The EchoUser Experience

When San Francisco banned plastic bags 2 years ago, my whoops of joy could be heard across the Golden Gate in Marin.  Having grown up in the developing world I grew accustomed - sadly - to seeing plastic bags everywhere they shouldn’t be: the streets, clogging drains, polluting rivers, the ocean, even stuck on phone lines. Everywhere except in garbage cans. You can be sure that I for one wasn’t going to miss their absence at all.

So imagine my surprise when last week my local Delano’s bagger put my groceries in one of these:

That’s funny, I could have sworn that plastic bags are illegal in San Francisco. So unless I’m missing something, this shouldn’t be allowed.

On second look, the makers of the bag have done their utmost to convince everyone that this is anything but a plastic bag with the liberal use of clever marketing copy.  Phrases like “no trees were harmed in the making of this bag”, and a cute little “nutrition” box highlighting exactly how it hasn’t hurt trees are nice tries - but belie the fact that eventually this bag will no doubt end up in a dump, where it most certainly will hurt a tree.

I get what the folks behind the bag are getting at: we have so many bags in production already that it certainly makes sense to train people to reuse them, thereby preventing more bags from ending up in landfills. Indeed, these particular bags do seem more durable than their crappy white plastic counterparts, so I could definitely imagine using them for more than one grocery run - but let’s face it: I can count on one hand the number of people I know who bring eco bags to the store every time they go.  Heck, I have 3 such bags in the trunk of my car, and I still manage to forget them each and every time.

As luck would have it, these bags have an answer for our laziness, too - a message nudging us to take them to “participating stores” for recycling. Good idea in principle, until my roommate tried it: turns out our local Delano’s isn’t one of those stores.

Go figure.

Castro plaza

Here’s an interesting look at the use of prototyping and “agile” development in a field outside the realm of software: urban development.  The project in question is the re-purposing of part of an intersection in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood, part of the City’s “pavement to parks” program.

I think it’s interesting to see the evolution and migration (or osmosis) of design principles from the software world into the real one.  IDEO’s “design thinking” revolution is perhaps the most commonly cited example of a non-software process employing agile (not necessarily Agile) methodologies, but there are certainly many other examples out there, from Principle 5 of The Toyota Way to basic prototyping approaches used in industrial design more generally.

I love that the City of San Francisco has taken some of this to heart as well, and is flying under the political radar by “piloting” (”prototyping”) projects before actually rolling them out.  I’m not sure if the City conducted any user research to see if there is any demand for the plaza (top-down management being a slight problem in government bureaucracies and all that), but I sure hope they conduct user research from here on out to figure out what kind of Castro Plaza, if any, we actually want.

I think I’ll float this idea by the team here at EchoUser to see if we can come up with some time to do some guerrilla research… Gavin Newsom, here we come!