EMP Museum in Seattle, Part II: Nirvana, taking punk to the masses

There’s a big exhibition about Nirvana at the EMP Museum. Apparently, it changes quite often, so don’t assume that it is going to be the same when go there. I had no idea what I’ll find, and there’s a lot of stuff that would have been cool to see. There’s some puzzle pieces,  fun stories, interviews with people close to the band… Anyway, these are my highlights:

First songs recorded

First contract Nirvana signed with Sub Pop

BLEACH

Original picture taken for the cover of the album

Design annotations

And here’s the final result

NEVERMIND

Notes on the cover for the album…

“If anyone has a problem with his dick we can remove it“

“We can take out the pool floor just to make it blue water“

Sweater that Kurt Cobain wore during the ‘Smells like teen spirit’ video

IN UTERO

Used for the cover of the album

Guitar smashed by Kurt Cobain (one of many…)

EMP Museum in Seattle, Part I: SciFi

There’s a museum that you don’t want to miss if you ever go to Seattle: The EMP Museum, which is all about music, science fiction and pop culture. I had no doubt I’d make the tour because they currently have an exhibition about Nirvana, but to our surprise, they  had a SciFi exhibition and a Video Games one, that were pretty entertaining too.

Another cool thing about this museum is the actual building, and specifically:

• Its architect, Frank Gehry (also know by teh Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Dancing House in Prague, or the MIT Ray and Maria Stata Center in Cambridge, amongst others)
• The monorail, which goes through the museum.
• I know I was lucky with the weather, but when the light gets reflected in the surface of the building it creates this beautiful effect on the stairs, in front of the same.

The SciFi Exhibition

Here’s a collection of items that can be found at the EMP Museum SciFi exhibition. I have to admit that I am not that much a science fiction fan, but I was able to recognize some of the following:

An authentic alien

Superman

A laser sable handle

An ax… that once belonged to Jack Nickolson

Terminator

And some Star Treck stuff

Seattle, here we go!

They say Seattle is a beautiful city, and I am sure it is, but it is not the reason why I have always wanted to visit it.

I missed the era of Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and all the others, I missed it because I wasn’t a teenager yet, and I first listened to ‘About a girl’ just a few months after Kurt Cobain died. I rapidly became addict to the sound of Nirvana, and discovered Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Sonic Youth, Alice in Chains, Temple of the Dog,…

And THIS is why I’ve always wanted to visit Seattle so badly, because it had- and I know it’s not they same, but they say it still has- an absolutely crazy and amazing musical scene.

Listening to Nirvana while writing this post, I remember when I asked my mother to knit a striped black and red sweater when I was sixteen. A sweater that I still wear today.

Anyway, here’s a few things I am planning to visit this weekend: The Sound Garden, Easy Street Music Records (West), Experience Music Project, Pike Place Market, Pioneer Square, Black Dog Forge, Sub Pop Records HQ, Reciprocal Recording Studio, Crocodile Cafe, The Garage, and The Showbox.

And of course some non-music related places: Space needle, the locks, and the Chihuli Garden and Glass.

I am loading my phone with a few albums that I am going to listen as I wander through the city. I’m watching “Hype” tonight. And then, I will be ready for the adventure. Seattle, here we go!

And no, I won’t be going to Aberdeen, unfortunately there isn’t time for everything. Next time maybe.

Have I already said that I am so excited? Because I am.

NBC Store at the Rockefeller Center in NYC

During our visit to New York City a couple of weeks ago, and as genuine tourists, we stopped by the NBC shop at the Rockefeller center. We spent like half an hour there, browsing t-shirts, mugs, hoodies,… you name it. We didn’t buy a thing, but here’s some fun pictures that I took:

The Big Lebowski

Community

The Office

Psych

Friends

 

The Simpsons

Confusing confirmation messages and the day I got fined for not parking my bike correctly

Confirmation messages seem like an easy thing to design, but the truth is they are not. And because they seem easy to design, we- product managers, designers- sometimes don’t pay much attention to what we are doing, and built applications that throw very confusing messages. These are three curious examples that I’ve had to deal with, and my suggestions to improve them.

It’s been a while since I stopped using Bicing but I remember one of the things I didn’t like from their service is that, every time I parked a bike, they confirmed the transaction with a message in color red. In my unconscious  - and in lots of people’s- red means wrong, warning, danger. I get it, red is also their corporate color, but you shouldn’t use just red for a confirmation message if you want your users to think the transaction went through successfully, should you?

Suggestions: I would, at least, use a green √ or, in its absence, a huge- and I mean huge- “Congratulations” message.

My parents run a restaurant in Calella (Barcelona) and they had never used online marketing nor accepted online reservations until I convinced them to do so.  The system that we use, Minchador, sends us an email- me in that case, because they don’t really like computers- with the information for the reservation, and then it needs to be confirmed by us. Leaving aside the fact that I live in San Francisco and my parents’ restaurant is in Calella, so it’s a nine hour time difference we are talking about here, I find it is a good and practical system. The customer makes a reservation, I receive an email, check availability, confirm, the customer receives a confirmation email. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Problem here is that most of the times, customers don’t realize they are not making a reservation but asking for it, and that it needs to be confirmed.

This the confirmation message they get when they send the form:

Suggestions: Hihglighting the confirmation message in a color that is not green, for instance orange. Why not green? Nothing went wrong, but the reservation is not confirmed neither finished yet. I wouldn’t use red either, because as I’ve said, nothing went wrong. You could also show the users they are not finished by using step 1, 2, etc. indications. Another option would be to show a telephone number along with the confirmation message, so that the customers can call if they don’t want to wait for a confirmation email. Showing an estimated wait time, don’t just say “we’ll confirm your reservation whenever we are able to”, say in less than n hours and if you can’t control that, make the users of the system- the restaurants in this particular case- commit with their customers. And finally, explaining the users how are they going to receive the confirmation message. Is it going to be an email? A text message? A phone call?

Try contacting a host through Airbnb without being logged in. The confirmation message is not color-confusing, and the text is big enough, the problem here is that, due to the over information we are used to, or messages like “click here to share with your Facebook friends” and “click here to share on Twitter”,  we’ve become blind and sometimes, don’t properly process those so needed confirmation messages. I understand there are other reasons to design such a confirmation message- more users that connect their Airbnb and Facebook accounts, for instance- but that doesn’t mean that, strictly from a user perspective, the message can be confusing.

I’ve recorded a video to better illustrate my point: http://screencast.com/t/wLEvEbVVe3g

What was my experience contacting hosts? After the “confirmation message”, which is not a confirmation message but a “register-or-your-email-won’t-be-send message”, I just closed the window. Next day I thought, ‘mmmm that is weird, yesterday I contacted 10 apartments and I haven’t received a single answer‘. Want to know why? I had sent no emails at all, I had only wrote them and closed all the windows thinking they had been sent, but they hadn’t. And then I rembered that this hasn’t been the first but the second time this happened to me. O_o

Suggestions: Using colors or icons. Colors and icons are a clear indicator of transactions going or not going through. Keeping the form behind the alert message so users can understand that they are not finished sending the form. Focusing on the signup/ login, not on the Facebook connect. I don’t like connecting Facebook with other applications but, if I am required to do so when I am about to contact a host of a room I am interested to rent, I will. No need to convince me with “your friends are using Airbnb”, I already have a strong motivation to signup/ login: your product.

The day I got a 250 euro fine for not parking my bike correctly

Every time I parked my Bicing bike, I thought ‘oh, wait, something went wrong’. Until one day, I stopped worrying about it. One day I received a 250 euro fine because I hadn’t parked the bike correctly and somehow, it got lost. I am not blaming the confirmation messages, but they obviously didn’t help

Zacatrus y el poder de las recomendaciones

Pues sí, les devía un post a estos señores, so here it goes.

Creo que fue Javi quien tuiteó sobre Zacatrus, y aunque en ese momento no vivía en España, me lo guardé en los favoritos. Porque yo de Javi me fío (y porque los juegos de mesa me gustan mucho).

En diciembre fui a casa por Navidad, y se me ocurrió regalarle el Carcassone a un amigo para su cumpleaños (nota para Jordi: no pinches en el link). El caso es que hice el pedido, el cual debía ser entregado en casa de mi amigo directamente (y no en la mía), porque entre otras cosas, yo me volvía en breve a San Francisco. Recibí un email de confirmación pero, fallo mío, no lo leí hasta el día siguiente (estar de vacaciones es lo que tiene, no lees los correos al segundo de que te lleguen), cuando parece ser que el pedido ya había sido enviado… a mi dirección, no a la de mi amigo.

El lío vino cuando llamé para ver qué se podía hacer. Me voy a ahorrar el “yo les dije”, “ellos me dijeron”, etc. Lo que pasó fue que la atención no me gustó y como soy una cabezona, y a pesar de no tener tiempo para comprar otro regalo para mi amigo, cancelé el pedido.

Pero luego me sentí mal. Porque soy así, tonta, y creo en la bondad de las personas (y además me invadió el espíritu de la Navidad, todo hay que decirlo), y me sentí mal. No por haber cancelado el pedido, sino por el hecho de haber tenido una mala experiencia de usuario con Zacatrus…, cuando Javi había dicho que molaba!!

Así que les escribí un email, todo lo constructivo que pude. Me vuelvo a ahorrar lo de “Mira, creo que el problema ha sido este, no este otro, blabla”. Me contestaron. Y no sólo me contestaron, sino que lo hicieron en tono totalmente colaborativo, reenviaron el juego, esta vez a casa de mi amigo, y hasta me hicieron llegar un obsequio (nota para Jordi: guárdamelo con cariño).

Les devía un post porque sí. Porque las personas que trabajan duro para ofrecer un servicio o vender unos productos que nos encantan, y para solucionar nuestros problemas cuando los tenemos, se merecen un reconocimiento. Cuando algo sale mal nos quejamos pero, ¿y cuando algo sale bien, como en este caso, qué hacemos? Pues yo, lo digo.

Gracias Zacatrus. Para que las cosas salgan bien, solo hay que querer que salgan bien.

 

Bye bye 2012

Este año he tenido el blog un poco desatendido, pero no quería darle la bienvenida al 2013 sin despedirme del 2012 como es debido. El 13 es mi número favorito, así que mi primer impulso ha sido pensar que, por ese motivo, éste iba a ser un buen año. Luego ha venido Plunchete y me ha dicho “yo hace unos años que decidí que todos los años iban a ser buenos”. Y me ha parecido una actitud mucho más apropiada para la ocasión. Así que nada, preparándome estoy para un año de p*** madre.

El 2012 ha sido un año lleno de cambios para mi. Vale, digamos que mi vida está siempre llena de cambios, ¡y lo que me gusta!. Si nos conocemos y hace tiempo que no hablamos, ya sabes que la próxima vez que nos veamos vamos a tardar un buen rato en ponernos al día. Pero este año, los cambios han sido mayúsculos.

En julio me casé, en septiembre Plunchete y yo nos mudamos a San Francisco, y hoy, termina definitivamente mi etapa en Masterbranch. Miro hacia atrás y me acuerdo del vértigo que he sentido en el pasado, en repetidas ocasiones, al converger tantos y tan importantes cambios en mi vida. Esta vez, sin embargo, una hasta ahora desconocida vocecilla en mi interior me dice que todo va bien, que si no es esto será otra cosa y que lo importante es querer ser feliz. Siento que las riendas de mi vida son mías, y que puedo hacer con ella lo que quiera. Siento que ser feliz es cuestión de actitud y que los malos momentos sirven para hacerme más fuerte. Siento que me queda tanto por aprender,… y por disfrutar. Y así intento compartirlo con los que me rodean.

Gracias 2012…

Y hablando de los que me rodean, este año han entrado en mi vida algunas personas a las que, a día de hoy, ya es como si conociera de toda la vida, y por ello doy las gracias.

Este año también he aprendido que reírse de las cosas sí sirve para solucionar los problemas, o al menos, para verlos desde otra perspectiva y abrir la mente para poder encontrar una solución. Así que me retracto de lo que dije, gracias por hacer que me diera cuenta (ya era hora).

Esto no es nuevo, pero doy las gracias por poder seguir compartiendo mi vida con gente honesta, gente auténtica, gente que deja verse y que cree en lo que hace y en las personas.

En octubre vi a The Smashing Pumpkins en concierto- ¡y qué concierto!- y pude por fin quitarme el mal sabor de boca del año 2000 en Barcelona. Por fin. Ya puedo volver a ser una fan completa de The Smashing Pumpkins.

Y gracias a ti, y a ti y a ti, por ese café, esa sonrisa, ese email, ese comentario, esa foto, esa cena, esos 5 minutos, esas risas, esas copas… tu ya sabes de qué hablo.

Thank you…