Uncommon Sense (for Software)

Devshop is a Branham Top 25 Up & Comer for 2008

This just in... Apparently Devshop is a Branham Top 25 Up & Comer for 2008.

Cool!

Ottawa DemoCamp 8

Ottawa's 8th DemoCamp is almost here! So far there are 7 presenters lined up:

• chide.it: get feedback. give feedback.
• LoyaltyMatch: Frequent Flier points converted to cash at new shopping marketplace.
• FriendsRoll & TopLinks: Giving new life to the Blogroll
• Globex Pro 3.5: Software suite to ease the daily pains of doing business globally
• Trade Wars Rising Beta MMOG: See the game in development and an engine capable of allowing player-generated games !
• Devshop v2: "Devshop Returns" - a sneak peak at the upcoming product. First time demo'd anywhere.
• FaveQuest facebook app: Version 3 of the facebook video app. You can now create and share your own video channels and we fill them automatically for you from all over the web!

I'll be showing the Alpha version of Devshop v2: Devshop Returns!

Usual time, usual place:

Date: Monday, March 31, 2008 from 7pm to 9pm
Location: Clocktower Restaurant on Bank Street, just south of the Queensway.
Format for 6 demos: 2 minute introduction, 8 minute demo, 5 minutes for Q&A and discussion

Hope to see you there!

Ottawa Edition of the VC Round Table

Here's an interesting event I plan on attending, though it might be interesting to those of you in Ottawa...

Something's missing in Canada's tech community - the chance to informally interact with VCs, learn about what it is exactly that they do and how the funding process works.

The VC Roundtable series aims to fill this gap, by hosting small (free!) get together across Canada's major cities where Rick Segal, JLA Ventures Partner and VC blogger will walk through what getting involved with VCs is all about.

Rick Segal will be hosting the Ottawa edition of the VC travelling roundtable on April 16th from 11am to 1pm at everyone’s favourite pub TheClockTower at 575 Bank Street. If you would like to attend, sign up!

Software Development's Evolution towards Product Design

I just read a brilliant and well illustrated piece on the evolution of software product design. It takes you from the days of a lonely programmer with a technical problem to solve for themselves or possibly another buddy programmer, all the way through commercial product development. Check out this great storyboard for the gist of it:

Check out the full post for the narrative.

Innovation versus the WENUS.

Sheesh. I just read a blurb about this McKinsey article:

Some people are passionate about innovation, while others shy away from new ideas. McKinsey research finds that, in some organizations, managers who are most frequently sought out for advice on new concepts often have the most negative attitudes towards innovation—partly because they have difficulty balancing new ideas with current priorities.

One way around these bottlenecks is to intentionally create networks of managers charged with encouraging new ideas. This kind of decentralized team can identify promising new concepts and prioritize them so that they receive the attention they deserve.

It's a premium article which means you have to pay for the whole thing, which I don't generally do, so I haven't read it. But the summary above was enough to get me thinking.

Big companies seem to have real difficulty balancing innovation with their WENUS. (Remember the WENUS, a statistic that Chandler from the TV program Friends was in charge of managing at work? "I'm LOOKING at the WENUS, and I'M NOT HAPPY!" (WENUS == Weekly Estimated Net Usage Statistic). Chandler was a middle manager.

The mention of a "middle manager" in the McKinsey blurb above frames the core of the problem. Once a company gets big enough, the temptation to have middle managers who's jobs are defined by operating metrics alone (think: productivity) is a dangerous game. What McKinsey is referring to is a manager who is only focused on managing the existing business process and is not too concerned with improving it. Perhaps it's not their fault - perhaps their compensation is ONLY tied to these metrics and they have absolutely no incentive to rock the boat. In fact, perhaps they would be punished for new ideas if they take a small short term hit on their WENUS because they let someone on their team work on something that might improve things in the future.

McKinsey's recommendation? Create teams of managers who are charged with encouraging new ideas (from the troops). Great. Yet another layer of management, who is now by definition at odds with the line managers, and if they are to be effective (at encouraging new ideas) they must swindle resources from the line managers to implement these ideas. With no ability to simply hear one of these great ideas and say, "Wonderful - make it so!", how effective could they be? Does the person coming up with the idea have to hand it off to dedicated "innovation implementers" who work for the innovation manager? How much of the idea is lost in translation?

This is a terrible organizational structure. A team member's reward for coming up with a good idea is that they have to feel like they are "going around" their direct boss to someone else and then be put in the awkward position of having that other manager get into a pi--ing match with their direct boss over the team member's time. Wonderful.

Big companies love to specialize. Your job is the WENUS. Yours is innovation. No wonder in the tension between status quo and progress, big companies are often slow to change and lethargic. Their very organizational structure is tuned towards optimizing the status quo, rather than adapting and thriving on change and progress.

What if these so called "middle managers" were also charged with innovation? Not some arbitrary quota like "3 good ideas per month", but rather, at least reward them for thinking progressively instead of tying their rewards only to the WENUS.

Worse, the way you define a role determines how you recruit for it. So, after creating the traditional line manager roles which aren't encouraged to innovate, you've likely staffed up for them as well. Now, suppose you change the definition of that role? Drat. You've already recruited people who may not be the ones to shine. Now what do you do?

Was your product "assembled" or "carved"?

I've spent the last quarter re-designing the user interface for the Devshop product. The new design will be out in a couple months. During this process, I spent practically the whole year with my eyes wide open, looking for and noticing little cues to good industrial design along the way. I'd keep a list of screen shots of aspects of a particular product that I liked. I kept a list of ideas I had along the way for reference and revisited them all during the design process. I didn't just look at software. I looked at automobile design, furniture, interior design, print, architecture - any product discipline. I looked at video production, animation and writing too.

Good design is considered to be very subjective. I don't believe it is subjective. I think it is empirical and measurable. The problem is, people have a difficult time articulating what they like and don't like. They have a hard time dealing with the fact that unfortunately, a product isn't designed JUST for them, but rather for a market of people that hopefully all share a set of common enough needs and can therefore use the same product to fulfill some number like 80% of their needs. And because of these difficulties, people discount design as subjective because they can't reconcile why one person (who can't articulate why) likes something while someone else doesn't.

The other day something hit me. I think it's an easy way to articulate a set of characteristics in design that people gravitate towards, without consciously realizing it. It must have some root or explanation from anthropology or some very natural origin. I don't pretend to know the causal relationship, I've just noticed the trend.

It's what I'll now say is the difference between a product that looks like it was "assembled" (from various parts) versus a product that looks like "carved" from a single source material (like a single block of wood, clay or stone).

I have 3 examples to share: cars, laptops and finally, software.

Example #1 - Cars:

Assembled:

Carved:

Avalanche: The Avalanche is clearly "assembled" from various materials (metals & plastics), which jump from one to another along the exterior. The surface is lumpy and clearly shows things "bolted on" to the exterior. The coloring is high contrast, from light colors to dark colors. The shape is boxy, rough and has lots of cracks, crevices and protrusions.

Corvette: The Corvette looks like it was carved from a single piece of red metal. It has long smooth lines that are curved instead of at sharp angles. Very few protrusions and crevices, and nothing bolted on to the exterior. It is the ultra "low contrast" (in this case monochromatic) which furthers the illusion that it was carved.

Example #2 - Laptops:

Assembled:

Carved:

Dell: Latches, stickers, logo/emblem, rubber stoppers, lights and buttons all protrude, in different colors, from different materials along the exterior. It has a lot of visible seams, cracks and crevices. You can just imagine things being "snapped" together during assembly (and things "snapping" off as they catch things during use). The stickers aren't even straight.

Apple: Again, a single color is used to make it look like it is a single piece molding. Care was taken to remove anything that might stick out beyond the smooth surface. Even the screws on the edge have been carefully chosen and placed to not deter from the soapstone-like exterior. The power light, IR receiver and iSight camera (even the screws!) are all perfectly flush along the outside.

Example #3 - Software:

Assembled:

Carved:

Google's Gmail: Gmail actually makes my eyes bleed. It looks like it was cobbled together as an experiment or a prototype and nobody bothered to finish it. The inconsistent use of margins and whitespace, font-sizes and layout waste opportunities to visually group and convey information to the user about usage and importance. The color choices were obviously made by someone that is style blind and probably wears plaid with stripes to work. It looks like a hack.

Apple's iDisk: This iDisk screen struck me when I first saw it. It is one of the best examples of a user interface that actually looks like it was "carved" from material. The round, smooth edges, low contrast & subtle color changes (as if almost to signify texture change of a physical material rather than primary color change). The cleanliness of the margins and generous whitespace further indicates that is was designed rather than hacked.

The cues:

There is actually a morale to this story. We're surrounded by so much technology that we sometimes forget that we all come from nature. Most people have either a conscious (embraced) or unconscious (unrecognized) affinity to natural materials. Most people prefer curves to edges, simplicity to complexity (simplicity = fewer apparent material changes and protrusions, etc.). They may not know it but they will gravitate towards these things when given a choice, if everything else is equal.

I recently came to consider the following cues that can be used (or misused) to achieve a "carved" (natural) versus assembled (artificial) look in user interface design for software:

1. Curves vs. angles: Sure, sure, the Web 2.0 craze is experiencing a backlash towards rounded corners. The point is that people respond to smooth curves better to sharp jagged edges - again, if not consciously, then subconsciously, depending on how self-aware they are and how well they can articulate why they like or don't like something.
2. Contrast: : Lots of high contrast color changes mid-surface are going to increase the artificial or "assembled" looking nature of your product. A few changes is probably ok, but use them to convey something or shy away from them. The higher the contrast of the change, the more influence that change has to convey something, either intentional or by accident, so make it intentional.
3. Margins and whitespace: Even and consistent margins and gutters give a look of polish. Make these inconsistent, and your product comes off looking hacked. VERY generous use of whitespace can convey a feeling of cleanliness and simplicity, regardless of how many things are actually on a screen. The mean-distance between "things" on a screen (i.e. the gaps of whitespace) increase the overall perception of "smoothness" of the surface. The less white-space around things, the more "lumpy" it looks (remember all those protrusions in the Avalanche and Dell?).

Going forward, I think it's better to make your product look carved than assembled. People will respond better to it, even if they don't really understand why.

It all starts with recruiting.

Work to live or live to work? Do you consider yourself to have a job or a career? The answer to these questions can tell you a lot about a person. Too bad you can't just blurt them out and ask them directly while interviewing someone because it's too easy to see what the interviewer wants to hear and fake it. But as a recruiter, this is a pretty fundamental question.

The software industry is fairly unique in that it is filled with people who love what they do. Hobbyists. These people would build software whether they get paid for it or not. That means, if you're a "work to live" sort of person, in this field you're already below average. People that love what they do are much more likely to go the extra mile to be great at it. Given that it's also a very competitive space, over the years I've come to think of this trait as a filter when hiring. You'll never build great products with a team that "works to live".

Someone that works to live approaches their work with a "fulfill the requirements" sort of attitude and behavior. They may very well work hard while they're at the office and meet many of the "good general employee" criteria, but that's still not quite the same thing as someone that's in it because they love building software.

People who consider building software their vocation, are constantly absorbing what they encounter in their travels (things they liked about a particular product, new/fresh design patterns, tips/tricks/optimizations, etc.) and constantly looking for ways to apply these to the product they're working on at any given moment (mid-project, this accounts for a lot of scope creep - may be best to log them and plan them into the next release for the sake of a predictable schedule - but capture that enthusiasm, it's gold). They consider what they do their "craft" and are constantly looking to improve it for the sake of bettering themselves and their products.

The software business is all about the people. It requires virtually no materials, big iron equipment, even office space these days as the amount of software written in coffee shops is on the rise. One of the biggest differences between an OK product and a great product is the passion, creativity and craftsmanship put into it by the people building it - and all those extra miles they were willing to go to make the product great.

I believe that to build great products you have to start with great people (meaning: enthusiasts). This isn't a field where you can afford to just "get by" by fulfilling the letter of the requirements and moving on. It's too competitive. If you don't go the extra mile, someone else will and they'll eat your lunch.

Ottawa DemoCamp7!

Wow 7 already. Seems like only yesterday these started. Next one is on Monday (the 28th of January, 2008) at the usual pub, The ClockTower (575 Bank St.).

Demo's scheduled:

• 'Protecode Demo' - demonstration of a tool that unobtrusively detects, logs, and identifies external content during software development. This tool is used to automatically create records of Intellectual Property ownership and licensing attributes of external code (eg Open Source modules or snippets) that enter a project.


• Distributed Musical Instruments. Software that will allow MIDI files to be replayed on different sound modules. This will be a demo of an entry level process leading to a system creating a Virtual Musical Sound Studio.


• 'The Traveler IQ Challenge' - Demo of a viral marketing app gone wild. In June of 2007 the TIQ was launched on Facebook to promote TravelPod, since then it's been launched on Friendster, TravelPod, TripAdvisor and virally on 4000 other syndicated websites. The TIQ has now taken a life of its own generating millions of monthly unique visitors and driving significant traffic to TravelPod.com.


• 'JohnnyVoIP' - Initial beta of a social communications platform tool that is currently available on Facebook allowing users to forget about downloading, installing, and finding their friends - just click on a link.


• Internet Business Logic - A Wiki and SOA endpoint for business rules in open vocabulary, executable English. - Flash Demo Preview


• iotum - iotum's conference calling application for Facebook.

Starts at 7pm as usual, goes 'til about 9pm.

Hope to see you there!