Monthly Archives: July 2007

07/23/07

Books for a Better World, Pt. 1

There are a couple books (literally, two) that I find myself quoting from on a very regular basis. Today, I come to speak of the book that takes about an hour to read and years to fully assimilate.

But before I reveal the identity of this book, a question: when was the last time you started using a new application (for the sake of this blog, “applications” includes web sites) and felt like the architect of said application truly cared about your experience?

Speaking from personal experience, it never occurred to me why certain applications felt “better” and “worse” to use. Nor did I ask myself why frustrating applications had ended up being designed as they were. Now I reflect on both regularly, and the reason is Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug.

Before I go any further, I should probably throw in fair warning: after reading this book, my reaction to using poorly designed software has changed from a mix of frustration and confusion to simple anger. If I waste more than five minutes finding a basic piece of functionality in an application, this now generally leads to severe annoyance. There is a fair chance that you, too, will revile the authors of your poorly designed software after reading this book. Therefore, if you are a person of action with a strong sense of justice, think twice before reading a text this potent.
dontmakemethink.jpg
But if you think you can deal with the truth, here’s what you’ll learn:

The premise of the book centers around the fact that users are very busy people who have neither the time nor the will to give an application as much attention as designers think they will. Krug asserts that when encountering a new application, the human impulse is to scan a page in about 1-3 seconds, make a best guess what will get them where they want to go (in Krug’s words, “satisfice”), and muddle along from there. He points out that designers should take care not to waste users’ milliseconds through making unclear links or leave them stranded in an application without a clear sense of where they are. He goes on to do some exercises where the reader sees examples of well-organized sites (i.e., Amazon) and poorly organized sites (buy the book and see them).

What’s more, the book is chock full of pictures and great examples. As I’ve come to know other Internet entrepreneurs within the community, I have found myself repeatedly citing examples in this book, as it seems to take most applications at least an iteration or two before they can get enough user feedback to create a UI layout that makes sense. Without this book and a strong sense of responsibility to your user, an application can quite easily never get things right.

With this book explained, you can now look forward to hearing the exasperated tales of applications that drive me bonkers, like TopStyle. This application earned itself an express ticket to my bad side today when, after handily reporting files with CSS errors in them, it provides no clear path of how to fix (or even view) these errors. Clicking on a specific error in a list of errors just jumps directly to the top of the file that the error resides in, not to the error itself. Brilliant.

07/20/07

The Storm

The storm of activity has begun, as we have finally found the web designer/scripter we need to finish the alpha push. Without further ado, let me introduce (ahem)…. me!

I tried to do it otherwise. The eMyth guy would surely have a cow about the entrepreneur/technician overlap, but at some point, I’ve found that the complexity of proposing deals to web designers in the relative absence of cashflow and a demonstrable user or technology base is just less efficient than getting my hands dirty in the Javascript/CSS/AJAX/Ruby/Rails/HTML. And besides, most all of the contributors to the project so far have found me, not vice versa.

But I like learning, so I’m generally enjoying the web development experience so far. Moving from console/application development to web development really does bring into focus the issue of “what satisfies you” as a developer? I speculate that most people find the greatest satisfaction when they can use their creativity to make coolest possible stuff happen on their technology platform. Web development has those overtones, but it seems to me to be just as involved “how to get your code to run on buggy browsers developed 10 years ago” as it is creative problem solving. I don’t know who finds that satisfying, but as a means to an end, that’s what this game seems to be about.

07/12/07

Be Wrong

I love being wrong. Actually, check that, I hate being wrong. But I love finding out how and why I am being wrong.

When considering whether to undertake a new type of challenge, my guess is that “being wrong” is a big component of what makes people hesitate. Why?

In school, we all had regular opportunities to be wrong. Every test you took, you would probably be wrong on at least 10% of the answers. And there was no subjectivity; no “this seems wrong but it could just be me.” You simply didn’t “get” the test question, or you misunderstood the homework instructions, and you had to learn what had caused your reasoning flaw.

Graduating to a professional environment, it seems like the opportunities to be bona fide “wrong” are few and far between. Those who are regularly told they are “wrong” are often people who become disgruntled and leave their job. The rest of us glide happily along, forgetting what it was like to get a “C” on the final.

But what more fundamental component of personal growth is there than learning, and what more fundamental component of learning is there than experiencing failures? If you haven’t been exceedingly wrong at least six times in the last six months, I’ll bet you’re becoming less than your potential.

07/9/07

Lull Before the Storm

Here it is. Do you hear it? It is the sound of nothing happening. It is the sound that indicates that my video game is almost done, and has at long last provided a bit of that “end of project crunch” that the game industry has become famous for.

The game is preliminarily done tomorrow. It’s done in final form a week or two after.

And that’s when this party really gets afoot. Immediately following the conclusion of my regularly scheduled programming, two weeks of “vacation” follow. And by “vacation,” I of course mean discussing, designing, and maybe even developing, if that’s what it takes, to put the legs on this here hobby horse.

Stay tuned…

07/4/07

Buy! Buy! Buy!

I think I’ve hit upon a pretty apt analogy for the ebb and flow of getting one’s business rolling. It is the very indicator used by millions of business the world over. It is the stock market.

200_year_stock_chart.gifFirst of all — and you won’t hear me admitting this again at any point in the near future — a lot of what comprises “success” is stupid luck. I have spent hundreds of hours recruiting our team to this point, and the best people we have all 1) came from different sources 2) did not find out about Bonanzle through any of the numerous postings I’ve made to sites like Jobster and the UW Career Center. People routinely ask me (and I routinely ask other people) how to find the best people for a project, and the generally accepted answer is that nobody’s got a clue. You just keep talking to people and eventually get lucky. The stock market analog is the (fairly common) incident where a lifelong financial analyst is beaten by the S&P 500. Even seasoned analysts can’t generally compete with luck.

Second, no single day is very indicative of the overall trend. I think this is one those principles you hear a lot when talking about entrepreneurialism without really understanding it. It’s often worded as “you should expect a lot of adversity and challenges to overcome,” but when you actually experience these “challenges” (or less nicely: failures) on a daily basis, it is easy to get discouraged and lose track of the overall upward trend. What it feels like is that every time you get traction with a new idea or new recruit or well-executed maneuver, it gets negated by the Looming Unforeseeable Obstacles. But, viewed objectively, a business only needs to have slightly less failures than it has successes to win. In the stock market (and in my stock market, fantasy basketball), the same is true: trend trumps daily blips.

And the correlate to both the first and second principle? That the best you can do for either your business or stock is to put yourself in the best possible position to succeed, cross your fingers, and pray to the law of averages for a break. Oh dearest law of averages always comes to the rescue of the worthy. But eventually.

07/2/07

Slog Conquers Blog

Alas, dear blog, you have been whupped by the slog of this week’s tasks and obligations, but I’m fighting back as valiantly as can be.

Most recently, Bonanzle.com has had some of its content refreshed to reflect the current needs of the site (i.e., web designer), and to ensure that the most visited pages (i.e., “About Us”) have some information that is as useful as possible, without actually being so useful as to describe just what this project is all about.

In general, things on rolling. No two weeks are the same, and no one week is easy, but every week puts a few more tangible pieces into the puzzle, which is a most satisfying process to watch.