YakShaving

Aug 11

The case for more context-aware (particularly time based) experiences

I believe there’s huge potential for user experiences to adapt to the “current” stage in people’s lives, whatever term “current” can be applied to. Context-aware recommendations for content, services, experiences and more is a field that’s bound to explode. Companies, societies, and individuals are cropping up to serve this use-case of curating/filtering and making people aware of things when apt/necessary.

While technically it seems complicated and difficult (because it’s hard to know someone’s current state of being), I believe there’s scope for lots of the existing user experiences to take advantage of “currency” in someone’s life.

contacts

As time progresses, your contacts change

For example, I believe email clients could be improved simply by creating temporary contact clusters for months or for different projects. When the email client senses that I’ve received >1 email message or sent > 1 message to a contact (other than a reply-chain), it’s likely that this person could be labeled a contact, and should show up in the AutoComplete. As months progress and you move from one project/client to another, the core set of contacts that you deal with change, and your autocomplete/addressability should dynamically reflect that. Over time, if the system made you aware of these changes in communication, that would be stellar.

As a sidenote, I have no idea why I can’t search through recent contacts, or search email in a sidebar, or really do much of anything when I’m in Compose Email mode. I can’t imagine that I’m the only person that often needs to reference a snippet or content in a past conversation in order to convey something in a new email. Currently, this is only possible by opening two tabs or if the past conversation was in the same thread. At the very minimum, I should be able to find recent contacts in a sidebar or something.

email

Proposed email interface

Getting back to the point of this post, I hope that we’re not alone or martyrs at BettrAt in suggesting that time-based context awareness is a vitally important mechanism to help deal with information overload.

Aug 03

Why “A bit more design” is clearly warranted if you don’t want to be toast

Dan Hill, noted author of City of Sound wrote about this Breville Toaster and applauded the design of the “a bit more” button. The post was commented on hacker news quite a bit and I’ve thought about its design in general a bit more.

Breville Toaster

Breville Toaster, flickr: Dan Hill

Dan says, regarding the “Bit More button:

That choice of name – and the function, and its simple realisation in a sturdy button with a good action – is a deft bit of design, and for me, the ability to produce deft, including through good copy, is one of the key differentiating factors setting apart good designers from average.

Is it worth it to spend the extra time/effort/mental energy to design differentiated stuff for the tasks people are trying to accomplish? I suspect many people that might read this are already Designer or Dschool students, so they’ll say “yes,” but just to support the argument:

  • It might create unique intellectual property / design that can be protected. You can see that the “Innovative A Bit More” button is trademarked.
  • It increases the average price point of the toaster (sometimes with seemingly no upper bound)
  • It associates the brand of the toaster with products that are well thought through — “I loved this toaster, so I’ll probably also love Breville’s ________.
  • In the design of “everyday” products, furnishing with smart touches and friendly copy like “a bit more” is a continuous reminder of the device’s usefulness. I marvel at how much daily interactions with products that people have already purchased contributes to a strong brand. For instance, continuous interactions (e.g. Brad Feld’s “Month of Mac”) with well designed Apple products clearly just drive the motivation to buy more Apple products without testing them out. It’s almost as if the device carries the brand to some holy level where the consumer says “I’m sure that this has been thought through, and I’ll pay for it without blinking an eye”

I hardly think that needs to be more economic justification for good design. That said, my next post will be one that’s more actionable on Task oriented and Process Oriented design.

Jul 28

Magic is making something out of nothing

Warning: This might be a fanboy post, but it’s more about my fascination with an important idea that the best companies can create something out of nothing.

IBM Nipple Mouse

Most people will remember the first (or second) generation laptops that came out. In an effort to save some space and still provide an adequate means to point, they’d have these little red rubber things in the middle that people would use to point, in lieu of a mouse. This is still back before there were svelte tiny USB dongles that you could use to connect external input devices. IBM pioneered the pointing stick, or the “laptop nipple mouse” as it was nicknamed, by the suggestive tweaking nature.

Then came the touchpad, as most laptops have today. Eventually, Apple tacked on multi-touch on its trackpads as user behavior caught up and people felt really comfortable using two fingers (or more) to perform functions and inputs on the system efficiently, while allowing for the simplest of users to use “1 click” simplicity that the device manufacturer is known for.

Yesterday, Apple came out with a device that extrudes this whole interface into another product, the Magic Trackpad. That’s sort of amazing: Apple has the ability to evolve an inferior input mechanism (the stick pointer or trackpad was never as good as a mouse) and turn it into a beautiful looking, market-viable product. I predict capacitive screens on iMacs are coming.

Screen shot 2010-07-28 at 8.33.58 AM

The Magic Trackpad in all its beauty

From the product intro:

Why should notebooks have all the fun?
Desktop users, your time has come. The new Magic Trackpad is the first Multi-Touch trackpad designed to work with your Mac desktop computer. It uses the same Multi-Touch technology you love on the MacBook Pro. And it supports a full set of gestures, giving you a whole new way to control and interact with what’s on your screen.

It’s marketed toward desktop users! What other hardware manufacturer would have the rocks to take something that users perceive as inferior (a trackpad) and turn it into a feature of a new product? Brilliant.

As an aside, I am amused that this wasn’t the first time that Apple has tried an external trackpad.

I think I’ll sit on the sidelines for the magic trackpad and opt for a Bamboo Fun to offset the tunnel that ensues when using the mouse too much.

Jun 29

Reflections on startups after Chicago Startup Weekend

This past weekend, I was a part of Chicago Startup Weekend. We (Some friends, my brother, and I) gave a solid college try at launching a minimum viable product (MVP) to help foodies connect to personal chefs and aspiring food entrepreneurs called BigStove. We did hone our message and are working on taking some important validation steps after putting up some landing pages.

The general idea behind StartupWeekend is that you work on an idea all weekend and launch/pitch at the end. Think TechCrunch50, except you build the MVP in a weekend. Pretty awesome way to work and validate your idea.

Chicago Startup Weekend

Chicago Startup Weekend

Thought I’d take a second to reflect overall on the experience:

On Personal Leadership:
- I realized a lot about my personal leadership style in a very short period of time. Having an undergraduate CS background, and a graduate degree in design and business sounds great and is helpful, but what’s better is being able to find people who are amazing at what they do and having trust that they can do a helluva better job than I can.

- Being an individual contributor as a leader is helpful when it can be managed well. It indicates that you care enough to get your hands dirty. However, remember to choose battles wisely. We didn’t need >2 people working on setting up the backend/Django. As an aside, we should have known that the “contest” wasn’t about actually building something, it was just about pitching. Only one of the other teams appeared to actually have something built besides for us.

On Startup Teams:
- I realized I mostly like working with people who DO stuff, and BUILD stuff. Talk, and ideas are cheap. Especially ones that aren’t informed by user research/talking to people.

- It takes people a while to understand that user research is about finding unique insights about how people operate and their unarticulated needs. When you have vague notions of what you want your product to be ALREADY, then this user research is harder to do. You tend to have a radar for points that substantiate what you intend to build. This happens all the time in larger companies when managers are undergoing new “innovation” efforts.

Desired/Undesired Behaviors for Startup Teams:
The great thing about startup weekend is that it’s a great place to test out how a team is working. In a sense, it’s by far, the best place to “interview”. Experience high stress, move quickly, get done a bunch of stuff over a short period of time.

Desired:
– Integrity. Being able to trust all the members of your team is important. Don’t do things that put that integrity into question. Though I forgive and forget a lot, matters of integrity are pretty important.
– Solid work ethic. Working with some people is an absolute pleasure because they just have an intense curiosity to just GET IT DONE and show the results of what they’ve done after they’ve done it. The work is inherently valuable and takes the team to a new place.
– Don’t be afraid to pitch constantly, it helps refine the message. Agree to a pitch as a team and then try it.
– Disagree and Commit. It’s okay to disagree, but once everyone is on board with the same plan/vision, commit and move on.

Undesired:
– “Management” mentalities. There’s little scope for project management for the span of a weekend. Just build stuff. Even if it’s a map of what you think needs to be done.
– The Blame game. It’s too easy to blame other(s) on the reasons why something didn’t work or you didn’t get done what you needed to get done. This is a deleterious behavior and doesn’t convey personal ownership. Startup teams work best when people PRIVATIZE LOSSES and SOCIALIZE WINS, not the other way around (e.g. Awesome job on this data model, guys….. Sorry I F%@$% up our Q&A session, I know what I’ll do next time)
– No man is an island. Cliched, but prima donna “artistes” don’t carry the team. Unfortunately, I was harsh on a team member for doing this. Luckily, the team member was my brother, so no love lost.
– Passive Aggression. * I didn’t notice this much this weekend but I have with startup teams in the past. There’s no room for facetious passive aggression in this environment. Better to be aggressive, provide reasons for why you believe the way you do. This really gets to me.

On Lean Startups
– The importance of “getting out of the house” is immensely valuable. We’ve met 23 people across 5 food markets in 3 cities. We’ll talk to more in order to drive them to our landing page and see how easy it is to convert/gauge interest. We’ll only build if there’s verifiable interest.

bigstove leanstartup steps

On Startup Weekend:
– The Startup Weekend, Mark/Chris,et al did a great job at putting the weekend together. Enjoyed spending time with most of the other teams/entrepreneurs there that were building businesses.

- Regarding the “contest”, I thought some of the ideas were great — I especially liked RemnantRetail — and thought that they should surely have won. Amazing that some of these companies / visions are developed in a weekend — It takes some TC50 companies a year to get where they are to launch. I also really liked City Murder. Think there’s a huge oppty for “real” social games that I’d maybe actually feel like playing (I’m not a gamer). I thought it was bizarre that the second place winner was literally partners with one of the judges, but I’m not surprised, this is Chicago after all.