fiction.

-Abrams in an interview with Memory Alpha

We as a culture have evolved to expect more from our “viewscreens.” Many of our TV channels have crawls and information graphics. Look at what CNN produced during the elections or what ESPN News does on a daily basis. Our computers provide constant updates. Even our cars and phones have interactive interfaces. We expect modern screens to do more than just show us pictures. We expect them to inform us.



That old concept of a passive viewscreen has been discarded in the new Star Trek movie. The giant viewscreen acts as a heads up display for the ship. Warnings, current speed, the health of the away team, status of the ship and more appear over the top of the screen. And the information that is provided is contextual, only appearing when needed or applicable.

We have become a viewscreen culture

Looking at the new Star Trek viewscreen, it feels futuristic. And what that really means is that it feels like a radically advanced version of where we are now.

I think that we have become a viewscreen culture. We have become comfortable interacting with screens in a way that wasn’t comprehended in the late 60’s and wasn’t fully understood even in the 80’s and 90’s. In fact, we are more than just comfortable. We now expect our screens to provide us information and feedback.

As the web, digital television, phones and computers evolve, our cultural expectations of the screens and surfaces around us with continue to change and evolve. We as designers are already starting to see this. People expect more from their web sites and other digital interfaces. They expect these tools to interact with them. To provide the information they need when they need it.

What designers need to remember is that this is just the beginning. People will continue to become more and more comfortable with screen-based content. And we must continue to push the limits of the medium to provide the interaction and capabilities that our society is beginning to expect.

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Bob Wertz is a creative director, type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.