Unboxing

My apologies. This is a rant.

When did unboxing become an important part of purchasing something? It started with gadgets, but seems to be spreading to more and more items. Lots of reviews now begin with a person’s experience as they take it out of the box for the first time. Why is something that amounts to less than .01% of the time you spend with something actually matter. I can understand the importance of first impressions, that whole Blink response, but I would think that applies to the first time you use it. I could appreciate a review that powers a device on for the first time. How much configuration is required, how long does it take you to get to the good stuff? If anything, the time spent capturing the unboxing experience is reducing the objects desirability, because it lengthens how long it takes you to actually be able to use it.

Moreover, I’m concerned that design efforts to improve the unboxing experience result in greater waste of packing materials. When designing for consumer products. Price is very important, because that’s the psychological barrier people have to get past to own the product. If the price is too high, people don’t buy.

That being said, someone once told me that the price will only be remembered for the first week, but the quality will be remembered forever. Please take the money you spend to maximize your product’s unboxing experience and put that toward improving the product’s quality.

I like that Samsung has a similar appreciation for the exaggerated importance of unboxing. It’s an older video, but here is their unboxing experience for the Omnia:

The war on paper, part 3

I’ve scanned up through our 2006 finances. It’s interesting to watch the trends in our organization emerge, dissolve, re-emerge, etc.

In the beginning, we kept separate folders for phone bills, utility bills, etc. We also separated our financial records between my accounts and Julie’s accounts. That lasted about a year. By end end of ‘05 everything went into the same folder.

We also worked to make the paper system work. When writing a check to pay a particular bill, we’d pull the carbon copy out of the check book and staple it to the bill for easy reference in case we ever had to look it up. We would also staple deposit receipts with the paystubs to reference we when deposited income. It was an awesome system. The problem, of course, is that we never actually needed to go back to look up any of that information. We meticulously documented stuff that just didn’t matter.

I still believe that record retention is important, that’s why I’m scanning it all in. I also believe that the integrity of your organization should correspond to the frequency with which you will need to access that data. Yes, it will take a few minutes longer to find a phone bill, assuming I ever need to find it, which I probably won’t.

Word to the wise. If you foresee yourself ever going paperless, avoid staples. Or, at the very least, get a staple remover.

Other interesting things I’ve noticed:

• While I appreciate that American express uses smaller pages for their statements to reduce paper consumption, it means they have to be scanned separately from most of the other documents.
• That said, the most common document thus far to cause a paper jam is a Capital One statement. They use pages that 8.5” wide but 33% longer, and for some reason that increases their likelihood to cause a paper jam.
• I really do like this scanner. It’s not taken me so long to get through 2005 and 2006 documents because it’s a long and arduous process. It actually only took me a couple of hours.

The war on paper, part 2

I must say: At first blush, this duplexing scanner is awesome. No more loading one page at a time on a flatbed scanner, flipping to get the other side. I load in 10-20 pages at a time, hit the button, and put a basket underneath the catch the spoils. Paper jams are surprisingly far between for something that is entry level for its category. I’ve not investigated the character recognition, so I don’t know how well it indexes all of the financial statements, but as long as I can search by a month and year, I should be able to get close enough to hone in on what I’m looking for.

One lesson that’s held true is the importance of having a reasonable filing system. One that gets you close quickly, without being overly specific. We used to have different folders for different kinds of bills. One for gas, one for phones, one student loan payments. We’ve since consolidated to a folder that holds all of the finance documents for a given year. Specificity is directly related to the frequency one must access the data. Don’t have a file folder to distinguish between gas bills and electric bills if you’re going to have to look back at them once or twice a year.

But folders are still needed! I feel it is important to spell that out for my own sake, mostly because of the engineering product lifecycle management software we’re getting at work. It pushes in the opposite direction, with minimal folders and an emphasis on searching for what you need by indexing documents through their metadata (information that’s not immediately in the document, but attached to it as relevant upon putting the document inside the database). Admittedly, that’s where the future appears to be headed, with refined search technologies and greater indexing capabilities to automate document parsing and knowledge retrieval. Call me old fashioned, but I like folders.

And yes, I do see the irony in that last statement given that I’m in the process of digitizing old paper to get rid of it and better embrace the future.

We’ve thus far won many of the battles, but the war is not over. The master strategy has not fully matured. This is the not beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning!! (Thanks Churchill)

The war on paper

It began with the coffee table. For the past 3 years we have lived in a 3 bedroom house. For more than two years of that, it was just the two of us. One might think that 3 bedrooms is more than enough to house just two people. That’s what we thought when we bought it. We wanted room to grow our family. But after two years we found the house seemed to be shrinking. What was once spacious had become crowded. No matter how many shelves we setup, no matter how many plastic tubs we put into the attic, the house was getting progressively crowded. What’s worse, we were plagued with clutter. No amount effort was sufficient to eliminate the clutter from our home. Many weekends were lost in the effort to clean up and organize the home better. There simply was not enough space to house all that we had accumulated.

Credit to the source of our solution comes from my sister’s boyfriend. We visited them one evening and both of us could not help but notice how clean his apartment was. Granted, he had no child to muss things up, but our problems predated the birth of our son. His toys only added to the mountain of clutter. On the trip up we’d talked about the feasibility of finding a larger home. Neither one of us liked the idea. We like our home, we like our neighbors, and the market means we’d have to sell at a loss, which would not position us well to buy into a larger home.

But, back to the apartment. Very open, very clean. The drive home was a different conversation. That’s when I realized it: Surfaces! Kevin has a distinct lack of surfaces. Surfaces obviously afford a place to put things down, but unless you maintain vigilance, they will gather rather than forcing you to tend to them. Lacking surfaces, there was no place for clutter to really gather. He had to deal with the mail when it arrived, rather than putting in a pile to grow. He had to deal with the empty grocery bags, rather than throwing them on top of the coffee table.

It took some work, but we finally got rid of our coffee table. The impact was immediate. The living room doubled in size, and was inherently cleaner. My wife looked at me and said, “What else can we get rid of?”

We posted items on ebay, craigslist, and freecycle. We donated what would not sell or people asked for. We threw away what the  donation’s people would not take. We hemorrhaged clothes we’d never wear and books we’d never read again.  Finally we came to the latest project, which is the filing cabinet. I’ve had this cabinet since college. It’s survived 5 moves (including one down the street on top of a rolling trash can in the snow), it weighs a ton, and it’s big and an eyesore. Julie never cared for it, but we needed a place to keep all of our files. The irony, is that the solution to get rid of the filing cabinet weighs about `1 lb and is the size of  a brick. It’s a duplexing scanner. We are going paperless.