Design and engineering
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgtpyRSuaak Seriously good talk. Very powerful:- The elegance of simplicity.
- The power of experience. (What's a great experience?)
- The magic of stories. Technology + Art = Magic.
- At Pixar, creatives and techs get paid the same.
- It's really hard to get the tech people to respect the creative people and vice versa.
- Peer culture: everyone shows everyone else their work and get lot of feedback.
- Learning environment. Empowered people. Great at tech & creativity - work hand in hand together. Same team. Giving feedback.
- Product design + Engineering + Understand Consumer problem.
- Team of DIFFERENT thinking people. Not just engineers. Different. Respect each other. Bounce ideas of each other.
- Examine and understand a problem.
- Iterate to a solution.
- NEED A TEAM! Not one person, one designer, one product leader.
Medellin
Great photos of Medellin http://www.behance.net/gallery/Las-Golondrinas-Comuna-8-Medellin/5910203
Marketplace
Escrow and payment provider for marketplaces - https://www.balancedpayments.com/ looks good.
Developing the ability to get stuff done is crucial. Some quick thoughts:
- Technical skills.
- Maker's schedule. (so you get stuff done in a day)
- Process. (OKRs) (so you get stuff done in a week)
A startup accelerator for the world’s poorest
https://medium.com/on-startups/ca9a1a6c9da0 See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6380008
Tech is what makes a city great
http://pandodaily.com/2013/09/10/tech-makes-a-city-great-the-mckinsey-report/
National Geographic Photographer Meets Deadly Leopard Seal - Then This Happens.
Just watch the video, yey seal (and that it sucks to be a penguin).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v-o-LGns_uY
Like for blogging?
Thinking: is the Like for blogging related to the Linkroll (since a link is like a Like)? I should get an email or notification when someone Likes my post. That's the feedback loop I'm talking about. And Liking should be 1-click. So is adding to the linkroll 1-click?
It is conceivable that there is simply no distributed solution that can compete in user experience with a closed solution like FB and such. But that doesn't sound like it would be true.
The new blogging, again
I'm oldschool but I like blue and white. New look today.
Now, the new blogging. Can we reproduce the LIKE in the world of blogging? The feeling of immediate feedback? The one-click micro-payment that has no limits.
Here's a related thought: why do people think stuff on blogs is more private than stuff on Facebook? (Technically it's not.) Because more people see it on Facebook. And you get feedback.
Blogs need more feedback. Commenting is too much work. Where's the LIKE button for blogging? (And I don't mean the Wordpress Like button, that just feel like micropayments to Matt.)
Mmm...
Classification conundrum: non-human persons
In which India declares dolphins "non-human persons". Cool. Only one but: humans can be performers. So why not dolphins? Still pretty cool, kinda sci-fi.
Definitions unclear -> go to jail
The dictatorship of data
How data was misused in the Vietnam war.In 1977, two years after the last helicopter lifted off the rooftop of the U.S. embassy in Saigon, a retired Army general, Douglas Kinnard, published a landmark survey called The War Managers that revealed the quagmire of quantification. A mere 2 percent of America’s generals considered the body count a valid way to measure progress. “A fake—totally worthless,” wrote one general in his comments. “Often blatant lies,” wrote another. “They were grossly exaggerated by many units primarily because of the incredible interest shown by people like McNamara,” said a third.
Census categories: What happens when you let everyone self-identify?
I've blogged about this before, the US census is an ongoing and fascinating categorization case study.
From the article: "By 1970 the government was collecting census data by mail-in survey. The shift to a survey had dramatic effects on at least one census category: race."
- First, it resulted in a dramatic increase in the Native American population. Between 1980 and 2000, the U.S. Native American population magically grew 110 percent. People who had identified as American Indian had apparently been somewhat invisible to the government.
- Second, to the chagrin of the Census Bureau, 80 percent of Puerto Ricans choose white (only 40 percent of them had been identified as white in the previous census). The government wanted to categorize Puerto Ricans as predominantly black, but the Puerto Rican population saw things differently.
Categories and the world: categorization of abuse and dependence
New and improved categorization of abuse and dependence just joins them, with this amazing quote in the article, where two students were trying to figure out the difference between abuse and dependence.
“Isn’t ‘abuse’ like when you get a DUI?” said the medical student.
“Yeah,” said the psychiatry resident, “and ‘dependence’ is when you get withdrawal, right?”
“I think ‘abuse’ leads to ‘dependence,’” said the neurology resident.
“Or maybe ‘abuse’ is not as bad as ‘dependence’?”
“So what about our patient? He’s pretty hard-core.”
“I see him all the time in the emergency room. Totally intoxicated.”
“I’ve seen him drunk on the train.”
That sealed the deal.
“Dependence it is!” they all agreed.
zipcar localization: british english, canadian english
Zipcar is the first site I have ever seen options for the type of English: American, British, Canadian.
Social design talk notes
Never too old to learn.- I believe in fundamentals.
- Adaptation, evolution. Design = solve the problem. (So changeable design > unchangeable design.)
- Community = group that works together.
- Group -> social -> trust.
- Trust each other to get things done.
- Our environment is everyone else.
- You want to be unique but also fit in. You feel lonely.
- So you form an "identity", so you can fit in but be apart. A representation of yourself.
- Create an outside world we can control. Collect. Music. Home. Friends we trust. World is not so scary then.
- Can also create inside world we control: yoga, music, meditation, learning, ...
- EVERYONE is doing this.
- People just need to talk.
- Need identity, trust.
- People need connection.
- If you write it out, forms a narrative. Story.
- Narrative leads to identity: this is me. This is what I did.
- The connections give things life.
- Graph is very valuable information.
- Don't hide info, show it all in feed.
- Keeps going, like life.
- Pile of things that I like.
- When something happens, send feedback (like, pin, repin, tag, ...).
Old faceted tags screenshot
Saved via here (via a trippy duckduckgo search), I found this screenshot of a semantic tagging system that I built and then gave a talk about around 2005/6 or so. The idea was that tags were organized in facets, which gave them some level of meaning (ie. "sanfran" is a place), and from that meaning and from tags that were used together, you could infer more meaning (ie. "peter has been to sanfran").
Wow this is exceedingly cool
But what is not so cool is that WP doesn't seem to let you post animated GIFs? Come on guys!
Click the image to see the animation.
Where the illustrators hang out
Salon.io is pretty interesting. Posting this here to not loose the link (which is also interesting). What an INTERESTING post!
2013 social media cleanup
Let's see:
- New blog at http://blog.petervandijck.com (and Wordpress.com's image import is just magical btw). This was the biggest deal.
- ITTT for cross-posting to Twitter from blog. This is meant to encourage me to blog as opposed to posting on Twitter.
- Turned off bunch of apps on Facebook. No more cross-posting from Twitter to Facebook. Twitter is work-world, Facebook is friends/family who don't care about my geeky rants.
- Still using Path as my private little Facebook for a few select people.
- Next: set up phone apps for everything.
New blog posts will go straight to Twitter
Perhaps this will inspire me to blog? The problem I'm trying to solve is that of audience.
My first blog post ever. Still pretty good :)
New feed
I moved my blog to http://blog.petervandijck.com. I expect this to be a long-lived URL, wouldn't be surprised if it lasts 30 years. Which means my feed has also changed, those of you who still use Google Reader or something similar, subscribe to http://blog.petervandijck.com/feed/
I moved my blog
To a new domain (with redirects), blog.petervandijck.com. I put it on Wordpress.com. And may I just say: the moving and importing of content was ridiculously easy. Wordpress even copies images from your old site into your new site. Automatically - nothing you have to do. That's impressive.
Feature debt and the art of taking things out
There is 1 feature in your current product that you could take out today, without any negative consequence at all.
Taking it out will make maintenance and software evolution, technical debt, support, and probably even the user experience better. It will make your codebase more maintainable. It will make everyone happier. You added that feature because you thought it would make a difference, but it doesn’t.
In evolutionary terms, taking this feature out will increase fitness (or keep it fixed) while decreasing complexity.
That’s feature debt.
No product is so perfect, so optimized that all of its features are in perfect balance, all necessary, all required.
No digital product anyway. Here’s one that’s pretty close. But note:
- It’s very simple.
- It’s been optimized for centuries.
So let’s assume that there is 1 feature in your product that you could take out, with positive effects. Once we agree on that, it’s quite likely that there are more than 1 features that you could and should take out. There are features you should not take out, too. The more complex the product, the more features you should take out. Facebook surely has dozens of features that they could take out today, and the net effect would be positive. Google probably has hundreds. Windows has thousands.
There’s not a lot written about the art of taking things out once they’re launched. Taking things out during the “design process”, sure, but not after it’s launched.
Apple is famous for removing features from live products. They’re also famous for launching products with very few features, but that’s for a different post.
There are 2 kinds of features that you can take out: features that nobody uses, and features that some people like but that aren’t helping *you*.
Features that nobody uses are easy to take out. The hard part is to define “nobody”. Early on (first year or two), I like to go with 10% of my active users. If not even 10% of my active users are using this feature, we should probably kill it. You could do 20%.
It’s easy to know when nobody uses your feature. Track it. Once you use metrics to inform (not drive) your product decisions like this, you’ll never go back. But that’s another post as well.
Features that a significant amount of your users actually use and like are harder to take out. But if they’re not helping *you*, perhaps you should. These are often features that are attracting the wrong kinds of users, or encouraging the wrong kind of activity, or perhaps they just don’t fit with the direction you want to take the product in.
If you’ve never considered taking features out of a live product, try it. It engenders a whole different mindset. You’ll start asking, before even developing a feature: do we really need this? It will make you want to measure things. It will make you think more deeply about your product. It will be good for your team. That’s probably a rule for a good product team: takes features out of live products.
Notes:
- The debt metaphor comes from WardCunningham
- See also: You Aren’t Gonna Need It
- Decreasing complexity is good, because it speeds you up.
- Andrew Chen calls it product design debt.
- Architects call design debt “work that remains unfinished after a deadline”, which isn’t exactly the same concept.
The new blogging.
I suddenly understood: the new blogging is BETTER than the old blogging.
Twitter, Facebook etc., that’s for links and quickies. Blogging is for deep thinking, well written essays etc. (And for news blogs etc.) That’s what I enjoy reading, and I think that’s what I’ll try to be blogging then.
Firing up LiveWriter!
Bird categorization by the cat in the hat
What makes a bird a bird? All birds have feathers, and that is that. (video)
Pinned-tab startups
One way of thinking about consumer startups (Twitter, FB, Google, …) is that you want to create a product that people use all the time. Daily. If you’re not using it daily, you can easily forget about a site, and then it’s an uphill battle to get real engagement and user growth.
So I think of this as my pinned-tab startups. The tabs in Chrome that I have pinned. Right now, of the newer startups, Yammer and the brand new engagio are in there.
My pinned tabs look something like this right now:
I wonder if there’s a way to find out with javascript if your page was pinned?
Many UI standards, one app? Local UI conventions be damned?
We had it so easy on the web. You make your app once, and it ran everywhere. Sure, we had to contend with some nasty browser wars, but we learned how to work around those, and it all worked out in the end.
Now we’re back in trouble.
Developing for mobile means developing for iOS and Android, at least. Not only are they different OS’s (analogous to different browsers), but worse, they have different UI standards and expectations by their users.
So you can’t just create 1 UI for your app anymore, in an ideal world, you create mutliple UI’s.
Except, I am not convinced it works that way. I haven’t seen apps that successfully create many different experiences, each tailored to a different OS and set of UI expectations. The WinPho Twitter app, for example, kind of follows WinPho conventions, but it seems cobbled together and lacking, compared to their iOS app. It’s the same with most apps.
On the other side, the more successful apps seem to be creating 1 experience and porting it to multiple platforms, local UI expectations be damned. (Facebook, Path, etc. have essentially the same app, with very small concessions to local UI conventions, on different platforms).
It’s a conundrum. I’m not sure what the answer will turn out to be. Will we make different UI’s for different OS’s? Will some kind of “generic”, cross-OS UI conventions evolve (despite the OS owner’s best efforts to avoid this)? That’s where my money is right now, but I could change my mind tomorrow. Or perhaps we’ll all end up in HTML5 app land (although that is starting to seem unlikely; if it was going to happen, wouldn’t it have happened already by now?)
Thoughts?
I'm at YMCA Sports Complex at Park Slope Armory.
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What (some of) the industry is thinking for 2012
GigaOm has a good series of quotable thoughts by some industry leaders.
- “Somebody has to step in front of the open source parade any really lead it”
- “What Steve Jobs understood was that he was more like Calvin Klein than he was like Andy Bechtolsheim.”
- “I’m chairman, not CEO, which is sort of like being a grandfather instead of a father, which is way better in dirty-diaper mode.”
- “I stepped down from Sun eight years ago because my boys were 2, 4, 6 and 8 years old, and I wanted to be with them. Now, they’re 10, 12, 14 and 16. Wayne Gretzky’s kids never really got to see him play hockey. My boys are getting to see me do what I do.”
Matt Mullenweg: (wordpress)
- “I worry about the independent web. - I hope this is the most closed it will ever be in my lifetime.” –> Amen to this, by the way.
- “There are 20,000 or 30,000 people that make their living from WordPress.”
- “I think we’re going to enter a golden age of design, just by virtue of thousands and thousands of founders and designers asking themselves, “What would Steve do?””
Philip Rosendale: (secondlife)
- “Mostly, of course, you want to make money. But try to make money in a way that is epic and awesome.”
- “Investors ask, “Who’s the customer, and what existing market are you servicing?” We said, “We don’t know, and there isn’t one.””
- “The LCD industry is in meltdown. The losses are huge and have been for the last five years or so.”
- “For the tier one companies, it’s not about the hardware anymore. It’s about hardware, software, content. And content suppliers are king right now. - They all make the same products and compete on price.”
- “One challenge for next year is whether the industry, our customers, find an interesting tablet that isn’t just like the iPad but cheaper. Certainly Amazon is making a go of it.”
Padmasree Warrior: (cisco)
- “I truly believe that leadership is something that you have to be involved with in terms of the details as well as the strategy.”
Dennis Crowley: (foursquare)
- “We have a lot of ex-Googlers here and we’ve taken a lot of the Google culture that we really like and applied it to Foursquare. For example, people do weekly snippets and we have a pretty strong review process and pretty strong interview process.”
- “People know us for check-ins but with the data, we want to push people more toward the recommendation engine and the way to do that is make that prominent and a big part of the app.”
- “We’re at 15 million users now and the next stop is 20, 25, 50 million users.”
Caterina Fake: (flickr, hunch)
- “We are sensitive to certain stimuli, so that when we were Neanderthals dragging our knuckles on the ground we’d say, “Ooh! A berry!” and pluck it. That feeling is reproduced in our brains with Twitter, Facebook updates, and especially games.”
- “my goal is to sleep later”
Dave Morin: (Path)
- “2012 will truly be the year of mobile Internet.”
- “Find the users who see your vision and talk to them. Find out why they love the product and what they’re trying to do with it. Often, they’re trying to do something that you haven’t designed it for. You need to unlock that potential.”
Elon Musk: (paypal)
- “The way I see it is that all transportation will go electric except for rockets, ironically.”
Hyperlocal international
Interesting article on Uber (taxis) about scaling hyperlocal internationally. Scaling businesses internationally through global cities is a strategy of the future. Over 50% of the world population lives in cities, and that just keeps climbing. Cities are now larger markets than many (most?) countries.
Speed as a competitive advantage, and set-based design for startups
I’ve watched this video again and again over the years.
It takes about execution, and speed as a competitive advantage. Some ideas in there are not yet widely accepted, even in lean startups or agile programming. I need to learn more about these Poppendiecks.
“Optimizing a part of a system will always, over time,
sub-optimize the overall system.”
Set based design.
Says: don’t just do 1 thing, do a set of thing. Toyota, in 15 months from concept to a live car, develops a whole set of engines for the first 4 months. 10 active engines under development! In detail!
Tell me if I’m wrong, but NOBODY in the startup world does anything like this. Makes you think.
From their site:
Waste is anything that does not add customer value.
The three biggest wastes in software development are:
Building the Wrong Thing
"There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." –Peter DruckerFailure to Learn
Many of our policies – for example: governance by variance from plan, frequent handovers, and separating decision-making from work – interfere with the learning that is the essence of development.Thrashing
Practices that interfere with the smooth flow of value –task switching, long lists of requests, big piles of partly done work – deliver half the value for twice the effort.
I don’t know. This is good stuff.
As usual, the insights are simple but deep. I’m specifically thinking about how to use set based design in a startup.
It’s funny, btw, that you get speed by delaying decisions. By making less decisions, not more.
I'm at The New Victory Theater.
http://4sq.com/7Ic5bO
I'm at Café Grumpy.
http://4sq.com/oHoxY
More blogging
One of my 2012 (my god!) plans: more blogging. Longer form blogging too. I’m still thinking about how to tie this in with tweets, check-ins, and such. But my blog should be the center of my online life, that I’ve always felt/known.
I'm at Markt.
http://4sq.com/IOnxQ
I'm at Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
http://4sq.com/29M4aF
PHPFog vs. PagodaBox
For PHP hosting, PagodaBox seems to have nailed the sweetspot better than PHPFog. I’m using them and so far so good. These services are more expensive than simple shared hosting or AWS, but worth it in ease of use.