Breaking down that data even more

Design/Art, Thesis

I’m posting my analysis of the more qualitative elements of my thesis survey. Specifically, I looked more closely at the reasons people gave for participating or not in recycling programs.

The results were a little bit surprising to me, in that I thought lack of participation was a result of difficulty in use of these programs. But, in fact, based on the responses I got, it was not difficulty, but primarily lack of awareness of the programs themselves.

If you’d like more details, check out my full analysis here: ParticipationReasons

Faculty meetings and brain overload

Design/Art, Thesis

So, if you’ve met me in person, you probably know I’m pretty shy and fairly social awkward until I get to know you. It’s all part of being an introvert. Another part of being an introvert is I’m not as good at reading non-verbal cues or subtexts in conversations, so it usually takes me bit to think over and process new ideas, concepts I don’t fully understand, and hell, sometimes even ones I do understand. This results in some pretty confused and blank looks from me in classes and meetings, despite the fact I perfectly understand the words someone is saying, I just might not fully process the meaning of those words until later.

So, that’s what faculty meetings about my thesis have been like for me. But you know what, I’m starting to get it.

DeLevie, I understand what you were saying about branding now. There is an element of it that should be addressed in my thesis. I just wasn’t as interested in the ideas of branding, so was trying to avoid them. Nope, can’t do that, and the results of my research to date have shown that branding of recycling programs is a large part of people not participating. So, yes, I will be revising/adjusting my thesis question based on this. I told you I’d understand a few hours later!

So, moral of the story is, yeah, I give blank looks a lot, but it doesn’t mean I mentally checked out. Usually it means my brain is racing trying to take in all the new information, and can’t process anything else. Processing…Processing…Processing.

Is it UX or Interactive Design?

Design/Art, Thesis

Struggling with whether or not I should frame my thesis as a UX or Interactive Design project. I’m leaning towards UX because I think my strengths lie more in research than coding. BUT, I am making an app, or at least a smoke and mirrors app. So which is it?

Honestly, my passions lie more in UX, because things don’t have to suck as much as they do. For example: Why do websites ask for the credit card type on their payment screens? They can tell by the first number on the card what type it is, why make people enter it? Or: why do cable and satellite box UIs suck so hard? Seriously. It’s so easy to do good design, you don’t even have to come up with your own ideas most of the time, your audience tells you a good chunk of that.

But, then there’s the whole I’m creating an interactive experience, soooooooooo confusion.

Guess I better decide today.

How I start planning something…

Thesis

Bulleted lists.

Lots and lots of bulleted lists. On paper. On my clipboard. (A clipboard makes anything look more official)

For some reason writing out my plans as bulleted lists works better for me than typing it up on a computer. Something about the action of writing it down, erasing, drawing arrows, sketching next to an idea, circling, and all that jazz helps my brain sort things out more efficiently and with less distractions.

I know, weird, right?

Planning with clipboard, paper, pencil and bullets!
Planning with clipboard, paper, pencil and bullets!

T-Mobile and its new break-up campaign

Thesis

I’ve been saying for a bit that the wireless phone industry is the next industry that will be shaken up and reinvented if the carriers don’t do anything about it.

Think like music and movies and TV and how they’ve changed because of the customers and what they forced those industries to do to accommodate them. The industries didn’t change because they wanted to, but because their customers were leaving in droves, so they had to find new ways of appeasing customers and still be able to make money. TV customers wanted a la carte channels; TV providers didn’t want to break apart their extremely profitable packaging schemes. So what did their customers do? Created their own versions of a la carte by watching TV online, either through piracy or other less than legitimate means until companies like Netflix, Amazon and HBO started giving people what they wanted: a reliable, legal, affordable way to watch only the content they felt like paying for.

The TV and Movie industries fought this at first, but finally embraced an online a la carte model, realizing it’s sort of pointless to NOT take advantage of the opportunity and ignore what your customers are demanding. The music industry still has an image problem for the way they treated piracy in the late 90s and early 2000s, and although that industry seems to now have embraced the internet and its distribution channels, It seems the TV and Movie industries saw the lessons learned from music and avoided treating their customers like criminals and enemies to be squashed, defeated, and sued into bankruptcy (for the most part).

It looks like at least some in the wireless industry knows they have an image problem. 2 year contracts are bullshit. Overage fees are bullshit. Charging people an extra fee to connect their phone to data on top of a monthly data fee is bullshit. Forcing family plans on people is bullshit. Charging $20/mo for unlimited texts is bullshit (looking at you at&t! there’s no way it actually costs that much to send miniscule amounts of data like that across your network).

So, leave it to the U.S. underdog of the wireless industry to make the first step with their new campaign: Break up with your carrier

Genius! The only thing that keeps many people from switching? Contracts. T-mobile will pay your contract termination fee for you.

This will shake up the industry and I think we’ll see some big changes in the next few months, I’m excited about it. Wireless data consumption is a big fucking deal, it has and will have huge and widespread impacts on a number of aspects of our daily lives. To make it easier and more affordable to access this information will potentially have huge cultural impacts. Imagine how much has changed in our lives since the first iPhone was introduced…now think about how much the industry changed when at&t wasn’t the only carrier with the iPhone. T-mobile’s break-up campaign has the same potential to shake up the wireless marketplace. Freeing up customers to chose how and when they consume that data will cause changes we can’t even imagine yet.

Maybe I’m putting too much importance on wireless data consumption, but I really doubt it. I guess we’ll have to watch how this plays out, but I really think this is a step in the right direction. Well done T-mobile, well done!