There is an anecdote that I once read in my childhood, for which I have long since lost the reference, which I'd like to relate today. No doubt I will get the names wrong, but you'll have to forgive me that (meanwhile, if anyone has a reference for this story, I'd be glad to have it). Anyway, here it is, in all its mangled glory:

The Lady X, upon returning from a formal event for the first Derby government, was asked by her friends to recount the experience of meeting the many famed diplomats and politicians. She said: "First I met the Lord Palmerston, and in talking to him I was captivated. I was certain that he was the smartest man in England. But then I spoke to Chancellor Disraeli, and forgot all about the Lord Palmerston, as I became convinced I was the smartest woman in England.

Here's something to ponder: Is your brand Palmerston or Disraeli? Both can work, I think (with my respective examples being Google and Apple), but only one of the requires you to not be the smartest person in the room.

The right honorable Benjamin Disraeli

(If you have joined us recently, you may not know that Weekend Ponderables are our way of throwing our various concerns about open problems in advertising and branding out into the Internet soup, hopefully to engage a bit of thought and discussion.)

Today's ponderable really bothers me. It concerns a variety of products, but I'm going to pick on Apple.

Apple advertises to you that if you have Apple products you will live in a cool, modern world of bright flat color and expensive furniture. More often than not, this turns out to be true, because so many of the people who buy Apple products go out and paint their world with bright flat colors, and buy expensive furniture on installment plans. This phenomenon literally boggles my mind. When I think about it, I reel.

So, this weekend, let's all take a moment to think about the self-fulfilling prophecy in advertising. Let's ask ourselves: If we advertise a world that's desirable enough, can we actually get consumers to go out and make it? If so, this seems to gesture towards a rather mind-blowing imperative from a design ethics standpoint.

On Saturday, I proposed something to ponder over the weekend. Namely, I suggested that we all think, over the weekend about the possibilities of a brand and design strategy that takes into account multiple degrees of control, in the various registers of user experience.

This is a deep and complicated question, and whatever strategies will be used to resolve it will likely involve brand strategies that are downright alien to the ones we know today. Why this might necessarily be the case, I thought, may give us some deeper insight into moving forward on this difficult problem. After all, diagnosis is one thing, treatment is another.

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Dear Apple,

Thanks for iTunes. And thanks also for the handy automatic software updater. It is both wicked chromed-out and also it gets the job done. Finally, thanks for keeping iTunes so up-to-date. Every month or so, sure as sugar, there's something that needs to be fixed or improved, and without fail, you do it. So thanks for all that.

But listen: Quit recreating my iTunes and Quicktime Start Menu items. I move them on purpose.

How hard can it be?

With admiration and irritation,
Fondly,
Paul

Microsoft Research just published a paper revealing a new type of web search ranking — BrowseRank [pdf] — as revealed at last week's SIGIR (Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval) conference. (Thanks for the heads-up James).

The gist of the proposal is that search results are ranked by how long users tend to stay on a single page vs. the amount of incoming links a page has (i.e. PageRank).

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As of Friday, the Apple iPhone 3G was available in stores. Apparently they received 300,000 pre-orders, which contributed to an estimated 1,000,000 total sales.

This means that some 1 million people – within two days – took advantage of Apple's swell offer, which was, and I quote: "Twice as fast. Half the price."

Now, way back when Nick was Not Keen on Kindle, he diagnosed what he thought was a developing trend in the release strategies of the lifestyle technology market. Namely, that the companies that manufacture these devices – the Kindle, the Nintendo Gameboy DS, and, I'm going to add, the iPhone – "lead with a subpar, feature-crippled design only to follow it with the design they should of come up with in the first place..."

I'm asking now: Can anybody out there give me any reason that the first-generation iPhone should ever have been mass produced? I mean, aside from the obvious fact that a handful or two million Apple fanboys and gadget-lifestyle types are going to buy whatever Apple comes out with? (Not that this isn't a good reason, from Apple's perspective.)

The first-gen iPhone was not only plagued by activation problems – which would by itself seem to indicate a premature release, at least in some sense – it has been alleged that "something like one in ten of the initial iPhones bought was defective," (and if you don't strictly believe that number, you can still get the point by browsing the comments on that last post).

So here's my question: Short of the first-gen iPhone being defective by design, what changed so much this year as to allow Apple to come up with such a substantially better phone, so much cheaper?

And here's what I'm concerned is the answer: Nothing.

In the late 1870s, scientist and eugenicist Sir Francis Galton developed an image of the prototypical "face of crime" by creating composite photos of men convicted of serious offenses.

Though Galton failed to discover anything abnormal in his composite criminal faces, he did find that the resulting visages were shockingly handsome. (The middle face here is the product of 14 criminals.) Studies have since established that people find prototypical faces—those with average features—to be attractive.

– Maggie Wittlin, Seed Magazine

An attractive 'average' face generated by the Face Research Lab

Back in September, 2006, a paper published in the journal Psychological Science proposed a new explanation for this phenomenon: Prototypical faces are pleasing because they're easy for the brain to process.

"The principle finding is that you like a pattern to the extent that you classify the pattern fast," the study's author and psychologist at the University of California, San Diego Piotr Winkielman said.

On the one hand, this is pretty old-hat to anybody in the design business, and particularly anyone in the interface design business (web or otherwise).

We all learned in UI 101 that (a) a good operative definition of "usability" is that a user doesn't have to think about how to do what she's going to do, (b) that one of the best ways we can accomplish this is give them interface elements that they've already learned how to use.

On the other hand, the Gestalt Laws of Prägnanz provide us with some formal figurations that explain why our brains like puzzles.

Just as doing a bit of physical exercise, mental exercise is not only helpful to us in the long run, but can provide an "adrenaline-rush".

A simple Gestalt 'Figure-Ground' puzzle

So, obviously our designs should be created to take advantage of our user's perceptual fluency both positively (providing familiar UI components) and negatively (using Gestalt and other techniques to provide users with the endorphin-rush of solving a simple visual puzzle).

The really interesting question is whether you can do both of these things at once in a way that preserves the value of each. Now that's a design problem.

I was over at a friend's house last night, doing design research (read: drinking bourbon and playing video games), and found myself momentarily distracted from my pleasant Kentucky-style buzz by the jaw-dropping visual assault Super Smash Bros. Brawl for the Nintendo Wii.

Nintendo draws on its deep stable of characters to create a tightly branded interactive experience.

O! Insidious Nostalgia

Super Smash Bros. Brawl is a branding tour de force. Level designers Kazuhire Irie, Takeshi Suzuki, and Kou Arai have situated the game as a living history of the Nintendo product line, adopting a wide range of design styles to recreate elements of Nintendo's extensive mythology in a way that allows the player to simultaneously:

1. indulge in the thrill of recognition
2. have an enormous amount of fun game-playing
3. be spoon-fed nostalgia for the commercial products of yesteryear, or else feel an immense need to play catch-up ("Why would they have a level from Earthbound? I never played that.") as part of a not-so-subtle upsell. All the original games are available for $4-5 directly from your Wii.

Visually meshing the old with the new, you can see the living history of 30 years of Nintendo.

These three things in combination provide an almost narcotic Gestalt effect that all branding and identity designers could learn something from. It's branded fun.

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