Philly's Electronic Ink could advise "Good Wife" law firm

If Electronic Ink had done the presentation on "data visualizing" to the board of a fictional law firm on the hit TV show The Good Wife, maybe cranky elder partner Howard Lyman wouldn't have thrown up his arms in dismay, declaring "I don't see the use!"

On the Oct. 4 broadcast, the firm's young name partner Cary Agos suggested that the partners "listen to new ideas" like working with visual depictions of their workflow "to communicate complex multivariable data" that anyone can grasp.

It could save them meetings, calls, duplication of services, and even missed chances and mistakes.

But the verbiage and a pie-style graphic was a turn off for the old-timers who just couldn't "get it."

In real world situations, when Philadelphia-based Electronic Ink delivers information-glomming and depiction services to Fortune 500 firms across finance, health care, pharmaceutical, energy, and retail, "we understand that confusion, too," said CEO Harold Hambrose.

"The proof is really in the "hands-on experience, the doing," not in discussing it, he said at E.I.'s One South Broad Street base.

"When you go to an ATM" - an early inspiration - "or put your hands on an iPhone, you don't need instruction. The software speaks to you, intuitively leads you to what you need to know and do. That's why Steve Jobs often said that Apple was 'a design company,' not a hardware company."

And it's also why, Hambrose adds, many of the 65 people who work at Electronic Ink are behavioral scientists, and why their lab work - studying user interaction, including eye motion - is just as crucial for execution as the data crunchers and graphic designers who package what's up in the client's world.

Such as . . . tracking the national power grid in Britain to spot overtaxed regions that "could bring the system down," Hambrose said. An operator once had to consult many screens, risking whiplash. E.I. boiled down the big-picture view to one screen and essential pictorial.

The firm also took on a big challenge to make it "quick and easy" for people "of varied experience" to work equally well as counter persons at a fast-food chain, by having them input orders on an icon-based cash register.

For one of the world's leading stock trading institutions, they made it a lot easier to spot fraud that formerly took months of spreadsheet study to find.

When developing tools for clients - such as J&J, Deutsche Bank, Exelon, Reuters, and Comcast - E.I. designers may take the team to the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Why?

The artful balance of elements in a painting, the way a tapestry weaver has managed to tell a complete story in a single piece, helps the designers craft a similar, multi-scene story that can be read in a glance on a screen.

So at an E.I.-enhanced call-center, when a customer's phone number comes up, so too does a visual depiction of his/her "history" with the company - a pattern of circles (each representing a year), and graphic icons standing in for products and issues.

Is the caller a longtime customer who's never phoned in before? Or a distraught sort who's complained numerous times? If the latter's the case, why is the case still open?

The screen is designed so all this can be grasped quickly, without an operator putting you on hold.

A Carnegie Mellon School of Design grad, Hambrose, 48, first aimed to "work on Madison Avenue, creating glossy advertising campaigns."

Then he lucked into gigs with Citibank, working on their first ATM interface, and in OS2 software design for IBM in Britain, as the only Yank. There's been no turning back.

While software is rarely honored for its aesthetic charms, one E.I. screen for a 911 radio command center made it into an exhibit at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

And this year, E.I. is popping the champagne on its 25th year, always based in Philadelphia for its "top talent pool," Hambrose noted. "I recently met with a major Silicon Valley investor who said if we'd been based out there, we'd have been 'snapped up years ago by a larger company.' But we've stayed ahead of the curve. We serve an international base of clients. We're definitely happy here."

takiffj@phillynews.com

215-854-5960@JTakiff