“New World Computing”
Steven Frank capably argues that the introduction of the iPad is more than simply the creation of a consumer computation sector – it’s a bold bet on the future of devices, interfaces and the ecology of networked computing:
Apple is calling the iPad a “third category” between phones and laptops. I am increasingly convinced that this is just to make it palatable to you while everything shifts to New World ideology over the next 10-20 years.
Just like with floppy disks, the rest of the industry is quite content to let Apple be the ones to stick their necks out on this. It’s a gamble to be sure…
The bet is roughly that the future of computing:
- has a UI model based on direct manipulation of data objects
- completely hides the filesystem from the user
- favors ease of use and reduction of complexity over absolute flexibility
- favors benefit to the end-user rather than the developer or other vendors
- lives atop built-to-specific-purpose native applications and universally available web apps
Read These Later – Week 30
There’s a lot of talk about Minimum Viable Product. What I want to see is more conversation around the idea of the Minimum Usable Interface: Realism in UI Design
The goal is not to make your user interface as realistic as possible. The goal is to add those details which help users identify what an element is, and how to interact with it, and to add no more than those details.
Another fantastic Letter of Note: Harvey Weinstein tells Erol Morris he’s boring
Speak in short one sentence answers and don’t go on with all the legalese. Talk about the movie as a movie and the effect it will have on the audience from an emotional point of view.
Small By Choice, Whether Clients Like It or Not
Q. People have compared you to the Soup Nazi on “Seinfeld.” Where do you think that comes from?
Ms. Esparza: That comes from American culture. The customer really isn’t always right. We believe we have the expertise to bring the best product. We don’t randomly put these ingredients together. We spend the time to test these and try them.
What to do if the world hates your idea – Scott Berkun
In some ways how you handle rejection is self selection for creative work – if you cant handle a few rejections from publishers, how will you handle a few bad reviews of your finished book?
And if you are trying to get a book published, here’s a tally of the books an editor at Del Rey rejected last year and why: Why I Say No
The Social Behavior Incentive – a good checklist for Social Design [ed note - this may be the only time I ever link to anything Robert Scobble has said]
Site Search Best Practices – Another good checklist. You know, someone should just make a book of checklists for interface designers. Like a final gut-check prior to handing something off.
old school cupcakes
This absolutely made my night. It’s near-perfect… sub Calibre 12 with Operation Ivy – boom. Done.
Read These Later – Week 28
Links to articles and posts that I’ve found interesting in the last week:
1. An Ethnographic Study of UX Professionals: ‘UX professionals are some of the most professionally unhappy folks I’ve ever encountered.”
2. 5 Myths That Can Kill A Startup: “Some companies have an unfortunate culture that mandates relentlessly hard work. When things get tough, people work harder. When things are good, people work harder still to try to keep the “good times rolling.” But this cycle of doom will ultimately fail as people burn out, get sick or simply quit.”
3. Confidence For Good: “People, both women and men, should be so fiercely passionate about good ideas that self-promotion is a natural extension. Otherwise, why is it worth doing in the first place? It’s when confidence and self-promotion are obfuscated from passion that the claims become flimsy and empty.”
4. Hi There: “Life is getting friendlier but less interesting. Blame technology, globalisation and feminism.”
5. Boarding Pass Fail: Redesigning the airline boarding pass.
6. Use Twitter in Your Next Presentation (ed. note: I was unlucky enough to witness a terrible presentation last week and walked away wishing the presenter had boiled down her points to 140 characters each – turns out there’s a strategy for that)
7. And finally… my bacon side project, House of Sticks, competed in a blind taste off against 8 other local and national brands last night. For a couple of guys with a hand-welded smoker in Oakland, we didn’t do that bad.
Week 28
Writing a weeknote on Sunday means you get to cheat a bit, see what everyone else has got going on. Reading through the posts, I found my self nodding in agreement, especially when I got to Ben Brown’s admiration for BERG, and his desire to get the internal processes of XOXCO worked up to a high gloss. I can certainly empathize; between client work, IxD ‘10 prep and Pumpkinhead, there’s sadly been little time to really define Second Verse. I’ll be needing to manufacture an opportunity to change that.
If Ben sorts out that cloning procedure, I’m next in line.
Thankfully, this past week offered the chance to work with Kristin Nienhuis – as talented and forthright a collaborator as I could ask for. She and I will be knocking out the KickLight work over the next few weeks, making certain that the best ideas make their way off of the whiteboard and into the product. Friday’s all day review with the KickLight team was illuminating – initial presentation of working artifacts is always nerve-wracking, but I find it provides the best possible gut check. If your concept deviates from your client’s intended direction, the opportunities to course-correct are fleeting. Sort it early, and check in often.
Production work for Pumpkinhead is increasingly gaining momentum. I take an enormous amount of pleasure in responding to Tony & Tim’s “wouldn’t it be awesome if” messages with realized sketches of their proposed functionality. We are unapologetically building for ourselves, putting pieces of the experience together in ways that keep us motivated to push everything further, faster.
Two weeks remaining before Savannah, and plenty to do before I leave.
Week 27
The second Friday morning of January, and Second Verse has officially entered its second calendar year. What a complete difference from a year ago. I find myself pausing to consider the delta between the then and now at regular intervals, and generally end up with a smile on my face.
The news is up on Crunchbase now, so I should probably mention that I’m involved with Tony Conrad’s latest startup. Yes, it’s called Pumpkinhead. No, that’s not the name of the product. Pumpkinhead evolved as a project code name early on; Tony had asked Jason Santa Maria and I to help flesh out an idea he had been discussing with Tim Young. Both Jason and I are fans of horror films – his taste is more refined, I like them dumb. REALLY dumb. “Leperchaun” franchise dumb. Given the time of year (and the fact that it stars Lance Henriksen), I thought “Pumpkinhead” would work just fine.
Then Tony named the company after the codename. Guy has a sense of humor, one of the many reasons I’d follow him into hell.
So, yes. Pumpkinhead. It’s evolved past the original concept into something refined… and wonderful. The further we get in building it out, the more excited I am to get it out in the world. It marries quite a few of the things I care about into a very straightforward package, and thanks to Jason, it’s starting to look pretty sweet.
There’s more going on. I’ve been balancing Pumpkinhead with running Second Verse; on most days, successfully. My business development efforts in early December worked out well, and I’ve contracted with some folks from SRI to work on a video product called KickLight. They’ve been successful in proving the value of what they’re building, and they’ve asked me to help them refine and build it out.
In my work with them this week, I’ve already wound up re-learning the truism that the more you try to simplify things, the more you risk eliminating or obfuscating what differentiates the product in the minds of your users. Looking forward to getting deeper, seeing how to evolve the experience.
Finally, as the organizer for IxD 10’s Local Design Challenge, I’m delighted to say that submissions should start coming in next week. The judging panel has been selected and briefed, and everything is coming together for the conference early next month. If you’re attending, please let me know in the comments.
Happy new year to you.
Week 23
With twenty days remaining in the year, there’s about six blank pages left in my current, much-abused Moleskin. With the amount of work that’s going on, I’m fairly certain I’ll be breaking in the next before New Year’s Eve.
Last week’s opportunities have sorted themselves out, and it’s clear what I’ll be working on in the weeks and months to come, though timing is still a little up in the air. End of the year is always like that. I’ve had meetings this week with both my accountant and tax planner, and we’re looking to close 2009 on some very positive notes.
Speaking of positive notes, the holiday season got off to a rousing start with some great parties from the folks at Social Cast, Kissmetrics, Mule Design and Kicker. It’s amazing that anyone get anything done with all the festivities, but everyone I’ve been speaking to says business is good, bordering on great. The economy may have done some damage to the availability of venture capital, but startups and the agencies who serve them seem to be pretty healthy.
Best non-party work event of the week was certainly the Quantified Self meetup at Wired on Monday night. Excellent presentations from the WakeMate guys, plus Dave deBronkart (aka ePatientDave), Esther Dyson, Ashley Tudor and Jen McCabe of Contagion Health. I’m most interested in learning more about actigraphy, especially with its potential for valuable insights when combined with historical infographics.
One more week of work before the holiday shut-down. I’m hoping the effort I’ve put in over the last two weeks helps Second Verse come out of the gates sprinting in January.
MySpace Post-Mortem in the Financial Times
This weekend’s must-read for me was Michael Garrahan’s “The Rise and Fall of MySpace” over at FT.com.
…by the beginning of 2008, things began to sour. Facebook, a rival social network that was simpler and easier to use, was gaining momentum and starting to grow more quickly than MySpace. Murdoch confidently told the world that MySpace would make $1bn in advertising revenues in 2008 – but the company missed its target. Users began to desert the site, which had become cluttered with unappealing ads for teeth straightening and weight-loss products. News Corp executives could hardly hide their displeasure, and in April this year, DeWolfe left, closely followed by most of his senior management team.
I went into the article with some trepidation; reports after-the-fact are always more about ass-covering and finger pointing than actually distilling some kind of objective truth. Having consulted directly with some of the people mentioned during a sensitive time in the company’s history, I’ve got my own perspective on the events described. More than anything, I was intrigued by the narrative the article weaves, and the import Garrahan places on Rupert Murdoch’s actions.
Overall, it’s a good article for those that are interested in the anatomy of disappointment. It is marred a bit by some howlingly bad technology writing (e.g. “MySpace was firmly at the forefront of Web 2.0″) but manages to transform blatant attempts at perception management by News Corp PR and anonymous former MySpace execs into a compelling read.
And Now I Am Yelling at My Machine
[Updated at 11:30 PST 12/07/09]: Mike from Mule Design weighs in, and I like his sentiment.
[Original post]: Today on Twitter I made a dumb little joke about Dean taking down Favrd. I think the point I was trying to make was that, hey, there’s plenty enough of that going on with Twitter, but thanks for trying to reduce it. I never signed up for Favrd, but I was flattered the two or three times one of my tweets got some notice from it. I didn’t give the sudden closing of shop much thought beyond that.
Then I made the mistake of reading the comments on this post from Zeldman. Everyone’s entitled to their opinions, but jesuchristo I can’t believe some of the stuff I’m hearing from people I respect. Go read it. Your outrage may vary. All I can say is that community-building is for people with strong stomachs – individuals can be great, but invested groups of users very quickly find ways to be massive pains in the ass towards people who are just trying to make them happy.
Reading all of this, I decided I wanted to make a public statement to anyone out there who might be trying to make something cool for me and my friends to use. I tried to tweet it, but I was 60 characters over, so here goes:
Here’s my promise to you: if you build something, get fed up with the community of self-important assholes that use it, and decide to take it down, I’ll never publicly excoriate you for doing so. Cool?
Rather than compare someone to “an angry Hebrew God,” I feel that a suddenly-bereft former user has the following options:
a) Join another service
b) Offer to host it themselves
c) Roll their own
… and that seems like plenty options enough, even if just to keep things civil. Besides, it’s tacky to hurl biblical invective at a guy who’s obviously taken enough shit already.
Week 22
I had been expecting December to be quiet from a business development perspective, and had front-loaded the workload for the quarter to compensate. I decamped for New Orleans in week 20 having successfully delivered on all of Second Verse’s outstanding obligations. While I was off eating more po’ boys than I really should have, Om Malik announced the work I did with his team on the redesign of the GigaOm Network blogs, and a variety of new opportunities have emerged.
The earliest part of this week was spent prepping for and conducting a one-day workshop with a new client; it looks likely to move forward, affording me a welcome opportunity to revisit the online video space. One of the projects that completed before the break may require some additional oversight, so a retainer relationship has been proposed. Finally, I’m getting a second bite at the apple with a project that would have me working with some of my favorite big-idea folks in a rather heady problem space. The majority of my time this week has been spent drafting and submitting proposals for all of this new work. I’m realizing that I was overly conservative in my estimation of demand, and will need to retool my Q1 projections.
There is one opportunity I won’t be able to pursue, despite it being right in my wheelhouse. I’ve been offering a bit of UX advice and direction to some friends working on a digital comics application, but they’re in need of a dedicated resource. Do you love comics, and solving hard UX problems? Leave a comment and I’ll connect you with them.
Meanwhile, there’s been some progress in making Second Verse more of a “real” company. I jumped at the opportunity to purchase the secondverse.com domain, and have redirected blog traffic away from the original dot WordPress address. The goal is to switch over to my own WP install and put up a marketing and communications site for SV, though right now I’d settle for having business cards. More on that soon. On the physical front, I’m extending my tenure within the Small Batch (Typekit) space through 2010. I’ve now got my office to myself (doubling my previous meatspace square footage!), and Bryan promises I’ll have a door at some point.
Real enough, for the time being.
