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
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paula [at] paulachang [dot] com.
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contact [at] leightaylor.co.uk
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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.
Customer service as 20% time
At Performables: “We’ve got a rotation system now where everyone handles customer service requests for a full day….that’s all they do that day.”
Sounds like a good idea. Do customer service for your 20% time.
Design for mobile first
More and more, I’m designing for mobile first these days. It’s a big change in design habits, but it helps. First because mobile is where the growth and opportunity is, but second, as Bret Taylor says: “people design better with constraints”.
True, true.
Which is also why I think that HTML5 will get there. (The other reason is that the big companies (Google, Facebook, Apple) are all pushing it in unison).
Lessons at Netflix: feature idea = hypothesis
Netflix treats each new feature as an hypothesis, that is then tested.
“There is a big lesson we’ve learned here, which is that the ideal execution of an idea can be twice as effective as a prototype, or maybe even more. But the ideal implementation is never ten times better than an artful prototype. Polish won’t turn a negative signal into a positive one.”
I need to practice my writing.
Well written: “Its general ethos that I need to get over the concept of privacy makes me want to shove a camera lens up Zuckerberg’s left nostril 24 hours a day and ask him if he’d like for his company to rethink that position.”
Related: I wish I had some better blogging tools these days, integrated with Chrome. It seems most dev efforts are going into integrating with FB and Co, which is a shame. The pendulum will swing back soon, I sense/hope. Back to the open web.
My tech predictions for 2011
- First murmurs of Facebook’s eventual decline. I think Facebook’s role as the identity system of the internet has been brilliantly executed, but they too are prone to the walled-garden syndrome of wanting to keep users in to increase revenue. It will continue to grow, but the first murmurs of its eventual decline will start next year. It’s decline will likely happen when (not if) it’s role as a proprietary identity system and social graph is slowly replaced by more open alternatives. Innovation always goes from closed to open.
- Mobile will continue to explode. I was slow on understanding the importance of mobile, but a computer in your pocket is really the future. One of the victims of mobile in 2011 will be camera manufacturers. There’s really less and less reason to buy an actual camera, when you can buy a mobile phone for the same price.
Only two predictions, one of which everyone agrees with, so there goes, not particularly inspired today 
Blogs good, Facebook bad
Blogs where great for Google, creating a valuable link graph that they could mine. Facebook is bad for them, creating a valuable social graph that Google can’t (easily) mine. Blogs where also good for the internet, and Facebook’s role, I’m not sure about it. Aligning itself with what is good for the internet seems to have been Google’s smartest move so far.
Pukka Belgians wage war on the Dutch
OK. So the Pukka episode where the Belgians (dressed as ninjas) attack the Dutch (dressed as hippies) with waffles and fries, and are finally conquered by hippie music and lurve, dubbed in Spanish, is pretty trippy. Who invents this stuff?
Search feedback form
Interesting pattern at Ikea: a search feedback form at the bottom of a results list.
Google easter egg: the answer to life, the universe and everything
Oh Google calculator, you make my day.
Also try this search.
“Wing it” vs. “Guide me”
Even though it’s not exactly Standard English, I like the wording here: “Wing it” versus “Guide me”:
From Blurb’s Booksmart program.
“to navigate this site”
An easy usability problem to solve, instead addressed with a really oldskool “to navigate this site” note. Funny. (The book is highly recommended though.)
Why gender is a text field: more on ambiguity
This post explains why they left gender open as a text field. See also my recent post about ambiguity. This is gonna be a theme if I ever write about classification again.
Another good post about gender and dropdowns.
Another awesome support direct phone number
I think this is becoming a trend. Give high-paying customers the CEO’s phone number 
(from Ginzametrics).
Data cleanup, and allowing for ambiguity.
In my recent talk about IA, I also mentioned the cost of data entry, and the advantages of keeping it simple for users (or I may have skipped that slide).
“The secret ingredient that most surprised me about their pipeline was Peter's use of Mechanical Turk. A lot of their headaches come from the fact that users are allowed to enter free-form text into all the fields, so figuring out that strings like "I.B.M.", "IBM" and "IBM UK" are all the same company can be a real challenge. You can get a long way with clever algorithms, but Peter told me what when these sort of recognition problems get too hairy, he reaches for his 'algorithmic Swiss Army knife': the human brain-power of thousands of Turks.”
Nice example.
Related to the ease of data entry, by the way, is the fact that open text fields allow for ambiguity, a point I also tried to make in my talk.
When you ask users to classify themselves, it’s good to allow for ambiguity, because you’ll never come up with categories that everyone feels comfortable with. (Even with binary things like man/woman it’s good to leave some ambiguity, like “Other”, or “Would rather not share”.) Another good example of allowing for ambiguity from Google Health:
Tab stacking
Opera is attacking the old “too many tabs” problem with tab stacking. The UI looks like this:
Browsers aren’t the first to encounter the problem of too many tabs.
Amazon was a famous example, it went from something like this:
To this:
Which gave way to parodies like this one:
The problem, of course, is providing access to lots of categories. In the end, they’ve moved to a different paradigm and are back to the classic left-hand navigation:
I wonder if browsers will follow a similar evolution? Perhaps not, the problem space is a little different: they don’t have to provide you access to everything in their catalogue, just to what you’ve opened. It’s more like the icons in your Windows taskbar, which have a similar problem. They solve it by letting you group items of the same type:
Interesting to see where this ends up.
Search by Shoe Shape
The new Shape facets of Amazon are pretty awesome. Searching by overall shape/type makes a lot of sense.
Sort by Agony or Sort by Magic
This Sort By Agony filter from Hipmunk is even better than Google Reader’s Sort By Magic 
What does the X do?
This is pretty confusing, slapping on the irrelevant icons. What does the X do exactly?
Usability day in Bogota
I gave a talk in Bogota last Friday on the world usability day, organized by Natalia Vivas (information architect at Zemoga) and Co. It was great, lots of people, lots of interest, and the talk went well even though quite a few people had to listen to it through simultaneous translation (with my thanks to the translator, a talk on categorization is not easy to translate).
Bogota is a great city, love it, there’s heaps of interesting stuff going on.
Thomas Floracks (who is doing a startup-like project at http://www.vivareal.com/) pointed me to hubhog, a coworking space for tech startups and such in Bogota, worth checking out.
Julián Amaya showed me Bogota and is doing great software development at Monoku.com.
I uploaded my slides and notes to the always excellent Slideshare.
