Good Experience Live V

Gillian Zoe Segal: New York Characters

Gillian Zoe Segal is a photographer and author of New York Characters. Segal's work has appeared in the New York Times and Time Out New York. Here is a rough transcript of her talk at Good Experience Live:

I went straight from undergraduate at the University of Michigan to law school and then straight to work as a lawyer. I realized that working as a lawyer wasn’t for me. I 1997 I enrolled in the international center of photography. Every day I would walk from where I lived in the upper west side to the school which at the time was located on the upper east side. I kept seeing familiar faces. Including this man who ended up on the cover of my book. I went up to him and asked who are you what are you doing and why are you always here? He's known as the mayor of the reservoir. It's become his office. And he's well known within the New York City jogging world. What makes New York the best city in the world is the people. Among the 8 million of us, there are some that stand out in the crowd and really give the city its character. Some are highly visible. Some are well known in their neighborhoods. And some are involved in their little subcultures.

I set out to document these characters, these wonderful personalities. Joe Franklin became famous as a radio host in 1950 and then started a talk show. He's now known as the king of memorabilia. He has an office on Times Square, and the ceiling is falling in. His office is piled high with clutter. You literally have to walk in sideways or you'll cause an avalanche.

My next character is Curtis Sliwa who became famous for founding the Guardian Angels in 1979. One of the ways I found my characters was by asking people I photographed for recommendations. Curtis sat down with his crazy rolodex and gave me all sorts of crazy numbers. I'd also show up In a particular neighborhood and ask who's famous around here.

These are the Vodels. They're kind of the darlings of the New York art world. He's a retired postal worker. She's a retired librarian. Since they got married, they'd use her salary to pay rent. And they'd use his to buy artwork.

This is fireman Ed. He's a massive fan of the Jets. He's almost as famous as the team is. He always sits In the same section. He sits on the shoulders of his brother and leads that cheer J-E-T-S Jets Jets Jets! He takes his job very seriously. He even confided in me that sometimes he gets so nervous before games that he throws up.

This is the lemon ice king of Corona. He's been in business since 1949 in Queens. He, too, takes his job very seriously. He has one rule: No mixing flavors.

This guy is named Radio Man, but he's really about movies and television. He spends his days riding his bike between every movie and TV set. He's really a celebrity groupie. He even has a hotline you can call to learn where the shoots are. You'd think that celebrities wouldn't like him. But they do really like him.

This is the Polar Bear Club president. The club was founded in 1903. On Coney Island, they swim every Sunday between September and May, when the water is at its most freezing.

Johnny Footman is New York's oldest taxi driver. He's 84 years old and has been driving taxis since 1945.

You can't really live in New York City and escape Rev. Al Sharpton's presence. He's one of our most powerful politicians even though he's never been elected to an office.

This is a crowd pleaser. He's our subway dermatologist. He became known because of his tasteful ads in the subway. What I was curious about was how many doctors were in his practice. He is successful, but he's the only doctor in his practice. How does he come up with those ads? He makes them up himself. He shows them to his family, and if they say you cant air that its disgusting, he runs them.

Here we have John McEnroe. When you think of John McEnroe, you think about how good he is at tennis, but you also think of his temper and his famous temper tantrums. He really is like that in real life.

This is Kitty Carlisle Hart. When I met her she was 93 years old and still so with it. She represents New York's high society.

This man I call the subway dancer. He's one of the most famous subway performers. He dances with his doll Lupita, whose made with a broomstick and a mask. She's attached to his feet, and they dance to salsa music.

One of the benefits of coming to a live lecture is that you get to see some of the people who didn't make it into the book. This is the soup nazi, and he really is like he was portrayed on that Seinfeld episode. He and I got into a fight, so he wouldn't sign my release. So he's not in the book, but I can show you what he's like today.

Good Experience Live IV

Stewart Butterfield: Possibilities, Constraints, and Experience

Stewart Butterfield is president of Ludicorp Research and Development Ltd. and founder of the 5k competition, a lo-fi, high-profile design contest. A member of the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences, he recently served as a nominating judge in the Best Practices category for the Webby Awards. Here is a rough transcript of his talk at Good Experience Live:

I was directing a design group at a Web agency, and one of the designers was developing a template. They were really big and super ornate and were getting upward of 60k. I told him that they had to be smaller than 25k, and he said, "No way! There's no way anyone can design something smaller than 25k." Oh, so? So I got the idea of holding a contest to develop Web sites smaller than 5 kilobytes. That's 40,960 bits. Those bits are either on or off. That's about 850 words in English. It's a pretty small picture. There's an infinite range of possibilities of things that could be 5k in size.

There's some math behind this. 2 to the power of 1 is one dimension. It's a possibility space. 2 to the power of 2 is two dimensions, a plane. And 2 to the power of 3 is three dimensions, an object. 2 to the power of 4 is a hypercube, about the limit of what we can draw on a plane. In that case, one node has three neighbors. In 5k, there are 2 to the power of 49,960 possibilities. 40,960 is a mind-blowing number of dimensions. And 2 to the power of 40,960 is even more mind-blowing. It's more than the number of milliseconds since the big bang multiplied by the number of particles in the universe.

When we started the contest in 2000, the average home page might have been about 80k. Amazon.com was 120k. So 5k is pretty small. Nevertheless, every point in a possibility space differs from its neighbors in some minimally different way. The more complex the space, the more minimally different neighbors each point will have.

The reason 5k seems small is because there's a progressive process of adding constraints. One is the way we encode information. After coding something in ASCII, you have to layer HTML. Maybe you layer cascading style sheets. Maybe you layer Javascript. All of these constraints make the possibility space smaller.

What makes sense? Constraints of natural language. Constraints of utility. Constraints of aesthetics. What is beautiful? The process of design is often the identification of a tiny island in a possibility space. If you look at the 5k competition, there's some interesting stuff. Every year, themes will come up. People will get similar ideas.

That's because constraints are everywhere. Think of music, architecture, and poetry. Experimentation usually means playing with constraints. Additional constraints are often employed in creative competition such as 48-hour filmmaking, three-day novel writing, and two-ink design competitions. There are all sorts of contests that are like the 5k.

Introduction of constraints motivates people to become more creative. The project I'm working on now is a massive multiplayer game for the Web called Game Neverending. Games are very interesting. The rules of the game are constraints. When you define a game, it's defining a set of constraints. In researching games and play, I came across this quote from Martin Buber: "Play is the exultation of the possible." And then we have Richard Pew: "Design is the successive application of constraints until only a unique product is left."

Good Experience Live III

Elizabeth Peaslee: What I Learned in School

Elizabeth Peaslee is vice president of customer experience at Travelocity. Here is a rough transcript of her talk at Good Experience Live:

Someone once referred to Travelocity as the old lady of the Internet. 18 years is a long time. For 11 years we had a product called EasySaabre, which wasn't so easy. If 18 is old, I'm in trouble, so I changed the title of my presentation from "Growing Old Gracefully"
to "What I Learned in School."

After launch, we had a pretty basic page, a branding person's dream given the size of that logo. There were some ads, and there were four buttons because there were four things you could do. In 1997, we added a search tool for low fares. There were five prominent buttons. I refer to these as our Crayola years because everything was very colorful. Travel is colorful and fun.

In 1998, we moved to a standard two-column design, what I call our junior high "studious wallflower" years. In 1999 we added a third column. We wanted to get everything people could do on the home page. We had a rather industrial-looking set of buttons. By the end of that year we moved back to a reverse two-column design.

In early 2000 we bought Preview Travel. Interviewing people about what they liked about Preview Travel was that it was fun. So we added more color. And with the merger, our home page started looking like an org chart. People asked us why we had everything on the home page when all they really wanted to do was go on a trip.

So senior year for us was about consumer research, customer interviews, and lots of user tests. This was a project we kicked off in 2001, and we decided we could take our time. We didn't want to rush our next redesign. Interviews with customers led to our next design phase. We picked three designs we thought were pretty good, and we took those to user tests. We could get 200-400 people in less than a week rather than eight in a day. We needed facts. We needed to be able to go to people and say this is why we should do something.

One of the three designs came back far exceeded the other two. Now that we knew what the page should look like, we had to add the functionality. People said personalization was very important, so we added a fare watcher. We went into another phase of testing. This was not a quick project. We tested the new home page design against our current home page design, as well as the home pages of our two biggest competitors. It was viewed much more favorably.

We rolled out that page at the beginning of 2002, a year after we started. One of our goals was to get people off the home page. We measured that throughput and bail out. We cut the bail-out rate off the home page by half. 100% throughput isn't realistically attainable.

This is the design we've had for about a year and a half. And the measurement we've been able to do has gotten the rest of the organization focusing on customer experience. Usability testing didn't use to be a discipline. We've shown people that usability testing, focus groups, and talking to your customers is important and useful. Graduation is really just the beginning. We've made a few tweaks. We improved our search tool. We reduced the number of ads. We put the personalization front and center. It's slightly fluid.

What's next? We are constantly looking at the home page. It has a little bit of visibility. Everyone looks at the home page. What's the value of something on the home page? How many people click on that? Do we make any money off of that? Maybe something should be taken off the home page. We use research and testing to justify the changes we make. We have data behind it, and we're able to show results.

Good Experience Live II

Ken Jackson: How New York Is Different

Ken Jackson is the president and CEO of the New-York Historical Society, the oldest cultural organization in the state of New York. Jackson is also a professor of history and the social sciences at Columbia University. Here is a rough transcript of his talk at Good Experience Live:

I'm delighted to welcome you to the New-York Historical Society. Many of you are not from New York. I am not from New York. As you might be able to tell from my voice, I'm from somewhere else: Memphis. But I share Mark's enthusiasm for New York. How is New York different than other places?

One way is that it's old. New York is older than Boston and Philadelphia. We're thrown off by the skyscrapers, but New York is literally the oldest city in the country. Other cities have disappeared. To call them a city in our own time is really a stretch. History in some sense in this country is for losers. Because New York won, it's often forgotten. What we think is historic is wrack and ruin. Lower Manhattan is historic, but we don't think about it as such because it's not old. 1624, what's that? In European or Asian terms, that's insignificant. Another reason New York is different is because it's old as a big city. New York has been big for a long time.

What difference has history made? New York is famous for its rudeness. We tend to think of that in a negative sense, but New York is an entrepreneurial city. We were founded by the Dutch, not the Puritans. Boston was founded by the Puritans as a religious experiment. New York is about making money. It's a company town. If you know your history, you can predict your future. Cities have history and move in a trajectory. Because the Dutch were here to make money, they were more open to other people. New York became the original melting pot. It was never anything but that. Why do people come here? At the end of the day, people in New York don't care. In a huge city like this, we don't have time to chase down the people we don't like.

What has that got to do with today? All of the life and vitality of American cities is along the edges. That's the North American model. What's on the edges? Office parks and subdivisions. Yes, New York has suburbs, but no one grows up on the edges and feels like there isn't a center. New York is a very centered region. All around the country, cities have been losing urban density. Their boundaries have expanded faster than their population has grown -- except in New York and San Francisco. People move to the suburbs and to Florida, but someone takes their place.

Another difference is where the rich live. New York has more than its share of poor people, but what makes New York different is that the city has a large population of the wealthy in the center of the city. Park Avenue, Fifth Avenue, and Central Park West have the highest real estate values. The richest county per capita -- not per household -- is New York County. That's the island of Manhattan. That's astonishing. If you are very rich, you make a point to document that you are out of New York City 180 days a year so you don't have to pay New York state tax. Even with all of the homeless, unemployed, and underreported actors and actresses, we're still the most wealthy city in the world.

New York is also different in other ways. It's a 24-hour city. You can find a cup of coffee at 3 or 4 in the morning. I do an all-night bike ride every year. We've got good public transportation. One other thing is important. That is safety. When most people think of New York, they don't usually think of safety. But our crime rate is extremely low. Homicide and auto theft is down 70% over the last 10 years. Stranger crime is down 90%. But the real reason New York City is safe is because middle-class people aren't likely to be the victims of homicide. The reason New York City is safe is because we don't have automobile accidents here. Distances are short. You're not in harms way if you walk.

Let me talk about the good experiences. Assuming that being big is good, if you're here, it's because you want to do well in life. You are different. You have accepted the American ethos: to aspire. Maybe New York is the most American of places. Why is it that New York became so big? It wasn't always that way. You could argue that New York has a location that is so fabulous that finally it began to kick in. Another could be luck. After the War of 1812, British manufactured goods destined for American markets ended up in New York. The British merchants made New York their auction place.

Also, people here take charge of their own lives. When you get on the No. 10 bus, you know that there's a schedule, that there's a route, and that there's a fare. Those are managerial concepts, not technical concepts. That originated in New York. The New York Stock Exchange started in 1792. Even though Philadelphia had the first and second banks, New York far surpassed it.

Long before the Civil War, New York isn't even thinking about other cities. People did something to change their luck. We need to have a place that celebrates difference and is open to new experiences. That place is New York. And a place isn't anything without its people.

Good Experience Live

Mark Hurst: What Better Place

Mark Hurst is founder of the Internet consulting firm Creative Good. Previously, Hurst was director of product development at Yoyodyne, an early Internet marketing firm founded by Seth Godin and later bought by Yahoo. Here is a rough transcript of his introduction to Good Experience Live:

I want to take a few minutes to explain why I came to this place, why I created Gel, and what it's all about. I created a slideshow to describe where I was following the dotcom. This is the office we were going to build out just before the peak. We were going to take this sweatshop in the Garment District and transform it into a professional services office. We did, but then we laid everyone off. So I took some time off to go on a road trip.

This is the tent I slept in. I sometimes stayed in Motel 6 when I needed some time off. After 911 I had some family business I needed to take care. Family business completed, I turned west. In Minneapolis at the Mall of America, I got to thinking about experience. At the Mall, there's a line between the experience and the commercial side. There's even a Chapel of Love at the Mall of America. And on the day I was there, a couple got married.

I kept heading west to the mountains. This is the Sitting Bull monument, one man's vision of building something. The Salt Flats were one of my favorite places. It was one of the quietest places I've ever been. One of my least favorite places was not New York, but the Las Vegas version of New York. And then I got home, one of my favorite places.

After traveling across the country and having all of these experiences, I realized that New York was the place I wanted to be. Now is a time to return to our values and want we want to work on. I came back to Good Experience. Experience is more than just fixing Web sites. I wanted to put a conference together that brought together a broad perspective of good experience. New York is the place to do it. New York is an experience in and of itself. What better place to hold this than the New-York Historical Society? I can't think of a more relevant place to hold this event.

Happy May Day! II

London police disperse peaceful protesters. Anarchists take to the streets throughout Europe. Asians agitate for change. Beijing remains quiet because of SARS. Rocks are thrown in Berlin.

And in Boston? Troopers train to carry submachine guns at Logan.

Happy May Day.

Workaday World XXIX

We just got a batch of new Fast Company hats sporting the new logo.



I don't really like wearing hats unless they're stocking caps in the winter. But I made sure I got mine. Red. I'm wearing it now. Will probably tire of that soon.

Conferences and Community VI

I still owe Media Dieticians my wrapup analysis of SXSW Interactive two months after the fact. And I've not posted my notes from the Toronto Comic Arts Festival or Anime Boston, much less the first class in my CCAE course on Boston, Cambridge, and the American Revolution.

So why the heck am I planning to confblog Good Experience Live tomorrow? Because I can. I don't know if I'll be able to practice as immediate a journalism as I did at SXSW, but we'll see if they have WiFi. At the very least, I'll post reports tomorrow night. Then it's back home to Boston for the Media in Transition conference, which I also plan to report on.

Backlog, back off!

Event-O-Dex LV

May 4: Local animator Karen Aqua will screen some of her animation work for Sesame Street at River Gods in Cambridge. Soundtrack music features Ken Field, Franc Graham, Jesse Williams, Mike Duke, Phil Neighbors, Marji Alonso, Steve Langone, Dinty Child, Linda Viens, Carolyn Kaylor, Denise DiZio, Wanetta Jackson, Eric Paull, John Styklunas, Ethan Meyer, Mike Rivard, Dana Colley, Alec Haavik, Rick Barry, Randy Black, Ken Winokur, Dan Kellar, and Mickey Bones.

Music to My Ears XXXVI

Jenn just turned me onto the Buddyrevelles, an interesting pop band from Chicago. Listening to one of their downloadable songs, "Growing Old," I think they sound like a cross between the Smoking Popes and the Beautiful South -- wonderful earnest pop for a cloudy, drizzly day. Sunday afternoon music!

And Marm0t shared a song by the Long Winters from Seattle with me this morning. "New Girl" is a little more powerful in its pop, and the lead singer's voice reminds me of the dude from Zircus, an art-school rock project that recorded the Dave Sim-inspired song "My Astoria."

Workaday World XXVIII

I usually don't like posting purely personal entries in Media Diet, but I've had the most curious day so far. Having gone to bed early last night -- like 10:30, which has been rare in recent weeks -- I had set my alarm for 6 a.m. I wanted to get up early, shower, shave, do the dishes, pack my suitcase for tonight's trip to New York for Good Experience Live, and head into work before the T got too crowded.

But I like to sleep. I really like to sleep. If I wake up from a dream, I try to fall back asleep to chase the dream. This morning, I kept hitting snooze and resetting the alarm until after 8 a.m., at which point I got up. This is my usual way of waking. Snooze, snooze, snooze. The overcast skies didn't help much. As much of a morning person as I am -- and as energetic, hyperactive, and productive as I am during the day -- I need a surprising amount of sleep. I sleep at least eight hours a night. Usually more. Even if I go out. (It helps having a flexible work schedule.) But I make it up by burning brightly during the day. How much sleep do you need?

Is it possible to sleep too much? Seems not. Also, why does the snooze button give you nine more minutes of sleep? And lastly, why is that I always wake up a second or two before the alarm goes off -- instead of when the alarm actually sounds? Am I so in tune with my alarm that some inner working trips my trigger before the alarm itself gets its chance to do so? I always wake up just before the alarm goes off.

In the end, I did most of the dishes, took out the trash and recycling, packed, and hailed a cab to work because of the rain to still arrive at a relatively decent hour -- even if I did hit snooze for two hours. Sheesh. I wish I didn't need so much sleep. Chuck, the door man at the Scotch & Sirloin building, goes to bed at 10 every night and gets up at 3 in the morning. I wish I could do that.

How much sleep do you need?

Cobblestone Pie

If the weather cooperates today and tomorrow -- which it isn't so far -- the Cambridge Department of Public Works will repave the stretch of Franklin Street between Western Avenue and Pearl Street. The street is in somewhat sorry shape, but the repaving is also a shame. Why? On the block right next to my house is a stretch of exposed granite paving stones.



Not far from where I grew up in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, there was an exposed patch of wooden paving blocks that the city's work crews left exposed as a reminder of what once was. Fingers crossed that the Cambridge DPW leaves at least some of the granite paving stones exposed -- either along Franklin Street or in the bus turnaround just off Green Street. To cover them up entirely would be a shame.