Pink Noise: It’s out there

Posted by jasonwong in good design on March 2nd, 2010

When I was a graduate student at George Mason University, there was a professor there named Chris Kello. He has moved on to one of the University of California-Merced, but his area of study remains the same: pink noise. What is pink noise? Well, we all know what white noise is: that random noise that we often hear as static. This is different from noise that indicates a clear signal within that random white noise – a radio broadcast, a WiFi signal – something that has a distinct pattern that can be clearly picked out of the noise. Pink noise is essentially a quasi-random yet somehow organized pattern that can be detected in the noise. Think self-organizing systems like the weather. Think chaos theory, think fractals.

Those studying pink noise have found patterns in the stock market, weather patterns, and Chris Kello looked for pink noise in basic cognitive functions. Now, scientists say that movies – namely, the length of scenes as they are shown in order – follow a pink noise pattern.

From The New York Times:

According to the new report, the basic shot structure of the movies, the way film segments of different lengths are bundled together from scene to scene, act to act, has evolved over the years to resemble a rough but recognizably wave-like pattern called 1/f, or one over frequency — or the more Hollywood-friendly metaphor, pink noise. Pink noise is a characteristic signal profile seated somewhere between random and rigid, and for utterly mysterious reasons, our world is ablush with it.

So there you have it: it’s everywhere, waiting to be detected. In our stars, our heartbeats, our thinking, and our movies. Pink noise. It’s out there.

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A Tale of Two Microsoft Names

Posted by jasonwong in marketing, memory on February 18th, 2010

Microsoft needed a search engine to complete with Google. Windows Live was not doing it for them. Google had already become a verb – who hasn’t told someone else to “Just Google it”? So they needed something catchy and easy to remember. Bing! I’ve got it.

Bing! Short, catchy, and an onomonopia for when you’ve actually found what you want. It’s perfect. As good as, if not better than, Google.

Microsoft needed a new phone operating system to compete with the iPhone, Android, WebOS, and Blackberry. They needed something new and fresh after the holy disaster that is Windows Mobile. They seem to have done a good job with designing the system. But now they needed a name. Zune Phone? Windows PhoneOS? Wait, no, I’ve got it. How about…

Wow. That’s… a mouthful. It’s not catchy, it’s not easy to remember. Windows Phone 7 Series? Windows 7 Phone Series? A Series of Windows 7 Phones? Windows Phone Series 7? I can’t even remember the order that the words go in!

Microsoft Marketing Department: WINS: 1. LOSSES: 1.

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Google Tech Talk: The Video

Posted by jasonwong in news on February 9th, 2010

I gave a talk at Google about two months ago, and now it is finally online. It is embedded here for your viewing pleasure. The whole thing is about an hour long, so please make yourself a bowl of popcorn, sit back, and enjoy.

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Amazon’s list of products is a mess

Posted by jasonwong in bad design, clutter, visual search on January 29th, 2010

Amazon, like any shopping website should, lets you browse their great deals. Today, there was this:

Oooh, cheap laptops? How could I not click. Then, I was presented with this unholy mess. Seventeen laptops on the same page. All have the same picture, extremely similar specs, and virtually identical names. (Click for full size)

There were some filtering options on the left side but they would not be very good at narrowing choices, considering how similar these all were.

One part shame on Acer for creating SO MANY similar models: the AOD250-1694, the AOD250-1695, the AOD250-1842, etc. etc. etc.

One part shame on Amazon for presenting all of these options in what is quite possibly the worst method for displaying this kind of information. There should be a much easier way to, at a glance, compare these laptops, or the filters should actually involve computer factors.

Either way, I’m not buying an Acer laptop today – certainly not from Amazon.

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The Apple iPad: Thoughts

Posted by jasonwong in bad design, good design, marketing, thoughts on January 28th, 2010

Disclaimer, in case you didn’t know for some reason: I have a MacBook and an iPhone and I enjoy them very much.

The iPad is intriguing. I have seen many people ask why they would want one. I think Apple essentially presented several use cases (eReading, couch surfing, airplane video watching), but it boils down to this: if you’re in the market for something that’s cheaper and less useful than a laptop but is more expensive and useful than an iPhone, the iPad is your device.

I am just curious as to how big that market is.

A friend of mine has an iPhone and Apple desktop. He doesn’t do work when he’s mobile, so he is interested in this device. For me, I can’t justify one right away. I would not get the more expensive 3G model, so I’d be stuck with just a WiFi connection, which means mostly home use. Since I already have a laptop as my main computer that I can bring with me, I don’t see the iPad use case working for me.

In terms of striking the balance between a cheaper laptop and a more useful iPhone, they leaned more towards the iPhone. However, they brought along many iPhone shortcomings – namely, multitasking and Flash in the browser. Therefore, you cannot have Pandora streaming, have your IM client going, and also work on something in Pages at the same time. With a $500 iPad (which Josh Gruber says is fast, fast, fast), you can only do one thing at a time. This just kills it for me.

I don’t think a big enough deal is being made about the fact that Apple is using its own Apple A4 chip in the device that makes it “fast, fast, fast.” Apple bought P.A. Semi and is now designing their own ARM-based chips in house. So, from this, the iPad is faster. I would like to think the processor can handle more than one application at a time, though. Yes, you could say that the iPad would bog down running too many apps, but so too can the MacBook. People expect multitasking and, if Apple could design an elegant system to do so, they should. Essentially, my argument boils down to this: Apple can’t possibly have unitasking as a written-in-stone design goal; at some point, they are going to have to introduce multitasking. It seemed like the introduction of the iPad, with its wickedly-fast processor, was as good of a time as any.

John Timmer, Science Editor of Ars Technica, nails it for me (scroll to the bottom of the page to read his thoughts directly):

Steve Jobs very explicitly placed the iPad in the category class between the phone and notebook, and it very nicely splits the difference between the two. And that’s precisely why I’m a bit disappointed by it—it doesn’t share enough of the features of either one of those two devices to actually make it useful to me.

When I leave the apartment for anything beyond local errands, I’m almost invariably carrying both a cell phone for communicating and a laptop for getting work done. A truly useful device would be one that could let me leave one of those devices and its added bulk, cables, and worries about charge status at home. The iPhone went a little way towards that dream—it was a phone, but its ability to handle a bit of web browsing and some light e-mail meant that leaving the laptop at home was possible in a few additional circumstances—but, for the most part, I’m still stuck lugging two devices.

The iPad doesn’t fix that. It’s clearly not a phone, so my phone would still have to come with me. It would do a better job of e-mail and web browsing than the iPhone but, if I’m carrying one of those anyway, that’s not a huge help. On the other side of its category divide, the iPad might add a few more cases where a laptop is unnecessary, but very few. I’m a touch typist; I take notes on presentations while watching the speaker, and I am often writing in one application while looking over a document in a second. With no physical keyboard and no multitasking, the iPad simply wouldn’t work for me. It’s just too limited to mean I could leave my laptop home any more often than I already do.

Apple looks like it nailed its target of creating a truly distinct device that’s somewhere in between the phone and the laptop. And, for precisely that reason, it doesn’t seem like it would be all that useful to me.

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