It's hard to write something like this, because interventions are always hard. And despite the forum and all of the assumptions people make about internet forum postings, this is actually a message intended for you with the best of intentions.
Jacob, please just stop.
Please just change careers. Become a tester or a sales person or a horse trainer. I don't care.
It's clear from your writing that your approach and attitude towards users and your job as a user experience person is exactly the opposite of what a good, effective, and successful designer takes.
I'm not asking you to change careers because Metro is such a disaster. We all make mistakes. But you have little of the empathy towards other human beings that is required to be good at what you are employed to do.
Look, I understand this is tough. You probably have spent a long time working on Metro and it's natural to want to defend something you helped create. The longer you spent on it, the more difficult it is to be objective about it.
User experience is different than other kinds of roles in the engineering process. It requires us to be able to put our egos aside and put the user first. While it is generally true that everyone should be thinking about the user, being in UX means that you have to be the one that takes this to the extreme. It's your job to be not only a voice of the user, but be the amplifier turned up to 11. Good design is not about technical details, marketing considerations or sales figures. There are other people in the process to advocate for those other factors. User experience design is measured by those people on the other end of the software, not by anything else. Not by bug counts, skus sold, graphic design awards given or anything else.
It's a bit similar to role of a defense attorney. It's not their jobs to make sure the right decision is reached. It's their job to be the best possible advocate for the defendent and to make sure that all of their rights under the law are respected.
So back to you. I've read your numerous postings, comments, etc. here and elsewhere. It's clear to me and other people who are "users" that you are not our jealous advocate in the design process. And it's also clear that you are not able to do the most important thing which is required to become that advocate: listen.
This post is not about Windows 8. It's about you.
Please just stop, for both of our sakes.
These biometric and other ID systems are basically creating DRM for humans. Take all the problems we have with doing this with music and now apply them to us.
I don't want my music DRM'ed and I sure as heck don't want my body DRM'ed.
Also his audience, and book readers in general, might be less inclined to purchase services after the free copy.
Actually this turns out not to be a problem. We now have publishers who are finding that you can give an electronic version of a book away and that sales of the paper copy are not only not diminished, but enhanced. An example that just happened yesterday is the availability of the new Suze Orman book that was given away on the Oprah website. The book is also ranked #7 on Amazon after the giveaway.
From the article:
"I can tell you that with respect to the '9-11 Report,' the free download did not seem to hurt sales at all," Norton publisher Drake McFeely told The Associated Press on Saturday. "There were people who wanted it quickly, in a less convenient form, and that was clearly a different market from the people who wanted the traditional book."
Part of why I pay for a book is to get pages printed and delivered. Part of why I pay for a movie ticket is to have a giant screen and a comfy seat. Part of why I pay for a sculpture is to admire the physical shape of it. Copies of art that lose these qualities/benefits are less valuable to me. Even if I get an electronic version of a book, for example, I'll still pay for a physical copy. Or more precisely, I'll pay for a different set of benefits. Getting one doesn't prevent me from being interested in the other.
Semi-related rant: Sometimes people forget that there are a lot of players involved in producing any piece of art.
For Suze's book for example, there were editors, printers, software makers, truck drivers, buyers, cashiers, etc. Before you start with the "without the artist, there is nothing!" argument, let me head you off. Without someone to layout the text there is nothing. Without someone to print the book there is nothing. Without someone to drive the printed book to the store where you can get it there is nothing. Etc. etc. Not only are many people/organizations/systems involved in making art, those people are involved in the actual content of the art as well. The choices made by the illustrator of a book, the editor of a movie, the producer of a tv show, etc., actually shape the meaning, and thus, value of the art as well. Can we start getting away from this cult of the "artist" or "author"? Art is a team sport.
One thing to remember is that on one level art is _always_ the result of patronage. Let's say an author, such as Douglas Adams, spends 3 years writing a book. Well somehow he had a place to sleep and food to eat and clothes to wear before the book was done and could be sold. Maybe his parent's were his "patron". If he wasn't writing the book because he had a contract with someone to publish and sell it, then he was taking a risk that no one would want to read his book. No one may be interested in buying it. And if it sucked, society as a whole is under no obligation to cover the costs of those three years or give him anything for his effort. If he had a contract with someone, like a publisher, then it's the publisher's problem if the book sucks. The publisher who contracts with an artist is taking a chance as well. They are investing in the artist, in paper, in ink, in shipping, etc. with the hopes that they can put all those things together in a package that they can sell people for money. Again, if society doesn't value that particular combination of content/ink/paper/etc, we are under no obligation to buy it.
Now think of the people and systems for music distribution. ITunes and Pirate Bay are two different packagers and distributors of music that's offered to people. Neither directly pay artists to make music. In fact, the record labels rarely pay artists to make music. First the artis
I view these results as a significant success for a new distribution model. But there are at least two things that make this experiment flawed and that limited how much money they've made off of In Rainbows:
Site Usability
The website where you buy/download the albums is REALLY hard to navigate and understand. They don't even make clear that you set your own price. Had I not known beforehand that you could set the price, I would've abandoned the site because it looked broken.
Can't Purchase After Download
If you download the album for free (like I did), but then decide you like it and want to pay for it, YOU CAN'T! Basically they let you have one download per email address. So unless you have another address handy to use the second time, you can't retroactively pay for your first download. That's just silly. Of course some of us want to decide whether we like it or not before handing over some cash, so this is a significant feature flaw.
So given these two significant things were hampering sales of the album, I'm actually pretty optimistic about the model. The next artist that does this and gets the site experience right and supports a "delayed" purchase, will make even more.
This new license scheme is the final straw. I can't give these people money anymore.
Can anyone point me to the right OS to switch to? I haven't installed any Linux distros in forever, so I have no idea what the latest and greatest is. I suppose I'd consider a Mac, but that seems like just as much a closed system as Windows.
Just help me get away from this madness.
Thanks!
How about this for an alternative:
Let users uniquely mark other users in a way that only they can see. For example, I raid with "RoxxorNightElf" and he ninjas some loot. So I give him a new name, "Imaninja", which only is visible to me. If he logs in with that or any other character he has on that account, I always see "Imaninja" as his name (or appended to name).
In this system, there is no need to restrict how many characters/servers/etc. people can have, yet individual users can easily keep track of the griefers in any incarnation. Users are still anonymous (i.e. I don't know their real name), so privacy is not comprimised. He gets to remain an anonymous loser and I get to raid without him.
Slashdot Mirror
It's hard to write something like this, because interventions are always hard. And despite the forum and all of the assumptions people make about internet forum postings, this is actually a message intended for you with the best of intentions. Jacob, please just stop. Please just change careers. Become a tester or a sales person or a horse trainer. I don't care. It's clear from your writing that your approach and attitude towards users and your job as a user experience person is exactly the opposite of what a good, effective, and successful designer takes. I'm not asking you to change careers because Metro is such a disaster. We all make mistakes. But you have little of the empathy towards other human beings that is required to be good at what you are employed to do. Look, I understand this is tough. You probably have spent a long time working on Metro and it's natural to want to defend something you helped create. The longer you spent on it, the more difficult it is to be objective about it. User experience is different than other kinds of roles in the engineering process. It requires us to be able to put our egos aside and put the user first. While it is generally true that everyone should be thinking about the user, being in UX means that you have to be the one that takes this to the extreme. It's your job to be not only a voice of the user, but be the amplifier turned up to 11. Good design is not about technical details, marketing considerations or sales figures. There are other people in the process to advocate for those other factors. User experience design is measured by those people on the other end of the software, not by anything else. Not by bug counts, skus sold, graphic design awards given or anything else. It's a bit similar to role of a defense attorney. It's not their jobs to make sure the right decision is reached. It's their job to be the best possible advocate for the defendent and to make sure that all of their rights under the law are respected. So back to you. I've read your numerous postings, comments, etc. here and elsewhere. It's clear to me and other people who are "users" that you are not our jealous advocate in the design process. And it's also clear that you are not able to do the most important thing which is required to become that advocate: listen. This post is not about Windows 8. It's about you. Please just stop, for both of our sakes.
These biometric and other ID systems are basically creating DRM for humans. Take all the problems we have with doing this with music and now apply them to us.
I don't want my music DRM'ed and I sure as heck don't want my body DRM'ed.
Also his audience, and book readers in general, might be less inclined to purchase services after the free copy.
Actually this turns out not to be a problem. We now have publishers who are finding that you can give an electronic version of a book away and that sales of the paper copy are not only not diminished, but enhanced. An example that just happened yesterday is the availability of the new Suze Orman book that was given away on the Oprah website. The book is also ranked #7 on Amazon after the giveaway.
From the article:
Part of why I pay for a book is to get pages printed and delivered. Part of why I pay for a movie ticket is to have a giant screen and a comfy seat. Part of why I pay for a sculpture is to admire the physical shape of it. Copies of art that lose these qualities/benefits are less valuable to me. Even if I get an electronic version of a book, for example, I'll still pay for a physical copy. Or more precisely, I'll pay for a different set of benefits. Getting one doesn't prevent me from being interested in the other.
Article about Suze Orman's book giveaway: http://apnews.myway.com//article/20080216/D8URJ49G0.html
Semi-related rant: Sometimes people forget that there are a lot of players involved in producing any piece of art.
For Suze's book for example, there were editors, printers, software makers, truck drivers, buyers, cashiers, etc. Before you start with the "without the artist, there is nothing!" argument, let me head you off. Without someone to layout the text there is nothing. Without someone to print the book there is nothing. Without someone to drive the printed book to the store where you can get it there is nothing. Etc. etc. Not only are many people/organizations/systems involved in making art, those people are involved in the actual content of the art as well. The choices made by the illustrator of a book, the editor of a movie, the producer of a tv show, etc., actually shape the meaning, and thus, value of the art as well. Can we start getting away from this cult of the "artist" or "author"? Art is a team sport.
One thing to remember is that on one level art is _always_ the result of patronage. Let's say an author, such as Douglas Adams, spends 3 years writing a book. Well somehow he had a place to sleep and food to eat and clothes to wear before the book was done and could be sold. Maybe his parent's were his "patron". If he wasn't writing the book because he had a contract with someone to publish and sell it, then he was taking a risk that no one would want to read his book. No one may be interested in buying it. And if it sucked, society as a whole is under no obligation to cover the costs of those three years or give him anything for his effort. If he had a contract with someone, like a publisher, then it's the publisher's problem if the book sucks. The publisher who contracts with an artist is taking a chance as well. They are investing in the artist, in paper, in ink, in shipping, etc. with the hopes that they can put all those things together in a package that they can sell people for money. Again, if society doesn't value that particular combination of content/ink/paper/etc, we are under no obligation to buy it.
Now think of the people and systems for music distribution. ITunes and Pirate Bay are two different packagers and distributors of music that's offered to people. Neither directly pay artists to make music. In fact, the record labels rarely pay artists to make music. First the artis
Site Usability The website where you buy/download the albums is REALLY hard to navigate and understand. They don't even make clear that you set your own price. Had I not known beforehand that you could set the price, I would've abandoned the site because it looked broken.
Can't Purchase After Download If you download the album for free (like I did), but then decide you like it and want to pay for it, YOU CAN'T! Basically they let you have one download per email address. So unless you have another address handy to use the second time, you can't retroactively pay for your first download. That's just silly. Of course some of us want to decide whether we like it or not before handing over some cash, so this is a significant feature flaw.
So given these two significant things were hampering sales of the album, I'm actually pretty optimistic about the model. The next artist that does this and gets the site experience right and supports a "delayed" purchase, will make even more.
This new license scheme is the final straw. I can't give these people money anymore. Can anyone point me to the right OS to switch to? I haven't installed any Linux distros in forever, so I have no idea what the latest and greatest is. I suppose I'd consider a Mac, but that seems like just as much a closed system as Windows. Just help me get away from this madness. Thanks!
How about this for an alternative: Let users uniquely mark other users in a way that only they can see. For example, I raid with "RoxxorNightElf" and he ninjas some loot. So I give him a new name, "Imaninja", which only is visible to me. If he logs in with that or any other character he has on that account, I always see "Imaninja" as his name (or appended to name). In this system, there is no need to restrict how many characters/servers/etc. people can have, yet individual users can easily keep track of the griefers in any incarnation. Users are still anonymous (i.e. I don't know their real name), so privacy is not comprimised. He gets to remain an anonymous loser and I get to raid without him.