Mike Industries

I’ve been a critic of Nike’s online presence since the first time I tried to find out about a shoe seven years ago and was greeted instead with a confusing Flash movie having nothing to do with shoes and leading me around in circles until I had to go to Google. “Design vomit” is what I call that stuff, and most things Nike did back then reeked of it.

Over the last few years, the company seems to have gotten more web-savvy and now produces a good mix of design-driven and utilitarian interfaces depending on what the marketing goals are for any particular sub-site.

Wanting to give them another shot, and needing a pair of running shoes now that I actually have time to run, I checked out nike.com and found this really cool shoe that you can custom design for yourself online.

Great!

I spent the next 10 minutes choosing the colors of every single element of the shoe, right down to the lace eyelets, through a very slickly done Flash interface. I went to the University of Washington for my undergrad degree so the shoe I created was black, purple, and gold. The process couldn’t have been any easier… kudos to the Flash team on configurator:

Then came the breakdown.

There was no “add to cart” button anywhere. There was a “store locator” button so I assumed they wanted me to go down to Niketown or something and try it on first and then maybe order it from the store. Luckily, I have a Niketown about a 15 minute bike ride from my place so I pedaled down there and tried on a non-configured version of the shoe. Size 11, great. I asked the guy how to go about ordering the customized version and he told me to go online.

I said “You mean you actually do the ordering online?”

He said “Yep.”

I said “Ok, I’ll look again, but I didn’t see that option.”

He said “Yep, that’s how you do it.”

So I ride home and reconfigure my shoe from scratch again. I hit the “Review” button and up pops this error:

Eh? A non-specific error message? According to the message, the item is either unreleased (which I know is not true since I just saw it in person) or, whoa, they “reached their made-to-order limit for the day”???

What?

I don’t even know what that means. Why wouldn’t you just put my order in queue and manufacture it as soon as you can find the requisite child-laborers to build it?

So instead of putting my order through and shipping it to me when it’s ready, Nike instead gives me three options:

1. Try again tomorrow when they’ve “reset their capacity”?

2. Email the design to someone… presumably with the accompanying note “Hey, look at what I can’t order from Nike!”

3. Print the design out so I can hang it on my wall and be reminded of how much I want it.

I just don’t get it. I’ve been racking my brain trying to think of exactly why Nike would put such an error message up and I can really only think of one possibility: whoever designed the database and backend for this system built it so that it can literally only store X number of orders per day. This just seems ridiculous to me though as databases should theoretically hold an unlimited amount of data.

Any ideas?

Dean Kamen’s self-elevating wheelchair: not just assistive, but liberating.So everyone’s all of a sudden talking about accessibility again. Just as you thought 2005 was going to be the year of folksonomies, APIs, and Ajax, the discussion over the last two weeks seems to have centered on a “new” aspect of accessibility:

Whether we really know what we think we know.

Ever since the original movement towards web standards led by the WaSP and many others, we’ve had similar messages sent to us:

“Valid code makes for accessible websites.”

“Use proper semantics to help screenreaders interpret your pages.”

“Use lists for navigation and any other list-like content to improve accessibility.”

And so, for several years designers and coders took these rules of thumb to heart, tried in earnest to follow best practices, and went about thinking their websites were “accessible”.

Why would they think that? Not because they physically observed it, but because they were told it. And who could blame them? You’re a web worker with a million things on your plate. Which is easier to do: hire an accessibility consultant to physically test your sites with disabled people or simply believe what you’ve heard? 99% of us, including me, chose the easier route.
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In an amusing twist of irony, my nameplate (pictured above) arrived last week, 4.5 years after I first ordered it.It is with both sadness and anticipation that I announce my departure from The Walt Disney Internet Group after four and a half years of employment. It’s been a great half-decade here and I can’t thank The Walt Disney Company enough for giving me the opportunity to work on such high-profile projects with such high-caliber people. In my time here, I’ve helped lead the standards-based redesigns of ESPN.com, ABCNews.com, and many other Disney-owned properties, as well as play a hands-on role in the design and development of all-new technologies like ESPN Motion, and countless unannounced products still in the pipeline. I owe all pride from working on said projects to the incredible teams of people across the company in Seattle, North Hollywood, New York, Connecticut, Orlando, England, and Japan who continue to make it all possible.

That said, I’m moving on.

So why would someone give up a six-figure job that they love, working for a company that they love, in a city that they love?

Two words: Opportunity Cost.

There’s something big I want to build, and now is the time to build it. I’m not going to say any more because I’m leery of getting caught in the hype machine, but you can expect a launch later this year. Watch this space for details as they become available.

As for blogging on Mike Industries, it’ll be business as usual for now. The iPod contests will continue (of course!), and my posting frequency should remain steady at several posts per month. Additionally, if I’ve turned you down for an interview or speaking engagement in the past, feel free to ask again as I no longer have a PR department to deal with. Disney’s policy required me to refuse almost all such requests in the past, so it’s nice not to have that restriction anymore.

And so with that, I begin anew on something I’m very excited about. If all goes well, it’ll grow like a Vine.

MouseOver. MouseOut.

Mark Cuban is full of a lot of things. Lots of great ideas, lots of money, lots of love for NBA officials. Just lots of “stuff”. A veritable box of inspiration, really. The other day, he wrote a post about something I’ve thought about for quite some time: the present day value of gold.

Hundreds of years ago, gold was treated as a global currency because it was relatively rare and it helped produce items which indicated social status (viz. jewelry). If your family had a lot of gold, it was considered rich. If your country had a lot of gold, it was considered rich. Eventually, when everyone moved to paper currency, the idea was that each unit of paper was “backed” by one unit of gold in the treasury. The concept being that if the entire global economic system were to break down, we’d still have the gold to trade with.

This concept, however, is almost completely obsolete in today’s society. In the case of a global economic meltdown, who is going to care about collecting bars of gold? These days, it’s things like oil, enriched uranium, and natural gas that become the real currency of survival in such dire times.

Cuban takes things a step further though and brings up something I hadn’t thought about: given that gold has little substantive value anymore (it’s not even close to the most precious element), why not take our entire supply and sell it off at $420 per troy ounce while it’s still worth something? Maybe pay down the national debt a little?

It’s been many years since I took my last macroeconomics class so I’m sure Cuban is probably missing something here that would throw the world into a tailspin, but it really doesn’t seem like a terrible idea to me… in theory at least. The toughest part about it, and possibly the deal-killer, seems like the process of unloading it. The U.S. obviously couldn’t just announce one day that all of their gold was for sale. Perhaps in steady chunks over a long period of time though, it might work.

Anyway, I’m way out of my “element” here… just wanted to mention this interesting idea.