The archives at the Cathedral Church Of Saint Peter In Exeter have some interesting examples of layouts from centuries ago.

Rosa Medicinae

“A page from John de Gaddesden’s Rosa Medicinae, a 14th century work. The author is mentioned in the Prologue to Chaucer’s ‘Canterbury Tales’. This is almost certainly the earliest medical work surviving in Exeter.”

Pythagoras’ Theorem

“Proof of the Theorem of Pythagoras in Euclid’s De Arte Geometrica – late 13th century.”

Business advice from David Lynch?

“Intuition is the key to everything, in painting, filmmaking, business—everything. I think you could have an intellectual ability, but if you can sharpen your intuition, which they say is emotion and intellect joining together, then a knowingness occurs. Feeling correct is a feeling I think everyone knows.”

Steve Ballmer spends one-third of his time meeting with customers

“I get energy from seeing our customers. It reminds me of the things we’re doing well and it also reminds me of the things where we need to improve.”

You only get three seconds to make an impression

“People have forgotten that the most important thing on a website is the content. Not the gradient, not the drop shadow, not even that PhotoShop brush that you thought would be cool as a background image. If your content doesn’t say interesting stuff in a concise manner, then no amount of CSS Zen will help. Writing for the web is the toughest and most important part of developing web sites/applications. Get that wrong, and every other part of the design process from your information architecture through to your IE5.5 on OSX CSS hacks just doesn’‘t matter.”

Video: Real worldish use of multi-touch driven screens

Jeff Han and Phil Davidson demonstrate how multi-touch screens “will change the way we work and play.” Examples include usage in image editing, web browsing, creating 3D animations, etc. [tx ML]

Fotolog and Flickr neck and neck

“Perhaps this is a sign that those folks trapped in the Web 2.0 bubble are not being critical enough about what is responsible for success on the Web circa-2007…Maybe tags, APIs, and Ajax aren’t the silver bullets we’ve been led to believe they are. Fotolog, MySpace, Orkut, YouTube, and Digg have all proven that you can build compelling experiences and huge audiences without heavy reliance on so-called Web 2.0 technologies. Whatever Web 2.0 is, I don’t think its success hinges on Ajax, tags, or APIs.”

What’s your favorite building? Link it up.

For example…

Continued from Part 1...

Michael Bierut elaborates on the similarities of graphic design and speechwriting for clients.

Your client has a message to communicate: an argument, a sales pitch, a call to action. Your job is to give it form. You’re an expert at this. You know how to take a complicated bunch of ideas and reduce them to their arresting, memorable, engaging essence. You come up with some big ideas that you’re convinced will work and, detail by careful detail, you bring those ideas to life. But there’s a problem: your work is second-guessed by a bunch of middle managers, some of whom are insecure, some of whom have their own agendas to inject, some of whom just like to say no. Despite all that, you refine and revise, hoping to keep the strength of your original idea intact. Finally, your work is approved, and it goes out into the world. If you’re lucky, it really makes a difference: minds are changed, passions are fueled, your client looks great. And, somehow, hardly anyone out there knows you were involved at all… It sounds a lot like graphic design, doesn’t it?

He goes on to reference some examples cited in Peggy Noonan’s What I Saw at the Revolution book about her time — and pressures — writing speeches for Ronald Reagan and H.W. Bush.

I particularly liked this backstage pass into the beautiful closing words of the Challenger Disaster speech Noonan wrote for Reagan:

The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honored us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them — this morning, as they prepared fro their journey, and waved good-bye, and “slipped the surly bonds of earth” to “touch the face of God.”

Bierut adds:

A deluge of mail and calls followed. But does it surprise you to learn that during the attenuated review process, someone from the National Security Council suggested that that the end be changed — quoting, of all things, a then-popular AT&T commercial — to “reach out and touch someone?” Noonan described this as “the worst edit I received in all my time at the White House.”

Ahh, clients. To be fair, we’ve all been there—we’ve all thought we had a better solution to a problem than the people we hired to solve it. But it’s still funny.

In Features sell products (but don't get used), Heidi Adkisson says most people never use the features they pay extra for due to the “paradox of the active user.”

A few years ago I did an extensive in-home study observing use of a particular computer hardware peripheral. Most people had high-end models with many features. But in my observation of use, only one “power user” went beyond using anything but the core, basic features. These people had paid a premimum for features they didn’t use. However, when describing their purchase experience, it was clear they aspired to using these features and sincerely intended to. But, once the product was out of the box, the paradox of the active user took over.

What’s the paradox of the active user? It’s the term for a behavior pattern observed during studies at the IBM User Interface Institute in the 1980s…

Users never read manuals but start using the software immediately. They are motivated to get started and to get their immediate task done: they don’t care about the system as such and don’t want to spend time up front on getting established, set up, or going through learning packages. The “paradox of the active user” is a paradox because users would save time in the long term by taking some initial time to optimize the system and learn more about it. But that’s not how people behave in the real world, so we cannot allow engineers to build products for an idealized rational user when real humans are irrational: we must design for the way users actually behave.

Related: The CEO of Philips asks, “Do people need the gizmos we’re selling?” [via GE] He thinks manufacturers should draw inspiration from the clarity of Google and Craigslist.

Spending hours learning to use a new gadget is the last thing most of us want to do. The ability to take a product out of the box and just have it work, without the need to read a manual for hours, is now high on most consumers’ priority lists when deciding on a purchase.

The attitude behind “RTFM” reveals an interesting bias. It assumes there’s one manual…THE manual. But that’s a company perspective, not a customer perspective. Customers have to use dozens of products each day that come with manuals, not just the one product you make. It’s not that they’re lazy bums who don’t want to read the manual. They just don’t want to read all those manuals.

[Fireside Chats are round table discussions conducted using Campfire.]

The Chatters
Seth Godin (blog)
Mark Hurst (blog)
(Moderated by Matt and Jason from 37signals)

Topics
Topics covered include Google, Apple, JetBlue, the common thread of companies that offer top-notch customer experiences, the GEL conference, zoomers and why they’re important, industries that don’t get it, and more.

Sample quotes
Mark: “Go to the top person…and ask him/her when’s the last time they sat, face to face, with a customer, and let the customer talk – no focus group questions, no usability tasks – just talk about their experience. In many orgs that gets a blank stare – as if to say ‘Customers? i don’t have time for them.’ And there’s your answer.”

Seth: “I think the long term benefits are how you rationalize it to the board and to your investors. But I think that’s not sufficient to drive a true service attitude. That comes from your mom or from something in your make up that makes you want to serve people in what you do all day.”

Seth: “TAKE RESPONSIBILITY! If there’s a problem, fix it. If your job can’t be fixed, quit. How dare you waste your life in exchange for a paycheck. You have high speed internet access, bub, you’ve got no excuse. You don’t live in a hovel in Ghana. Go do it!! Pick up the phone and call someone.”

Mark: “Try to become more aware of experience – whether at work, while using technology, while in a store, in a bank, or wherever. i think the more people are aware of good and bad experiences, the better they are at taking responsibility (re seth’s comment) for creating good experiences where they can.”

Stunt Software

Stunt software gives its receipts a familiar look. [tx RB]

On The Fly

On The Fly lets men “shop by lifestyle.”

Citysearch

Citysearch now lets you text listings to your cell phone.

An autistic woman produces a film about how she interacts with the world and then chimes in on the thread at Metafilter. [via as]