Which would you rather have:

• An app that, based on preferences you enter about cuisine, price, experience, etc., comes up with a list of restaurants in your neighborhood that fit your criteria?
• A friend who’s been to every single restaurant in town that you can always count on to come up with a great suggestion for food, no matter what you’re in the mood for?

With some exceptions (and there are always exceptions), I’d rather go to the person first, then the app. Yelp has plenty of suggestions for coffee and wi-fi in the city, but I still check Cafe Talk. Amazon has great reviews, but I’ll often still look at the page of that one blogger who writes a 20 page article just to talk about the pros and cons of one set of headphones.

Why pick one person’s opinion over the wisdom of crowds and a 200 million dollar company?*

Simple: The person cares, and the person is a person.

*Note: Yelp is actually an exception, to the extent that its full of people. But the people all care about different things.

Products are utilities, services are solutions

First off: this doesn’t apply everywhere.

I don’t need a personal assistant to read me my emails or backup my files. I’m OK with large warehouses of computers doing that, because I know exactly what needs to be done and there isn’t anything surprising or complicated about it. When I know what I need, I look for a utility.

What separates utilities from solutions? Uncertainty.

If I’m looking for a website designer, who would think it was acceptable to hand me a copy of Photoshop, a book on HTML, and say, “here’s your app, go for it?”

A utility is designed to take things we know we need and get them. The best utilities tend to be well targeted and have a specific function. No one has to ask Instagram what he does at a party; it’s pretty ______ obvious.

But even there – how did you get introduced to Instagram?

Did a friend tell you about it? Did you read about it in a blog? Did you see someone using it?

Instagram started out as something unknown, and when it comes to unknowns, we need a personal introduction.

Even if it’s a product, start out with a service

I know the eventual goal of a product-driven startup is to build something that “scales” out–the definition of scale being that we can go out and have a picnic while our software makes monkey.

Nonetheless, I see lots of people who start out with the picnic. Oh, they may be working hard on their product, but there’s no relationship to the customer. They build the system and throw it over the wall and hope it goes viral. Starting a connection to your customers through an impersonal, on-stage launch is how you get casual interest. At the beginning, there will be no one but you to give a personal introduction to your gadget.

It can be as simple as telling the story of what it does and letting them use it, but you have to provide that service the first few times around. Even in the greatest product driven businesses, it’s people who are telling the story, not the product. The eventual goal of scale is not to stop telling the story, but to have others tell it for you.

I recently had the chance to compare an organization to an email.

The organization has had a number of meetings and made some useful decisions. They’ve put up a small site, but want to reorganize it and update the copy (it’s currently a shell with no visitors). This has been going on over approximately two months.

The email was from an email list about a startup competition:

On Friday night individuals pitch ideas for new ventures

Teams form around the best ideas and then work over the weekend to develop and launch a prototype on Sunday

——

Useful observations:

• In a startup, your limiting reagent is how fast you can build. If you have a fast engineering team, you can iterate quickly.
• Just because a product is minimal doesn’t mean it’s viable. The key criteria: Does the user have something to do?

[more (full article)]

I was just as much shocked as dismayed. Mulberry was hawked by so many colleges that I assumed its destiny was all but sealed. College students, as early adopters, would all be exposed to Mulberry and see how wonderful it was, and they’d take it to their jobs, promoting an almost viral spread.

I guess the Thunderbird/Outlook duopoly was just too strong for Cyrusoft to handle. However, all is not lost, as Mulberry is available for free now.

Let’s take a look at all the wonderful features of this program! (full article)

[originally started a long time ago]

Security is not just about locking down a system from a list of attacks. The way you design a UI dictates how people behave, and people’s behavior is responsible for 90% of attacks. [citation needed] Defaults matter. No one forgets to lock an automatically locking door.

The fact is, while a security system must be set up to prevent hacking attacks, guesswork, and theft, it must also be designed in such a way that leads people to behave more securely. When you have a system where keys are hard to create but easy to copy, naturally, people will end up using the same keys at eBay that they do at Flickr.

The need to “educate users” is an indication of design failure.

You probably have friends who use the internet. How much would you guess most of them use the buttons on the IE (or Firefox) toolbar?

Observation suggests a rule like this: For 80% of the users, only 20% of the buttons gets used (I, for one, never click anything under “Page”). There’s a great book that points this out quite nicely, but it doesn’t draw the thought to its conclusion. Perhaps there’s a place for ugly design that stitches together a haphazard mess of seemingly unrelated functions, knowing that most long term users will use their tunnel vision to filter out all but the most important functions to them.

TimGas: saying myspace and “design” within one sentance of each other
TimGas: is just asking for me to block you
Me: but it’s so true
Me: i don’t look at all the stuff on a mys**** page
TimGas: i’m feeling sick now
TimGas: brb, puking

Most people intuitively know when they’ve gotten stuck. Suddenly, after plowing through mountains of work, returns suddenly diminish dramatically. People who program late at night will recognize this phenomena; coding turns from an art to a masturbatory exercise in frustration. (This also comes up when doing late night work as a student, interestingly.)

The reason people can overlook the stall point is that it’s not one point. If we got pitched headlong into a freezing room, we’d be far less likely to leave the thermostat alone.

Being acutely sensitive to even the smallest amounts of frustration is a good way to pick up on incoming stall points.

Be intolerant of annoyances.

Me: I hate windows mobile.
Tim: Why?
Me: In what universe do you get a smart phone that’s too smart to make calls with?
Tim: Yours must be defective, i’ve never had a problem with that.
Me: No, it’s not. I’ll explain.
Me: My mom got a palm treo 750.
Me: This should have incited my “ruh roh” response.
Me: somehow it didn’t.
Me: That was fine, even though she never uses mobile web
Me: but then, she got this plantronics headset
Tim: ruh roh
Me: and she was telling me how she couldn’t get the regular phone speaker to work anymore
Me: she disabled bluetooth
Me: but she could still only make calls with the headset
Tim: hmm
Me: soo, I removed the device from the partnership. Now, it still doesn’t work, bluetooth’s off, and when i call i don’t hear anything.
Tim: Did you check the volume?
Me: Furthermore, it requires some ridiculous YES I CHECKED THE VOLUMEFDSFDSF
Tim: and does speakerphone work
Me: –anyways, ridiculous passkey (no speakerphone doesn’t work)
Me: and without the pass key you couldn’t reattach the headset
Me: So now i couldn’t talk on the phone,
and couldn’t talk on the headset.
Me: ==with a palm treo and winmobile, you can do everything but make voice calls
Me: We called tech support
Me: They had us do a hard reset
Me: The lady’s basic explanation was “you have to think of the phone as a little computer. and just like your computer builds up cookies and stuff and slows down, your phone can also get cookies and slow down as well, so you need to turn it off regularly”
Me: (I congratulated myself on keeping a straight face through that one)
Me: but it seems to have worked
Tim: treos suck

Tim: the phone is clearly better than my old one
Tim: but the cpu sucks, and the screen configuration is retarded

Me: it’s totally unacceptable to have to whip out a stylus just to turn off the headset
Tim: there’s not a button on the headset?
Me: there is….it doesn’t work
Tim: my friend josh has a blackjack and bluetooth headset and has zero problems with it
Tim: it’s clearly the treo that sucks
Me: menu->cancel bluetooth
Me: so….go to the MENU menu
Tim: whaaa
Me: i want to find the idiot who dreamed that one up
Me: and give them their phone back
Me: with my fist
Me: the button on the headset hangs up
Tim: funny
Me: not when mom’s on a 2 year contract
Me: there are three buttons on the headset
Me: volume up, volume down
Me: and the “multifunction button”
Me: which i believe is mainly for hanging up

One of the best ways to force people to review games correctly is to make it in their best economic interests to do so.

http://www.facebook.com/terms.php

There are 6000 words and 70+ paragraphs. How many Facebook users do you think actually know the legal terms they accept when they join the site?

Quote:

PLEASE READ THESE TERMS OF USE CAREFULLY AS THEY CONTAIN IMPORTANT INFORMATION REGARDING YOUR LEGAL RIGHTS, REMEDIES AND OBLIGATIONS. THESE INCLUDE VARIOUS LIMITATIONS AND EXCLUSIONS, AND A DISPUTE RESOLUTION CLAUSE THAT GOVERNS HOW DISPUTES WILL BE RESOLVED.