RIAA, Here's your New Business Model: Innovate

For years the Recording Industry Association of America has been cracking down on some really annoying people—their customers. The plan to stop this? Target more customers and make them pay outlandish amounts for distributing it.

Now it would stand to reason that if a large portion of your customers demanded to receive your services in a way that you weren't offering, that you would figure out a way to keep their business. But yet the RIAA has decided instead to lawyer-up instead of innovate.

iTunes was one of these innovations. For just 99¢ I have a great quality recording in seconds. It's legal, it's easy to access, it's a good service. It recommends new songs. Much like last.fm who is also innovative. I can listen to any song I want and discover new artists. Both good services. I spend more money on music now than I ever did in the CD age. Why? Because I can just buy the songs I want, instead of having to decide if the song was worth the price of an album.

But with videos it's a little different. You can go on to YouTube for some things, or to NBC.com for instance to watch shows. But being in England I'm restricted from watching American TV shows on my computer. (To me this makes no sense, because it's the WWW, it wasn't given that name for nothing.) Restricting customer access to your goods only asks for trouble. Making anything difficult for customers hurts business.

So what if RIAA made it easy for people to pay for what they have on their computer through an online amnesty program? They can get the content any way they want, and there is an option for people to make it 'right' afterward through an Amnesty program. Pirates...um unpaid customers can donate any amount, and the money goes directly to the company without having to pay for things like oh, distribution. And even better, people can donate for the good stuff, showing RIAA what people want to see/hear more of. A direct way to give customer feedback. Here's how it could work:

You've seen Arrested Development 15 times. You love it, you quote it all the time. To you, Arrested Development is worth more than $40, you give it $50. You want the writers of that show to make more of the same and you are willing to pay for it.

Now, the extra money you spent on Arrested Development made up for the time you wasted watching Evita. For that you don't donate. However there are plenty of other Evita fans out there, who would make up for you.

But the thing is, that not having to pay for distribution, media, packaging, shelf space, etc would reduce the cost of the film or song so you would be saving money vs going to the store. Good for the customer and the company right? They could upload their official copies to torrent sites, be more creative in their advertising or product placement, and have a link at the end of it for people to enroll in the Amnesty payment program. Heck you could even give them rewards for it. Like the ability to have a brief role in a film, jam with their favorite musician or be entered into the movie/song lottery. Where everyone that donates x amount of $ would be entered to win. See, innovation. Don't force the customer to change, change to your customer.

Or you could send lawyers after 80% of your customers, that would generate all sorts of positive brand image for you. I'm sure it would turn into a real money-maker.

New Young Womens Theme

After the Young Women Presidency announced the new Young Womens theme (adding the value "virtue" with the color gold), I wrote on our theme poster and tried sticking it to the wall. That poster just doesn't want to stay up.

So being the designer I am, I designed a whole new look for the Young Womens theme, which is less grandma-looking. It's a banner that can be hung and has a damask pattern with it. I decided it wasn't worth designing unless it was something I really wanted for myself and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

I figured some of you may be in the same situation so I'm offering the funky new banner (printed on fabric, rod and ribbon not included) along with a beautiful print of this year's scripture theme on etsy. Have a look and tell me what you think!

Form vs. Function debate

Here is a design paper that I've put together on the whole form vs. function debate.
What do you design/content/function theorists think?

Let's "Spread the Health"

Before I moved to England, I had heard the horror stories of Socialised Healthcare. All the doctors were bad because they didn't get paid very well and had no incentive to treat people better or improve their profession because there was no reward system to be recognized for good work and everyone got paid the same. This meant that although my doctor was free, my doctor wouldn't be good. I was also aware that I wouldn't be able to choose my doctor or be able to get the treatment I wanted and it would be awful.

I was against it as much as you if not more. That's what I thought anyway, before I tried it.

The truth is, socialism is a part of our life already. Now I know this sounds crazy, but if you look at the definition:

"An economic system in which the basic means of production are primarily owned and controlled collectively, usually by government under some system of central planning."

Examples of this are: taxes, insurance, schools, libraries, fire departments, student loans, social security, welfare, small business grants, government bail-outs, charities, disaster relief, and yep, churches. These are all forms of socialism. Which work well under the umbrella of a democratic republic.

Now, I'm a Capitalist. I don't agree with a Socialist government being in charge of everything in the least. But there are some social programs that we have that make life better, that are optional and allow us to help look out for those that are at the bottom. So for argument's sake, I'm broadly using the label of "socialism"—like everyone else in the news has lately—which is different than Socialism with a capital "S". So again the point I am making is that we all need social programs to get by, and calling someone a Socialist for wanting programs like this is blowing things WAY out of proportion. Because if you do that, we're all under that label for some reason or the other.

To be truly non-socialist, we would pay for our roads individually, our schools individually, our churches individually, put out our own fires, never pay a tax for anything and buy every book we read. Pay our doctor without an insurer, pay our college professors directly for our classes, plow the roads ourselves (which is true in some parts of Idaho!), etc. Of course it's impossible for everyone to do everything for themselves. We have classes of 20 that have the same teacher, that go to school in a building paid for by a group of people. It's cheaper and easier that way. So we have a combination of systems, republics, democracies, social programs, etc. That allows for people to make their own income, but benefit from an organized system for some needs. Which is unlike communism, that mandates that everyone can only make one salary and you have no choice in which groups you can get services from. Which is a really bad thing as we all know. It's socialism used for evil and takes away agency. It was these guys that put socialism under the umbrella of a dictatorship and turned it into an ugly word.

Now looking at this through a church perspective ask yourself:

1. Do you complain when your tithing goes to help the poor members of your congregation?
2. Does your fast offering donations make others work less hard to eat, if so will you stop paying it?
3. Is it bad that Church-owned farms, ranches, canneries are controlled by Church HQ, and they control the price and production of the food they've made for its members?
4. Is it unfair that your tithing builds a temple or church for people who can't afford to buy it themselves?
5. Should missionaries pay what their mission costs in their area, instead of spreading the cost to be equal for all areas?
   
6. Is it bad that 70% of tuition for students going to church-owned schools...is paid by tithing? (okay maybe you can think of a few students who you'd like to withdraw your donation from, but you get the picture)
7. Should wealthier members of the church get a tithing break so that they can be free to spend more money in their business (if they own one) so that poorer members of the church that might be employed by them will earn more so they can spend more money in tithing and have a better life? (...if their tithing savings goes directly towards employee's salaries)

As an example of this, say that the wealthy member makes $100/year. Instead of paying $10/year they get a tithing break of paying just $8/year.

The poor member makes $10/year. They pay $1.

Now if the rich member puts all of their $2 into one poor member's salary, the poor member would now pay the church $1.20/year. And that is a very charitable wealthy guy to give away all of his new money like that.

This means even though the wealthy member was completely unselfish, the church loses $1.80, which means they have less money to help others in the church

But in reality, the poor member wouldn't get all of the $2. Instead it might be spread out to everyone in the church, each getting about 2¢, or put into savings where it earns interest and no one gets it. And we all know that you can't pay tithing on 2 cents. A policy like that would overtime drain the Church. Same goes for the tax system. Of course the Lord does a better job of taking care of people than the government, so it is worth every penny. :)

But of course we are happy to pay more tithing if the Lord blesses us with more. We want to use that to help others. That's because we are all good and charitable like that. So why do I look at it so differently when a country gives me better opportunities to earn a living, that I am stingy in sharing my increase with them? Well for lots of reasons, but this post is long already.

Note: If you answered "no" to these questions, you agree with social programs to solve some problems.

In the UK, healthcare is kind of treated like tithing. Everyone pays 11% of their income directly into the Health Fund, called the NHS. And here are the benefits everyone gets, no matter what:

1. You don't need health insurance and there are no forms to fill out or policies to read carefully or physicals proving that you don't need help with your health already.
2. Doctor's don't have to raise their rates to pay for malpractice insurance (which is usually around $250,000+ a year in the US), because the government pays the cost of lawsuits.
3. Businesses don't spend money on their employees medical benefits (so they can spend it on other things like allowing more vacation for employees—like paid maternity/paternity leave and Andrew gets 38 days a year paid vacation, which is a whole 2 months!).
4. Babies are delivered for free, even if you are a wed mother.
5. If you get cancer or need a bone marrow transplant or kidney, you don't have to put your photo on a can in Wal-Mart, because your cancer, kidney and bone marrow treatments are free.
6. Ambulances don't charge you for saving your life after some jerk crashes into you at 70 mph.
7. The thought of Life-flight doesn't give you a heart attack when you think of the charge.
8. I have the choice of 8 doctors within 2 miles of me and they are all seeing new patients. I can get an appointment within 1-4 days easily and switch doctors if I don't like mine (but mine is great). And I'm in the suburbs.
9. Doctors are rewarded financially for being better than other doctors (see pay scale here, multiply x2 to get the dollar amount), and if you are shown to be a horrible doctor that shouldn't be treating people, you are kicked out or moved to a desk job. My GP doctor earns between $160-$240K a year (and pays no malpractice insurance, office rent, equipment/supply costs, etc). Think how fast a doctor could pay off their student loans.
   
10. I can purchase private insurance and go to private hospitals and doctors instead if I wish.
11. No bottle of pills that I buy will be more than $14, ever. And if I don't like my generic pills, I can get brand pills for the same price. Here's why:

Because everyone is working together, the UK is able to put these restrictions on drug companies to lower the costs of medicine for their residents:

1. Drug companies cannot spend billions of dollars advertising your pill to generate a need from the public (there are no drug commercials on TV here).
2. Drug companies don't need to spend millions of dollars to package a product to entice doctors to use it for their patients (this means a lot coming from a graphic designer).
3. Doctors don't get paid by drug companies to give their patients more expensive medicine.
4. Drug companies eliminate billions of dollars spent on salesmen coming to the clinic to sell individual doctors on drugs and instead work with the main healthcare group directly which then sends out the information to all the doctors about your product (in fact there is a central computer system here that when a patient needs a pill the doctor has all of the choices and information about the pills that work for you right there on the screen, and if you don't like your pill you can switch if you want, you have a choice).
5. The NHS negotiates a price cap on some drugs, so that pharmaceutical companies can't increase prices simply to create bigger profits. Imagine if everyone in America said, "I'm sorry, but I'm not willing to pay more than X for your drug, so find a way to lower your spending or you won't get much business." This already happens on a small level with some insurance companies. But if everyone joined it would make more of an impact.
6. Drug companies don't spend billions of dollars to get candidates elected or bills passed to make them more money and spend a lot less money on lawyers.

In other words, make it so the drug company can't spend so much on things that don't improve your health or the medicine. Developing a drug is expensive, but spending more on marketing and lobbying for it shouldn't be something the patient has to pay for.

Okay with that being said, the NHS Health Fund is not magic. Some hospitals are better and cleaner than others. Some doctors and nurses are better than others. They charge you to use the parking lot when you get radiation treatment. Some people are complacent, some people work hard. Some love working with people, some don't.

But I really like the idea that good health isn't something that only the wealthy can afford here. So whoever gets elected, I hope they make cancer less expensive, drug companies less greedy, insurance less spendy and lawyers less busy, whether it's under the label of "socialism" or not. Because we are really behind when it comes to making sure everyone is healthy in our country and we need a maverick or someone that can fix it, because now is the time to shake things up.

Ballot Design Review

Today I cast my overseas ballot. The designer in me couldn't help but be annoyed at the horrible design associated with these punch cards. Allow me to elaborate on what I mean...

The trick to making a clear design where the number and the dot are an obvious correct pair, is through close proximity and alignment. So I'll share with you what's wrong with the current ballot design of today (A) and the alternative solutions.

In design A, the dot and the number are the same distance from the dots and number above, below and to the left and right. In other words, pick any number and there are a potential 4 dots the same distance away from that number.

The "designer" staggered the numbers so that the dot wouldn't line up horizontally with the numbers to the right or left of them, but in actually, moves that dot closer to the number than the other dots now.

To correct that problem, a box has been drawn around each number, cluttering the page. The other funny thing is that because of a visual trick our eyes play, that line between the number and a dot below it, makes the bottom dot look closer to the number above it which is incorrect. In the end, without the boxes, the dot the least visually close to the number is the correct one to punch for your candidate. And yes, this is the ballot design in use today.

B merely puts the right number closest to the right dot and keeps the boxes. But do we really need to draw a box around each number to make it the clearest design? No. In fact it makes it less clear.

C takes the same position of the numbers and dots of Design B and removes the boxes to show if the design can hold on its own. It can't so well. Just look at the number 96 and the dot directly aligned to the right of it. Oops.

D removes the staggering, and with more space between each number-dot pair would be pretty simple to read. You don't have to double-check to know what's right. But space is usually too precious to be spent on clarity for a ballot and it wouldn't be approved because of that.

The difference between E and F is that the numbers are aligned left on E and aligned right on F. Aligning right helps the number to always be closer to the right dot. The clear problem here is that you have dots being an equal distance from the same number. (notice #11 and #15 as a comparison)

G and H are only different because of the line to separate the columns (instead of having to use extra space, draw a line). The line really clarifies the number-dot pairs, which makes H the winner.

H wins for a couple other reasons:
a) it saves more space by not having to create a gap above and below numbers, thus fitting in 3 times the amount of holes vertically
b) the dot closest to any number is the right one to punch for your candidate.

But what if there is a ballot that is perforated incorrectly? Aha, that's what the dots are for. The dot is to indicate two things:
1) where to punch
2) to line it up with the right number, in case the place to punch isn't exactly center, but the dot will always line up with the number and at least be on part of the perforation

So, seeing that, I think that each dot should be a miniature number representing the right place to punch, giving the voter further reason to not second-guess. After all might as well use the ink to say something beneficial or don't use the ink at all. :)

You can't mistake which hole to punch here!

And lastly, I think punch ballots should be eliminated altogether. But if we must use them, we should invest in a better design of them. And that's how the mind of a designer works when she votes. This took only a few minutes to find a better solution, yet these ballots have been ignored for years despite the complications with their design in several states. I think we should vote to have the design of these ballots reviewed by information design specialists...that is if we take extra care to make sure we punch the right hole.

Rexburg Temple Sketchup

Google released their own version of AutoCAD, and now you can download 3-D models of all sorts of buildings. Including the Rexburg Temple.

It will be interesting to see where this free modeling software goes!

Why you should believe what they say about dirty money...

People have always said, "You should wash your hands after handling money, you never know where it has been."

Well, here is one possibility. Perhaps this woman is vacationing near you?