Ryan Greenberg

Bad design is ugly, it is frustrating, it doesn’t create joy, it is not well considered, but above all bad design wastes time. This isn’t to say that design is just about saving time: Good design can make you slow down, it can make you think, it can be about things besides efficiency. Good design makes you think as much as you should, but no more.

This form is about the size of an index card.

I’m writing after a particular encounter with time-wasting bad design via the U.S. Postal Service’s form 3849. When a package cannot be delivered, the mail carrier leaves a orange slip that lets you request redelivery or go to pick up the package at the post office.

My girlfriend wasn’t home when the postman came earlier this week, so I went to pick up a package for her. She signed item 2 on the form, which is labeled “Sign here to authorize redelivery or to authorize an agent to sign for you.” I went to the post office, waited an hour, presented the signed slip, and was turned away: my name didn’t appear in the space for the agent’s name. “What?” I asked, “what space for the agent’s name?” “Right here,” the clerk told me, “it clearly says to write the agent’s name right here.”

She was right. The words on the form clearly indicate that the agent’s name should be entered in the upper-right corner. The form’s visual language, however, contradicts these instructions. Once you follow the numbered list and sign in section 2, it doesn’t look like there is anything else you have to do. The space for the agent’s name is so tiny that a glance at the form would never suggest that you have to write anything there. This is bad design. Not only does it waste time because a person has to think too much about filling it out—Look at the instructions in section 1, for example, which tell you to fill out section 3, then come back to section 2—but it also wastes time when people wait in line with an improper form.

In my case, it wasted an hour. That’s bad design.

3:58. As a culmination of two years of study at the School of Information, masters students present final projects that represent a significant work based on learning in the classroom. Next year I’ll be giving one of these presentations, but this year I’m just along for the ride.

The first step is a lightning round where each group of students get two minutes to present an overview of their projects. The projects are separated into three tracks.

Love to chat, but it’s time to get started…

While looking at Twitter last week I noticed that updates were missing from my user timeline. According to Twitter, I didn’t post anything between March 20 and April 9. Through a little investigative coding (and some help from Twistory, I found that my updates were still part of the Twitter system, but not associated with my user timeline. For instance, I posted this message on April 1, but if you look at that part of my user timeline, it doesn’t appear.

Twitter has closed the support ticket on this issue, but my problem isn’t solved. I opened my own support ticket, but the only advice I’ve received so far has been about changing my bio.

Since Twitter is such a large service, fixing this problem probably isn’t a high priority if it only affects a couple people. But it’s hard to know if it affects you unless you feel like going through all your messages and counting. Since computers are pretty decent when it comes to counting, I built Missing Tweets to help people check if they are missing any updates. The script works on the assumption that Twitter still maintains the correct total count for a user’s updates. This is true in my case: Twitter says I have made 993 updates, but only 955 show up in my user timeline. That means that 38 are missing.

Most people I have tested this script on aren’t missing any tweets, but a few are. Test it on yourself, and let Twitter know if you are missing tweets.

Note: This doesn’t work if you have more than 3200 tweets. Also, you can still use this even if your account is protected. Your browser will prompt you for your username and password. This communication is happening directly between your computer and Twitter; my site isn’t involved in any way.

There is a dedicated lane for cyclists on the west side of the bridge.

I bought a Kona bike last fall, and notwithstanding the incident where someone stole it and I found the thief and stole it back (another story—ask me later), it has lead a provincial life. During the week I ride it a couple of miles to campus and back each day. I put on some extra mileage when I run errands. Every now and then Caitlin and I will ride around town, either along sleepy Bicycle Boulevards, over the I-80 bridge and along the bay, across the Ohlone Greenway, or in the rolling Berkeley Hills. But this weekend, Caitlin and I decided to try out our wheels in the big city.

Our plan was to ride across the Golden Gate Bridge. Since we haven’t perfected the ride-across-the-water technique, we boarded BART with our bikes Saturday morning. It’s nice to have the option of taking your bike into San Francisco using public transportation. Once we arrived at the Embarcadero station, we rode along Market to the Ferry Building where we checked out the Saturday farmers’ market. After sampling a tasty blood orange, we barreled down Embarcadero.

This semester I’m taking a course called Information Law and Policy where we review court cases and laws related to, well, information. Our professor assured us that we would be completely unqualified to sit for the bar in May, but that we would understand some of the relevant issues about copyright, liability, fair use, and so forth. In other words, we should have some idea of when to consult a lawyer.

A few weeks ago we discussed fair use, a provision of copyright law that allows people to reproduce copyrighted works under certain conditions. There isn’t an clearly itemized checklist of when fair use applies; it depends on things like “the nature of the copyrighted work” and the use’s effect on the market for the original work. Our discussion made me think about a blog post I made almost two years ago.

One of the classes I took this semester at school was a little one-credit course taught by Quinten Hardy, “Information Technology and Identity: The Future of Storytelling.” The basic premise of the class is that a new medium never realizes its own genius initially. When the printing press was developed the first books were giant, immobile tomes because that’s how people saw books. It wasn’t until years later that someone considered printing them in smaller sizes to make them portable, which sparked popular reading. The first television programs were announcers sitting at desks reading the news, like radio but with video. One of our principal questions was what is or will be the Internet’s genius?

I was considering some ideas for the required final paper and I thought it might be interesting to look into single serving sites, a phenomenon that I read about on Kottke earlier this year. We discussed our potential topics in class, and my idea had a lukewarm reception, so I opted for a safety topic I had about how the format of sites like Reddit and Digg affect their treatment of news. A couple weeks later a classmate confronted me in the hall and convinced me that the paper on single serving sites was worth writing.

I finished my paper a couple days ago, created a domain for it, isthisyourpaperonsingleservingsites.com, and shot an email to my professor with the URL. I told some friends about the paper via Twitter, and a dozen or so visited to take a look. I also sent a short note to Jason Kottke, since I got the idea by reading his site.

Long story short, I came home this evening to find my site mentioned on Kottke’s site. I checked Google Analytics to find that over 2,000 people had visited the paper. To add perspective, that’s about 25% of all the visits to this site this year.

My thanks to everyone who has emailed me with comments and suggestions. I wasn’t able to devote as much time to this project as I would have liked (it’s only one credit of many), but I hope to revisit my analysis over Christmas break. Which is coming soon: check isitchristmas.com.

Update (Dec. 18): My site was mentioned on BuzzFeed, MetaFilter, and Hacker News. Also, Michael Sippey wrote an imagined one-paragraph conversation that I might have with my parents explaining my project. It’s funny, but I think it overestimates my parents’ interest by about a paragraph.

Update (Dec. 26): my 15 minutes are up. This is what a meme looks like:

While I was living in Chile and desperate for current material to read, I found an old issue of the New Yorker in my house. I had always ignored the magazine in the past because it looked boring compared to Time or Newsweek, I heard it was elitest, and the cartoons seemed dumb. After reading one issue I was hooked. The covers, the articles, the cartoons—it was like falling in love with a periodical. I conscripted my mom to begin sending me issues, an arrangement which delivered the most written words possible per U.S. Global Priority Mail package. Now that I’m back in school I barely have time to read, but the New Yorker is the one magazine that I still subscribe to.

The best thing I can say about the magazine is this: reading the New Yorker I learn fascinating things about subjects I had no idea were interesting. Anything can be interesting if it’s presented the right way and well written, and that’s what I get in my mailbox week after week. For example: a 10-pager on elevators, the way companies use Muzak to control atmosphere, a shoot-out over radio station turf wars, and how a woman was itching so badly that she scratched through her skull.

This week’s issue has a gem on “the secret lives of knives.” The first paragraph was enough to hook me. It introduces Bob Kramer, a Master Bladesmith, and describes how he received that title from the American Bladesmith Society:

“Kramer underwent five years of study, culminating in the manufacture, through hand-forging, of six knives. One of those was a roughly finished, fifteen-inch bowie knife, which Kramer had to use to accomplish four tasks, in this order: cut through an inch-thick piece of Manila rope in a single swipe; chop through a two-by-four, twice; place the blade on his forearm and, with the belly of the blade that had done all the chopping, shave a swath of arm hair; and, finally, lock the knife in a vise and permanently bend it ninety degrees.”

How could you stop reading after that? I can’t.

Yesterday was my first time voting at an actual polling station in the general election. Every previous year I wasn’t around to vote and had to cast an absentee ballot. I woke up at 6:00am to make it to the polls before I went to class. I only waited about 45 minutes—I can’t imagine what it was like for people who waited hours.

I spent the evening in South Hall on the UC Berkeley campus watching election results come up with classmates. When I left to go home I ran into an impromptu gathering of hundreds of students in the street celebrating.

After hanging around for a bit I decided to ride my bike home. As I rode down Bancroft Way I passed wave after wave of people marching up the hill. I happened to have my camera handy and I was able to get this nifty video clip. The shakiness is because it’s hard to ride a bicycle and hold a camera at the same time.

On a side note: voting in California is hard. By the time we get to the polls we all know which presidential candidate we’re voting for. But how are you voting on Proposition 63? Or Measure HH? I ended up casting 35 separate votes, and people in San Francisco had even more (including some completely ridiculous measures).

I like flying with Southwest. I don’t like the tactics that a research company is using on their behalf.

This email arrived in my inbox this evening. It invites me to take a survey about Southwest and offers a $15 incentive for participation. That seems relatively high, but not inconceivable.

I answered a series of demographics questions and questions about my preferences in air travel. Ten minutes and 20 pages later, I finished the survey and received the following message:

“Thank you for taking the time to participate in our study unfortunately you did not participate actively enough to be eligible for the $15 reward. We appreciate you taking the time to try and encourage you to please try again at your next available opportunity as your opinions are very important to us.”

I don’t care about the $15. This is simply a dishonest way to solicit information from your customers.

Some classmates introduced me to Wordle this week, a site that creates amazing displays of words based on their frequency. In addition to producing beautiful results, the program is fun to use. You can adjust all the settings: choose different typefaces, word arrangements, and color schemes.

I decided to give it a whirl, but with my entire website. I used my blogging software to create a text file with everything I have written here—140,000 words—and I uploaded it for Wordle to process. Here are the major themes in all that text:

Word chart of my site produced by Wordle.

Once you start making wordles it can be addicting. I kept looking for things that I have written to put into the system. I uploaded my senior philosophy thesis, emails, source code for computer programs. Get some text and try it out for yourself.