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.
I keep getting this “give us your gmail password” spam
Does anyone actually fall for this?
Why would you ever borrow money from family for a business?
“Every entrepreneur at one time or another has probably sat around the dinning room table presenting his or her brilliant business concept to an uncle, college buddy or colleague hoping to fineness a check for $10,000.”
Really? That’s weird, I can’t imagine I would ever do that.
Close this annoying snot-yellow banner forever?
Too self-depreciating, or just very funny?
Testing crossposting
To Twitter and FB. I am not a twitter/fb kind of person (maybe I'm not social enough?), so I prefer posting on my blog.
Let's see how this goes.
“All departments”
I really like the “all departments” pattern as used on Ikea (and other sites). They don’t have space to show you all their categories at the top, so they make them available behind a quick dropdown.
Bururu Barara
We ended up in the rather fabulous salsa bar the Bururu Barara in Medellin (el centro) the other day.
“Best guess is fine”
Interesting pattern: asking users for information but reassuring them that it doesn’t have to be perfect:
(From Google Health)
Another scary Chrome warning against google.com
What’s up with these warnings against google.com in Chrome? (Here’s another one.)
I mean, look at it. That’s not looking friendly. And that’s in Chrome.
Plus I have no idea what it means.
Good “come back” email
Get-points-to-log-in-today is a pretty good mechanism to get users to interact more. I got this email from OMGpop today. Not bad.
Time for a new type of feed-people reader?
Just a quick thought: now that Bloglines is closing, and Google Reader is the winner in the RSS reader market, perhaps it’s a good time to create a new type of reader, perhaps focused on people (and faces). With a UI in between FB/Twitter and Bloglines/Google Reader. Something like this?
Groupon’s unsubscribe page: Punish Derrick
When you unsubscribe from Groupon’s daily emails, you get this result page. It’s pretty funny.
“Free plan available”
At Cloudant, another button with extra info:
I like this one better though.
“Yes, there’s a free version”
At OpenDNS, nice button:
It was the first thing I read on that page, and it immediately answered my question.
iPad user interface observations for babies and toddlers
Having observed our 2/3-year old taking over the iPad as her computer, I’m becoming interested in UI for kids and toddlers. LukeW has some good points in this blogpost, but apart from that a quick search didn’t bring up much iPad specific UI thoughts for kids (except for this other one here).
One thing I noticed is that Amelia tends to tap things very fast, sometimes too fast for the tap to register. She also quickly learnt (from watching me) to swipe the unlock thing when starting. She likes simple games, animals making sounds, eating the apple, … She also likes watching pictures and videos of herself, and she can very quickly navigate to the photo app to a specific photo or video. She can also easily navigate the main app "homescreen”, swiping left and right to find apps.
Would love to hear more thoughts on babies/toddlers using iPads.
Google Chrome warns me that Google.com is unsafe?
Strange, Chrome’s protection mechanism seems a little trigger-happy?
1 2 3–the “Show all” pattern
I love the “Show all” filter in Ikea’s search results. Instead of having to page through results, it shows you all results on one page. Scrolling is faster than clicking through multiple pages.
I figure this works as long as the complete list fits on a page (and pages can be longer than generally assumed), which is what Ikea does: when there are more results, the “Show all” button isn’t shown:
Perfect implementation.
Kindle software - are you kidding?
Here’s a screenshot of some kindle software:
Reminds me of something. Oh I know! The Commodore 64!
Just keep it a reader, dudes!
More original sketches
After the sketches of Pacman and Twitter, also found this great blogpost, with more original sketches:
Flickr Places:
A lot more in that post.
Original sketches of Pacman
(via) After the original sketches from Twitter, the original sketches from Pacman :)
Are you keeping your sketches?
The fight for an open web in social and mobile
Facebook is great and all, but fuck it, it's a walled garden. Twitter too, mostly. The fight for an open social web is on, with a combination of geeky protocols like OExchange for sharing urls, ActivityStreams for sharing activity streams (it's an extension on Atom), OAuth and OpenID, microformats and many more. The infrastructure is being built and adopted by smart people in large companies (Google, ...). It's time for some awesome user experiences to be built on top of that. The current user experience of these open formats is still slightly dodgy compared to the closed alternatives, but they're getting there. The same fight is being fought on mobile, with Android versus iPhone, although that's somewhat of a mis-characterization since the iPhone has awesome html5 support and has pushed it hard.
Exciting times.
Sorting lists at scale
At (Twitter) scale, it becomes hard to generate unique ID's and sort with them, so they use something called k-sorts that aims at sorting things roughly, within a second of the time they were posted. Scale is weird, it's like inverted quantum mechanics. You always seem to have to loosen things up a little to scale up. Even laws of nature seem to loosen up once you get away from our scale.
Original drawings of Twitter
The original drawings of Twitter: (see also original sketches of pacman)
(my.stat.us!)
and the original drawings of Square:
From this video here.
Can someone make a Gmail attachment browser?
Something like this. Doesn’t need to be complicated at first.
Geeky music font design notes, via Simon.
jPlayer (for music) looks pretty good. jQuery, HTML5 support, Flash in case browser doesn't support it. (via Lucas)
The Onion: "Upwards of 66% of our server time is spent on serving 404s from spiders crawling invalid urls and from urls that exist out in the wild from 6-10 years ago." That's pretty crazy.
Pretty cool stuff: dataset cleaning up in gridworks.
Just write in HTML
Mark Pilgrim just writes in HTML now: "I self-published "Dive Into Python" in HTML, PDF, Word, and plain text. For years, there they sat, a list of downloads in different formats. Then I looked at my logs and realized that very few people ever downloaded it at all, and those that did mostly downloaded the HTML version."
Facets and tagging: whatever happened to innovation?
I wonder what happened to the innovation in tagging. The stuff I did with Mefeedia was somewhat innovative I think. Here are some screenshots (it’s no longer live):
We organized tags into facets (see above, this just took a few hours of organizing the top 1000 tags), and then built an inference engine (which was pretty easy to do):
It worked like this: if the tag “josh leo” (a person) is used together with the tag “new york”, we can infere that Josh has been to New York.
Which goes to show that with very little metadata you can do a lot of cool stuff.