Explain the Problem - Not your Solution
Something that drives me quite batty is when people turn to me for help and request a solution without explaining the problem. In other words, they tell me their answer to a puzzle, without explaining what the puzzle is, and expect me to understand what to do. They want the answer to be 42, but what is the question being asked?
This happens a lot in software design. The client calls up and tells us they want something done a specific way. They are telling us how to implement a feature, without explaining what the feature is or why it needs to be done their way. Since they don’t understand the architecture of the product, they usually don’t understand the impact of the request. And since they are approaching the problem from a non-technical perspective, their proposed solution may not technically work.
Close to the Business
The best software designers and developers are the ones who completely understand the business and flows for which they are creating product. This understanding allows them to apply their technical skills to business problems and create great product. And the best way to understand is to be a part of the business, to be close to it.
Drawing on my career to date, the best products I have made have all come from me being right in the thick of things. I spent 8 years writing leading edge hedge fund management and financial software, while sitting in the middle of a trading floor, surrounded by traders and analysts and accountants. Before that I worked on financial systems deployments, surrounded by accountants and managers. And before that, right at the beginning, I wrote software to sell trees, surrounded by the people who grew and cut down those trees.
On Designing Web Applications balancing Identity, Usability and Familiarity
Graphic design without understanding the user, the flow and site interaction leads to pretty, uniquely identifiable web applications that are quite unusable and fail to connect with their users. Web applications that mimic the graphic design of others may seem to be more useable, because they are so familiar, but look like someone else’s product, have no identity, seem bland and boring, and also fail to connect with their users.
Somewhere there has to be a balance between familiarity, identity and usability, in a design that engages users. Here is how we found it.
VC tries to sell a con
In Startups Are Hard. So Work More, Cry Less, And Quit All The Whining, Michael Arrington uses the 1994 post by overworked engineer Jamie Zawinski to make his point that startups are hard, Silicon Valley is awesome, you must work long hours, and if you do, the rewards are worth it. He states
But you also know that there is nowhere on earth like Silicon Valley. Nowhere else that is structurally designed to help you make whatever you can imagine into reality. Nowhere else where there are so many like minded people who are willing to sacrifice and work hard to create something new.
Hundreds of sites ordered deindexed
A judge has ruled 700 domain names to be seized and removed from Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Bing, Yahoo and Google searches, on suspicion, not proof, of selling counterfeit goods. Whether the domain names are local or foreign, infringing or not, or even valid but caught-in-the-net business sites is immaterial. They are ordered seized and taken down without notice or recourse.
Of course, there is no law to force a registry to change ownership, nor a law to require the search engines to delist in this way, but the judge ordered it anyway. Says Law Professor Venkat Balasubramani on this topic yesterday:
The readable future
Brent Simmons nails it again in The Readable Future, talking about the tools we all use to bypass all the ads and clutter of publisher’s sites.
The future is, one way or another, readable.
Because that’s what readers want, and because the technology is easier to find and use and learn than ever. That trend will continue because developers live to give people technologies that make life better.
Copycats
Matt Legend Gemmell writing on Copycats:
There’s an entire spectrum of terms available besides ‘copied’, ranging from “inspired by” to “plagiarised”, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing to be influenced by the work of others. The key is to ensure that you’re consciously agreeing with a design, rather than just aping (mimicking unthinkingly - a definition which no doubt does our hairy cousins a grave disservice). Sadly, much of the technology sector simply apes.
Almost no-one changes their settings
Following up on my recent I just want a Hamburger post, I came across a wonderful article by Jared Spool entitled Do users change their settings?.
In line with that I said about developers thoughtfully making decisions on options for their users, Jared makes some beautiful points
Less than 5% of the users we surveyed had changed any settings at all.
Why?
They assumed Microsoft had delivered it turned off for a reason, therefore who were they to set it otherwise. “Microsoft must know what they are doing,” several of the participants told us.
If your site does ..., you hate your Customers
There has been a lot of talk on the Internet lately on the inability for web site visitors to actually read the content on publisher’s pages because of all the annoyances and clutter on these pages. If you are one of these publishers, read on, this is to help you identify what frustrates your customers. If you are a reader like me, let me know of any major annoyances I may have missed out on.
If your site displays a full page ad for 15 seconds before an article can be read, you hate your customers.
If your site splits articles, even short ones, into multiple pages, you hate your customers.
Should I wait?
As a technologist, I am often asked by friends and family whether they should buy a new gizmo now or wait a while for the next release of said gizmo.
I always have the same answer:
If you need it, buy it now.