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:
Set a specific goal.
Figure out a test to measure it: a survey, a timer, a standardized test, etc.
Make sure everyone knows how important the test is.
Provide rewards for people who achieve the test objectives. And penalize people who don’t meet the test objectives.
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.
Management pats themselves on the back for great test results.
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:
Engineers design products (cars, cell phones, etc.) that meet specific test objectives, but not real life usage.
Customer service reps in banks, car dealerships and retail stores remind you over and over to answer “highly satisfied” on a random survey.
Teachers teach to the test.
Managers make short sighted decisions to stay under budget.
Advertisers make really annoying online ads to improve click through rates.
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.
Bob Wertz is a creative director, type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.
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… ↩︎
This post was originally posted on June 13, 2015 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.
I’m more of a college basketball fan, but lately, I’ve been watching some NBA playoff games. And now that the finals are upon us, we get to see the world’s best basketball player in LeBron James against the world’s best shooter in Steph Curry.
There’s a really interesting contrast here. LeBron James was anointed as the next Michael Jordan in high school and some of his games were televised. He was 18 years old when the Clevland Cavaliers drafted him first overall. He was an MVP in Cleveland. Took his talents to Miami and won two championships. This year, he returned home to Cleveland to try and win a title for his hometown. And now he’s led Cleveland to the finals to compete for the organizations’s first NBA championship.
Despite the fact that he was the son of a former NBA player, Steph Curry didn’t have a single major college scholarship offer. He was considered undersized by most programs. He played his college ball at Davidson near Charlotte, NC and made a name for himself in the NCAA tournament. He worked his way through the ranks, proving himself at every step along the way. And he’s now led his Golden State Warriors to the NBA Finals.
One player took a direct route to success. Another took a more circuitous path. And while it makes a great story, it doesn’t really matter. These two world class athletes took different paths. But now, they are in the same place. We tend to focus on the path someone has taken to succeed. But there is rarely a single path to success and that’s a great thing.
Some people are obsessed with corporate paths to success. They downplay the victories for companies they don’t like or understand.
Look at consumer’s perceptions of Apple and Google. Apple fans hate Google’s tendency to give products away and make money via advertising. And Google fans lament the perceived high cost of Apple products and their limited customization. Apple’s been around since the 1980s, grew fast, crashed and then grew into the most valuable company in the world. Google was founded in the 90’s, started fast and continues to expand into new markets. They have taken different paths to success, but they are both successful. Yet, commentators discount their successes because they don’t like or understand the path they have taken.
Other people are obsessed with paths to individual success. Getting into the best colleges. Belonging to the right organizations. Having the right things on their resume. This pressure starts very young. My kids have educational opportunities that didn’t exist for me. Inquiry-style preschools. Magnet elementary schools. Enrichment programs. But the result of this is that everyone is focusing on the “right” path earlier and earlier.
In the design world, I hear these all the time. You’ve got to go to a big market to be successful. You can never grow in an inhouse environment. You’ve got to work at an agency or large design firm before you strike out on your own. Someone actually once told me that I’d never get any where if I didn’t learn Flash. And while some of these bits of advice might be the most direct way to achieve success, it is by no means the only way to become successful.
You can’t completely disregard the path someone takes. It helps shape them and make them the person they’ve become. But we can learn something from Curry and James. Your path doesn’t really matter if you are focused on your goals.
Just because you don’t follow the accepted path doesn’t limit what you can accomplish. And if you do follow the direct path, it doesn’t minimize your accomplishments. Two amazing basketball players – Lebron James and Steph Curry – that have led their teams to the exact same place via two very different paths. But this week, they are both competing for an NBA championship.
Bob Wertz is a creative director, type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. His blogging journey started in 2008 with a Squarespace hosted blog.
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.
This post was originally posted on March 29, 2014 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.
I had one of those geek out moments with a client this week. I mentioned that I typically drink a cup of Earl Grey tea each morning. To which he responded: “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.” After we stopped laughing, we had to explain Captain Picard’s obsession with Earl Grey tea to some confused coworkers.
Afterwards, I had to come to the realization that a TV show that aired in 1987 affects my behavior today.
I was in middle school when the fictional Star Trek captain first ordered his beverage of choice from the replicator. At the time, we had hot tea in the house, but it was Mint or Lemon-flavored. I mostly would drink it when I was sick. But there was no Earl Grey that I remember.
Star Trek: The Next Generation ran for a long time and still runs in syndication today. I’m not sure when I started to drink Earl Grey, but it was sometime during or just after college. I’m sure I decided to buy some tea and when faced with too many options, I simply went with the option I “knew.”
It makes me wonder just how many other choices I’ve made are directly or indirectly traced back to television and media. I know I have a slight Nike bias because I grew up in Chicago during the Michael Jordan years. But other than Earl Grey and an affinity for Nike, I can’t think of any other long lasting influence that a show or movie has made on me. I’m sure there are many more but I can’t piece them together right now.
That said, I really like my Earl Grey tea. And I’ll happily have a cup every morning. But I’ll probably never think of it the same way again.
Bob Wertz is a creative director, type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. His blogging journey started in 2008 with a Squarespace hosted blog.
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.
Bob Wertz is a creative director, type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.
This applies to you even if you are using Keynote, Prezi or a PDF. ↩︎
I’ve seen people cut slides and have their presentations grow longer, rambling as they try to squeeze in all that they’ve “cut.” ↩︎
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.
Bob Wertz is a creative director, type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.
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 new Enterprise viewscreen display various data, including speed. Image via startrekmovie.com. Copyright Paramount/CBS.
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.
A rare instance of the original Enterprise using its viewscreen to display data from the ship’s computer. Image via Memory Alpha. Copyright Paramount/CBS.
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.
Nothing says the future like a digital alarm clock. Image via Memory Alpha. Copyright Paramount/CBS.
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.
The new Enterprise viewscreen displaying a warning. Image via startrekmovie.com. Copyright Paramount/CBS.
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.
Bob Wertz is a creative director, type designer, Ph.D. student and researcher living in Columbia, South Carolina. He’s been blogging since 2008.
This post was originally posted on November 29, 2008 on Sketchbook B. It’s reposted here as part of a project to move some of my favorite writing to my new site.
InShow is AIGA South Carolina’s annual design competition. While most design competitions have plaques, statuettes, acrylic blocks and other mass-produced awards, InShow has the “cube.”
Every year, the cube is manufactured from a different material. It’s been aluminum, concrete, cardboard, acrylic, ceramic and wood and is always roughly 5 inches.
The final prototype for the 2008 InShow Cube.
This year’s cube
The cube for the 14th Annual InShow was manufactured out of electrical boxes and carriage bolts.
I actually built the prototype for this year’s show as a backup for last year. The wood cubes had been shipped, but there was a slight possibility they would not arrive in time for the Gala. So I went to Home Depot and assembled a quick prototype from off the shelf parts. Something we could assemble quickly if the wood awards did not arrive.
However, the wood cubes did arrive in time, so the electrical box prototype was saved for the 2008 show.
Original prototype with duct tape hiding gap in the center and black labeling.
The challenge of the custom award
I was at least partially involved with the last five cubes: cardboard, acrylic, ceramic, wood and now electrical box cubes. And I’ve learned a lot from the process. There are several specific challenges to building a custom award.
Find a material. For the InShow cube, we use a new material every year. And every year, we go through a bunch of concepts and ideas. The cube needs to have a certain aesthetic value - after all it is an award - so the material needs to look nice when completed. And budget is an issue, too. An expensive material or process can completely throw the budget off.
The parts for the electrical box cubes came off the shelf from local hardware stores. We debated a few finishing options - like using duct tape to hide the gap between the boxes or some different combinations of parts. But in the end, we went with the cleanest execution of the concept.
The last five InShow cube prototypes.
Now make 60. It’s one thing to make a prototype. It’s another thing entirely to make 60 awards. Whatever concept you settle on has to scale. Building 60 cubes can be a massive undertaking, especially if you don’t think it through completely. Part of the design process is figuring out the most efficient way to build a larger quantity.
However, 60 is also too small of a number to be efficiently produced using a large-scale manufacturing process. So much of the work is done by hand.
The only scale related issue with the electrical box cube was finding enough electrical boxes. This is not a commonly used box size and is not stocked in large quantities. And with 2 boxes per cube, we were looking for 120 boxes. I had to buy all the stock at three different hardware stores to find enough boxes.
Whose award is it? The hardest and most time consuming part of building a custom award is personalization. The award has the name of the winning firm and title of entry. We also have a handful of judge’s awards that need to look a little different than the regular award.
I used a Dymo 3-D label maker to put the names on the awards. On the prototype, I used black labels and spray painted a black InShow logo. I wanted the label to look more intentional and so I experimented with different combinations. I finally settled on silver labels - which meant I had to spray paint the completed labels. I was a little more time consuming, but I felt the more subtle effect from silver labels on the silver box was worth the extra effort.
I changed the color of the InShow logo from black to dark gray (although most people still thinks it looks black). The special judges awards sported magenta logos - an accent color we picked up from the Call for Entries mailer.
Four prototype faceplates for the awards.
So what’s next?
I have no idea.1 Lots of concepts have been thrown around, and every year, it becomes that much harder to find another concept. But inevitably, someone will come up with a material and an execution that will work.
Okay, I have a few ideas. And even a few more prototypes… ↩︎
