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.

The introduction to “Made To Stick” offers advice on how to get people’s attention:

How do we get our audience to pay attention to our ideas, and how do we maintain their interest when we need time to get the ideas across? We need to violate people’s expectations. We need to be counterintuitive.

Why? The human brain is wired to perceive patterns and is drawn to aberrations. For example, the book discusses the success of Subway’s Jared ads and says the surprise factor — “I can lose weight by eating fast food!?” — was one reason for the campaign’s stickiness.

Check out Michael P. Maslanka’s review of Seth Godin’s Small Is the New Big for another example of the power of counterintuitive statements.

[5 stars] It is all counterintuitive
The world does not work the way we think it does. In his latest, Godin takes zest in letting us know this: the internet is really bad for us (it increases anonymity which decreases civility; competence is bad (it breeds complacency and clinging to the status quo); success is unhealthy (it seduces companies to gravitate to the mean, and lose the edge that got them to success in the first place).

More excerpts from the Made To Stick intro
Business communication often goes awry when it gets too ambiguous…

We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information. This is where so much business communication goes awry. Mission statements, synergies, strategies, visions — they are often ambiguous to the point of being meaningless. Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images — ice-filled bathtubs, apples with razors — because our brains are wired to remember concrete data. In proverbs, abstract truths are often encoded in concrete language: “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.” Speaking concretely is the only way to ensure that our idea will mean the same thing to everyone in our audience.

From The Fairest Fowl: Portraits of Championship Chickens by photographer Tamara Staples (Flash).

Macy’s

The example purchases and totals section of this Macy’s ad uses real items/numbers to make an abstract idea more concrete.

DrawerGeeks

The navigation at art site DrawerGeeks.

Senduit

Senduit’s straightforward layout.

David Pogue wrote a post about Worth1000.com’s recent contest that asked contestants to submit fake designs for nonexistent Apple products.

All of these are funny because Apple is so about design. It’s just ripe for parody, in a way that no other company is. (Quick: What would a parody of HP or Gateway designs look like? Ummmm….)

Interesting take. If someone was going to make fun of your company, how would they do it? (And if there’s no answer, is that a sign you’re lacking a defined point of view?)

Logitech Harmony 880 Remote
Cheshire Dave Isaacs writes:

I just got a Logitech Harmony 880 Remote for my birthday last week, and I think it’s the kind of product you’d want to promote on SvN: it’s smart and relatively simple: if you want to watch a dvd, one you press one button and it turns on the tv and sets it to the correct input, turns on the dvd player, and turns on the receiver and sets it to the right mode. And it even has a little menu that asks you if everything turned on ok and actually helps you remedy the problem if something didn’t turn on correctly. Awesome UI, and it’s a pretty little device, too. It took me only about 30 minutes to get it set up with my system, and the whole thing is handled online. It beats the crap out of every other universal remote I’ve had. I’ll never have to photocopy my remote and draw little circles and arrows for houseguests anymore.

Update: Some commenter dissent on this one…”I can handle using it but my wife hates it and threatens to throw it often when it doesn’t work.”

Go Light On My Lips
“Go Light On My Lips is the new generation of Mascara and Lip Gloss. Our unique micro-lighted applicator gives you illumination whenever you need it with up to 10,000 lights and comes with its own mirror built into the cap…giving you the versatility to apply color in any lighting situation.”

Terrariums
A Flickr photoset of Paula Hayes’ Terrariums. [via MM]

Chip and Dan Heath were recently interviewed by Guy Kawasaki about their book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. There’s an interesting part where they discuss “the Curse of Knowledge.”

People tend to think that having a great idea is enough, and they think the communication part will come naturally. We are in deep denial about the difficulty of getting a thought out of our own heads and into the heads of others. It’s just not true that, “If you think it, it will stick.”

And that brings us to the villain of our book: The Curse of Knowledge. Lots of research in economics and psychology shows that when we know something, it becomes hard for us to imagine not knowing it. As a result, we become lousy communicators. Think of a lawyer who can’t give you a straight, comprehensible answer to a legal question. His vast knowledge and experience renders him unable to fathom how little you know. So when he talks to you, he talks in abstractions that you can’t follow. And we’re all like the lawyer in our own domain of expertise.

Here’s the great cruelty of the Curse of Knowledge: The better we get at generating great ideas—new insights and novel solutions—in our field of expertise, the more unnatural it becomes for us to communicate those ideas clearly. That’s why knowledge is a curse. But notice we said “unnatural,” not “impossible.” Experts just need to devote a little time to applying the basic principles of stickiness.

JFK dodged the Curse [with “put a man on the moon in a decade”]. If he’d been a modern-day politician or CEO, he’d probably have said, “Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry, using our capacity for technological innovation to build a bridge towards humanity’s future.” That might have set a moon walk back fifteen years.

Later this week we’ll be conducting a Fireside Chat with Seth Godin (blog) and Mark Hurst (blog). Got a question you’d like to see us ask? Post it as a comment here and we’ll consider throwing it in the mix.

“The progression of a painter’s work…will be toward clarity; toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer…to achieve this clarity is, inevitably, to be understood.” –Mark Rothko

At a bookstore the other day, I picked up a book on painter Mark Rothko. It featured dozens of his paintings presented in chronological order, one per page. Flipping through the pages turned into an experience similar to viewing a flipbook movie. The movie was the story of his art over his life.

And you could see a definite progression. His art kept getting simpler and simpler. There was an evolution. He was building up to nothing. The longer he painted, the more he reduced his work to the bare essentials.

Mark Rothko’s artwork
Here’s a look at some of Rothko’s paintings from 1936-1945:

In his later work, from 1947-1969, “obstacles” are eliminated:

Images from the National Gallery of Art site’s section on Rothko.

Greg Borenstein writes in about the Quicksilver Radial Menu:

Seeing your screen capture from the Quicksilver preference pane recently reminded me of one of my all-time favorite outside-the-box interface elements: the Quicksilver Radial Menu. I can never quite decide if it’s ingenious or just utterly daft, but it’s a whole alternate interface style available for Quicksilver that opens up a transparent circle around the current item you have selected.

If you invoke it on a folder, for example, the radial menu shows you the contents of the folder arrayed in a circle around that folder’s icon [see below].

Then, if you hold the mouse down on any of the spokes, it shows you the actions available for that item [below].

Also, you can hit the arrow below the central icon at any point to flip the whole works over for more options (for example, to toggle between action and navigation modes). Like everything in Quicksilver, these options are all ingeniously and infuriatingly context-aware, constantly changing based on what kind of item you’ve got and what actions are available.

The whole experience is a little bit like someone smashed open the contents of your hard drive and the capabilities of all of your apps and just laid them open for you on a flat surface.