Alex's Thoughts

Dear Ensequence,

This summer I applied to intern for your marketing/business development team but unfortunately the internship was scrapped last minute. Regardless, I spent much time researching the current state of interactive television and thinking about the what is missing in today’s TV software design. You can always add the interactive features such as remote voting, live in-commercial purchases, or tailored advertising, but there is still a bigger more universal design problem, the TV guide.

I fell in love with iTV as well as what your company is looking to do in the next 2-3 years as you expand and hopefully saturate the interactive television market. Feel free to read over the following idea and reconsider the internship.

The Problem: You sit down at the TV, but don’t have an idea of what you are going to watch…sound familiar? So what do you do? You go to the TV Guide and begin scrolling or wait as the guide rotates through the hundreds of channels you subscribe to. There are thousands of shows, some of which are probably interesting to you, while others not at all, and although you can read the synopsis of each show you have no idea what to watch!

The solution: A more user-friendly interactive TV guide that gives recommendations.

How It Works.

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Every company has a logo, or a graphic mark or emblem that visually represents themselves in a compact, unique, and hopefully memorable way. 

First, there are those companies that settle for the ‘simple’ logo concept, transforming a common shape or design into a universally recognized company emblem.

Apple Inc. The first thing that comes to mind here is the simplicity of their logo. It consists of a rounded apple shape with a bite taken from it. This type of logo is obviously situational since if your company name is “Alex’s Computing” you can’t exactly find a shape that fits that. This image to name equality is an instant unconscious user recognition trick, that allows them to brand their company not only with their name, but interchangeably with their logo.

Target. Target uses the a very similar logo to brand name equality recognition trick to Apple. Target also incorporates a color scheme into their company, branding themselves as the red and white company, evidenced by their advertising push in the early 2000s. Every aspect of their marketing technique incorporates the red and white color theme. From their website to their TV advertisement they exploit subconscious color to company recognition.

Spartan Golf Clubs. Spartan employs a very different logo marketing technique. Spartan takes on a more sophisticated approach in hopes of luring customers by the use of optical illusions and the “double-take” effect. Does the phrase, “Old woman or young lady?” ring a bell? This is the most common simple optical illusion that has spread amongst our society. If you have not heard of this, feel free to check it out here. Spartan asks the same question in their logo through visual illusions. This “double-take” effect is an incredible marketing technique, where Spartan is able to capture the attention of the consumer for an extended period of time just due to the visual complexity and captivation of their design.

In today’s world the average American carries an average of 6 credit cards, has multiple “member” cards, carry gift cards, and just in general fills their wallet with plastic cards of all sorts. The number of pieces of plastic can begin to grow very fast, and can become quite overwhelming.

Solution: Create a “Master” card (MC) that can hold multiple cards / identities. The MC will be sold in different sizes (varying memory space) depending on the need of the user.

The MC will have several features. You can add a card as temporary or as permanent. So for instance, you add your credit cards / debit cards / store member cards / library cards as all permanent memory locations since these pieces of information will usually not change. However, you can also put temporary memory on your card that will delete within a specified number of days/months. This can be useful to put on gift certificate / gym membership information that you only need on your card for 6 months or so.

The cards will be sold in varying memory sizes to hold on average of 10, 20, 30, or 50 cards.

Also, the technology / process of adding cards to the MC is another challenge. This process must be doable by the average user. Maybe the card will be sold with a custom machine to input data onto its memory. This is certainly an option.

I still have to think out this idea some more…but wanted to see what people think.

Problem: People have become so obsessed with text messaging that the underlying disrespect often associated with it is usually overlooked.

Solution: Self control, and an understanding of the counter party’s perspective.

Imagine this — you are hanging out with an old time friend who you haven’t seen in a few weeks. You decide to go out to lunch, settle on a place, and are finally seated. You have the usual catch up part of the conversation and then move on to random stories about life, or the usual conversation about the common passion you both share. Then all of a sudden your friend reaches into his/her pocket and takes out her cell phone. You question, why is she taking out her cell phone? Does she not think I’ve seen this type of gadget before? You quickly realize that her pulling out the cell phone has nothing to do with you, but is a much more selfish move. She takes it out, acting like you don’t even notice, and begins typing away…

Now maybe this exact scene has not happened to you, with the restaurant, food, and old time friend, but I can almost guarantee that anybody reading this who is under 30 has this situation happen to them quite regularly. 

I would like anybody who texts with other people around them to seriously consider withstanding from this in the future, since although it doesn’t mean anything to you, it is sending a terribly negative message to the other person.

Here are some points to consider:

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Dear Apple,

As you are well aware I have been one of your biggest fans ever since I decided to make the switch 5 years ago. From computers, software, music devices, and phones, almost all the major technology in my life is branded with your universally famous bitten apple.

The iPhone has single handedly revolutionized not only the smart phone industry, but Apple itself. Its software is unmatched, style internationally imitated, and social influence unmeasurable.

As the iPhone is preparing to go through yet another OS release, I thought I would give my suggestions for a redesign / software improvements.

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Meet Etherpad, today’s online solution to text-based collaboration. Although recently acquired by Google, AppJet, the company behind Eterpad’s distinct technology has brought online collaboration to a whole new level.

Recently, while attempting to write a 6 page statistics paper within a group, I came to the conclusion that most group work is done very inefficiently. Let’s take an example with a group of size 4. The energetic individual who brought his laptop to the meeting is quickly deemed the “typer” while the 3 others simply scoot their chairs around his so that they can all attempt to peer over his shoulder and correct him when he makes a typo. Therefore we quickly notice that this is no “group project.” The amount of time spent to accomplish the end result is nearly the same as if it had just been assigned to the original “typer” himself.

Yet, what if all 4 of the group members could each look at and edit a live copy of the paper, together. Person 1 could begin writing the intro. Person 2 could begin the main body, while at the same time referring to Person 1’s style and thought progression he would see updating above. Person 3 could fill in the title, header, and page numbers, occasionally trying to write funny words and screw up Person 2’s hard work. And Person 4 could resort to the uselessness of the “typo corrector.” Now, we actually have a group working on the project together, increase overall efficiency, and will be able to finish the assignment is less than half the time.

With today’s project based world, efficient collaboration is key. 

Moral: If you haven’t already, meet Etherpad. Even if you don’t use it for something productive you will still waste approximately 30 minutes awing over its real-time editing capability.

Dear Saint Louis University Dept. of Ophthalmology,

Recently I took a trip to your ophthalmology department to clear up some issues I had been having with my eyesight. Although my 3 hour appointment mostly focused on reading E, A, and Ds projected on the wall, my initial interaction with the sign-in-software at your office is what stuck in my mind, but not for a good reason.

The proposition: You agree with my ideas about the software design/believe it could use improvement, you hire me to redesign the current sign-in software you use. You don’t, I will continue to let hundreds of others walk away with the same experience I did.

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Dear Google,

This summer I applied to intern for you, the world’s most successful company to date, as a member of your Corporate Operations Engineering team. Unfortunately, you did not share the same ideas I did about my summer plans, thus I will to propose the following.

The proposition: If you like my ideas, you hire me and I will work to fix them for you. If you don’t, well I guess I don’t have much to lose.

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As I was opening up my refrigerator today I noticed quite the ironic scene. As can be noted by the above image, I have word magnets on the front side of my fridge, as well as a piece of tape running across the top. I have upwards of 50 words randomly arranged from top to bottom, a constantly changing word puzzle of food for thought.

Yet tonight, I noticed something that triggered me to take this photo. The only word entrapped by the restricting tape running across the top is the word “freedom.” Now, this is rented fridge, and the magnets, tape, and placement of each were handed down from the previous owner.

The question: Was such an incident planned, or is yet another one of life’s random coincidences. 

For anybody who owns a mac, 1Password is the perfect password/secure information management application. Currently on sale for $39.95, this application is well worth its price.

The problem: In today’s browsing experience it is not uncommon for almost each site you visit to require some sort of login information.  Whether it be a forum, a store, a blog, or an email provider, the user usually has to create a unique login name and password for each website they visit. Yet, since most users don’t feel like remembering hundreds of passwords, most people use the same password for every site they visit, and its usually a simple combination of a relative word and number combination (i.e. middle name + date of birth)

So for instance, let’s look at the average user - John. For John, the login information he uses to login to Flickr to upload pictures taken on his family trip to Germany is usually the same login information he uses for his Bank of America account, a simple combination of a meaningful word or proper noun in his life with a combination of a meaningful number. And it is probably also the same information he uses for his Amazon store account, as well as his Gmail account. As you can see, this is a big security risk, for if one of these simple passwords is cracked, so are they all.

Does your browsing experience sound any bit familiar to John’s?

The solution: 1Password’s secure information library.

1Password’s main feature is its Safari and Firefox plugin/compatibility that allows users to instantly login to their favorite websites under a master password, stored locally, which can be a highly complex, randomly generated password, since the user only has to remember one.

This feature allows users to make each of their logins for different sites both unique and highly complex. Passwords are saved to the application library, thus the user never has to remember the individual login information. This allows a more secure and efficient internet experience since user’s individual accounts can have independent passwords/secure login identities and can be instantly recalled so you don’t spend minutes fumbling through your memory, stickies hanging on your monitor, or crumpled paper in your desk drawer.

Moral: With today’s increasing internet transparency, don’t leave secure login information up to simple memory recall. Get 1Password.