[UPDATE for new readers: Toyota has now paid for the replacement battery. Details here.]
Last week our 2001 Prius started acting strangely, and today SF Toyota gave me the bad news. The hybrid battery is shot and a replacement will cost just under $3700, tax included. We’re a year and half 8 months out of warranty, it turns out, so the repair cost is 100% our responsibility.
Our 2001 Prius in happier times. Photo courtesy sfgate.com.
This is a vehicle that was on the front page of the SF Chronicle in 2001, as a poster child for early adopters of green technology. We’ve bought another Prius since then and I’ve been looking with interest at the lithium-powered next generation coming in 2012. But this changes the equation. If you can expect to pay for a $3700 repair at 70,000 miles, the car suddenly becomes much more expensive as well as less reliable… what happens if the failure occurs elsewhere than in a major city?
I remember the naysayers when we bought it: “the battery’s going to die and it will cost you a fortune.” The reviewers scoffed at this: batteries don’t last forever, but it is unlikely to fail in the driving life of the vehicle. Too bad that’s not true. The $3700 new battery is warranted for 12 months. I guess that tells you something.
News like this could have a chilling effect on hybrid sales, just when we need a nitty-gritty, ready-right-now antidote for energy waste and climate change. (I love seeing the MPG on our 2006 Prius creep over 50, combined with the fact that the car has actually been made less efficient in order to come close to zeroing out the emissions.)
We’re putting our house on the market in San Francisco and I’ve been interviewing agents all week. Each neighborhood in San Francisco (ours is the Lower Haight) has its own personality and a corresponding base of people who want to live there, so a realtor’s knowledge of our area was very important. I prepped for this process in part by looking at names on “for sale” signs and visiting nearby open houses… which, it turns out, is a strategy almost nobody uses any more.
I learned that today most buyers start their home search on the internet and that the vast majority of sales in San Francisco are originally researched direct from the online Multiple Listing Service. That would be different in some areas, but in SF there is strong cooperation among agents and nobody has proprietary listings.
So, it follows that two things are critically important in choosing a realtor: a/the way in which they actually utilize the web to present their homes and b/their overall comfort level with the web in the way they market their services and the homes they represent.
Agents that don’t put multiple photographs of the property online, so prospective buyers can see what it looks like before they go to the house, are putting their sellers at a big disadvantage. I’d say the more information the better—floor plans, detail photographs, go for it—so long as they are organized so I know what I am looking at. And, don’t do it with a slow-to-load flash presentation on a third party website accompanied with a music track. One of our top choices did just that and it hurt them in the final decision.
Romancing the home is fine (and it can and should be done with good staging and good, well-lit photography—and of course a great verbal narrative!) but it can’t be at the expense of accessibility to the basic information that a buyer is looking for as they click through many listings.
As for web savvy, the realtor we went with didn’t have the flashiest (nor Flash®-iest) website but it was solid. He was one of two, out of 7, who was following me on Twitter prior to the appointment. (The other one sent me an email announcing that they were following me, which is not cool.) He had also researched me personally and knew, for example, of my lack of success in selling a screenplay. (Fortunately he did not offer opinions as to why that was.) And, after we met, he was one of the few who followed up with a PDF version of the presentation.
But this was also the only realtor who sent a personal thank you note via snail mail after the meeting. And he was totally and immediately attentive to follow-up contacts from me or my wife (who was 3000 miles away, making email accessibility essential). In the end, the day was won with smart selling using all the tools available, both old and new.
I hardly ever use this blog to promote my own services, so please indulge me. I want to make an analogy to Southwest Airlines, whose CEO David Kelly explained he gained market share in a dreadful economy by doing nothing. Other airlines started charging for checked bags, Southwest didn’t. “Bags Fly Free” was news.
The commercial side of Otisregrets can be found in the tabs at the top of the page. Though I’m a copywriter, I came out of a Master of Fine Arts program at UCLA Film School. I can’t help thinking in terms of stage management. How will the recipient interact with the elements of the direct mail package? What will the reader see “above the fold” on a web page that keeps them reading?
From the beginning, each of my copywriting deliverables has come with guidance on how to execute it graphically. Sometimes this means detailed design commentary within the copy deck; sometimes it’s working with an in-place designer; every now and then I do an old-school “copywriter’s rough”.
I don’t see other writers doing this as much these days, when we all are re-inventing ourselves to stay viable. Maybe it’s my own “Bags Fly Free” story. Check it out.
In my town lives a master carpenter named Chris. He donates his time to serve on the town historical preservation board, and he donated his time last fall to supervise a bunch of Saturday amateurs who volunteered to help rebuild a dilapidated but beloved local building. It was in this context that Chris provided a sweet example of a carpenter’s jig.
A jig is a made up structure which holds your work in place while you are performing a carpenter’s task such as sawing, drilling or glueing. A jig is handy if you are doing a number of repetitious operations (for example, drilling a row of holes at exactly the same position in a cabinet so you can hang a perfectly level shelf) but can also be used for a one-time operation if you don’t trust your ability to control an unpredictable process when wood meets a powerful force.
Making a jig is one delineator between a carpenter who cares about their work and a hobbyist tacking boards together. It’s the physical embodiment of laying the groundwork which a good marketer is going to do as well: define your problem, determine how you are going to approach it, then be clear in your mind about your plan of attack so you don’t get distracted and veer off course during the executional phase. Good copywriters do this without even thinking about it; less-good copywriters just hammer away.
But back to Chris’ jig. The job given to me and a couple of other guys was to hang siding along a 20 foot run. As he described the project Chris asked me, “do you want a jig?” That was music to my ears. Each row of siding needs to be perfectly level and it needs to overlap the previous row at exactly the same measure from the bottom. Trying to eyeball this with a long floppy board would create something ugly. So Chris made a jig. He took a 10” length of 2×4, ripped it down the middle to the 6” mark, then turned it 90 degrees and made a crosscut that met the first one to create a piece that looked like an L if you held it sideways. And then he made another jig exactly the same as the first one. If each guy takes a jig and fits in the shelf of the L under the previous row of siding, then rests the next piece on the top of the L, the work is in perfect position to nail into place.
Now it may occur to you there would be an easier way to do exactly the same thing. Just get two pieces of wood (you could even use scraps from the siding) then fasten them together offset at 6” to produce the two shelves you need to hold the work. But Chris did it the hard way because it gives him pleasure to make something that works well. Not a bad role model for copywriters.
A search for free range Thanksgiving turkeys led me down a rabbit hole today… culminating at two websites which were probably quite artful in a very different time, but don’t fit the expectation of today’s web users. We’re tired of hearing about Web 2.0… but here’s what we looked like before it got all interactive.
Meatpaper is a magazine about responsible meat practices when raising animals for food. It’s a cause I believe in and in fact I think I encountered these guys during a writing assignment. But now it all looks very unhelpful and self-absorbed. The cow in the preview pane has long since gone to her reward. The two ladies posed at the table are not nearly so interesting to me as to themselves. And if I go looking for content, there isn’t any. I have to subscribe to the magazine to get it.
Then I click through to the site of Julio Duffoo, who took the picture of the two ladies. Take a look: Nothing but the guy’s name and an arrow I can click to start a slide show, no instructions. Once that would have been sly, now it’s haughty and ultimately ineffective.
Web 2.0 users want instant access to a fire hose of information. We make fun of the ubiquity of content but this is the alternative. And I’m not saying either of these sites was bad in its day. But the assumption that “I’m important and interesting and creative and therefore I will put up a website and you will appreciate it” is not viable in the Web 2.0 era. And I think that’s a good thing.
I have been getting cranky lately about products in my daily life that don’t work as well as they should. I’m cranky not just as a consumer, but as a marketer. Because if a product doesn’t work as it should, people are going to bring it back or not purchase again as surely as if you’d made false claims in your advertising. And since life isn’t fair, you may well end up with the blame.
So here are three ineptly designed mass produced products each of which richly deserves a middle finger salute—not just for their design flaws, but because those flaws are so obvious they would have been detected with the slightest hint of usability testing.
Glide in its unusable tube.
1. Glide dental floss tube. Glide is itself a success story of good design: Teflon coated dental floss, so it doesn’t get stuck and break off in your teeth. The idea worked so well that Oprah praised it on her show and stuck a package of Glide under every seat in her studio for the audience to take home.
Now we have an economy size in a tube, at about half the per-yard price and not much more bulk so it’s a no-brainer if you use Glide every day. But guess what: as soon as you start to pull out the floss, the top pulls off and the roll comes unraveled and it’s almost impossible to put back together. I guess they must have several billion of these tubes in stock because they’ve now come up with a Rube Goldberg fix: a disk of clear plastic over the top of the roll inside. The roll no longer comes out, but guess what: neither does the dental floss, making the whole delivery system inoperable. Middle finger salute.
How would YOU open this mustard bottle?
2. Nathan’s mustard plastic bottle. This is my favorite mustard, and it used to come in a sturdy bottle with a tip, anchored with a plastic strap to the rim of the top, that you could use to seal it. Now they’ve got a new design which is designed to self destruct on first use and render the seal inoperable, which I guess means you will want to buy another right away. Not.
Look at the picture and you’ll see it is not at all intuitive how to get the top off. Click on the picture to enlarge it. Oh, there it is, that flat area in front. But it’s hard to get your finger or thumb in and unless you lift it off carefully and perfectly that entire sealing lid is going to break off leaving you with an extra piece covered with wet mustard that is guaranteed to get thrown away. Also, Nathan’s has taken to not putting a label on the bottle and instead just prints on the shrink wrap. Maybe it is rebranded for sale in other countries or maybe they are just hiding from their ancestors. A second middle finger salute.
Wireless switch on my poorly designed Gateway laptop.
3. My Gateway laptop. I could go on for hours about all the things that are wrong with this budget machine that could have been avoid simply by copying a well designed laptop instead of randomly assembling parts. But here’s the thing that is most infuriating and ridiculous: a slider on/off switch on the side near the front which controls the wireless. You’re virtually guaranteed to slide the switch at some point if the laptop is on your lap, or if you simply brush it with your hand. It’s easy to do this without noticing and then you wonder why you can’t get your mail or why that Skype call was dropped. Why in the world do they even need a wireless on/off switch in the first place instead of controlling it from the control panel? Middle finger salute.
That adds up to a three finger salute: Control+Alt+Delete. These companies should get these products out of here along with the designers that created them.
This week Apple announced that it was resigning from the National Chamber of Commerce because of the CofC’s position on reducing carbon emissions, as PG&E had done earlier. (The Chamber has since said it supports the concept of reducing emissions–just not any current legislation.) Apple also has a website where you can review its measures to reduce environmental impact. This is a good thing if you want to leave your children a world to live in and believe for-profit corporations need to do some of the heavy lifting instead of leaving it to the government.
I gotta say, though, that the packaging of the MacBook I bought this summer (last of the old white edition, now replaced by aluminum) was among the difficult to dispose I have ever encountered. The box had tricky plastic inserts and a wad of foam padding glued to the lid which was impossible to remove in order to break down for the blue bin. This represents a step back from a recent period where all Apple goods came in plain brown boxes. Hopefully a temporary slip. I took a picture to document my frustration but seem to have recycled it. Easy to do on iPhone, not so much in real life.
It’s not often you get to see a completely new user interface come on the scene, but that’s what we have today with dual flush toilets. This affords us a rare opportunity to look inside designers’ heads as they figure out the process of making consumers comfortable and confident as they use the product.
A dual flush toilet has two settings that use differing amounts of water depending on what is being flushed. The designer’s challenge is a/communicating this fact to the user, who possibly has never seen such a device before; and then b/letting them know which switch is for which function. Let’s look at a few examples of how this challenge has been met.
Dual Flush toilet instructions at University of N. Carolina.
The University of North Carolina installed a very institutional toilet with a handle that goes up or down depending. Since you don’t know which is which way does what they put up a sign to explain. I would say this is not very good user interface design: if you have to include instructions for a toilet handle, it’s non-intuitive and too complicated.
A couple of companies offer retrofit kits that add dual flush capability inside your existing tank. To make this work, they replace the operating handle on the outside of the tank. Dual Flush also has a handle that goes up or down, and they include a decal in the package that you can stick on the toilet next to the handle to educate users. Again, not ideal but we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt since this device is a lot cheaper and more environmentally friendly than buying a new toilet.
Dual handle flusher from Flush Choice.
Another retrofit kit comes from Flush Choice. This one has two handles, a little one for a little flush and a big one for a big. I think I would figure this out without a guidebook, but it would look a little circusy in a home bathroom and might not be sturdy enough for institutional settings.
Other designers have abandoned the handle and flush the toilet with an entirely different mechanism: buttons. Making such a radical change in the interface is pretty unusual, and it can only work because people really, really want to flush that toilet, and will take the initiative to figure out how. Buttons can be attractively designed, and they’re sturdy because they connect directly to a plunger in the tank. And in fact, all the dual flush toilets I’ve actually seen in the wild have buttons.
Dual buttons in a public restroom. (SEE UPDATE AT BOTTOM OF POST!)
Of the three photos here, the big wide buttons are from a toilet in a public restroom. The buttons are of equal size but they have images on them to tell you which is for which. The image of the solid circle implies “all the water” but it also reminds of solid waste. Maybe too graphic? And using same-size buttons for different-size flushes doesn’t seem like an elegant solution; the designer missed an opportunity to communicate by making the buttons also different sizes.
Kohler’s new moon/outhouse buttons.
That’s what was done with the new-moon shape, which is my favorite. It hearkens back to outhouse doors and once you study it, it’s clear that one button is larger than the other and I think most people would figure out that small means less. I kind of wish they would make the “less” button green but maybe that calls too much attention to itself to be a successful home décor product. (Interestingly, the plunger underneath this inside the tank IS green; also interesting, the home fixit guy who installed it got the parts reversed so the green low flush plunger ended up on the high flush side. In the end, some human errors can’t be solved with design.)
High end Kohler flush buttons.
The much, much more subtle split circle is from the same manufacturer, Kohler. This toilet is much more expensive than the one above and works a lot better. And I can easily see what went through the product manager’s head when they saw the new-moon configuration: “I’m not putting a picture of an outhouse in MY customer’s bathroom.” But it would have been an improvement.
Gotta go.
Which button should I push?
UPDATE: 4 1/2 years after writing this post, I revisited one of these toilets, located in a public restroom at my local coffee hangout. Take a look: with regular use, the legends on the two buttons have worn off so you can no longer tell which is which. D’oh!
I’m wondering why I and so many others were so ga-ga about Twitter at SXSW earlier this year. Maybe it was the new TweetDeck app that allowed us to chirp back and forth about the session that was happening in front of us in the same room. But anyway, I was expecting Twitter to change my life and it hasn’t.
If you want to make money with Twitter, what marketers are realizing is that it’s a great platform for communicating with your EXISTING customers—the same discovery we all made about email. Example: the Korean taco truck telling followers where it will show up next. A company letting its best customers in on a “secret” sale. And an organization like Zappos which has discovered Twitter is an effective vehicle for internal communications. I guess this isn’t really making money per se… rather, you’re saving money or expanding your base with an efficient means of targeted communication.
Best way to make Twitter relevant in your own life: go through your tweets and ruthlessly unfollow anyone who tweets frequently with info that is not fantastically interesting. If you are disappointed with what you read in Twitter, do this immediately then replace the unfollowed by going to http://wefollow.com/ and following a few media sources or people that seem interesting. Repeat on a regular basis, unfollowing those who aren’t interesting after all. Yes, this is work, which is the antithesis of what Twitter is supposed to be.
Twitter founder Biz Stone calls it “curating” your tweets, as if we all had a roomful of Hundertwassers instead of inane tweets about needing to go to the gym. Okay…
My fellow blogger Daniel Berman is a former San Francisco ad guy who, like me, found himself in upstate New York through a twist of fate. We met on Yelp through our reviews chronicling the quest for good food in Albany and environs. Daniel has now taken this a step further with a quixotic campaign to persuade Albanians to chef up and be more like Austin, a city of comparable size. He’s been driven a bit mad by observing that “Our top food blogger is promoting free beef and cheddar sandwiches at Arby’s. And our top food critic is spending her time in converted pubs and pizza parlors.” This sturm und drang caused me to reflect on what my own food experience has been since moving here.
As all things should, we’ll start at the track. One of the wisest and most economical things you can do in the Capital District is go to Saratoga Racetrack early on a summer morning and watch the horses exercise while the dew melts and the steam rises off the grass. It’s free and you can sit in a box seat which will subsequently be occupied by a celebrity or racing nabob, while you sip your coffee or nosh on the breakfast you’ve picked up on the way in.
Coolers claiming picnic tables at Saratoga Racetrack, 10 am.
They clear the grandstand at 10 am and you have to go out, pay, then come back in again. On the way out you will see: most of the tables in the $3 picnic area already claimed by folks who have brought in coolers and tablecloths and will return sometime before the 1 pm post time. I personally can’t think of a better way to spend the afternoon since you can watch the horses and jockeys go by in the paddock, on the way to the races, see the races themselves on closed circuit TVs everywhere, stroll over to a betting station, and potentially splurge by spending a big $2 additional to see the races live by moving to the clubhouse.
So my first look at a quality Saratoga dining experience consists in peeking at what’s inside my cooler. It is this: half a pastrami and swiss on seeded rye with Saratoga chips and Cole slaw from Ben and Bill’s deli, accompanied by a can or more of Genessee Cream Ale.
My trackside lunch from Ben and Bill's Deli, Saratoga.
Ben and Bill were the original Golub brothers, a distinguished Jewish family which owns the Price Chopper chain of supermarkets upstate. Their descendents chafed at the lack of local deli food and resolved to create the best deli between New York City and Montreal, which happens to be placed inside a supermarket in a strip mall. No matter: the pastrami is lean, the cole slaw is excellent and the included pickle is authentically fluorescent. They’ve licensed a few things from Carnegie Deli such as the cheesecake and the gut-busting Woody Allen mile-high sandwich but the $5.99 half sandwich special is really all a reasonable person needs to eat.
This includes a generous bag of potato chips which, as Wikipedia will tell us, were invented right here, across the Northway at Saratoga Lake:
The original potato chip recipe was created by chef George Crum at Moon’s Lake House near Saratoga Springs, New York, on August 24, 1853. Fed up with a customer who continued to send his fried potatoes back complaining that they were too thick and soggy, Crum decided to slice the potatoes so thin that they could not be eaten with a fork. As they could not be fried normally in a pan, he decided to stir-fry the potato slices. Against Crum’s expectation, the guest was ecstatic about the new chips and they soon became a regular item on the lodge’s menu, under the name “Saratoga Chips.”
Ben and Bill’s Saratoga chips are fried up fresh each morning and are miles apart from the uniformity of a bag of Lay’s. Some are burnt, some are a bit flaccid, but that’s the idea. Each one unique, these chips are made to be noticed and savored slowly over a race or two till the bag is gone.
The ideal liquid accompaniment for this would be a growler (64 ounce jug) of IPA from the ever-changing tap at Eddie’s Beverages on Excelsior, except that the track does not allow glass containers to be brought in. On a warm summer day, the light, refreshing and slightly sweet Genny Creme is a fine substitue. It’s a benefit that many upstaters regard this as a working person’s brew, a bit déclassé, so I’m rarely (actually never) asked to share my stash.
When I go back to San Francisco, my treat of choice will be a special from a Chinese lunch place, most likely shrimp in garlic sauce from Taiwan in the Richmond. Except with great difficulty, I’m not going to find anything like that here. Nor will I get Texas brisket or a perfectly simmered pot of turnip greens. But my trackside lunch works well enough, and I feel proud and resourceful regarding my competence in foraging in my new haunts.
