I'm a designer/engineer. I'm also a cofounder at Posterous.
Needless to say, design minimalism in action.
I would love to be a fly on the wall at Apple sometime. I'd love to hear what they *really* say behind closed doors. "OK guys, lets really get rid of all the ding dongs..."
Lala.com is a music sharing site that's been around for maybe a year or so. They've built some great traffic and have a product I use every day now. I first heard about it actually from Posterous users who kept asking for the ability to embed Lala.com in their blog posts. It's US-only for now (sorry, International friends) but at least now I don't have to pine away for a re-activation of my Spotify account. As a product, it's great. But there is always room for improvement. Here are a few basic design changes that I think could give a big ROI.
1) Incentivize long-lasting value by switching the Play and the Add to Queue button
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Building user experiences is just a repeating conversation you have with thousands of users every day. A faux pas here or there will not necessarily doom you, but it costs you some percentage of future customers in the end. For a service that hopes to be viral and organic, a few percentage points in conversion can result in significant deviations in outcome and success. A first impression is make or break, whether in person or on the web. Make yours count.
You should follow me on twitter here.
I hope this 7 inch tablet has something like a 500dpi display. If we learned anything from Tablet PC, it was that writing at 72 or 96dpi sucks.
I really liked the simple drag-to-right collaboration interface. There are some interesting ideas here. Too bad it's just a concept. The devil for these devices is in the execution details.
In 86 slides, Stephen Anderson explains why it's impossible to separate visual design from the core of the product. You can't just make it pretty later. Visual design has to be baked in from the beginning.
Visual design and understanding of gestalt give you the tools to realize your intentions. Interaction design is knowing what a user should be able to do on a given step. Visual design is making something that allows the user to do it, quickly, efficiently, easily, and all the while feeling good about themselves.
In consumer products, how the customer feels when using your software is make-or-break.
Striking example of a remarkable redesign for the most iconic brand in history. Get rid of the bubbles, the drop shadow, the embellishments. Unclutter. Simplify. Reduce.
Do less, be less, and end up with more.
Google’s dependence on hardware and carrier partners puts the final product out of their control — and into the control of companies whose histories have shown them to be incompetent at design and hostile to users.
Windows Mobile was a failed experiment in relying on hardware vendors, partners, and carriers to build a great consumer device. There were too many cooks in the kitchen. There were too many integration points.
Case in point: Bug fixes from the field. To get a device to market, there was the core device team, then a mobile operator/commercialization team, and finally the carrier's support / deployment team. There was no shared database of bugs. No shared responsibility. When schedules were stretched thin and the device was failing even simple tasks, it was too easy to point fingers. Oh, that's the carrier team's fault. That's the OS team's fault. That's the commercialization team's fault. Hardware's fault. Nobody took the reins to ensure a quality product was being created.
The Palm Pre team is doing it right. Google would do well to take note here. Building cool techie platform toys that let you create nifty Powerpoint decks is all well and good. But it's all a huge waste until there's a satisfied user using your awesome phone that works great.
It comes down to responsibility. Someone has to be responsible. If you're creating a device, and you want it to succeed, it better be you and your team.
On my first day of work at Microsoft as a PM six years ago, I sat down with my first manager for our first one-on-one and at the end she asked, Are there any questions? I said yes -- one last one: "When do we decide to remove features?"
She was flustered. It was not a question she or probably any PMs were used to answering. I clarified: "Well, features aren't always right. Sometimes they're done wrong, or they don't really fit what the user really wants. Do we ever remove features?" She remained dumbfounded at the question, and feeling like a n00b, I decided not to press further. In time, I realized why she was flustered. As a program manager, you spent so much time trying to get features in that it seems nuts to want to remove them. We made huge spreadsheets of feature lists, prioritized by P1, P2, P0 and sometimes P-1. Yes, negative 1. Because it gets sorted higher, right? Features got removed in other ways though. If nobody really used them, they were obviously chopped out and memorialized as a bullet point in the release notes. But that wasn't really my question. Those are the easy ones to chop. A product gets bloated not because the obviously bad features stick around. They're bloated because there are features that are barely OK in there. They're not complete. They aren't done correctly. Maybe the UI is wrong, or the internal states aren't thought out well enough, or don't match what the user expects. And there are egos attached, too. A poor PM's ego, at the least,and maybe a dev and a tester's self worth too. An entire feature team might have emotional stakes in that feature.So you can't chop it. And you don't have time to fix it, so it festers. You can never remove features. You have to fix them, painfully, over time.
This can be avoided. Go deep on the things that matter. Do less with less. Be minimal in scope and maximal in completeness. If you're a startup, don't hire. Make it happen with who you've got. Don't get a PM to sit in meetings or create meetings. Only hire do-ers / creators. Do more yourself. If you're a big company, give a skunk-works-sized team a whole shit-ton of power (and really mean it).
Be less. Do less. And you'll somehow end up with more.You should follow me on twitter here.
I love these kinds of questions posed towards filmmakers and media creators of all kinds. Like Ira Glass on creativity.
Great auteurs answer these questions about specific industries but they're broadly applicable to everything, including my favorite topic, creating Internet startups.
There's a certain auteur aspect to it that translates precisely. It's a business, no doubt about it. But you have to appeal to people, even change people's lives -- the way they think and act. You have to understand and communicate visually, spatially and emotionally with your audience.
There's a technical element, substitute filmmaking and editing and cinematography for software engineering, scaling, and tech architecture / ops.
How you start is the same. You create. You create until your fingers bleed, and then you create some more. Iterate and don't worry about creating crap, because at the end of it, you'll have made a movie. Or a site. Or a story. Whatever it is.
The final part spoke to me the most. Yes, it's harder than ever to become a filmmaker or an Internet entrepreneur, or an author-- a creator of any kind. There is so much competition. But that competition sucks so fucking bad, that it will be plain as day when you've created something good.
It can be done. Today. Now. Go.
Electricity greatly improved our quality of life. But I'm not going to get excited about buying a basket of utility companies. Same for the Internet. Can't live without it, but can't live with it (in my portfolio).
James Altucher will eat his words. To count tech out at a local minima is absolutely absurd. Fred Wilson is right: Tech is alive and well. But there are deeper reasons than what Fred Wilson mentions.
Other than computing technology, what field can boast exponential gains? Green tech is much talked about of late, but what are the rates of improvement for battery power, photovoltaics, and clean energy? Miniscule, in the single digit percentages. We can only wish for exponential advancement in almost all fields of technology. It's just not a reality.
With computers, we are blessed by the exponential curve of Moore's Law. Ray Kurzweil plots this exponential curve:
Just look at the innovation that has happened in 40 years. Bill Gates is famed to have said in 1998: "If General Motors had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty five dollar cars that got 1000 miles/gallon."
Instead, GM has gone bankrupt, and now we have one-inch-thick netbooks that we can buy for less than $300 that provide 300,000x the computing power of the ENIAC, which cost $500,000 and filled a very large room in 1946!
The exponential march of software begets the exponential march of software capability. Software has gone more and more high level. Instead of slinging machine-readable bits, we started writing assembly. Then C/C++. Then Java and Perl. Now, Ruby and Python -- each step is less efficient for the computer but more efficient for the human. In 1946 you needed a PhD to even get near a computer, and only now are we seeing the rise of the truly interconnected, paperback computer that costs next to nothing but is indispensible for everyday life -- not just for an educated elite but for every person on the planet.
The advent of the Gutenberg printing press and modern mass-produced book changed society at its core -- at its basic fabric, humanity as a whole became more educated, more equal, more enlightened, and far more human, rising out of the depths of ignorance. The rise of cheap, ubiquitous books formed the modern world. But now we have a book that is infinite in length and unbounded in capability to teach, share, educate, and think.
So we've got an exponential engine of innovation, and it is transforming society before our eyes. And we're at a such a local minima where the WSJ is calling the whole engine dead.
We're still only beginning this mad experiment of infinite and ubiquitous computing. The greatest, most earth shattering software has yet to be created. On the upslope of an exponential, you'd be insane not to go long.
