#UXfail TweetDeck (and Twitter)

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The first image is the full pop-up window you get when you click on the TweetDeck upgrade link from within the TweetDeck desktop app. Note how the window is not sized well for the content. Not even nearly.

The second image is what happens if you try to resize the window. Granted, part of the problem may be OS X Lion's lack of window chrome (boo, in of itself), or that this is an Adobe AIR app. But did nobody test this? Especially ironic is that this makes it really difficult for the user to GET YOUR PRODUCT.

Yet Another Offensive Aspect of "Homeless Hotspots"

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Let's put aside the obvious patronizing and exploitative features of the BBH-marketing-firm-driven "homeless hotspot" stunt. That's an exercise left to the reader. What I want to focus on are the assumptions, stated by BBH's Saneel Radia on Marketplace, that (1) this is simply using the Street Sheet "model" and (2) that the point of writing, editing, printing, and distributing a newspaper by the homeless and about homeless issues is all about... getting a wee bit of social interaction.

What we're doing is we're taking a model that exists already -- street newspapers. It's really that social interaction point, the ability for them to express themselves, to be a bit entrepreneurial. Again, if you really get into the experience, it is the opposite of condescending. It's very empowering, actually.

I call multiple, steamy layers of BS. Have you ever read Street Sheet? It's usually well made, insightful, and brings to attention issues affecting millions of people that you don't see on CNN. Just recently, the San Francisco-based Street Sheet collected position statements from candidates for District Attorney, had been active in the issue of making MUNI (local public transit) free for youth, and been on the scene at various Occupy protests. Hey, marketers: there's value in content, and content is not fungible.

Also, the process of reporting, writing, editing, producing, and distributing an actual product (as opposed to, say, doing whatever marketing firms do) keeps a person's mind sharp, which is hard to do when you can't afford an iPad or are engaged in daily work beyond survival, and provides skills and job training. There are many stories of homeless people pulling themselves up, as the saying goes, through the work street newspapers provide.

So, those are the "models" street newspapers provide. You think all a homeless person wants is to be graced by your patronizing presence for a few moments, in exchange for a few pennies?

Go market yourself, Saneel.

Mitt and Dale: Why Mitt Romney is a Bad Implementation of a Candidate (and What That Says About Him)

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If you want to know the true measure of someone, it's all about how they react when things aren't going their way. By now, the one thing we really know about Romney as a person (aside from the fact he's fabulously wealthy, to the extent that he and his family are almost on another, gated, branch of the evolutionary tree) is his ability to say jaw-droppingly awkward things when forced to talk to, you know, people. The examples are legion: "I like grits", "the trees are the right height", "who let the dogs out?", "garbage bags", and many, many more. What's in common in these gaffes? Why can we almost see the "I need to note something about an individual or locality, express that I see it, and say that I, too, am that" app load screens come up on Romney's main display?

Of course I'm guessing here, but I think it can be traced back to Dale Carnegie's "Six Ways to Make People Like You". My sense is that this framework is still floating around management training courses that were the Petri dishes Romney swam out of at some point, and since a small use worked once for him, he's upping the dose in order to Make It Work on a large scale. The problem he doesn't see is that it doesn't scale, and it doesn't work when you can't pull it off.

Six ways to make people like you 1. Become genuinely interested in other people. 2. Smile. 3. Remember that a person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language. 4. Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves. 5. Talk in terms of the other person's interests. 6. Make the other person feel important - and do it sincerely.

We can give him a partial pass on #4, as most of the interactions where the Romney suite of apps fail are not interactive, but variants on PowerPoint -- that is, he's presenting, not collecting data. Though his "I give the answers I want" moment near the end of the 11,432nd CNN debate is a fail. And really, not something you want the leader of a nation to be in the habit of saying (accountability is A Good Thing).

As for #1, well, empathy to strangers wasn't in the original design specs for Romney. And, again to be fair, it's a hard thing to ask given the nature of a campaign -- though Bill Clinton was amazing at it (I once heard him at a mall greet of thousands of people, and when someone said he was so-and-so's old roommate, Clinton knew who he was talking about, and asked him personal questions about their mutual friend).

#2 is an interesting case. Of course it's good to smile when you meet people. But again, Romney has taken the "it's good, so more is better" idea to the point it stops working. Or maybe he's afraid that dropping the smile will dock his relatability and likability rating even below that of, say, an STI. Take a look at how Romney holds on to that rictus in tough situations -- being pressed for answers, being challenged in interviews or debates. Is he trying to signal "I'm above this attack", or "this doesn't bother me"? I suspect someone once told him that Carnegie's #2 was key -- because the business world is small, and even if you screw someone over in a deal, you want them to think there's a chance it wasn't personal, just a game, and that there's so little bad blood between you that they'd be willing to get into a position for you to screw them over again.

(You could see something similar, though at a smaller scale, in Wesley Clark's 2004 bid. Look how the military man responds to a military question and compare to his face at the start of a Chuck Todd interview.)

The meat of it is a combination of #1, #3, #5, #6, and the special sauce of trying to show that one can relate. The problems arise in that a) Romney is not genuinely interested in these other people and b) he tries to combine #5 and #6 by saying "I do that, too" -- but not only does he not, he doesn't realize that replacing "that" with his closest match is not a viable substitute.

Just type "Romney NASCAR" into your favorite search engine and you'll see only ridicule about his comment -- at a NASCAR event -- that though he's not a big fan, he has "some great friends that are NASCAR team owners". This is a great example of the big fail of blindly applying Carnegie's rules. If he were honest, he could say something like, "I've never been to one of these -- it seems cool! Tell me more about it?" People actually love sharing their interests and passions -- if you're American, go to a pub during the World Cup, buy a pint, and ask someone to explain what they love about soccer (excuse me, football). But Romney was programmed to show that he already shares your interests, and that Your Concerns Are My Concerns, Too, So We're The Same. And that this will lock in someone's vote.

What's worse about this, aside from seeing the last dregs of someone's soul evaporate before your eyes, is it signals not just a lack of true care for individuals (to be fair, who can really care about every random stranger one meets when one is faced with hundreds, if not thousands, of them on a daily basis for months and years on end?), but the worldview that people are fungible products, means to an end, and not an end in themselves. They are assets to be collected and traded in for what you really want, stars or rings that'll add up to a power-up in a video game. It's an asset manager's view of citizens, and a blind application of a limited algorithm.

And what's even worst? What this shows is a blind application of learned rules, not the ability to think critically and rigorously. It's the same as a student turning in lecture notes about a Shakespeare as an original paper. This actually happened to me, as did the student asking, "Why, isn't this right? It's what the professor said -- are you saying he's wrong?" At some point this tactic worked for Romney, so now he's applying it. The goal is bigger? More cowbell.

This does not seem like a winning strategy for the leader of a complex, contradictory, nation.

What I Did Last Weekend (AngelHack Edition)

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Use cases, user interaction flows, icon and graphic design

My first-ever iPhone app icon!

And here's the video:

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First quick pass on map display wireframe

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Climatix grew out of a project begun by Robb Miller and Nick Orenstein at a green technology hack. The goal was to enable users to visualize, at a personal level, the vast but arcane data available about air pollution, power plant emissions, groundwater quality, as well the carbon footprint of facilities they may see every day. All this information is currently in open databases; it's there for the taking, but nearly impossible for the average person to make sense of. Security through obscurity, in a way.

The Climatix mobile app allows users concerned about environmental (policy, development, social justice, zoning, and health) issues to explore their world in a familiar and interactive way, seeing in real(ish) time the environmental and energy usage hot spots around them, or wherever they search. Not only can users use a familiar map interface, but Climatix's augmented reality (AR) interface, built on the Layar API, shows users these hot spots within the real world, and how to get to -- or avoid -- them.

Users can also add to the environmental data in a unique way. If a user sees a potential point of concern, whether it's a suspicious dump, a wasteful business, or leaking pipe, he or she can take and upload a photo to the Climatix app. This pins real-world experience to formerly abstract data and can teach all users of the Climatix app the cost of pollution, or uncover hidden sources of it.

This is a great tool for: individuals curious about their local environment, urban planners, local/state governments that want a better sense of where they need to focus their scarce resources, real estate developers, health researchers.

Most of what affects our lives and health -- air, energy waste, toxins -- is invisible. The Climatix app allows users to see this hidden world, and help uncover it further.

[Also on the project: Rico Mok and Evan Huang.]

See Climatix for more information.

Two Things You Want to Hear from Customer Service

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Whether it's tech support for your computer, or HVAC, or a government agency, or your health insurance company: 1. Click click click. "Oh, I see what's going on."

2. "There, that should take care of it."

The first means that the company gives customer-facing personnel direct access to account info and the entire flow of decisions affecting it.

The second means that customer-facing personnel can actually make decisions and reach into the spaghetti of rules, regulations, and settings to fix something.

(My small ISP is a good example of both; Blue Shield is a bad example of both.)

In Which I Kind of Defend the IRS

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Talking Points Memo is reporting (with a very clear chart) on the scale of the "tax gap". This gap, which unlike a "missile gap" or "shoe gap" other blind calls to blind action, seems to be real, and is defined as the delta between taxes owed and taxes paid in a fiscal year. As TPM's chart, based on numbers from the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, shows, the 2006 tax gap was $385 billion-with-a-b. This is second only to the $521 billion of military expenditures, larger than the $330 billion of Medicare spending, and a good sight more than the as-of-2006 $248 billion deficit. Neither TPM nor the CBPP go into detailed breakdowns of the gap's composition, but the CBPP was able to pick out the plurality culprit: underreporting of income. "Sole proprietors, a major class of small businesses, report less than half of their income to the IRS. In fact, under-reported business income is the single largest source of the tax gap, amounting to fully $122 billion in 2006 alone."

(This is not to pick on small businesses, the mythical all-American engine of the U.S. economy -- for dissent on that common assumption, see this NPR report. And this is not to let off the hook the "1-percenters" who move what would normally be "income" to "investment" by taking pay in stock options or other means, or place their money off-shore, or use any number of complicated dodges to end up paying low, if non-zero, tax bills. It's just that there are relatively many small business versus relatively few "fat cats", so in this case quantity of tax dodging overwhelms quality.)

It seems like a no-brainer, especially for those who spent this last summer forcing a Constitutional crisis over their avowed concern over the Federal deficit. (Or debt. They aren't always good at keeping the two straight.) These are bills that are due, bills defined and determined by tax laws agreed upon by Congress and state legislatures -- the very people who threatened a shutdown of the government over deficit issues, the very people who want to gut social programs, or kill Federal contributions to Planned Parenthood, or zero out foreign aid, as though the aggregate of those would be even a tenth of $385 billion. (Hint: they aren't. Not even close.)

A key finding in the CBPP report is this: "In the areas of the tax code with substantial information reporting and withholding requirements — most notably workers’ wages, which employers report to the IRS and on which they withhold income and payroll taxes — compliance is extremely high."

Let's go over that again. Where there are strong regulations on reporting, with enforcement, there's no problem. People report and pay their fair share, and are in the game the way it was designed, allowing other people to play fairly also. In contrast, the CBPP reports, "where there is no third-party information reporting or withholding, tax collections are abysmal."

Of course, knowing tax law, and what to report for income, can be a difficult task. No doubt reform could help some of those honestly baffled people. (Personal note: I long ago realized that paying someone to do my taxes saved me more than the equivalent in my hourly wage times the hours it'd take to understand what the hell some of these forms mean). There is generations-upon-generations of tax code, which has endured alteration and appending and what-have-you. Programmers, think of the code of a legacy application that's been worked on by hundreds of people over a decade -- spaghetti code. But the evidence shows that where there is strong regulation, there is strong compliance.

Now, how did we get here?

Just looking at the CBPP report, one can see that filling those tax code holes with strong reporting regulations would help. To quote at length:

"The Bush Administration pushed successfully for new withholding requirements on government contractors on the heels of troubling Government Accountability Office investigations showing widespread tax abuse. Then, in the 2010 health reform law, the Obama Administration teamed up with congressional Democrats to tighten reporting requirements on certain business transactions. These were two modest but real steps forward.

The current Congress, however, repealed both measures. To make matters worse, in last year’s deficit-reduction legislation (the Budget Control Act), House Republicans blocked Senate Majority Leader Reid’s effort to ensure sufficient funding for IRS tax compliance activities, even though the Congressional Budget Office concluded that it would have generated net budget savings of $30 billion over a decade."

So the first problem is resistance to clarifying and placing strong tax code. Debate amongst yourselves where the blame falls.

A second reason is that over the last decade, various administrations and political/private forces have pressed to cut support for the IRS. This is similar to how gutting the budgets of environmental and financial regulation departments at the Federal level have left giant holes for bad behavior at minimal cost. Recently, for example, we've seen the SEC have to settle slam-dunk cases, such as against Goldman Sachs, for relatively paltry sums, with no future leverage such as legal precedent, criminal convictions, and so on -- simply because the government agency in question does not have the resources to pursue prosecution or even audit for compliance.

You can see a teacup version of this in the 2006 move by the Bush administration to fire nearly half the IRS lawyers who audited tax returns on "some of the wealthiest Americans, specifically those who are subject to gift and estate taxes when they transfer parts of their fortunes to their children and others." That administration pushed hard to alter legislation to kill the estate ("death") tax, couldn't pull it off, so went after those who enforced it, or even just checked for it. Can't figure out how to rob a bank? Maybe if you could get the security staff laid off, it'd be easier.

This is still going on. Just recently the IRS reported that it's increasingly unable to do its job due to budget cuts and staffing. From the article: "Mr. Obama last year asked for the I.R.S. budget of $12.1 billion to be increased by more than $1 billion, to enable it to hire 5,100 employees. But Republicans, who oppose the health care program, succeeded in trimming the agency’s funds to $11.8 billion in the budget approved last month."

Of course, nobody likes audits, the idea of them or the practice. It is a painful process. But three things.

First: This is how we do. Though we may disagree with how the tax revenue is spent -- and that's healthy, on both sides of the political spectrum -- it is the cost of living in a civilization. And it's important to realize that tax cheating disproportionally benefits the top of the wealth scale, while taking away from those near or on the bottom. Though this could be seen as all the more incentive for the $50k/year small businessman, or waitron, to shave a little off the income reporting, my point is that we would all be better off with more consistent enforcement.

Second: These cuts don't just mean fewer audits. The affected IRS staff are also your Help Desk. Part of the reason audits are such a painful process is because we, as individual tax filers, might not have been sure of something, and had to make a good-faith effort. And we might have been wrong to some degree. But the cuts to the IRS staff don't just mean fewer evil auditors, but fewer people to answer our questions on April 14. This cuts our ability to figure out what the hell is going on in Line 48a: "Those demands have strained the I.R.S.’s ability to respond to inquiries from the public. Nearly half the taxpayers who wrote or faxed questions waited more than six weeks for a response, the report found. Taxpayers who telephoned for information found backlogs, too, the report said, as three in 10 calls went unanswered."

Third: You know, it doesn't cost that much, as a proportion of the Federal budget, to hire back these staffers. Certainly only a few million, tops. Even if they could reduce five percent of the tax gap, that'd be over $19 billion, based on 2006 numbers. That's a pretty good cost-benefit ratio, yes?

Fully funding Head Start is less than $8 billion a year. Worth it?

Hitler at the St. Brigid St. Book Club

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Timothy W. Ryback's "Hitler's Private Library: The Books That Shaped His Life" recounts how the author pored through 1,200 out of an estimated 16,000 books that the former German dictator and all-around Worst Person in the World collected and, apparently, actually read (most books evidenced Der Furher's propensity to underline passages in pencil, only occasionally doodling butterflies and birds in the margins). Amongst Hitler's Top Books to Take to a Desert Bunker were the collected works of Shakespeare, Robinson Crusoe, Don Quixote, and Uncle Tom's Cabin. Obviously, these books were loved, as they were selected by Hitler for preservation in a Berchtesgaden salt mine. That, or the official in charge of the books' caretaking mistook them for pickling cucumbers. Ryback does not describe how the books were cleaned by their current owner, the rare book collection of the Library of Congress.

Tuesday, Aug 30th

Discussion leader: Sarah Jane Tomkins Book: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides Treat to eat: Bryan brought a fresh veggie platter with homemade hummus and baba ganoush dips Discussion: Sarah Jane started the conversation by praising the wide scope yet human focus of this pseudo-memoir. Gus thought the metaphors were a little obvious, with the personal changes standing in for what was going on in America as a whole. Kim said she got "most of the way through" -- again -- though she did get far enough to complain about the "Asian girlfriend" character. Seriously, this is like the fourth book she hasn't bother to finish this year. Hog admitted he was uncomfortable with all the clinical sex stuff, though he wondered if that was the point. Adolf was quiet, being new to the group. When we got him to open up, he said this book, "if true", showed the decay of the American-er (something like that) way of life, and that the scenes of bootlegging across national borders by the frozen waterways of Michigan gave him some inspiration, though he wondered how much armored weight the ice would hold.

Thursday, Sep 8th

Discussion leader: Augustus Theoharis Book: One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez Treat to eat: Sarah Jane's famous ambrosia Discussion: Gus praised the genre of magical realism and gave a long talk about it, forgetting we'd read Borges and Ruolfo six and nine months ago, respectively. Sarah Jane said this was her fourth time re-reading it, and that she saw something new each time. Kim said she hadn't seen ice or snow until she was 14, so the opening always threw her as too matter-of-fact. Hog shared with us some of the other regional authors he thought we might like, and made us laugh when he recounted the racy plot of "Dona Flor and her Two Husbands". It seems like Adolf is still hanging back, but when prodded, he said that the lyrical language reminded him of an unfinished and unpublished novel he had by a friend of his named something like Gertie (sp?), though "obviously" translated poorly. He did say that South America did seem like it could be a nice place to retire to. This led to Sarah Jane showing us all her photos from her last cruise.

Tuesday, Sep 20th

Discussion leader: Hogarth Smith Book: Packing for Mars by Mary Roach Treat to eat: Augustus brought a Godfather's pizza -- he said it was an ironic political statement, but the group consensus was that he was being cheap Discussion: Hog apparently is a big fan of Ms. Roach's books, though some of us shied away at wanting to read a book about dead bodies. He said this wasn't the strongest of her works, but he'd picked up Adolf's interest in rockets. Adolf did seem to appreciate that. But we broke pretty early; the conversation was about Gus being cheap, and this got pretty heated.

Thursday, Oct 6th

Discussion leader: Adolf Hitler Book: A Million Little Pieces by James Frey Treat to eat: Hogarth's Homemade Hoagies. And beer. Discussion: Adolf didn't get a chance to introduce the book and start the conversation, as we all began with talking about how it was a fake. This shocked poor Adolf, who hadn't heard, and had taken the story apparently really, really to heart. He startled us all by screaming that it couldn't be a fake, not at all! He was so adamant, and finally started to break down in tears, crying that the story spoke to him deeply, and he felt it was really the tale of his life. We spent the rest of the evening taking him out for smoothies (which he really likes) and listening to his own stories -- apparently he had quite an unhappy childhood. We were trying to be supportive, but I don't think most of him got all the details (Adolf's accent can get really thick when he's upset). We all gave him hugs, Gus dropped him off at his apartment, and we haven't met since.

The Failure of Analogy in Policy: Debt Edition

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Though I'm late to the party on noting Paul Krugman's unpacking of the actual U.S. national debt issue and his smacking down of hysteria over it, I do want to add that this is yet another failure point for analogy and metaphor in policy and politics. Krugman notes that the analogy most often used in discussion of national debt is that the country is like a family, the national economy is like a family's budget -- more specifically, the U.S. debt is often explained as a too-large mortgage that this family has taken out, and now must be repaid. And in general, there are broad strokes and similarities, and indeed analogies can at times offer us ways to wrap our heads around unfamiliar concepts: a peloton of cyclists sometimes moves and reacts like a flock of birds or a school of fish, as the small signals of individual movements propagate and translate into smooth movements of the whole. But, as Krugman shows, just because both involve borrowing money doesn't mean the implications of and appropriate actions for one translate to the other.

Basically, the problem is that analogies (and metaphors) aren't predictive: the peloton may act like a school of fish, but that doesn't mean some of the cyclists should be netted and would be tasty grilled with a bit of lemon. (No, really, the meat would be too tough.)

The same goes for so much of business journalism. One company may be like another, true, but that doesn't mean one is the other, and one's future will not be the other's. At this point, no one would honestly say that Facebook is MySpace and the same will happen to both (though both may end up on the ash heap of history) -- but they did.

The same goes for economics. As Krugman demonstrates:

First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation.

Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.

Fact-based reporting FTW! It's not only lazy, but it's promoting Bad Ideas to allow the implications of an analogy to run unchecked. (Here we have to keep in mind something from user experience research, and tailor our design/writing to the impulses of users/readers; in this case, the natural impulse is to extend forward the path one has been put on.)

Granted, I've been guilty of employing a metaphor or analogy in a news story, sometimes even to amuse myself in the writing. I hope to keep in mind Krugman's takedown, and always ask, when employing such a rhetorical tool, "but what are the differences, and will they matter more?"