I found a link this afternoon over lunch detailing the murky history of typography in the Toronto subway system, which was fascinating reading for a usability and typography geek like myself. Overshadowed by more famous and visible signage programs (New York and London), Toronto's signage deserves the same amount of praise for its timeless design and craftsmanlike execution. Toronto's original stations were finished with white tile, and custom-designed letterforms were sandblasted and then painted into the walls, in contrast to New York's intricate mosaicwork. An interesting side note: the typographer responsible for the family design is uncredited and therefore unknown, as the designs were never signed.
Like its larger sister cities, the signage system has found itself ignored and overlooked by bureaucrats and politicians, who find hand-lettered placards and lousy Helvetica-based additions perfectly acceptable substitutions for standards-based design. The author of the article describes an study commissioned to redesign all of the signage in the early 1990s at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars, which was then unceremoniously shelved by the Toronto Train Commission. Instead, for a new expansion built soon afterwards, the TTC used a knockoff of the Unimark/Noorda signage made famous in New York City, further fragmenting the unified look of each station.
Equal parts politics, art history, typography, and architecture lesson, the main article is a fascinating read (as is the linked NYC Subway article—an equally worthy diversion) and an window back into the days when good design was championed by the public and politicians alike.
...when Aaron Brazell griped about First Mariner Bank’s customer service in a tweet headlined, “First Mariner, you’re dead to me,” he quickly got the bank’s attention — and a tweet from a bank employee asking how he could help.
The prompt response kept the 33-year-old Web consultant from switching banks, and resulted in Brazell writing a glowing item about First Mariner on his blog...
“That little touch of customer service went a long way,” Brazell said.
One auto-service firm made three times as much profit from fourth-year customers as from first-year customers. Reducing that company's customer defections by just 5 percent increased overall profits by 30 percent...
Sean's take is that businesses and institutions can't control what people say about them in public, but if they become involved in the discussion, the results are likelier to end positively—and positive outcomes build loyalty. A final word on loyalty from Reich:
Surveying 100 companies in two dozen industries, Reich consistently found that the longer a company keeps its customers, the more money it makes.
only 13% of respondents believe they have been highly effective in leveraging loyalty and brand preference among club members, and nearly 20% don’t even have a strategy for this.
Um, WHAT?
Too much spam and junk email topped the list of negatives associated with loyalty and rewards program membership (44%), followed by too many conditions and restrictions (38%), and rewards that lacked real value (37%).
Right. There's a reason we're all still getting spammed in our mailbox and email accounts; "Loyalty" programs are essentially just opt-ins for offers we as customers don't want or need. Have you ever actually tried to redeem frequent-flier miles?
Social media provides a real-time look into what people think about their lives, including the products they use. When it's possible to engage a customer directly with a solution to their problem instead of waiting for them to pick up a phone, the possibility is there to not only make that customer happy, but to turn them into an evangelist–which is worth more to marketers than any direct-mail campaign.
You may be surprised to learn that there are still corners of the internet that haven't mentioned the Apple iPad. This is no longer one of them. However(!) rather than engage in pointless punditry I call your attention to this video, edited to show only moments of usability design from the iPad keynote.
Edit: I will share one bit of commentary that I found interesting; The iPad is a computer the same way the Xbox360 is.
Wired had previously named HTML5 as one of the Top 7 Disruptions of 2009. Turns out they might be right. Apple couldn't take HTML5 capability out of the iPhone browser, could they?
It's a good thing Apple's going to announce their Tablet tomorrow ushering in a new era of world peace, freedom from disease, and faster-than-light travel. It looks like their walled garden is starting to crumble.
Yale's got a new musical admissions video, but who can forget Appalachian State's classic "Hot Hot Hot" extravaganza? As of today Yale's video has 277,093 views and Appalachian State's video has 1,137,239 views.
Which one is better and more effective? You decide:
That's Why I Choose Yale
Sample lyric: "Every College has a dining hall with a salad bar and grill/and organic options for every meal/I'm gonna eat my fill..."
Hot Hot Hot
Sample lyric: "Building our hopes on a great tradition/Speaking the language of a brave new year/Telling the world about a new day dawning/Spreading the spirit of the Mountaineer!"
...This is why advertisers and marketers get it badly wrong when they take an offline campaign and attempt to repurpose it for the web. They consider all those eyeballs online as a mass market that can be engaged by the classic PR control model of one-to-many messaging. They fail to understand that on the web control is almost impossible because of its open nature, and that the only thing that’s scarce in that “mass market,” is attention. Repurposing of content is analogous to what would happen if reality TV show participants had the gall to hijack the show’s cameras and production and make a real reality show..
And tell you to go read the full article yourself for proper context.
It seems like forever since people first started talking about the HTML5 specification, and even longer for actual features to begin shaking out. Mark Pilgrim has released a series of drafts from an upcoming O'Reilly book called Dive into HTML5, and in one chapter he details the additions to form elements and styling we should be expecting. We're not talking about mind-blowing advances—more like standardized methods for making forms easier to use without resorting to Javascript hacks, framework libraries, or black magic (see: placeholder text, date pickers, number sliders, etc. )
Sadly, as beautiful as the presentation is, it is also somewhat depressing in its stark representation of current browser adoption, but I for one am happy to see some forward progress in this area.
Today it surfaced that Microsoft is seeking to patent an implementation of sparklines, an original idea by the Frank Lloyd Wright of information design, Edward Tufte. Sparklines are line-height graphs that sit inline with text yet still convey a lot of information. In this instance the graph shows the data's history while the grey bar indicates the normal range.
Microsoft is seeking to patent the idea of placing them in a spreadsheet cell. They're not trying to patent the idea of sparklines, they've even given credit to Tufte for that. They are however trying to lock down the use of sparklines to only Microsoft products. So this useful feature wouldn't be able to be used by iWork or OpenOffice. Also, as far as I know, Tufte doesn't have a trademark on the term 'sparkline.'
So Microsoft's patent request is probably legal. It would be nice though if instead of grabbing out a chapter they design software that shows they read the whole book.
Oh, hey Microsoft, Google announced Chrome OS today. Pretty neat, eh? Oh, no, yeah sparklines are cool too.
From my perspective, its that Flash isn't really all that accessible to screen readers and organic SEO doesn't happen out of the box.
Something new has come around that may start the change to further accessibility through Flash.
Those of you familiar with sIFR know that accessibility with Flash doesn't have to be like catching a greased pig. Wrapper is a new HTML/CSS rendering engine has been created, and it works similarly to sIFR in that you use JavaScript to bind the HTML/CSS to ActionScript to create a Flash object version of the page on load.
I'm not saying that it's perfectly 508 compliant, but at least it might nudge Flash down the righteous path.
