Lufthansa Hates Your Infant: A Usability Study (Updated)

Update: We’re now checked in and have been upgraded as a family to Business class. Thanks to Lufthansa for getting on the case and putting things right, and for everyone’s support.

 

Twenty-something-hour double changeover flights with an infant of crawling age aren’t something you want to take too often. So when you do, like, say, when you’re moving your home across 9 timezones, you tend to plan ahead. As in, making sure you have a bulkhead seat with a basinet. Even if it means paying more to shuffle flights around and make sure you get there with a shred of sanity intact.

Image: CC Ricardo Ricote

So when you turn up for your 9am flight, and there’s a strike somewhere at the other side of the planet in an airport you’re passing through for an hour, you assume you’ll be somehow accommodated. Maybe there’ll be a slight delay. A change of flight a bit later in the day maybe. You’re flying Lufthansa, and your friends have recommended them. It’s all good.

Unless you find, having shuffled through the security theatre, that the ominous “cancelled” appears just in time for you to arrive at your gate. And then you wait. And wait. And two hours later you wait some more while first and business class customers are individually addressed and taken care of. Without so much as an announcement to anyone else (i.e. economy scum) in the room. As your child screams and writhes and wonders, much like you, what exactly is going on here and why you’re standing stock still in a crowd of people scratching your head.

Three hours later you’re told that there’s another counter that might be able help to you out a little quicker, so you hike over. With the buggy, the kid, the finger-garrotting luggage. And you get ignored and told to wait your turn while five people help out a single old guy and pretend you don’t exist. You stand. And you stare. And you sweat. And you console the kid. And you get to speak to someone, who, while they’re “trying” to address your problem, stops trying for twenty minutes a pop to deal with two other customers who are evidently less hard work.

A couple of hours later you’ve explained how you have two cases, three boxes, hand luggage, a buggy, and an infant without any lactose-free formula or food to last more than a day. You’ve politely declined the separate (enjoy playing pass the infant) leftover seats on a four changeover, four security check flight that will take you thirty-five hours to get to your destination, starting sometime tonight. And the one where you get to change airlines, recheck in your country-moving baggage, and one of you gets to go ahead while the other waits on standby in Copenhagen, with no offer of help at the final destination to somehow get your baggage out of the airport. Mother, baby, two cases, three boxes, hand luggage. Where’s the problem?

Six hours in, you politely, and then not so politely, suggest that some sort of minor upgrade or compensation might be in order given that you’re being offered ridiculous flights with significantly worse seats and endless flight times. And, you know, you actually paid money for this trip, and, erm, reserved your seats a month or two ago. Tears are shed. Not just by the kid.

There’s a brief flicker of hope about an Air France flight. Half an hour later, you’re told it’s full. Naturally. Too late, you’ve already been handed off to a different airline, a different person. Time to go back through immigration and security with all your bags. Time to wait for a bus.

Eight hours later you’re shipped off to an airport hotel by bus, your request for some assistance with your kid’s dwindling food and drink is brushed off with “ask the hotel”, which is miles away from anything resembling a shop. The hotel has nothing, your kid starts choking on the inappropriate food they have, even though you’ve tried to mash it up as best you can. Tough luck on the lactose-free milk, he’ll be ok. What’s a bit of dehydration, malnutrition or explosive diarrhoea among friends?

The best part. They’ve now offered you the same flight you should have been on this morning, only tomorrow. Suddenly this is possible. Eight hours later. After the other enticing options you were presented hours ago.

But here’s the doozie. You get to come back and do the same thing again, after another 5am rise, tomorrow. There might be a strike. You’ll have to wait and see. There might be a ticket for you. You’ll have to wait and see. You might get to fly. You’ll have to wait and see. Your kid might get seriously ill. You’ll have to wait and see, The lease you’re signing tomorrow? Tough luck. The hotel you’re paying for in Edinburgh? Your problem. The car hire paid up? Suck it up.

Have a complaint? Lufthansa would love you to post or fax them about it.

This generous offer is their way of demonstrating that:

Lufthansa regrets any inconvenience to its passengers caused by the strike measures and will do its utmost best to minimize the impacts

They’re just a little reticent about mentioning that this doesn’t apply to you if you’re flying economy. And if you’re merely shuttling an increasingly despondent eleven month old around along with everything you own on a humid Tokyo day, more fool you for choosing Lufthansa. Get your pen and paper out and whack some feedback in the post. It might pass the time while you’re waiting on another possibly nonexistent flight at the airport tomorrow with your kid. Or the day after.

You’ll have to wait and see.

State of the Word 2012: Slides

WordCamp SF took place last weekend, and while I wasn’t there in person this year, I had the opportunity to work at a distance with Matt on his slides for the annual State of the Word presentation. I’ve put all of the slides as full-sized images on a new page of their own for those interested.

This year, we kept things simple with the design, palette and typography, blending monochrome and anaglyph-inflected abstract and landscape photographs (all taken from Matt’s huge backlog of images from his travels around the world) with a simple circular motif and various weights of the ever dependable Univers (I used the Linotype Univers, in case you were wondering).

I wanted the images to reinforce the increasing international growth (and internationalisation) of WordPress evident in Matt’s presentation by making use of real locations that Matt visited on various (mostly WordPress/WordCamp related) trips around the globe. At the same time, I really liked the idea of every image being a personal memory recorded by Matt, which creates an intimate connection between speaker and slides not often seen. These aren’t stock images, they’re the point of view of the speaker, just as much as the rest of the presentation is.

The palette makes use of off-white and almost-black with accents that draw on the anaglyph red-cyan pairing or simply play off the monochrome processed versions of Matt’s photos. The use of sharp, high contrast black and white brings a certain stark, documentary air to proceedings (the process I put to use is modelled after the unrelenting, once military grade Kodak Technical Pan), putting the emphasis squarely on WordPress as part of the real world; while the anaglyph theme was my attempt to bring a touch of artifice, that unpredictable “ghost in the machine” quality, to the look and feel of the slides, as a visual analogue for the interaction of the real and artificial that takes place when people meet software. Here I was looking for something both hyperreal and at the same time playfully disruptive of the visual lexicon of documentary realism.

Like all slides, they’re happiest in tandem with their speaker presenting in front of them, so if you have a spare half hour, be sure to check out the full presentation here (or over on WordPress.tv):

State of the Word 2012

►

You can also quickly flutter through them over on SlideShare. For the pixel peepers, I’d welcome any feedback or thoughts you have on the contents of the full-sized slide gallery I’ve put up.

Automattic vs. Seattle: Photos

WordCamp Seattle 2012: Things We Learned The Hard Way Slide Gallery

Just finished speaking to the amazing people at WordCamp Seattle 2012 about the just relaunched Code Poet.com and the things we learned from WordPress designers and developers and their experiences of things they learned the hard way getting started with WordPress as professionals.

A few people asked if I could share the slides, so there they are:

Grab the PDF.

Check it out/grab it on Speaker Deck.

State of the Word 2011 Slide Design Notes

State of the Word 2011

Last Sunday Matt delivered his yearly State of the Word presentation at WordCamp San Francisco. It’s a real humdinger, and they’ve even cut in the slides throughout for the full experience. You can catch a video of the presentation over on WordPress.tv, or here:

Matt Mullenweg: State of the Word 2011

►

Vintage record covers, revisted

I worked (remotely this year) with Matt and fellow exile of the British isles Pete Davies on shaping up the narrative flow of the presentation and then experimenting with ways to visually represent it. Much fun was had. This year Matt decided it would be cool to revisit the vintage jazz LP cover theme for the slide design, so I went about picking out some covers to adapt to our purposes. I stuck mostly with jazz labels, as with last year’s Blue Note theme, but strayed occasionally into other genres where the temptation was too great not to. All of the designs fall somewhere within a decade or two of mid-century modern, arguably the golden age of jazz LP cover design.

Full Gallery

If you’re interested in seeing all of the slides in full-sized glory, I’ve uploaded them to a separate gallery page. Bear in mind that they were created at high speed, and were meant to be viewed that way, so you may find the odd kerntastrophe or grid insurrection (although hopefully not).

Inspiration

The idea was to allude to classic (mostly) jazz album covers, adapting them somewhat to suit the different aspect ratio of the Keynote slides and the considerably different usage. Here’s a slideshow of the source covers that I worked form. You can also check it out slightly larger images on the SOTW 2011 inspiration gallery page.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Huge shout outs to  Project Thirty-Three,Vintage Vanguard, and Cover Jazz for lovingly gathering hundreds of great cover designs together for me to ruthlessly plunder.

Likewise, to Christina Warren’s WordPress UI history on Mashable.

Process

Once we’d settled on the idea of revisiting the vintage jazz LP theme I had about two weeks to source, template up and populate the slides. Within the two weeks the presentation was being adapted and updated daily, up until the day itself. As is quite usual with any presentation, we cut, changed and even started over on around half of the 100+ slides about a couple of days before Matt was due to go on stage, so as I mentioned above, these were put together at high speed.

I made pretty much everything in Photoshop, with a bit of Illustrator and After Effects on the side. All of the slides were remade from scratch (no scans or clips from the original sources) with the exception of the image from the Jazzville cover and the central looped arrows of the Innovation loop slide, above. This mostly involved lots of vector tweaking, textures and layers-within-layers, tucked inside smart objects.

I’d love to have done everything in Keynote, but alas it still doesn’t support blending modes, which was a pretty much essential part of the process here, especially where dealing with vintage textures and the kind of overlays and colour blends so prevalent in this type of design. The downside of this is that tweaking a slide can be somewhat more longwinded when it involves finding, opening and navigating a multi-layered photoshop file per slide, rather than clicking on some text and quickly changing it in Keynote. The upside, I hope, is that the results aren’t really something you can really get with Keynote alone.

Challenges

The main challenges, beyond the tight deadline and iterative updates to the content throughout, were essentially:

• Adapting square-format LP covers to 4:3 layouts, which meant either significantly adapting the whitespace and design elements, or taking liberties with typography and layout
• Trying to do a fair job of staying true to the essence, if not the exact decisions, made typographically and visually in the original covers and estimating which typefaces were used in each case. With a month to research it, I could probably have done a better job here, but think I did okay given the approximate hour-per-slide timing and hopefully there aren’t too many typographic blunders scattered throughout. I’m putting the larger deviations down to the first point – adapting to the more vertically squat and horizontally spacious aspect ratio of the slide format
• Working from pretty small, far from original-sized screenshots of the album covers often meant that high speed creative liberties needed to be taken, as enlarging the originals for a better look at the details led only to pixelmush.

 

Form & Function

The most important thing was that the slides didn’t just reflect Matt’s rabid love of jazz, which works it’s way into a lot of the messaging and storytelling in and around WordPress releases, but also supported the key themes and narrative of the presentation. This year the focus was on the emergent, ever evolving, open conversation between WordPress users, core developers and the larger community of plugin and theme developers pushing the platform in new directions.

Matt touched on concepts including the landscape design and architecture focused notion of desire paths, Stewart Brand’s ideas on how people adapt architecture to their needs, and Kenya Hara’s reflections on Japanese vs. Western design. To support these key ideas, in relation to WordPress, I did what I could to find visual analogues in the key slides, where the graphic elements emphasized simplicity, transformation, call-and-response, variations on a theme, point and counterpoint, and organic growth. Hopefully that comes across in some of the selections and adaptations of the visual content.

 

See More

If you want to check out the full-sized slides, there’s a gallery for that.  I’ve also made a gallery of the collected original covers used as the inspiration for the slides. Why, you might even open them in two tabs and flit back and forth between them, should the mood take you.

Edit: They’re also up on Slideshare now, too.

Feedback

I had a ball making these, albeit an espresso-fueled late night race against time kind of ball. I’d love to hear your thoughts or feedback, here or on twitter (I’m @madebypick over there).

NoteSlate: a minimalist, lightweight, great looking digital notepad

Noteslate looks like it’s going to be an exquisitely designed, cheap digital memo pad/notebook, and at $99 might appeal to a bunch of people that might not otherwise be in the market. It’s a minimalist e-ink A4 slate that does one thing, and does it really beautifully – captures and displays your notes, scribbles and sketches.

Keeping things simple (and apparently open source), the NoteSlate folks throw out the ability to surf the web, listen to your tunes, and everything else in favour of doing one thing and doing it well. I actually find that appealing, its tantamount to the WriteRoom, iA Writer, or (closest) 37S Draft way of doing things.

And while ostensibly it’s the bastard love child of an Etch-a-sketch, Kindle and legal pad, there’s something Teenage Engineering-esque about the industrial design — minimal, spare, functional, but in that understated Dieter Ramsian way. It actually makes my iPad look a bit chubby and oldschool, while at the same time triggering latent memories of whiteboards, blackboards and the simple tactile pleasures of paper.

Admittedly, I’m one of those people from the alternate dimension where people use tablet pcs – there’s something entirely different about interfacing with ideas with a pen rather than through a mouse, finger or trackpad, at least at the ideas stage. I use a Thinkpad x201 tablet for a laptop, have a Cintiq 21 for my desktop/mac, and read and watch a bunch of stuff on my iPad, but NoteSlate falls into a different niche for me and will likely appeal to people that aren’t compulsive about this stuff.

Great as iPad is for consuming content, I’ve never really found drawing (let alone writing) with my finger an optimal experience. The sausage stylus suggests I’m not alone. On the other hand, lightweight as it is for a laptop, my ThinkPad is no featherweight, and just getting to my notes means delving into the distractions and processing cycles of a full OS (Windoze, no less).

I could see NoteSlate being used by designers, in schools and colleges, even by waiting staff, or as a little blackboard next to the fridge, for reminders about milk running low. At $99 that’s pretty feasible.

They’re bringing it out in a bunch of mono-colours (with a 4-colour version to follow), and selling it directly from the site. I’m quite partial to the black on white, white on black and green on black, but wouldn’t sniff at any of the offerings.

Looks like it will drop in June of this year, and pending this being some cruel joke/student prototype I’m grabbing one. Or a couple.

Aside: nobody paid me to gush this much, this just looks like something I’ve been waiting on for a long while, so hopefully it doesn’t have some massive sucky drawback/user experience gotcha

Everything & Nothing

Idly playing around with a vague idea for a print this afternoon, the words seemed familiar.

Everything & Nothing.

First impression – badly paraphrasing Sartre?

Google to the rescue, in spite of having the book on my shelf. It was, of course, the title of a short piece by Borges – at one time a favourite of mine – on the mercurial, multifaceted nature of Shakespeare, but with a sly wink at us, the reader. A beautifully written meditation on the self, fantasy, the tale of tales. You know, Borges.

Snip:

THERE was no one in him; behind his face (which even through the bad paintings of those times resembles no other) and his words, which were copious, fantastic and stormy, there was only a bit of coldness, a dream dreamt by no one. At first he thought that all people were like him, but the astonishment of a friend to whom he had begun to speak of this emptiness showed him his error and made him feel always that an individual should not differ in outward appearance. Once he thought that in books he would find a cure for his ill and thus he learned the small Latin and less Greek a contemporary would speak of; later he considered that what he sought might well be found in an elemental rite of humanity, and let himself be initiated by Anne Hathaway one long June afternoon. At the age of twenty-odd years he went to London. Instinctively he had already become proficient in the habit of simulating that he was someone, so that others would not discover his condition as no one…

Someone has kindly posted it in full online, but if Borges is your cup of tea, he reads more comfortably when removed from the lemon yellow confines of the proto-web, nestled among friends.

Snow

It snows a lot in Sapporo. These photos have since been made redundant by head-high mounds of the white stuff along most of the streets near where I live. Still, plenty of fodder for the February snow festival I suppose.

Learn WordPress Illustrations

Last year one of the projects I worked on was Learn.WordPress.com, a newb-friendly initiation to the WordPress.com experience. I directed the project, devised and structured the content and wrote a lot of the copy (along with colleagues Joy & Erica), but I think the part I enjoyed most was letting rip on some collaged illustrations to accompany the tutorials. Here are a handful of them:

WordCamp Yokohama 2010

I’m presenting at WordCamp Yokohama today, along with a bunch of much smarter people (including fellow Automatticians Naoko and Isaac). There’s a really good crowd gathered, and it’s amazing to see the WordPress community getting stronger and stronger out here in Japan.

All of the presentations are being streamed live on Ustream.tv, so you can see them there if you’d like (or catch the recorded versions later). I should think we’ll also be adding presentation videos to WordPress.tv in the coming weeks.

I’ve also put up some additional resources from my presentation on Assaulting Indifference, which focuses mainly on using design thinking, storytelling and visual communication as tools to grab interest and attention for your blog, business, or whatever else you’re putting out into the world.

You can check out links for content and creators discussed in the presentation, along with a slideshow and gallery of the slide designs here. As always, your feedback is very welcome.