If you can’t make it to the SEGD national conference this year or want to see what we are up up to in D.C., you might want to follow the Whitehouse & Company Twitter feed. We’ll be updating throughout the event and bringing our unique view of the show.

There will also be tons of spelling errors, because there is no spell check on the iPhone, so you’ll have that to look forward to as well.

Let’s get environmental.

Whitehouse & Company will be closed during the 2010 SEGD National Conference down in Washington D.C. June 2nd – June 5th. We hope to see you there and please feel free to say hello to Ben or Roger.

We will also be live blogging during the conference, so please be sure to check back to find out what find interesting in our nations capital.

For the technically minded, the site features:

• XHTML Strict compliance
• CSS Styled
• Cross browser compatibility
• Small bandwidth footprint

All of which means that it is state-of the-art, as well as having a clear graphic hierarchy to enable users to easily navigate and understand this otherwise complex and extensive site.

Whatever it was, I have a hunch that it had either a distinctive or descriptive title…

(Catch 22 and Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity are my last two and I would highly recommend both of them!)

In essence, every e-mail you send has a title too. it is called a subject line and should describe the contents of that e-mail as clearly and succinctly as possible. Yet often, subject lines end up being the most disregarded aspect of the communication. The Subject line is much like the spine of a book, describing the information it contains. I certainly would never pick up a book that had any of the following titles:

• Photos
• Couple of thoughts
• Hallway
• Chicken
• Stuff for project
• Team meeting

Unfortunately, The majority of the e-mails we all receive have just such Subjects. Subjects that might implicitly mean something to the sender, but usually mean nothing to the recipient. How can any professional, writing such an e-mail, expect it to be taken seriously and responded to. The fact is, they can’t. In addition, it creates problems when looking for old e-mails, creates misunderstandings of actions required, makes e-mail threads difficult (sometimes impossible) to follow, encourages e-mails to be deleted by SPAM software, promotes lax e-mailing habits, and discourages the recipient from reading your e-mail thoroughly and responding to it in a timely manner.

All this can be remedied, however, with the simple use of clear, informative subject lines to indicate what the e-mail contains.

• FOR YOUR RECORDS: Donor Plaque – Approved (Sep 7) Final Artwork
• REQUEST: Need PDF of Johnson Building Exterior Elevation
• MEETING: RESCHEDULED to Mon Oct 4 @ 3PM
• FOR APPROVAL: JPG Website sketches for Mon Nov 7 Meeting

All these subjects are detailed and communicate the contents of the email clearly. They are much less demanding of the person trying to evaluate what they should expect when (or if) they click on the link to open the e-mail. They either::

1. State the purpose – Why are you writing this e-mail?
2. Make clear the intended outcome – What do you want this e-mail to accomplish?

This not only reduces your recipients mental workload when opening your e-mail, but also ensures a quicker turn-around in their response. Faster turn-around means work gets done faster; work that’s done faster means greater staff morale and bigger profits; bigger profits mean more e-mails… You see where this is going? The need to have clear and descriptive subject lines takes on even more importance.

Most professionals have never been taught how to write professional e-mails. Understanding the difference between what is needed for a personal e-mail to your wife about the petunias, and a professional e-mail to a fabricator about a $100,000 installation, can make all the difference in the world.

If you are like most e-mail users, your e-mail program is set up to check for e-mails every 5-10 minutes. That’s a whopping 48-96 possible interruptions per day respectively! That’s like the mail person giving you letters every few minutes throughout the day. Oh! here’s another one.

This is a bad business and organizational practice.

1. It is a sure way to get distracted from your tasks at hand.
2. Answering e-mail throughout the day, instead of at a given time, can cause attention and focus deficits often resulting in poorly thought-out or rushed replies.
3. Answering e-mail throughout the day will often create a “now or never” reply strategy.
4. Constant interruptions can take their toll on your attitude and self-esteem.

After reading an article on e-mail productivity, I now check my e-mail approximately 5 times per day, which is about 5 possible interruptions per day (I say possible because I sometimes get no e-mail anymore now that I write more sensible e-mail messages).

h4. But what about those “Must respond” e-mails that need immediate attention?

Quite frankly, they don’t really exist. How many e-mails have you received that had to be answered immediately that couldn’t wait 2 hours?

• Subject: YOUR WIFE IS IN LABOR RIGHT NOW!!!! GO TO HOSPITAL!
• Subject: I need the Jenkins file for my meeting in exactly 2 minutes!
• Subject: The Building is ON FIRE you should think about leaving!

Do these e-mails look familiar? Probably not? It’s probably because e-mail is not used in this manner, because it doesn’t work effectively for these purposes.

If somebody needs something right now, or tell you something right now… they call or call and e-mail. Plain and simple.

Often we get so wrapped up in our now culture to even think that there is an alternative.

I urge you all, to try for one week, to check your e-mails at most once an hour and preferably manually. Or use the low tech version and quit out of your mail program between checkings. If you don’t notice a significant change in the way you feel about your e-mail productivity – you get your money back.

Happy correspondence-ing.

Unfortunately, It seems that their new brand is almost identical to that of The Scottish Arts Council.

It seems almost inconceivable that any company as big as Quark (Designed by Sicola Martin) could miss the incredibly important step of checking if another firm had the same mark before spending thousands of dollars creating a brand, updating their website, devising a standards manual, and incorporating it into their packaging.

bq. “Our new logo is one of the most articulate symbols of the new Quark, and I feel proud to have led the team that worked on it,” said Susan Friedman, senior vice president of strategic relations at Quark. “It’s a positive sign of change that has re-energized our staff and caught the attention of our customers and partners, who understand that Quark is dedicated to relationships built on trust and mutual goals. There’s a positive energy with our customers right now, and they’re shaping where this company is going, and how we’ll get there.” (press release)

I wonder who spent more on their identity, Quark, The Scottish Arts Council, Designer’s Network, or Artworkers?

Hey! Where did they come from?

Other designers have also commented on this subject

Remember the days when you’d long to listen to music by the album? You went over to your shelves and looked at the album artwork to find the music you wanted to listen to. With the invention of MP3s and digital music players, the concept of album covers as navigational aids got lost (along with shelves full of records). Suddenly looking for a song meant you had to know the artist, album, or song name. As a visual thinker, I can easily tell you what any album in my music collection looks like from memory, but have a real problem with knowing what album a given song is on.

Enter CoverFlow, an ingenious visual navigation system for your iTunes library. After only one day of use, I was absolutely amazed by how much I preferred it to the text only iTunes alternative. The user interface is simple yet highly effective for finding artists or albums by name, but allows for a more explorative selection of music. Searching through 50 albums is easier with CoverFlow, because it allows you to actually “scrub”[1] through an extensive collection of music in seconds and recognize each cover as you pass them. By browsing, you find albums you’ve neglected because of their spatial relation to other albums.

Browsing by album art is truly a far better system of navigation.

I urge you all to go and download the free application. Use it for one day and see if it doesn’t turn you back into a visual browser again.

[1] Video editing term, where one can fast-forward or reverse through a video quickly with use of a jog-shuttle.

When you love Netflix, as much as we do, it can be a real nuisance when you arrive at work having forgotten to post your viewed Netflix DVD envelopes. You curse your eyes for missing the mail box and hope you remember the envelopes on your way home… but then you forget… again… and the cycle continues.

A vicious cycle.

As brand strategists and developers of environmental design, we thought we might offer Netflix a two pronged reminder and advertising strategy.

1. Remind – The messages on the mail box remind members of the movie they just watched, and inspire possible future rentals a-la when was the last time I watched Casablanca?. The Netflix logo and trade mark red provide another visual cue, reminding them to mail their DVD, reinforcing the “Drop Box” metaphor of traditional video rental establishments.
2. Advertise – Persons who do not yet subscribe to Netflix are reminded of films through reference to different famous film lines. The humorous messages kindle the passerby’s interest in Netflix.

Other famous movie lines Netflix ads might employ:

• Now go away before I taunt you a second time.
• May the force be with you.
• Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!
• I could have been a contender.
• It was Beauty killed the Beast.
• I’ll be back.
• You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me?

Are we missing any?

This scenario happens to me over and over again and I never seem to get used to it. Is there another way? Are usernames really the best method for registering users?

This type of user registration is a bad idea and unnecessary.

• Con: hassle to remember for users
• Con: must be unique, so registering with a site where your ‘usual’ username is taken becomes a problem
• Con: username nomenclature randomly varies from site to site, some allow spaces, some must contain a number, some must be 8 or more characters making it a problem to create a username that works for all sites
• Con: Unless you have an ‘online community’ usernames add an additional level of complexity to any system

So smarty pants, if it were up to you, how would users register on a website?

By e-mail address.

• Pro: totally individual
• Pro: already remembered
• Pro: serves as a way to verify registration

In essence we are all known by our e-mail addresses. Since everyone has one they serve as the perfect form of user verification.

So who is still using usernames in 2005?

• Amtrak
• American Express
• Empire BlueCross BlueShield
• eBay
• Commerce Bank
• HSBC
• Roxio (although they have added e-mail option)
• Network Solutions
• GoDaddy
• AIGA
• Verizon
• Adobe
• Basecamp
• Backpack

Shame, shame, shame!

So who should use usernames?

In essence, only e-mail hosting companies should use usernames, because in essence they are creating an e-mail address with their username. You couldn’t really have Yahoo expect an e-mail address to create an e-mail address, that would be akin to which came first the chicken or the egg?