I just bought http://andrew-meyer.com, and I plan to put some material on it soon. I may port this blog over to that address, or I might keep it as a bio/resume/contact/projects page. Not sure yet, but I’ll write a post about what I decide later.
Here are some links I liked this week.
A little over a week ago, I went to the 15th anniversary celebration of the Mayfield Fellows Program here at Stanford. Between the VC;s, entrepreneurs, lawyers, and professors in attendance, it was a pretty inspiring group of Valley professionals. My favorite part of the day was a portion dedicated to former Mayfield Fellows speaking about their current endeavors. Of those, I was most struck by Dave Merril of Sifteo.
Sifteo is the company behind Siftables, a product described as “building blocks that think.” These blocks have a color display and are equipped with accelerometers which allow users to manipulate various installed programs via tilt and motion. As a UX guy, I’m really fascinated by the marriage between physical and virtual.
When I was little, I loved building things out of legos, blocks, kinetx and other snapfit objects. Now as a 20-something (almost) young professional, I rarely have the opportunity to play with physical interfaces. Instead, when people of my generation think of “play,” they usually think of video games. While I’m not really a gamer, most of my friends have the latest consoles and crowd around tv screens. I think that this activity is inherently not social (have you ever seen a room of guys playing Halo?). There are of course exceptions, especially the Nintendo Wii which have made games more social and collaborative.
My point is that “playing” in video game format today lacks the same social behavior and learning experiences that you get when collaborating to build physical objects. Sifteo has created a nice bridge between the virtual and physical to create an educational experience that is relevant. Some of the demo programs are pretty compelling (e.g. boggle type games which update frequently or color mixing palettes), and I’m sure a rich ecosystem of programs could be developed if they open up their platform to third parties. What if these blocks were location-aware and could upload programs relevant to your surroundings (e.g. a program on animals if you’re at the zoo).
While it appears that Sifteo is focused on early education, I would love to see something compelling made for adults. As I’ve mentioned, I miss interacting with legos and other physical objects, and I know there are others like me. In any case, I’m excited by these siftables, and looking forward to trying them out.
As of last Friday, I am officially returning to Topsy Labs, Inc. for a full time position. I’m really excited to be rejoining the team after my summer with them during the Mayfield Fellows Program. I’m staffed on some exciting projects, and I’m looking forward to my start date. Expect to see some future posts on insights into the real-time search space…
I haven’t updated napkintech in a while as midterms and job hunting have gotten in the way. In the spirit of getting back into blogging, I’ll start today with a short post about two videos I recently viewed. The main one is of a presentation given by Jack Dorsey, Twitter and Square co-founder, at the 99% conference. The other video is from a Robert Scoble interview of Dennis Crowley, Foursquare co-founder, and Alexa Andrzejewski, Foodspotting founder.
Nothing groundbreaking here, but I liked the takeaways from both videos. Dorsey’s listed three key lessons from launching both twitter and square: 1) sketch and share your idea (or otherwise get it out of your head in a shareable format) 2) Assess the marketplace to see when its right to execute and 3) constantly iterate based on feedback.
At Stanford, points 1 and 2 are more or less beaten to death (or at least they have been in my mixture of d.school and MS&E classes). What’s much harder to learn and execute is point 2. I feel like you can do all of the financial, strategic, or trend analysis you want, and it’s still incredibly tough to make a compelling consumer product at the right time. On this point, Dorsey mainly talks about Square in the video, but I think the story around twitter is more interesting. At Chirp, Biz Stone spent some time discussing how the founding team was fascinated by the future of both “away messages” on IM clients and SMS. Stone noted that consumers were willing to share their status through an away message or an SMS, but that neither were really being exploited for their full potential. Stone goes on to say that the team prototyped the first version of twitter in a weekend and had their friends try it out for a few days. The visceral and emotional reactions that friends felt while using this early version of twitter were so compelling that Stone, Williams, and Dorsey knew that they were on to something.
I bring up the Foodspotting video because Andrzejewski had a few lines which I think ties into this topic beautifully. Andrzejewski had been studying the twitter ecosystem and noticed an inefficiency for many users. A number of twitter users would eat at restaurants, take pictures of their food, and tweet about it. She saw a trend that was not fully being supported by the ecosystem, and decided to start a dedicated dish-sharing community, Foodspotting. In three months time, they have scaled up to 100,000 users.
How often do you intend to attach a file but end up sending an email without it?
I did that today except I was saved by a clever, simple safety net in GMail.
While applying for a job today, I intended to attach my resume to the email, but I was interrupted by a phone call and the resume was never attached (I bet it’s happened to you before!). I clicked the send button, and I got the following confirmation dialogue box in GMail:
Maybe I’m late to the party in discovering this, but it prevented me from writing a somewhat awkward follow-up email explaining that I forgot to attach my resume. I love how GMail recognized this situation, which I know is extremely common, and gave me a confirmation dialogue box.
I’ve been meaning to write a post on handling dangerous UI elements (read: “delete everything” actions), and this encounter with the confirmation dialogue has finally motivated to write it. In About Face 3,Alan Cooper illustrates the problem with dangerous UI elements with his “ejector seat lever” example:
Cooper’s point is an obvious one, but there are a lot of interface examples that violate this rule. I’ve certainly deleted everything accidentally or sent something when I meant to save it.
The guys at codinghorror.com write that the answer to dealing with dangerous UI elements that are occasionally used is to follow the opposite of Fitt’s Law. This simply means that these elements should be DIFFICULT to click on. If you have to place a dangerous UI element near a commonly accessed one, you need to have a confirmation dialogue or some other safety net.
37 Signals demonstrates a good example of this with its Backpack product:
Here, the trash can that allows you to delete your post is placed far away from the Save of Close buttons.
37 Signals also showcases another interesting concept for dealing with this situation–the notion of using “unfriendly” shapes for ejector seat-like buttons. They write about Keith Lang’s talk on the science of aesthetics, explaining that some shapes are “friendly” like the rounded rectangle, but others are “unfriendly” and deter people from interacting with them. Ejector seat buttons could employ something similar to the following “spiky button”:
To sum up, if you have dangerous UI elements, make them hard to click on. There are too many times when we’ve all made irreversible mistakes because of ejector seat buttons.
Recently found a visualization representing what various colors mean in different cultures and got lost in it for about 20 minutes. Click here for the full size version (from the guys at information is beautiful).
I saw Silicon Alley Insider’s “Chart of the Day” today, and I was fairly surprised to learn that major tech firms are taking on a lot of debt. Given the history of tech companies, taking on large amounts of debt is not a common practice. Instead, tech firms will issue stock in order to build up their assets. So, I was intrigued that Silicon Alley Insider was reporting that tech giants like Dell, Mircosoft, and Oracle are increasing their total debt. Apple and Google are conspicuously missing from the list…
The Wall Street Journal had a good breakdown explaining why these companies are racking up debt. The two main points explaining the trend seem to be as follows:
With regard to the second point, WSJ adds the following: “companies increasingly have to decide whether they are predator or prey and taking on debt ‘is a good way to signal your intentions’ to be an acquirer, adds Sarah Friar, an analyst at Goldman Sachs.”
Now, let’s see these companies make some big acquisitions.
From Silcon Valley Insider via Fred Wilson…
Here at Stanford we are conditioned to live by user centered design principles. With the d.school, ME, and my department, MS&E, the mantra is: “listen to your users/customers.” I have to say that I am grateful for my education in UCD, and I’ve learned how to simultaneously build both a software product and customer base.
But when does UCD fail?
I recently read a post on the Harvard Business Review blog and a related post by Don Norman on the topic. Norman, in reviewing Roberto Verganti’s book, “Design-Driven Innovation,” argues that UCD is only useful for incremental changes. If you want to be radical and have large changes, UCD ultimately fails. Norman has the following to say:
“Products within existing categories and constructed from existing technologies can undergo incremental changes, again driven by human-centered design, but they can also undergo radical transformation in meaning: these are design-driven. Thus, Apple’s iPod was a revolution in meaning, not technology. Similarly, Alessi’s development of cute, fun corkscrews and other kitchen items caused a radical transformation of that field, but did not require technological changes. Swatch redefined the meaning of watches, creating a radical revolution.”
Verganti wrote the HBR post, “User-Centered Innovation is Not Sustainable,” in which he applies the same argument to making the world more sustainable. The problem, Verganti writes, is that humans are not inherently concerned about sustainable behavior. We as humans are more concerned about “budgets, health, safety, well-being, and emotional fulfillment.” If designers simply make incremental changes based on users, we will never achieve a sustainable world. Designers, he believes, need to be “vision centered” and “forward thinking” to counter this problem. In Verganti’s words:
“ Only forward-looking executive, designers, and, of course, policy makers may introduce sustainable innovation into the economic picture. They need to step back from current dominant needs and behaviors and envision new scenarios. They need to propose new unsolicited products and services that are both attractive, sustainable, and profitable.”
Stepping back for a moment, I tend to agree with Norman and Verganti. My concern is that when you create truly “visionary” products that don’t meet consumer needs/desires, will they ever be used? I understand that sometimes companies and designers need to be radical, but you have to make sure that the products created somehow fit within a user’s lifestyle. Sure, a product can challenge a user’s current behaviors, but it must still connect with a user for it to have value.
