Terry Blanchard

You’ve heard me rave about how much I love my Mini Cooper in articles such as What is Great Design? But I’d like to tell you about how I got one, and how I became hooked on them.

I’m not a car guy by any stretch of the imagination. I don’t tinker under the hood. If you ask me how much torque my car has you will be met with a blank stare and a raised eye brow. I’m also not that extravagent when it comes to cars. I am fortunate to have a few good friends with some amazing cars. Porsche’s, Corvette’s, Audi’s, and a few Ferrari’s sprinkled here and there. And they’ve all been crazy enough to let me drive them. When my college pal, and fellow Microsoft alum, let me drive his Ferrari 355 I was visibly shaking and almost threw up thinking that his car was almost worth as much as my house.

As much as I love all of these beautiful, high-performance works of art, I just don’t have the desire to spend that much money on one. The reality of my life is this. I drive to and from work Monday through Friday, 26 miles a day. I’m a commuter. All other forms of driving are done in our family mini-van because I’ve got kids and a wife. So, I have a real hard time dropping $100K on a commuter car. I want to … and maybe I will when I’m 40 … but not now.

Back in 2004 my lease was expiring on my current vehicle and I was looking for something new. A good friend of mine, who owned a Mini Cooper, kept harrassing me,

“You should get a Mini, Terry. You’ll love it. Best car I’ve ever owned. It’s awesome.”

“I’m sure it is, but, uhhh … I’m not sure I’m a … uhhh … a Mini kind-of guy.”

He didn’t stop. He was very persistent. It almost ended our friendship. He finally said,

“I’ll tell you what, Blanchard. Go test-drive one, and I’ll never say another word. Ever. All you have to do is drive one. No strings.”

“Fine! I’ll take one out tomorrow!”

I show up at the Mini dealership. I didn’t do any research, didn’t look into to prices, stats, or reviews. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Zippo. Why? Because I wanted to shut my friend up. Plain and simple. The salesman approaches me,

“Hi, interested in taking this bad girl out for a test drive?”

“You bet. But I must advise you … I want to really see what this car can do. I want to push it’s limits.”

“I sure hope so. Otherwise, you’ll offend her. Let’s go.”

Personalizing the car by calling it “her”. Nice touch, salesman. But I’m onto your sneaky sales tactics and psychological ways. Don’t mess with me. I’m here to settle a bet, nothing more.

We get out into to some industrial, low-traffic area and we’re on a straightaway. I tell him I want to test the stopping distance and advise him to hold on. He’s unphased.

SLAM!

I hit the brakes full force while we’re doing about 80 mph (approx. 130 km/h) and the car is at a standing stop in what seems like a nanosecond. Hmmm. Impressive. But, it’s a small car. It should do that. I try to be unimpressed in front of the sales guy. He then points out to me,

“There’s a 90 degree right-hander ahead. Based on your driving, it’s clear you know how to take a corner. You can take this one at approximately 60 mph (approx. 95 km/h). I don’t respond verbally. Instead, I hit the accelerator. Being unfamiliar with the corner, I err on the side of caution. I take the corner around 50 mph, hit the apex perfectly, accelerate quickly out of the corner. Not a single tire squeal. Internally, my mind is saying, “Holy fuck! That was awesome!” The salesman turns to me and says,

“You can do better than that. Go around again. I said 60 mph would be fine.”

I think I was just told. Yup, I was called out. The gloves came off, and he was coming right at me. Alright, let’s go. I loop around and hit the corner again, about 70 mph. There was tire squeal, and I almost swung too far wide, but I kept it off the curb. What I couldn’t do, was keep that huge smile off my face.

We drive back to the dealership and I pull into the parking spot located in front when I utter the worst possible sentence any uninformed buyer can make,

“I’ll take it.”

“Great! I’ll go draw up the paperwork.”

Idiot, idiot, idiot. I’m already devising my exit strategy as I follow him back to his office. Price, maintenance, residual. I keep ticking these items off in my head. One of them will get me out of this mess! Not one of them did. Not because of a super-slick salesman. Nope, just an awesome car, price, experience, and overall joy.

I’ll talk more about the specifics in my next article.

Written by Terry Blanchard \\ tags: Cars, Design, Mini Cooper

Imagine a completely normal paper clip. How many ideas can you generate for what else it can be used for? You have 2 minutes. Go.

This exercise is one of the classic creativity tests to determine how skilled you are at brainstorming. The more ideas, the better. But how innovative are your ideas?

There is a very clear connection between the time you use to find ideas and the quality of them. So how do you make the most of the time you’ve been given? First, empty your mind of the ideas that you know about – they naturally come first. Now you have the space to think in a more lateral and untraditional way. If you use another two minutes on the above test, how many more ideas can you generate? What separates the last list from the first?

In the 60’s, many creative theories tested the connection between time and the quality of ideas. The results of the tests were not surprising. To generate good ideas, it takes time. This can be extra minutes, hours, or days.

Enter the “good enough” culture. It’s about making do with the ideas that come first. This is usually masked in ideas that we already know about. Traditional, safe ideas. We don’t take the time to invest in the more creative, new thought out ideas. We rush to move on. As long as it fulfills the minimum requirements, or is the first idea to generate unanimous approval, then it is obviously good enough. Time is up. Next!

In my posting about What is Great Design, Alan Cooper states that first-to-market is no match for best-to-market. Innovation and new thinking is crucial in today’s tough competitive environment. The challenge today concerns time and courage. Courage to focus on more than just performance and results. Courage to deviate from the norm. Courage to actually invest the right amount of time required to elevate to the next level. Courage to be better than just good enough.

Written by Terry Blanchard \\ tags: Brainstorming, Interaction Design

You would expect that kind of title from a designer, right? Who wouldn’t. So let’s back that up with a real example. The Motorola RAZR was one of the hottest selling cellular phones during the 2005 selling season and well into the 2006 season as well. In fact, it was selling at a rate of about four million units each month, or roughly 1.5 phones every second. If Motorola were to spend another million or two improving the design, they would make it back in a day.

In a single day.

Design is something you only have to pay once for your product. It’s a part of the fixed costs in the equation, not the variable costs. But it adds value to every unit sold. That’s what Thomas C. Gale, the famous Chrysler automobile designer who retired in 2001, meant when he said that,

Good design adds value faster than it adds cost.

I like this Thomas C. Gale guy. He knew what he was taking about.

Written by Terry Blanchard \\ tags: Chrysler, Design, Motorola, RAZR, Thomas C. Gale

I hate my furnace.

I really, really, can’t stand it. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever disliked anything as much as my furnace. Ever. What is it about my furnace that evokes such strong emotion and contempt for something that simply pushes air around my home?

Functionally, the furnace does everything it is suppose to:

• When heat is requested from my thermostat, it fires up the natural gas burners, warms up and pushes warm air through my ducts
• When cooler air is requested from my thermostat, it doesn’t fire up the natural gas burners and pushes the cool air from the central air conditioner through my ducts

All of these interactions have taken place with the thermostat. There is only one interaction that I actually have with the furnace, and they blew it. Big time.

Changing the filters.

While on paper this sounds incredibly easy, this is how engineering only to requirements instead of also engineering to usage scenario cause this type of frustration.

First, let’s talk about good furnace design. This was the type of furnace I had in my previous home. By the way, that’s not me in the hot-pink sweater. Had I known how good I had it with my old furnace, I might have taken a few pictures of this process. But I didn’t so I borrowed this one. Let’s review. No tools required, no disassembly of the furnace, you don’t even have to turn it off. You can “hot-plug” the filters. When you start to pull the filter out, it automatically switches off. It won’t turn back on until you install another filter. This also prevents people from running their furnace without a filter, which my previous owner did for his entire 8 year occupancy. That’s a whole different post. With this design, you can replace an old filter with a brand new one in less than 10 seconds.
Now let’s talk about the Frankenstein that is my current furnace. For starters, my furnace requires two filters, not just one. So my “filter budget” has just doubled. Let’s talk about that. Unlike the nice 90 degree angle filter in the good design above, both of mine sit at 45 degree angles to the air flow to create a “V” inside the plenum. Yup, I said plenum, not furnace. That’s the yellow part at the top of the furnace picture to the left. It’s where the air is brought into the furnace. It’s also where there are no access points to the filters except from the bottom up. Remember, there are two filters that need to placed in there. If you had x-ray vision, and I’m not saying that you don’t, you could look through the plenum in this picture and see the two filters sitting in a “V” position.

The picture on your right is looking up to one of the filters. This is where the fun begins. First off, you’ve got the return duct right there in the middle. Since that wasn’t enough pain to put me through, the brilliant minds behind this beast of a creation decide to mount the electronics on the right-hand side and the furnace and the pièce de résistance, the furnace motor behind the return duct.

Now that we’ve talked about all obstacles, let’s walk through my misery.

1. Remove the first filter. I’m not a big guy and I’ve got long, lanky arms. However, even with my long reach and fairly thin arms, I need to reach through that little gap on the left-hand side of the return duct, over the furnace motor, and try to pull down the first filter. To do this, I need to lift it up, pull the bottom of the filter towards the small gap between the left-hand side of the furnace wall and the motor. The gap is about the same size as the thickness of the filter.
2. Remove the second filter. This one is more difficult because it’s on the other side of the furnace. The side I can’t get to because of the electronics box. Similar process through. Reach long, lanky arm through the little gap on the left-hand side of the furnace, over the motor, across the bar that holds the bottom of the filters in place, carefully maneuver filter through small gap on left-hand side of furnace wall and motor.
3. Install first new filter. This is just the reverse of the first two instructions. Only it’s worse. Removing the old furnace filters I can be careless and rip them out, cut them on sides of the furnace motor, or better yet all the little nail/screw endings that marry the furnace outlet to the plenum. I can’t do this when I’m installing them.

Needless to say, after 5 or 6 fantastic, rust-filled, scratches all over my arms and hands, and an average of 15 minutes of my life spent fighting with this horrible furnace, I’m ready to strangle a kitten. Nothing puts me in such a pissy mood than that one, and only, interaction I have with my furnace.

This post was brought to you by the letter “D”, the number “7″, and how not to design a furnace.

Written by Terry Blanchard \\ tags: Furnace, Industrial Design, Interaction Design, Usage Scenarios

Ben Shneiderman wrote in his article Designing for Fun:

The psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi talks about the flow experience of optimal performance when people are creatively facing challenges to achieve personal goals. When people are in the flow state they suspend their fears, put aside their anxieties, and engage fully in the experience of the moment. Concentration is intense, time vanishes, and people experience mastery. Sports commentators talk about being “in the zone”; archers talk about the target coming to the arrow.

We’ve all had these moments at some point in our life. If you didn’t click on the flow link above, you should. It’s fascinating stuff and something designers should pack away in their toolbox. In Part 1 of this article we talked about different aspects of the design to see if there was a single silver bullet to great design. There’s not. But don’t be discouraged. The good news is, I have my Three Laws of Great Design. Hey, if Asimov can have them for Robotics, I can have them for great design.

Now here’s where Ben and I agree on what we think are the foundation of a great design:

I believe designers must address three almost equally important goals that contribute to fun-in-doing: (1) provide the right functions so that users can accomplish their goals, (2) offer usability plus reliability to prevent frustration from undermining the fun and (3) engage users with fun-features.

Mine are a little more concise and easier to remember. I call mine the 3 F’s:

• Function
• Form
• Fun

Let’s break these down:

1. Provide the right functions so that users can accomplish their goals. Form without function might have it’s place in the fashion industry, but not in an interactive medium. Your users need to have a reason to use your product. It might be to blow off some steam in a first-person-shooter, a quick solitaire break at work to distract and entertain, or find that one channel out of the 450 available to you that has the show you want.
2. Offer usability plus reliability to prevent frustration from undermining the fun. This is why my Mac is fun, and my Windows laptop is not. If my computer crashes, I am immediately ejected from “the zone.” My TiVo was rock-solid. It was dependable and highly usable. My DirecTV replacement fails in both those categories, but they are “functionally” equivalent.
3. Engage users with fun-features. When the functionality and usability have been accommodated in the design, it is time to add the extra touches and flourishes that delight and amuse users. Apple did this by taking something as lame as data backup and making it very engaging with Time Machine.

I just attended the Vancouver International Gaming Summit and the Opening Keynote was an interview with Shane Kim, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Game Studios. Towards the end of the interview he was asked,

“Canada is a country of about 30 million, yet there seems to be a tremendous amount of great content coming from here. Why do you think that is?” His answer came quick.

“Canadians like to goof off.” He was quite serious. Shane still lives in Vancouver so he can get away with saying that before the session turns into a hockey bench-clearing brawl. He continued on.

“Canadians like to have fun. It’s very much a part of their culture, their being, who they are. That comes through in the games they make.”

What does that mean? Well, I think that means your signature in the design. Your mark. All designs have it. What’s yours? If you have a playful personality, it will shine through in your designs if you are working in an environment that fosters creativity. An environment that fosters creativity … sounds like another post to me!

I’d like to leave you with a parting quote from Ben:

It’s great that designers are turning attention to fun, as a separate design space, distinct from functionality, usability, and reliability. Did anyone notice that fun is part of functionality?

Written by Terry Blanchard \\ tags: Design, Interaction Design, Usability, Visual Design