I made it to Sydney, and everything is absolutely wonderful.

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I’m getting rid of some stuff at the last minute. I’ve thrown together a page with details and photos, and if you can pick up what you want in Hamburg this weekend (and you can read broken German), you should have a look.

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Please post your insights as comments here or in streams using whatever tool is most convenient but tagged #IKStowe so I can find them.

And all of the quotes in her article came to her that way. Nice to see journalists and bloggers playing nice together, instead of constantly sounding the other’s death knell.

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Warning: none of it’s visually unsafe, but some of the audio is NSFW. Put your headphones on.

“Marcellus Wallace” from Pulp Ficiton

The one that started all of this for me. It went around in emails ages ago, and I’ve looked at it again and again ever since. By the talented Jarratt Moody, who has more goodies on his own site.

“Choose” from Trainspotting

Pretty wild mix of fonts here, but somehow it works, and the timing’s spot on.

“Nick the Greek” from Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels

Lovely feeling of 3D space, and the graphic illustrations add a bunch. The spelling could do with a check, though.

“The Rules” from Fight Club

The grungy background, wobbly camera and type make for a nice change.

“Jesus” from The Big Lebowski

One of the best speeches in the movie, and here the colours and layout express the different voices well. The background colour changes also create a good visual rhythm.

“The Perfect Girl” form The Wedding Crashers

I haven’t seen the movie, but the animations nice and smooth. But better than the type animation are the little object details, especially the “dating” table.

“Pancakes House” from Fargo

Love the palette, the textures also add a lot, but what really makes this one are the silhouette illustrations. I must however admit that I’m getting a little sick of Helvetica. Are students so conservative these days?

Last But Not Least…

I know, it’s not from a movie, but I found this so spectacularly well done that I just had to cram it in here.

I don’t do type animation, and likely never will, but I enjoy looking at it and am sure it gets different creative juices pumping in my head. Andy Budd reminded me that we web designers often live in a fenced in little world, and that we’re cheating ourselves of a world of inspiration. When you look over the fence, where do you look?

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I was at dConstruct last week, and one of the speakers I enjoyed the most was Aleks Kotoski. She shined a light on the chasm between the games and web industries, showed what we can learn from one another, and suggested ways to encourage bridge building. When you think about it, game designers have everything anyone needs to totally rock interactive design. Think of the stunning skills that game designers can be proud of:

• A track record of creating interfaces that are simple to use despite mind-boggling functional complexity.
• Masterful guidance through experiences that not only makes sure you’ll advance, but also keeps you motivated to see and do more.
• A sense of aesthetics that can make a fanciful world believable and consistent, not to mention wondrous and beautiful.

So why does Electronic Arts, a company that earns its money from the sweat of game designers’ brows, have a site (especially the store) which fails to even be usable, let alone rock? Couldn’t someone in the company with these skills take a minute to look at their web site?

My problems with Electronic Arts started back in 2006 when Will Wright, best known as the guy who created The Sims, gave the first demo of Spore. Back then, my problem was only that I wanted to play Spore, and it didn’t exist yet. It took two years for it to be released, and when it finally came out last weekend the more irritating problems started.

Keep in mind that as soon as I saw that demo I said to myself, “I must play that.” I was a fan before the game even existed. I’m the proverbial choir. There should be nothing in the world easier than selling me a copy of Spore. So why haven’t I got it yet?

Buying Spore: Round 1

1. On the day it came out, I eagerly pounced on the German Spore site, and clicked on “Hol dir Spore” (Get Spore).
2. I landed on a page with all the different versions of Spore, and seeing no “Buy Now” button, clicked on the “EA Store” teaser in the right column.
3. The big fat text on the next page said “Jetzt Herunterladen” (Download Now) and I grinned. Getting close! Click!
4. A green button “In den Warenkorb” (Add to shopping Cart) on the next page promised to lead me the right way. Click! Gimme!
5. Typical shopping process, click type type click click. Once finished (hahahah, it’s mine!) I clicked on the download link, which led to… an exe.
6. Realising I’d just bought a PC download, I slapped my forehead, and started searching for a way to get to Electronic Arts’ customer service.

That’s what most of us do first when something goes wrong online: blame ourselves. I had indeed made two critical mistakes, but both were unavoidable. I hadn’t screwed up, Electronic Arts had. But more on that later.

Electronic Arts (dis)Service

After many more clicks and quite a bit of backtracking, I’d managed to write a mail to Electronics Arts support: “I screwed up, blah blah blah, please change my download to the Mac version blah blah, thanks!” An automated email reply promised an answer within 24 hours.

After 60 hours without an answer, I tried again. Another 24 hour promise. 48 answer-free hours later, although I was pretty annoyed with Electronic Arts and their service vacuum, I was still ultra-keen to play Spore. I’m not known for patience, so I figured I could work out a refund for my PC version mistake later, and went back to their site to buy the Mac download.

Buying Spore: Round 2

1. I returned, full of suspicious caution this time, to the “Hol dir Spore” page mentioned above.
2. Being suspicious, I noticed the tiny “More Info About the Mac Version” link I’d failed to notice before (first critical mistake above). Hmmm. Click.
3. The Mac info page had links to two vendors: amazon.de and weltbild.de. Doesn’t Electronic Arts sell the Mac version themselves? Hmmm. Anyway, Amazon’s my friend. Click.
4. Boxed CD version only, delivery by the 15th. Erm, no thanks. Back. Click weltbild.de.
5. Same thing. Boxed version, delivery days away. I want to play now, and it can’t be that there’s no download for Mac. C’mon, this is software! Back.
6. Down at the bottom of the Electronic Arts’ Spore Mac info page, I find another teaser for the EA Store. That’s better! Download here I come! Click!
7. Hunh? I’m on the same “Jetzt Herunterladen” page from before. By now I’m downright mistrustful, so I notice the tiny grey text: “Platform PC” I’d missed earlier (second critical mistake). Could Electronic Arts be actively trying to piss me off? Is someone at EA laughing right now?

No Joy

So, Electronic Arts has managed to turn an excited future Spore fan into a disappointed and frustrated ex-customer in three easy steps.

First, by making their website as misleading as possible. As I said above, they have hundreds of people who are interaction masters. Games and websites are quite different animals, but the principals of clear and simple interface design, user guidance and expectation fulfillment work for both. Note to EA: get your designers to help with your site. You need it. Urgently. If they’re too busy, let’s talk. I’m looking for a challenge.

Second, by hiding behind a “service” wall which pushes customers away. No one who’s spent money on a product should have to explore, research and fight their way to getting help with that product. The best single way to get a customer to love a brand is to turn a moment of confusion and helplessness into a feeling of relief and satisfaction. Note to EA: without your customers, your products are worthless and you can pack up shop. Make happy customers priority number one and change your service strategy to reflect it.

Third, by insisting on selling bits packaged in atoms. Games are bits. Boxes and CDs are atoms. Bits travel well through the internet, take up no space on the shelf, and don’t require me to leave my keyboard, which is where I play my games. This should be obvious to anyone who’s been selling bits as long as Electronic Arts. But I’ve got a Mac, and there is no Mac download. That doesn’t mean there’s no Mac version of the game. There is. There’s just no download. Their games have taken very creative advantage of the internet for years now, so why are their distribution methods (at least for Mac versions) stuck in 1998? Note to EA: Apple’s US home computer market share seems to be around 8%. Do you really want to inconvenience and irritate that many potential customers? All you’d have to do is upload the Mac version to your server. Why haven’t you?

What Now?

I’ve just written Electronic Arts again, and simply asked for a refund. Another promise of an answer in 24 hours. We’ll see.

As much as I wish I could claim that Electronic Arts will collapse in on itself due to its confusing web sites, poor service and outdated sales methods, I doubt they will any time soon. They sell some pretty cool games, and people want them. I’d like to say this experience has so turned me off Electronic Arts that I’ll never buy from them again, but I still want to play Spore and will buy it somewhere, somehow. So in this case, getting the experience right is probably not a matter of corporate survival.

But think of how much better EA could be if they not only had killer games, but also a site that encouraged instead of hindered sales, and service that left customers loving the brand? Sounds like a pipe-dream from where I’m standing, but it should be CEO John Riccitiello’s dream. Anyone got his email address?

Update: today I got an answer from Electronic Arts! Only five days late, but who’s counting? Bad news is, they say:

Spore in Macintosh platform is not available to download. We recommend you to purchase physical copy for Mac Platform.

The good news is, they’re idiots! Spore is actually available as a Mac download from GameTree. A friend (thanks captkevman!) saw my complaints, read this article, and made me aware of GameTree via Twitter. Funnily enough, the info about where to buy a Mac download of Spore is buried in Electronic Arts’ own support site. Maybe the support staff should also read it? Either way, I’m off to download Spore. Hold my calls!

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“The Urban Web”

I wasn’t quite sure if I should feel totally uncool for having never heard of Steven Johnson, but he’s written a number of books which sound interesting, and judging by his polished, relaxed style, he’s a conference circuit regular. His latest book, “The Ghost Map”, is the story of the London cholera outbreak of 1854, and was the subject of his talk. John Snow, with the help of local vicar Henry Whitehead, proved that cholera was spread through contaminated drinking water with a mix of detective work and innovative mapping. His map is worth a look: the black bars represent deaths, and reveal the pump on Broad Street as a likely suspect. But Johnson placed more emphasis on the social network of which vicar Whitehead was a super-node, enabling the investigation to go deeper and faster than Snow could have ever achieved alone. A gripping story full of info design geekery that put “The Ghost Map” on my wish list.

This led to a demo of Johnson’s new project, outside.in, which gathers regional info from blogs in your city and displays them in a format reminiscent of newspaper sites. He said Brooklyn, where he lives, is the “bloggiest neighbourhood” in America, so I can imagine the attraction for Brooklynites. The “radar” function alerts you via email to news closer to home, like the truck that burst into flames near Johnson’s house while he was on holidays. As much as I liked the idea of outside.in, radar had the feel of a “solution without a problem”, as a friend said. And as someone living outside the U.S. I once again felt terribly left out. Not only do very few Hamburgers (yes yes, Hamburg residents really are called that) or Sydneysiders (yep) I know of blog about their city, but outside.in doesn’t work outside the U.S. One day maybe.

“Playing the Web”

The day’s prize for most energetic talk definitely goes to Aleks Krotoski. She’s an academic, avid gamer and writer at the Guardian, and gave her talk with much running back and forth, arm waving and the occasional dance step or two, which all sounds maybe a little spastic, but I’m not doing her justice. It was utterly charming. She wondered why the games industry and web industry share so little. Games-makers understand stickiness so well, and we webby folk are so deep into community and openness, isn’t it obvious that we could and should learn from one another? She asked how many games-makers were in the crowd, and the number of hands—ten, tops—proved her point.

After establishing that gamers and webbers don’t actually share, she went through many things we can learn from one another. For lack of detailed notes, I’ll summarise: game people understand play, rich world creation and guidance, web folk get community and have a more fundamental, analytic understanding of interfaces. Far too short a description for a talk so full of energy and exciting ideas. With any luck her presentation will appear on her Slideshare page soon. In the break Kars Alfrink, who knows the games scene far better than I, confirmed Aleks’ concern, said that it’s been coming up on both sides of the fence alot lately, and said she illustrated and analysed it better than he’d ever heard before.

Favourite (inexact) quote: “The term ‘experience economy’ is a phenomenal way to make fun boring.”

Question: what games conferences would you recommend?

“Leveraging Cognitive Bias in Social Design”

For my dollar, Joshua Porter gave the most hands-on useful talk of the day. He took the psychological research evident in his book “Designing for the Social Web” further, and dove into cognitive bias and how we can use it to improve our interfaces.

We all use mental short-cuts, or heuristics, to make decisions when we don’t have enough info. Keeping some typical heuristics in mind can help us make interface paths clearer and motivate users. Some examples:

• The ‘bandwagon effect’: we tend to follow others, so showing activity and lots of users helps convince new users to sign up.
• The charmingly named ‘Lake Wobegon effect’: everyone tends to think that they’re above average (I’m sure Joshua wasn’t trying to say that I’m not).
• Loss aversion: “losses loom larger than gains.” He demonstrated this by asking who’d go for a 50/50 chance to lose/gain £100 pounds. Even when raised to lose £100/gain £300 no more than half of the audience raised their hands.

There was quite a lot more meat in the talk, and plenty of web examples of cognitive biases in use—I’m seriously hoping Joshua’s planning on slidesharing his presentation soon, though it sounded like the start of another book, so maybe he’s playing this stuff closer to the chest. And I guess it had to come: after the talk someone asked “isn’t all of this evil?” Of course it’s good to think about the ethical consequences of what we’re doing, but is it evil to make a button big and red because we know that our brains register larger, brightly coloured objects before others?

On a personal note, I’d gone all fanboi and brought a copy of Joshua’s book with me to Brighton for a signing, but never had a chance to corner him. And then, purely by coincidence, I ran into him at the Tate Modern in London on Sunday. Short chat, due to my bad mood and him sitting down to eat, but he seemed a friendly guy. Didn’t have the book with me though, so no autograph.

“Designing for interaction”

When Daniel Burka, creative director of digg, and co-founder of Pownce, took the stage I was sinking into a concentration low. But what I took away was a list of challenges to designing systems to help huge numbers of people do similar things together.

1. Getting signups
2. Encouraging positive behaviours
3. Allowing flexible participation

His suggestions for solutions to these challenges were of course taken from his learnings at digg and Pownce, such as streamlined registration, avoid king of the hill contests (lesson hard learned from digg) and my favourite, “pave the cow paths”, i.e. instead of forcing users through pre-defined paths, watch where they naturally go and pave the groove they wear in your site.

“Social Network Portability”

My low led to nodding, which has nothing to do with Tantek Çelik’s talk, and plenty to do with the comfortable, warm darkness of the auditorium and the pre party thrown by the chi.mps the night before. This was the only real tech talk of the day, full of Microformats and code snippets. As far as the ideas go, it all sounded pretty familiar, so no “aha!” moments. In my groggy state the code would’ve been like a rubber mallet to the back of the head, so I ducked out for a coffee. Sorry Tantek, no hard feelings.

“Designing for the Coral Reef”

Lunch! I’m awake again! The votes are in, and the Matts Jones & Biddulph from dopplr get best talk of the conference. As the only speakers to take advantage of the on-stage couch (and if I’m not mistaken, Matt Jones presented in bright blue and white striped socks) they certainly get the “most relaxed” trophy.

The talk itself was a rambling journey through dopplr being a social physics engine (by way of a model of space/time), coral reefs as infrastructure and animal, slippy maps, streaming info in and avoiding “please wait” states, respecting privacy, data portability, building sites no one needs to visit, and plenty more. If it sounds chaotic, well, it was more a thoroughly entertaining information performance than a typical conference talk. Y’had to be there I guess.

The high point of the whole talk was the idea of a “delighter”, an unnecessary feature created purely to delight the user. Dopplr’s best example of a delighter is the personal velocity display. My personal velocity, 5.59 km/h, is about the same as a duck apparently.

And a few announcements: you can add trips by tweeting @dopplr, there are now dopplr groups, with more functionality coming soon, and when you share a specific trip, you’ll soon be able to generate a QR code for it. Unfortunately their hoped for live demo—iPhoners should shoot the QR code on the screen and see a trip—failed due to uncooperative light conditions.

Best quote (although they packed in many worth remembering): “Google Maps is like looking at a blue whale through a letter box.”

Best gimmick: the dopplr colours, which if you haven’t noticed yet change in the logo and the favicon as you enter trips. And the delighter of the conf were the city stickers the Matts handed out at the post-party, which were traded like baseball cards by giddy geeks all night. And as of five minutes ago, you can generate your own city stickers with the dopplr/moo mash-up mooplr!

“The System Of The World”

I’d heard from many what a good presenter Jeremy Keith is, so I was looking forward to this. Since he describes himself as “stuck-up”, I guess I don’t have to fear insulting him: after 10 minutes I thought nothing of his talk other than “what a load of pretentious über-nerdery”. After the Matts, it was like dropping from 5th gear in a sunny-day convertible into 1st gear and drizzle. He read from a verbose academic style paper (admittedly accompanied by a lovely slideshow) and jumped from quoted pop-psych book to dropped name at a dizzying pace, and I waited patiently for it to make some sort of sense.

But, after asking myself at least ten times, “what the hell’s his point?” Jeremy started to get a laugh or two. His text and style lightened up a little. He said more, and quoted less. And I realised he’d been building a complex (and perhaps unnecessarily baroque) foundation for a point that was indeed pretty impressive and inspiring. What was it? Don’t ask me to even attempt to repeat it—just go read his talk (bring some time with you) or enjoy the version with the pretty pictures, or wait ‘til the podcast is online.

Oh, and he said “ugly bags of mostly water” too. Gotta love that.

A Round of Thanks

First and foremost thanks as I write this goes to Alastair Campbell who took insanely detailed notes and propped up my mushy memory. And other than that the Clearlefties and others who organised dConstruct, the excellent speakers and the chi.mps and backstage.bbc folks who threw the pre and post parties respectively. If I can afford to get over the pond (two ponds, actually) next year, I’ll see you in Brighton.

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As I’ve mentioned before, one of my main motivations was a unshakeable desire to return to Australia after over 10 years. I’ll be stepping off the plane in Sydney on October 3rd.

But more than that, I’ve been motivated by something I think of as “growing up.”

Working for a big company is in so many ways so very easy. Someone else decides what you’ll do. Someone else tells you how to do it and when. And someone else shoulders the stress and worry if and when things go wrong. No matter what you do, as long as you’re at work every day, do your best to be useful, and don’t do something completely stupid, you get your paycheck. And no matter how excellent your work is, every month’s paycheck looks the same. This state is akin to childhood—your parents shield you from most of life’s worries and feed you regularly.

Many people work this way all their lives, but it’s been getting under my skin for a year or two. It’s pretty cosy to have so little worry, so it took that long for the itch to outweigh the comfort.

Growing up is about deciding things for yourself. Saying “yes” to risks, and living with the triumphs and disasters of your own decisions. Earning more when you work harder and less when you slack off. Being able to run with exciting new ideas, and reject the duds. Knowing that there’s no one else to blame, no matter how good or bad things are.

I believe living and working this way is what it is to truly be alive. I certainly hope I’m right, since I am, as of today, a freelance designer.

It feels pretty good so far.

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So what’s design mean to you, Thomas?

It’s the layer on top of things that are used, that makes them comfortable and gives them more ease of use. It’s adding experience but taking away the hard edges, and allow people to embrace the tool or service in a closer interaction.

Other than that, his explanation of “the four foundation layers” for developing social tools gave me plenty to think about.

After the interview, Thomas and I coincidentally discovered a shared love of typography, and spent an afternoon in Copenhagen, a beautifully designed city, hunting interesting type with our cameras (his booty and mine). It was a blast to spend time with Thomas: he spit out interesting stuff the whole time, and I wish I’d written it all down.

I’ll be seeing Thomas again soon, and would love to do another interview. What would you ask him if you could? If you’re as interested as I am in what he’s got to say, leave a comment with your questions, and I’ll gather them up and me and my camera will ask him next week.

I interviewed eleven smart people at Reboot10 in Copenhagen, Denmark, asking the same question: what’s design mean to you? This is the last video in the series.

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