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.
http://4sq.com/7atY8w
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.
Moving on from photos to mobile wallets
During 2011, I was founder-in-residence of a photo startup called Gush. It was a great vision, and one I hope still happens (there are a few good contenders in the space). And the team was the best I ever had the honor of working with. But it’s time for me to move on.
2012 (and onwards) will be dedicated to a future of mobile wallets. The vision is, in short, that I can take my phone and leave my wallet at home. It’ll likely take us a few years.
DotCloud versus PHPFog
Spoiler: assuming you want to deploy some simple PHP apps, PHPFog looks better for PHP than DotCloud.
DotCloud and PHPFog are two “Heroku for X” cloud hosting providers.
Basically, they make it easier to run your code in the cloud than using your own Amazon Web Services account. Which isn’t too hard either, and there’s a free level, but it does involve some sysadmin-like tasks, and you have to get your head around all the Amazon settings etc. In other words, sysadmin stuff, which is exactly what you’re trying to avoid. DotCloud and PHPFog both promise to take care of those headaches for you, in return for a slightly higher price than AWS. PHPFog is (as the name suggests) focused on PHP. Dotcloud does a lot of languages, but supports PHP too. The whole idea is to make your life easier. Sounds like a deal!
Let’s compare them. Remembering that anything that gives me more sysadmin-like work is bad. I’m paying you to take that away.
The first problem with DotCloud is that they use Nginx, not Apache, and therefore you can’t use mod_rewrite. Not only is mod_rewrite superstandard, but now I also have to install Nginx locally. Nothing against Nginx (it’s awesome), but more work for me, not less. Not good.
Second, DotCloud doesn’t support Windows, officially. I develop on Windows. “Not supported” doesn’t make me feel good.
Next, PHPFog has a bunch of PHP-related niceties. They give you a PHPMyAdmin setup out of the box to manage your database. A bit 90s, but nice. They even give you the code to connect to your database right there. Nice. Making my life easier is good.
All in all, DotCloud seems the more “professional” outfit, they support a lot more languages etc. But PHPFog is focused on actual PHP developers, not treating PHP as an add-on, something to check off the list.
Now I haven’t actually used both extensively, so this is a fairly superficial comparison. Thoughts?
Will pepper spray also be classified as a vegetable?
Via Lou, related to pizza being classified as a vegetable (or not?):
Cute categories
Cute categories in Gmail and other Google products:
Fairly understandable. When used like this, I think cutesy category labels are fine. They give products character.
Smart defaults and useless options
Some options are just not worth having. Take this dialog from Google maps:
Who ever wants a long URL if they can use a short one?
Less clutter like this:
Don’t make me think!
The measuring mindset.
I’m working on Gush, a startup around photos.
One thing that I’m doing different this time, is that we measure *everything*. Literally everything. And I noticed that that creates a mindset.
Whenever I am working on a new feature now, I think, while sketching, how am I going to measure this. What is success going to look like in numbers?
And from seeing some numbers already, I also know that small decisions make big differences. If I am working on a feature and I know only 5% of users are ever going to use it, is it worth even working on? If I am putting a feature behind a click, and I know nobody will ever click it, is it even working on.
I don’t think the measuring mindset, by itself, leads to success. You risk optimizing into a local maximum. But it does lead to better product decisions.
Lean startups and UX
Giff Constable writes down almost exactly my own thoughts on the lean startup movement.
In particular, it’s almost funny how a lot of the research techniques are old hat to us in the UX world. On the other hand, UX has never been strong at doing the type of “but do they even want this?” type of early phase research lean is focusing on, and I think that, plus a strong theory around “everything is a hypothesis, and your product is there to test that” is what I think Ries & Co are adding. A great, great contribution for sure. Much better than what the UX folks with their “let’s do some ethnography early on” talk.
UX never figured out a great way to do early hypothesis testing. They didn’t create a language around it. Lean startups did.
I think the underlying reason for this, and for much of UX’s frustrations and limitations, is that the UX role in a company usually isn’t the decision making role. Whereas, by focusing on startups, lean startups speaks directly to the people making the final decisions. UX people have gotten them stuck in consulting roles. Too bad.
Enough unprocessed thoughts on this. More later.
The Ruby of legalese?
If contracts are code (they pretty much are), then someone should invent the Ruby/Scala (pick your readable language) of legalese. Have a programmer/language designer and a laywer pair up. Write a human readable, well-defined language for contracts, and open source it. You'd make millions.
Twitter buzzing about earthquake in NYC
We just had an earthquake on the eastcoast (NYC), literally a minute ago, and Twitter is buzzing. Twitter was the first place I checked, to make sure I wasn't just imagining things or having a particularly bad hangover.
Goes to show the power of Twitter and realtime. I wonder if they'll go down.
Google says (it didn't take them long either) it was in Virginia, 5.9.
Interesting navigation
Sometimes going really all in with your localspeak (or made-up category names) can work:
- Home
- Anyguey
- Barbara
- Reelteve
- Spicy or not
Hiring a team
I was reading about hiring and leading today, and two things stood out:
"The aim should be to have your followers surpass you eventually. A second class leader will try to prevent that, that's a lose-lose for everyone."
I always try to hire people who are better than me at what I'm hiring them for. It doesn't mean they have to be better than me at everything, but at what I'm hiring them for, yes. I do believe in "developing" people, ie. letting them grow, but it helps a lot if they're really good to start with.
The second part was: " a very liberal mindset that comes with a reluctance to tell other people what to do".
Now, I do agree that you have to learn how to tell people what to do, and there might be some reluctance there at first. But mostly, I think that it's better to tell people what you expect of them, what to aim for, and then let them figure out what they should be doing to get there. Teach them to yearn for the open sea, and all that.
But that requires hiring really smart people who are good at what they do to start with, of course.
I've never hired junior people and built them up. I guess that works well in a larger organization with fairly set ways of doing things, where you can just teach them. In smaller, startup-y places, I'd expect you want people who can make the right decisions without supervision.
Interesting though, this hiring/team-building stuff.
Upgrading
It's a pain, I want to get this blog going again (I'm SO tired of Twitter/Facebook/G+/...), but I have to upgrade the WP install first. Here goes.
Why you can’t find the Share button on Google+
Quite a few people have complained they can’t easily find the share button on Google+. Here’s the UI:
The problem is that the Share button is below that Friends button. Friends isn’t really a button, more like a tag, but it looks like a button, and that’s what matters. Your eye is in the textbox (you’re typing), and the friends/more people crap stops your eye from looking below that for a Share button.
Easy enough to fix though.
Make the Share button more prominent (visually) than the friends button. And move it to a central place right underneath the text box. Oh, and don’t grey it out.
Something like this:
Fixed!
More features != competitive advantage for a startup
I was surprised to see this slide in a presentation for a new startup idea.
(The startup idea is the column at the right, MusicWalla).
More features isn’t better. More features is unfocused. More features means you’ll do them worse. More features means you probably don’t have any differentiation. If you’re doing a startup, you should have less features than your competitors. If you have more features, you’re probably doing it wrong.
Person:alive, dead, undead or fictional?
Metadata is always fascinating, I wonder what they were thinking when adding undead?
View-all pattern spotting
I saw the view-all pattern used on the Wired site today. Particularly nice for articles, saves me from having to find the printable-version link.
The IA of Starbucks drinks
Wonderfully analyzed. IA becomes a language creates lock-in becomes an experience becomes a competitive advantage.
links for 2011-05-09
-
paula [at] paulachang [dot] com.
-
contact [at] leightaylor.co.uk
-
promising lisboa based designer
The definition of a kilo
It turns out that the official reference weights for the “kilo” have been changing weight. Nobody knows why. In a few years, there will be a number of meetings to figure out a new way to define a kilo.
Classification and standards are closely related, let’s see how this works out. Reminds me of how Pluto was re-classified as no longer being a planet, not too long ago.
iOS apps are different because of the payment, not the form factor
I realized something: iOS (iPhone, iPad) apps feel different than websites, not because of the form factor, but because of the fact that you can easily pay for them. Apple made micropayments possible for developers, and in turn, that made a new type of app, a new type of content possible, because developers are now being paid for it. Apps don’t depend on pageviews (to serve ads).
It’s the payments, not the form factor that made the explosion of apps possible.
LinkedIn Today’s layout is a terrible, content-less mess.
The idea is excellent, exactly what they should be doing, but the layout is terrible. They should have done a list. Instead, we get a mumble of half-words and empty images.
Examples?
Two meaningless images on the homepage. With almost meaningless text. What am I supposed to make of those cut-off titles? And those empty images?
And ok, whitespace fair enough, but what the hell is this?
Badly aligned. Meaningless whitespace. And again, meaningless images and text that’s cut off so short it’s also meaningless. All I can make out here is: something was posted on an official Google blog. Something. I guess I’ll have to click to find out what?
Another awesome usage of whitespace:
See those pixels? Between the top half and the bottom? That’s like what, 30, 40 px of meaninglessness? Worse, it makes it harder to connect the bottom feature with the top one (the bottom piece actually works as a kind of navigation to the top piece).
What’s wrong with just a list of news LinkedIn? Too boring?
Also: featuring yourself as the top news on your launchday isn’t cool.
The entire LinkedIn Today homepage is full of meaninglessness. There is almost NO content, what’s there could be fitted in a paragraph. Everything else is filler.
One more, for fun:
Who are those 6 people?
Conferences this year?
Check out Langyrd, social conference directory by Simon Willison & Co.