De-frienders and De-friendees

Today, I was on facebook looking through a friend’s friend list and saw a friend of mine whose profile I hadn’t checked out in a while. When I clicked on this friend’s name to see what was new on her profile, I got the pop-up window of the non-friend.

“Wait a second,” I thought. “We’re friends.”

And as my brain cranked through all the possibilities, I realized, “Holy crap, I’ve been de-friended.”

I’ve written about how many “friends” I have that I wouldn’t really consider a “friend”, more like an acquaintance or some other relationship, but this one hurt because this was a person that I actually, like, really like. I’ve known her since junior high and when I saw her on facebook, I was very happy. (Yes, a lot of modifiers in this paragraph. It’s for good reason, though: It’s very true.)

But something happened on the way to the cleaners. You see, she wrote on my wall when we first became friends, and I, in a move of obscene density, never wrote her back. So, I assume from here that this made her mad and she de-friended me.

F– that guy.

Yes. F– me.

It wasn’t just that she was offended by something that happened in a virtual environment, she also ended up sending me a message that she was angered by simply de-friending me. And so I ended up sending her an apology letter asking if we could be “friends” again. Seriously. Over facebook.

Over.

Facebook.

Thus, the crux:

To my new de-friend, me not replying was every bit as offensive as her having called me to say hello and never calling her back. Except, in some ways, not replying on facebook was worse. Why? Because facebook is even easier socially than making a phone call. Frankly, facebook lowers the bar for effort so low that when you don’t reply, people get really offended. And for good reason: It takes, what? 30 seconds of effort to write on a friend’s wall? And then all the profile information, photos, and everything else do the rest of the catching up for you. There’s no 45 minute conversation, awkward silences, or fumbled good-byes. There’s simply:

Hi, great to see you doing so well. We always had a good time hanging out and I have a lot of good memories of you. If you’re around, maybe we could get together some time? In the meantime, take care with everything, good luck with your son, and keep in touch.

So, yes: Even in the facebook world, relationships require a level of attention and care commensurate with the level of friendship you have in the 3-D world. In this way, the virtual world is merely a medium for real feelings. And just as in the 3-D world, the relationships are tricky because some relationships you care about and some you don’t, some need tending, some don’t, some friends just don’t like to be on facebook that much, and some refuse to be on it at all.

But it isn’t so hard to say hello and we must not forget this. And if you think it’s hard to say hello, think about how much harder it is to make up.

Throat-Clearing + Happy New Year

Some thoughts as we round up 2008:

• As some may have noticed, I have taken down nearly all my posts having to do with politics. While I greatly enjoyed writing about the election, in my current unemployed state, it seemed a tad reckless because, frankly, politics and work just don’t mix.

That said, I never really felt like I was “political”, per se, and yet, I’m still surprised at the reaction I got from some people. While I did have a candidate I personally supported more than the other, with my background in trial/courtroom communication and argumentation, my only real agenda was analyzing each candidates’ strategy and how it persuaded or affected the so-called moderate voter. Some of the reaction I got from people was pretty interesting, though. When I wrote something that I thought actually showed more support for one candidate, I got comments that suggested I was supporting the other. And vice versa.

I quickly realized that there’s no controlling how people will interpret your words, no matter how carefully you craft them, no matter how much you focus on the process of getting elected and ignore a hoped-for election outcome. Politics is just too hot-button of an issue. So, I took all those posts down except for one, because that post was about a personal experience regarding bigotry, hypocrisy, how we seek out those who agree with us and the collective need to challenge ourselves to be better. And if someone doesn’t want to hire me because of that post, then so be it.

•  In general, blogging has been tougher to keep up on than I thought it would be. I thought that, in my current state of unemployment, blogging would be fairly easy. But I’ve realized that you have to have experiences and conversations that make you want to blog about something on your mind. In this, my unemployed (read: broke) state, I don’t have a whole lot to write about. Most of my days involve either going to the public library to get out of the house, finding a corner of the house to get some privacy, or going for a run. My nights tend to be made up of going to the corner watering hole to play a few rounds of Golden Tee Golf. (The interaction design in that game is stupendous, by the way.)

In other words, I’m not visiting the richest of environments for new thoughts and experiences regarding designerly things. Quite the opposite of Carnegie Mellon, to be sure. For the most part, this is fine: It’s been healthy to not obsess too much over design, but it also means there’s not a whole to say, but when there is…

•  My posts tend to take longer to write than I mean for them to. I’m pretty obsessive about my thoughts and insights and writing and clarity. Basically, I don’t want to sound like a total schmuck and I’d rather be thorough and thoughtful than quick and controversial. For example, my Abilify post took a solid 14 hours of research and writing. (Yeah, I know, I need a job.) Why so long? I knew basically nothing about drug names, always had a curiousity about them, and had to get all my facts in line before spouting off about it (and I certainly had never thought about drug names as an ethos-pathos-logos thing. All that was made up on the fly, then hammered out, drawing on design school stuff that I never thought to apply in such a way.)

So, yes, this is why there are not as many posts as I’d like there to be. But hopefully, they have some quality to them, even if they sometimes verge on pedantry.

• I’m pleasantly surprised that I get any traffic at all and find myself intensely flattered when I get occasional unforeseen boosts in traffic. It’s like I’ve won an Emmy every time anyone reads a post. Thank you all for reading!

• If anyone knows of any design jobs you think I’d be good for, please let me know. The poor economy has made the job hunt much worse than it was, even as recently as early November.

Happy Holidays and Have A Wonderful 2009!

A Conglomeration of Relationships

Just so you all know that I’m not dead, I do have a post for you. Unfortunately for me, after taking a fair chunk of time writing this the past couple days, further research showed me that most of what I propose below is, in some way, already mostly a part of facebook’s profile privacy management. The problem is that facebook’s process for profile privacy management isn’t straightforward and could be much, much simpler with an easy re-design. So, all is definitely not lost with my post, as having a simple, satisfying, and useful user experience is still the name of the game. Also, because I realized my half-blunder after spending so much time already writing, I’m not going to proofread it very closely. ‘Tis what ’tis. Thank you and enjoy.

——

According to facebook, I have 246 friends. This is one of the most ego-flattering, preposterous lies that’s ever been told about me. If I really stretched the limits outside of facebook, I might have 18 friends, 5-6 of which are close friends, and 2-3 that I would consider “best friends”. Instead, what I really have on facebook is a conglomeration of relationships, made up of family members, close friends, friends, acquaintances, old flames, co-workers, classmates, colleagues and one person I’ve never met nor talked to, yet I admire his writing, so I friended him and lucky for me, he accepted (It seems he accepts everyone. Oh, this is not a “fan page” either, it’s his actual profile.)

My situation is not unique. Actually, it’s the norm for facebook. This is a problem. You see, for most of these relationships, I don’t mind these friends seeing my life and catching up a bit—it’s like a constant reunion—but I don’t want all of them in my private life. Yet, I can’t control what my conglomorees can see, to the point that I’ve considered deleting my facebook account. (I know, I know, I’m addicted to facebook, I know. But hear me out.)

To their credit, facebook does offer some semblance of privacy from exposing yourself, especially with things like photos. Facebook gives control to the user through allowing the easy creation and management of friend groups. Facebook also has ways for you to control what gets published in your friends’ news feeds and has ways for you to tailor what you get in your news feed as well. Lastly, there are also ways to protect your information from non-friends and you can always choose to show a limited profile to someone. But no one, I mean no one, keeps someone out in the cold with the barebones limited profile.

Why we don’t keep potential “friends” at the limited profile view is, mostly, out of guilt. We don’t want to be mean, shafting someone who wants to see some recent pics of us, some pics of our family, etc. But the problem is that this makes you make a choice: Heed the friend request or not.

Now, I’ll be the first to say that I’ve been denied facebook friendship, although I’ve never denied one friend request. I’ve cringed when accepting a friend request and later “defriended” some people, but I realize this is a choice that I make, whether to allow these people so far into my life. And I know I could just not be on facebook or limit what I put up or really prune back the old conglomeration of relationships. But the problem is that I even have to consider doing any of these moves. Facebook is a free site that wants users, users, and more users because the more users and friends we all have, the more entrenched facebook becomes in our lives, making it a bigger fixture, making it nearly indispensable.

Not to mention, part of what makes it fun is the public forum-ness of the whole mess, the free voyeurism, the, well, socializing. Openness keeps facebook from becoming “clique-y”, your friendships egalitarian. Exclusivity is for private messages.

However, I’m here to say that facebook has reached a threshold, a critical mass of societal penetration where facebook can now shift to overdrive, to the next level in friendship control. The next level includes a simple, pre-designed, user-friendly solution to allow for different levels of conversation between friends: A group called “Inner Circle” and the others, simply “Friends”.

These distinctions are made by you, the user about whom you deem a close friend, and they apply to your status updates, your photos, posted items, live feeds, etc. You can choose your Inner Circle who you want to get specific updates from and if your friend has chosen you back for Inner Circle status, you get their specific updates. This allows conversation among close friends, weeding out old acquaintances, co-workers, and yes, family members.

There would still be regular status updates to all of your friends if you so choose, but having an extra layer to be able to communicate with a handful of friends without email and not having to worry about what you’re writing about or posting would be priceless. After all, I don’t mind if my “friends” see innocuous pictures of me with my family, but what I want is to be able to have the same user-friendly experience of socializing among my close friends as it currently is for everyone.

Having this type of control is, I believe, the key to the next level of facebook membership and site usage. I say this because those who are not on facebook often cite the lack of information control as one of their top reasons for not joining up. Sure, these non-facebookers don’t want to connect with all those old friends, but more so, they don’t want their laundry aired to the whole world. Further driving my proposition that allowing more communication control will drive facebook usage is that the current lack of control is one of the main reasons that current facebookers don’t use it more: Everything’s too public, too out there. And most people aren’t that exhibitionistic.

The bad news is that facebook probably will never change their current set-up. Why?

Facebook’s entire platform, its entire service, is based on openness, its egalitarianism. Being so open limits how much amount a user has to think or act while limiting the social stress of choosing who is part of your “Inner Circle” and who is just a “Friend”. They’re all friends. By making everyone equal, it shifts the stress and guilt of deciding who is a friend-worthy instead to a question of what is socially acceptable in a public forum. In other words, the facebook society is its own policeman: If you’re ashamed to post it, you shouldn’t be posting it. This is happy times for facebook.

Next, keeping the communication channels wide open keeps facebook from becoming “clique-y”. If you all of a sudden have 300 million users choosing not only what does or doesn’t get published but also to whom something gets published, then you create pockets of friends and possibly mute the very thing that makes facebook so fun: its sociability-ness, its sense of open voyeurism, if you will.

These are definitely problems. But facebook has all the tools to manage two levels of friendship and they have reached the critical mass where such tools wouldn’t stunt their growth, it might actually turbocharge it. After all, I would be inclined to post more updates if I knew that my colleagues, my Mom, and that girl from my 8th grade science class weren’t going to read it. But please don’t make me de-friend them.

The Mount Everest of Drug Names: Abilify

As a son of a doctor, my dad would often bring home random swag branded with drug names that left me as the only college kid I knew who would wear a shirt for anxiety medicine while using a pen with a Viagra logo on it. (Feel free to make inappropriate jokes about the relationship between ink and pens.) However, having all that swag around led to a familiarity and a mild fascination with all the different drug names and how the drug companies come up with them.

So, over the years, I’ve casually taken note of how the names of drugs have slowly changed from names that sounded scientific, like Amoxil, to names that sounded like a brand of bedtime tea, like the sleeping pill Lunesta. A few weeks ago, though, I sat stunned when I saw a television ad for the new drug Abilify. After initially laughing at the name and cheap-looking logo, I soon realized that the paradigm of drug names may have just shifted quite dramatically and it deserved a little more thought and research.

The first paradigm shift is in the phonetics of the name, “Abilify”. More often than not, drugs contain the letters V, X, Y, or Z, which make for interesting syllabic twists and unique names. As my dad would soon inform me, in the past 10 years, a lot of drugs started sounding the same (with names like Zyrtec, Zantac, and Xanax; Prevacid and Prevacol; Lotrel and Lortab—and on and on), making it clear that Abilify stood out in this context. Abilify obviously only contains the letter Y, and it’s at the end of the word. This is the only drug I found that ends in a Y.

Consider, out of the Top 199 drugs, the names contain:

43 instances of X
15 instances of Z
42 instances of V
25 instances of Y

That’s 62.8% of drugs with an X, Y, V, or Z in them. I don’t know for sure, but I’d bet that’s 100 times more common than those letters occur in a standard English dictionary.

The second shift is that it’s the first prescription drug name that’s a verb. Yes, the very first one. (Aleve works as a verb also, but it’s over-the-counter). What makes Abilify a verb? According to Oxford American Dictionaries, adding the suffix -fy to a noun “form[s] a verb denoting making or producing”. (Think: Amplify, Falsify, Deify, Horrify.) So, you are no longer taking a drug, you are actually making your body/self/life “able”, allowing you to “Abilify your body/self/life”.

While I don’t mean to denigrate someone’s needed medicine to balance themselves mentally, I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.

But all of that doesn’t constitute a paradigm shift until this last part is factored in. After this research, I began parsing out how drug names are created. (For all you branding, marketing, and design dorks like me, you should get a kick out of this.)

In general, the history of brand-name prescription drugs goes like this: Prior to the mid-to-late 1980s, the prescription drug brand name was often a derivative or shorthand for what the scientific name of the drug is. For example, the drug Amoxicillin was given the brand name Amoxil, while the drug Naproxen was given the brand name Anaprox. These sorts of names made the drug easier to pronounce, yet still sounded “scientific”.

Somewhere in the mid-to-late 1980s, the names started changing, This time, the drug names were derived from what the drug did. For example, the drug “Prevacid” is a drug for those with ulcers or persistant heartburn. It works by preventing your stomach from making acid. Take the words “prevent” and “acid” and you have “Prevacid”.

Not too much later, in the late 90s, drug companies changed the name game again. Only this time, they went for how the drug will make you feel. “Celebrex”, for example, is derived from “celebrate”. In Italian, the drug “Allegra” means “Cheerful, Lively”. On the further reaches of this movement is the sleeping drug “Ambien”, derived from “Ambient”, which connotes relaxation.

The reason these shifts are significant is because brands tell stories, they have an implicit and/or explicit meaning and we consciously and/or unconsciously absorb these meanings. Basically, it’s rhetoric. So, as the drug companies have fought to be heard above the noise of the marketplace, they’ve become increasingly savvy in telling the story of their drug through unique names that appeal to different aspects of the human psyche. And since the names tell stories, they all follow Aristotle’s ancient storytelling techniques of Ethos, Pathos, and Logos to a surprising degree.

The Ethos of a drug name is that of phonetics. That is, the credibility of the name is tied up in the sound of the name, that it sounds like a thing of science.

The Logos of a drug name is what the drug does, or treatment, like Prevacid.

The Pathos of a drug name is appealing to how the drug will make you feel, your emotion, like Celebrex.

Of course, not every name fits neatly into one of these boxes as there are crossover names. But, each drug name so far fits somewhere in this spectrum. Which brings me back to Abilify.

Abilify does not sound scientific in any way, shape, or form, so it loses on Ethos/Phonetics. As Logos/Treatment, it also fails gloriously because the name doesn’t tell you what it does. As a matter of fact, any drug that helped you in any way could be called Abilify. Think about it: Headache? Abilify. Muscle Tear? Abilify. Diarrhea? Abilify. High Blood Pressure? Abilify. The name literally means nothing. You could “Abilify” your car, for God’s sake.

So, that leaves us with how the name of the drug makes you feel, its Pathos/Emotion. Making yourself feel “able” is definitely a feeling—a good feeling, which is nice. (As an anti-psychotic medicine, it hopefully makes those people feel very good.) The feeling it connotes is one of empowerment. But, as a verb instead of a noun, it shifts the paradigm from a “thing” to consider to something to “do” to get better. And with that, it becomes not about Phonetics, Treatment, or Emotion, it becomes an Idea, which, in turn, requires action to make real.

The risk with a drug name that requires action, is it shifts the customer out of the realm of passive story-receiving to one of active story-making. A story where you are the active player, not the name telling you the story. And I have absolutely no idea how this fits into branding as storytelling or if I’m way off-base, but my immediate feeling is that making the customer an Actor brings a brand name into a form of Interaction, which really complicates things. And it also places it at great risk for being a total and complete failure, the kind of thing that goes down in medical history as “The thing to never do”.

However, on the other side, if Abilify has any success, then drug names could change drastically from here on out. In other words, drugs could then be named anything that doesn’t sound medical or scientific and doesn’t have a direct logic to a treatment, but is just an abstract Idea.

Finally, if my analysis is way off-base, then at the very least, Abilify sits at the highest tippy-top peak of Emotion, the Mt. Everest of drug names, either daring and smart, or risky and stupid, but where there is room for only one flag: Abilify.

ESPN SportsTicker + Wayfinding

As an avid sports fan and watcher of ESPN, I’m enthralled by ESPN’s new sportsticker wayfinding device. In the clip below, watch the rolling information at the bottom. (My apologies for the clip of a show I find annoying.) Underneath the NFL label on the bottom left-hand side, you will see a small yellow bar. As the news passes through, the bar reduces in size exactly in proportion to each bit of news. So, if there are 20 news bits, the bar reduces by 1/20th after each news bit. Anyway, take a look (the image becomes clearer around :30).

To many people, I’m sure this is no big deal. But, trust me, for sports dorks the world over, it is a big deal.

Why? I’ve been watching ESPN for about 25 years. The ticker is a mainstay on ESPN, predates the Internet, and is a common source for game updates, even with the Internet. I have flipped over to the ticker way more times than I could count (guessing, I’d say 18,000 times). Yet, it’s one of the most often overlooked experiences in the world of a sports fan. And until now, one of the most frustrating.

The reason the ticker has been so frustrating is because the time spent on each sport varies widely with no way for the viewer to know how much time would be spent on each sport. For example, if Major League Baseball is in season, but only 3 games are being played that day, then the amount of time the ticker spends on baseball is short. But, unless I follow baseball (read: “care”), I, the viewer, have no idea how long the ticker will spend reporting on baseball before moving on to, say, the NBA. 30 seconds? 2 minutes? 5 minutes? Longer?

Since I didn’t know how long the news would last, I had no sense of where I was in the flow of information I often cared less about. This made it so I either had to watch intently for an undetermined amount of time or take a chance on turning my attention elsewhere, hoping to catch it at the right moment. (Perhaps the most frustrating thing was waiting patiently, getting distracted for a few seconds, and in the process, missing your favorite team’s score that you were waiting to see.) In response, the reality is that as time went by, I would often change the channel or turn the TV off.

What is really nice about the ESPN ticker is how simply they added such useful information. They used the information structure already in place and gave it one extra feature that, like Lebowski’s rug, really ties the room together.

Consider the ticker’s underlying information structure already in place:

1. Alphabetical through different sports league title (MLB, MLS, NBA, NCAA, etc.);
2. News (about 5 seconds per bit, depending)
3. Scores (about 4 secs per game)

And now: 4. The line segment.

That simple line segment uses humans’ ability to make quick spatial judgments to give micro-level information that, in turn, guides the macro-level information. For example, if the line is moving in little chunks, based on a constant starting point of line length, we can quickly estimate how many news bits there are. And given the underlying structure of alphabetical ordering and a fairly constant time for scores and news, we can quickly estimate how much time will be spent before moving on to the next sport.

Seriously, this was the simplest little thing that I applaud for its, well, simplicity. And yes, this is completely inconsequential in the grand scheme. But it’s little things like this that show audience consideration that help make design what it is.