October 2008 Archives

On the first day Larry Tesler joined Yahoo as the head of the User Experience Design group, someone asked him to summarize his management philosophy in 7 words or fewer. I'll never forget his response:

People do their best work when happy.

I totally agree. I managed a team of program managers at Microsoft for 6 years. I ended up moving back to being an individual contributor (IC) because I enjoy that work a lot more. But having spent time as both an IC and a manager has given me perspective. And that perspective is that the strongest correlation to productivity is happiness.

The primary role of the manager is as champion for the employee: Understanding their talents and motivations, putting them in situations where they can best use their talents, and giving them the motivations that brings out their best performance. The skill set is more like social worker, therapist, or even coach to relly get inside their head, understand what makes them tick, and generate empathy with each direct report individually. The worst thing you can do it try to treat them all the same.

So in your 1-on-1s with your employees, the single question you should always ask is, "How can I help you be happier at your job?" Or flipping it around, "What about your job is making you most unhappy or stressed out right now, and how can I help fix that?" This one technique, coupled with some quality active listening, will immediately make you a better manager. And, sad to say, it will likely make you the best manager your direct report has ever had.

So the first question you should ask in every 1-on-1 you have is simply: "Are you happy?"

On Oct 28, John McCain and Sarah Palin to cancelled a rally in Quakertown, PA due to the weather: a cold, steady rain and driving winds. Barack Obama ignored such pedestrian issues and went on with his rally at Widener University in Chester, PA, addressing a crowd of about 9,000.

I think this picture says it all.

I'm in the midst of a job search right now. And at this point in my career, I'm as much evaluating the companies as they are me.

Perhaps I'm overly sensitive to issues of customer experience since as an experience designer, that's what I focus on. But communiques such as these do not leave a positive impression on me.

Thank you for your interest in our recently advertised position of User Experience Designer and employment with Initech. Your resume will be reviewed over the next 5 days to determine how your skills and experience might best match our current opening.

If a match is determined, we will be contacting you shortly to arrange for an interview. However, if a match does not currently exist, we will maintain your application on file for future consideration for a period of one year.

Thank you again for your interest in Initech.

and

However, as we continued our interviews, we have found a candidate  who is a better fit for the requirements of the position. We will keep your resume on file, and let you know if we have any other openings in the near future. Thank you for your interest in our organization, and I wish you success in your job search.

This corporate impersonal tone was the standard for a long time, but it just doesn't seem appropriate in the 21st century.

Now in all likelihood, I probably won't end up with a job offer from either company. But what if I did? Or what about my perceptions of these companies as I talk to my friends and colleagues? Or write in this blog?

It's really surprising that people don't take more time and care on all of their company's communications. PR isn't just what the marketing department says it is. It's every interaction the customer has with the company.

I've been working on updating this for over a week now, and I'm finally ready to abandon it. (Designs are never finished; merely abandoned. Or released into the wild.)

OK, this isn't really news; it's common knowledge. But I have a specific example.

As I was working on my resume, I did a search for all of my issued patents. The system is so slow, that it takes somewhere around 4-5 years after the application for a patent to be issued. A new one had been issued since the last time I checked: 7,360,165 — Addresses as objects for email messages issued on April 15, 2008.

The only problem is, the US Patent Office already granted this exact patent three years before on May 17, 2005. Check out 6,895,426 — Addresses as objects for email messages.

It appears that some lawyer at Microsoft uncovered the original research for the the Email Addresses as Objects patent, and somehow thought that it hadn't been written up and submitted. So they did, and the USPO happily granted it. Again.

While I do enjoy having more patents, this isn't quite the way I hoped to achieve that. In fact, it's ridiculous. The system is broken, and while I have utmost respect for Nathan Myrvold as an visionary design thinker, his Intellectual Ventures is a farce. IV is content to stand by the sidelines making no attempt to implement the designs in the patents they hold, instead leveraging the broken system to extort money from people actually in the arena.

I stopped to run an errand on my way to work today and when I came back out, my battery was flat. Given that the battery is the original that came with the car, and thus it is 10 years old, it's not too surprising. But still annoying.

After getting a jump from AAA, I drove straight over to Sears. And I have to say the experience was great. There were two options: DieHard Standard and DieHard Gold. That was it. No other brands, no need to decide among a whole line of different levels and options. Just decide whether you want the basic model or the Gold.

I bought the Gold. It cost only 15% more, and I was moved by the unexpected absence of a paradox of choice. It was a bliss of dearth. Plus they had it installed in less than half an hour. I highly recommend them for your car battery needs.

I've been laid off for the second time in my career. Yes, in this soft market. I'm averaging one every 7 years. So maybe I'll aim to retire by 2015 so I don't have to go through this again. :-)

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. This whole thing was an experiment. I just thought it would go a bit longer. I entered the sales contest, and walked away with third prize.

I'm currently looking for the next big thing. I'd love to work for a small company (5–25 people) where I can be the lead designer.  Here is my updated resume. Feel free to forward it on to anyone who might be interested in my skill set. Thanks!

Pes´si`mize
The opposite of optimize. Make the worst or least effective use of (a situation, opportunity, or resource).

Dave McClure -- master of 500 hats -- thinks I'm part of the secret society of design hit-men; the design mafia, even. I can see certain advantages to maintaining this image. I'm going to go along with it.

Dave says:

If i'm fighting a guerrilla war and need a design done that will kill El Presidente, you are my man. best slide i've ever seen to get a point across... bar none.

Thanks, man. That means a lot coming from you.

This comes from Paul Graham, Y-Combinator investor who has a really great blog on the tech start-up business space. It's a good filter for choosing a vision (defining a problem) and then implementing it (designing a solution).

Find (1) simple solutions (2) to overlooked problems (3) that actually need to be solved, and (4) deliver them as informally as possible, (5) starting with a very crude first version, then (6) iterating rapidly.

The IxDA mailing list had a recent thread on the 7 habits of highly effective designers. It reminded me that I had sent this exact content out to the Yahoo! Design Group as my farewell message. It was my way of passing along the wisdom I had learned working at Yahoo!.

I cleaned it up for public consumption, and I pass it along now to you. Items 2-4 are really only directly applicable in a large organization such as Yahoo!; Nonetheless, they should give you some perspective on your own situation. I hope you find them useful. And I highly encourage designers to take #7 to heart.

1. Understand the user needs/goals before you design. I could expound on this one in length, but instead here is my pithy aphorism: "First define the problem, then design a solution."
2. Partner with a sympathetic PM or developer who will help champion your design. All of my design successes at Yahoo! had this as a common component.
3. Connect with your fellow designers. This is something I wish I'd done more of in my time here. It not only connects you with other like-minded colleagues, but it also exposes you to other areas of the business and might open you up to internal transfer opportunities. Cross-pollination is definitely a good thing.
4. Write up design bugs. This is the most effective tactic I've found for keeping important design details from falling through the cracks.
5. Use a highly responsive tool for creating design mocks. I have tried out many programs over the years including Photoshop, Illustrator, PowerPoint, Interface Builder, Visual Basic, AppleScript, and a host of others for creation design mocks; Visio is my current favorite on the PC, and OmniGraffle on the Mac. They are both very responsive and mostly keeps out of my way letting me focus on the design.
6. Know Thyself. I highly recommend reading either Now, Discover Your Strengths or StrengthsFinder 2.0 and taking the test therein. I found it extremely valuable to know and focus on my strengths.
7. Apply your design skills to your passions. There is a huge need for design thinkers in all areas of our lives, not just web and software. I've had success applying my design skills to several non-profits. I'm optimistic that designers can help solve the biggest problems facing us today. I believe that designers will play a critical role in crafting Public Policy 2.0™ in areas as diverse as the environment, human rights, commerce, and law. I'd love to see one of your names in the news when it happens.

Late last night as I was working on an update to my Designing with Vision presentation, I received an email from SlideShare. They chose to feature my presentation on the Slideshare's home page! It has already been pushed down the list by another on, so it probably won't last longer than a day or two. Still, it's helped me get over 300 views so far.

Check out the updated version if you haven't yet already. I got some great feedback from Jackson Gates that really improves the cohesiveness and flow.

Yes, I borrowed the title from Philip — my fellow KPAO-ian — but I think I have a unique take on it. However, what's more important is what you think. Let me know in the comments!

As you may know from my previous post on the subject, I'm a huge fan of Seeqpod for finding and listening to music right now with minimal hassle. However as I blogged about at the time, there is a downside; there is no easy way to get the actual MP3 file to put on your iPod. In fact, typing in the URL manually doesn't always work either; the original file might have been moved or deleted since Seeqpod indexed.

Well those issues are over. I ran across this video over the weekend that describes how to pull the mp3 files out of your browser cache. The Firefox-specific instructions start around 4:10. But to summarize:

1. Go to Seeqpod
2. Find a song you want
3. Play it, making sure the download progress bar goes all the way to the end
4. Open a new Firefox tab and type about:cache in the location bar, then Enter
   
5. Navigate to the path shown for the Disk Cache Directory
   
6. Sort by size, ignore the _CACHE_00#_ files, and add .mp3 to the end of the biggest files.
7. Open them in your MP3 player to make sure you got it right. If so, rename the file.
   

Dave can't be the only one around here exploring the mysteries of fonts and typography. Presenting the Unicode snowman. ☃

Here's a bigger version for your viewing pleasure:
☃

Sean O'Malley — a colleague of mine — recently posted these slides on 3 marketing lessons to get your start-up off the ground. I've embedded it below so you can check it out right here.


I'm also working on a similar slide deck on designing with vision. Look for that in the coming days.

Today's NYTimes:

Mr. Obama criticized Mr. McCain and Rick Davis, Mr. McCain's campaign manager, for his comment on Friday that the campaign is "not a CNBC news show on the stock market."

Reading such sentences is, to me, like running into a brick wall.   Whose comment?  About whose campaign?   Is that person suggesting that there should be more talk about the stock market?  Or less? 

I can't proceed without unraveling not just the ambiguity, but its sources.  I'm paralyzed by the drive to clearly understand.  Why continue reading without understanding the premise?

This affliction makes me a slow, but thorough reader.  (And a charter member of the Obviousness Fan Club.)

Pausing to think it through, I suppose it must have been McCain who had upbraided Obama for dwelling too much on the stock market.

But this post is not about politics or unclear writing.  It's about cognitive psychology.  I want to know: am I alone afflicted with this condition?  Are are any of you so vexed?

(PS: Turns out I was wrong; it was McCain's campaign manager who had made the comment, not McCain.)

My latest crazy idea involves crowdsourcing for good. Much like you can install applications that let you donate your unused computing power to analyze SETI data or protein folding, I was thinking that people could donate their time to add phone numbers into the USA's Do Not Call registry.

I suppose this could be automated, but such a service would quickly get shut down. Instead, treat the problem more like BitTorrent model. Have a central repository that tracks all of the numbers that are already in the system, and offers new numbers up for people to submit. The person simply clicks a button, and then clicks another to confirm, and they are done.

You'd think that this registry would confirm with a call to the actual number, but they don't. The confirmation comes over email to an address you enter. So you can use your own address (with a + uniqufier if you want), or even a service like Mailinator.

Yes, I realize that the FAQ on the site says that "You should register only your own telephone numbers.", but as far as I can tell, this is in no way illegal. Besides, very little of great import every got done by people sticking with only what they should do.

Vertical Horizon is one of my favorite bands. Well, at least their last two albums, Everything You Want and Go. They have a new album coming out this fall called Burning the Days, though exactly when no one knows. So I created a Google Alert to find out more.

And today, I received notice of this FTP site which appears to have the audio files from the new album up. Get them now before they are gone. And for crying out loud, buy the freaking album when it comes out and support these guys. These files should be considered previews for the final product. The band is great and your purchase is a vote in support of that.

My main bank account is at Fidelity, which has no local branches. So when I need to get money out of an ATM, I can choose any one I want. As of late, I've been going out of my way to use Wells Fargo ATMs. Why? Because I'm a design geek, and Wells Fargo has recently rolled out a new UI design for their ATMs. (Well, it has been over a year since they started the roll-out, but I only just noticed it.)

Holger Struppek was the lead visual designer on the re-design project and has a great article documenting the process. Of course half the reason I love the new design is because the font they use throughout is Myriad (the same font used by Apple for its corporate brand). It really makes the whole UI feel a lot fresher and cleaner.

So at least for me — admittedly not your typical banking consumer — the commodity world ATMs has been differentiated by good design and it has turned me into a customer. Do you know of any other commodity products differentiating by design? Leave a comment!

This is a half-baked idea, but as a designer, I've always thought there should be some scale of measurement for the ease-of-use of something. The two ends of the scale are pretty easy to define. At the far end is something that is simply impossible, such as backward time travel or a pain-free Windows experience. We'll call this 0. And the other end is something that is impossible to prevent from happening, like the sunrise or the hype surrounding any Apple event. This will be 10. The midpoint (5) would be for things that are of average ease-of-use, which is more difficult to define. I suppose it would be along the lines of using a standard can opener. "Using" computer viruses are somewhere around a 7 or 8 on the scale, whereas using your average cell phone is somewhere around a 2.

That's about as far as I've got so far, but I thought I'd throw it out there and see if anyone else had ideas on this, or pointers to similar thinking. I'm too lazy  to do the research myself, so I'm trying to crowdsource it here. :-)

I'm a huge fan of Ben Folds. Whereas Elton John, Billy Joel and Bruce Hornsby defined the genre of "piano pop", Ben Folds is staunchly in the "piano rock" category. His new album, Way to Normal, doesn't disappoint, despite 3 fairly weak songs in the middle (Errant Dog, Free Coffee, and Bitch Went Nuts).

But what really amazed me was the "leak" version. Over an 8-hour recording session, Ben and his band composed and recorded 6 tracks, which they bundled with a couple of real songs from the album. They then put the package up on file sharing sites several weeks before the real album was schedule to launch. Rolling Stone has a great article about it.

And the thing is, those songs are good. I mean really good. Sure they're rough, but they also have emotion and musicianship behind them. As Ben says:

The word 'fake' came up when we started doing it and it takes all the responsibility out. You can just be free to write and let it go... I may be on crack, but I think if that was half the real record, it'd be good. Everyone I know keeps wanting to put it in and play it.

I agree. Way to Normal is a great song with a very catchy chorus. Free Coffee Town is a much better song than the version on the real album. Frowne Song and Lovesick Diagnostician are also solid songs. Honestly, I would have paid for this album too.

Fark has a fantastic thread going on now comparing the current US Presidential / VP candidates. It is amazing to me how the simple concept of a table of picture equivalences can be riffed on so many different and original ways, yet still stay within the same form.

Planet Granite just opened a new climbing gym in San Francisco recently. It's in a renovated warehouse in the Presidio, near Fort Point. They left some of the old fixtures in place during the renovation, and as a result there is some gorgeous art deco typography sprinkled throughout.

On the top level, there are some great signs from old P&H mining equipment, as you can see in the photos here. I really loved the ampersand, so I spent some time today recreating it in vector form. Here it is. Click it to download the SVG file.

Bill Gates used to have a corporate vision: "information at your fingertips".  With LaunchBar that future is here.  This is far and away my A-number-1 mac productivity tip and I've passed it along to the many PC migrants who have asked me for Mac advice.

With LaunchBar, here is what I can do from anywhere, at any time:

• Open an app, document or a project folder: cmd-space, then type a few of letters of the item to open, then press return
• You can navigate up and down the folder hierarchy.  For example: type in an abbreviation to get to a project folder, then use the arrow keys to get to a particular document within the folder.
• Open a recently used app: "cmd-space ps space" reveals, for example, a list of recently opened Photoshop files.  Arrow down and pick one to open it.
  

You can directly access the Mac Address Book and Mail:

• Look up David Cortright in the address book: "cmd-space cortr return"
• Start a new email to David Creemer: "cmd-space creem shift-return"
  

Accessing websites is fast:

• Get to any browser bookmark*: "cmd-space nyt" to get to nytimes.com.
  
• Open a URL : "cmd-space cmd-l productvision.org"  There is no need to have a browser open or frontmost.
  

Launchbar has search templates, so you can get straight to the search results.  Here are some searches do all the time:

• Look up something in Google: "cmd-space g product vision"
  
• Look up something in Wikipedia: "cmd-space w bill maher"
• Look up an address in Google Maps: "cmd-space gm 123 Sesame 32177"
• Look up a store in Google Maps: "cmd-space gm pizza 94114"
• Search for a product in Amazon: "cmd-space am nikon d90"
  
• Look up a movie in Rotten Tomatoes: "cmd-space rt religulous"
  
• Look up a movie in Netflix: "cmd-space nfs the closer"
• Look up something in Yahoo Answers: "cmd-space ya remove bubble gum"
  

You can do this from anywhere, at any time.  You don't have to switch apps and you don't have to take your fingers off the keyboard. 

Recently, in The Mother of All Search Functions David Pogue wrote about how you can use Google's I'm Feeling Lucky to find things so much quicker.  That is great, except you have to find your way to the Google home page, which can take a few steps.  With LaunchBar you can kick it up a notch and find things through I Feel Lucky anywhere, anytime.  To use Pogue's examples:

• Get straight to a product page in Amazon:  "cmd-space gl amazon freakonomics"
• Find something on ebay: "cmd-space gl ebay delft figurine"
• Look up a word in the dictionary Define.com: "cmd-space gl define ersatz"
• Look up someone in Facebook: "cmd-space gl facebook amy pomeroy"

Using I Feel Lucky in conjunction with LaunchBar bypasses the search results page and takes you straight to the destination page.  This is a good choice if you have a reasonable belief that a definitive page should exist out there.

There are other solutions that do bits and pieces of what LaunchBar does.

FireFox 3 has its awesome bar, which lets you do some of LaunchBar's tricks within the URL line.  It's a big step forward, but still not in the same league as LaunchBar.  But it's not smart about the abbreviations, and you must first be in Firefox, in the address bar.  Having LaunchBar globally accessible saves you these little steps a hundred times a day.

MacOS has Spotlight to launch docs, which was apparently inspired in part by LaunchBar.  But it doesn't learn your shortcuts and it's only for finding stuff on your hard drive.

There are other tools on the Mac, some free (Butler and Quicksilver).  I have tried them extensively, and they are not bad.  But when you are shooting for maximum productivity, I have found that it's not worth scrimping.  LaunchBar is the professional's tool.

A key feature that distinguishes LaunchBar from the competition is that you don't have to explicitly pre-program the shortcuts.  Just use what feels natural and automatic.  To get to nytimes.com, just type any reasonable subset from the string... nyt, ny, times, pick the correct match from the disambiguation menu.  It'll quickly learn to associate the destination with the shortcuts you typically use.  You train it just by using it, not by going into a configuration UI. 

And you don't have to be consistent.  Use "nyti" one day and "ny" the next.  It'll learn your habits after a couple of tries.  This means you don't have to memorize shortcuts you haven't used in a while.

If you use a Mac as your main productivity computer, you really owe it to yourself to get a hold of LaunchBar.   Opening and finding things does not get much faster.  It's Information at your fingertips.

(*Caveat: Firefox 3's new bookmarking system is not yet supported in LaunchBar, but will be in an upcoming version.  In the meantime there is a good workaround.)

The Copyright Royalty Board kept royalties on digital music downloads at 9¢ — a smart move. But what is mind-boggling is that they set royalties on ringtones at 24¢. So they basically are saying that the value of a 10% portion of a song (a 30-second clip of a 5 minute song) is nearly 3× the value of the whole song. Talk about out of touch with reality.

Going either further, I don't understand why anyone would buy a ringtone, rather than simply buying the full song, and exercising their fair use rights to create a ringtone from it. It's simple to do if you have an iPhone and the latest version of GarageBand. And there are several ways to create ringtones using just iTunes.

All of this begs the question why one even needs the have the song to create a ringtone. All of the digital music stores offer 30-second previews of every song they sell. It seems like it'd be pretty straightforward to automate the process of grabbing this 30-second clip and turning it into a ringtone. Anyone know of such a untlity?

For one of my work projects, I needed to edit the hosts file on my Parallels Windows XP VM (which I use to test IE 7 compatibility). I ended up creating a shortcut to it, and thought others might find it valuable.

1. Right-click on the Desktop
2. Click New -› Shortcut
3. Type: %SystemRoot%\system32\notepad.exe %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
4. Click Next
5. Type: edit hosts file
6. Click Finish

Now just double-click on that shortcut on your desktop to edit your hosts file.