Choosing your Choices

Posted on by Eric F. Savage

A popular theory of the past few years that has worked its way into the web/business/usability spheres is that more choices are worse. Essentially the idea is that people get stressed out and balk at making choices. If you order a chicken salad and you’re given one, you’re happy. If they ask you if you want your chicken from California or Canada or Mexico, and your mayonnaise from Vermont or Cape Cod, you get less happy. The idea was largely popularized by the book Paradox of Choice, which I haven’t read but apparently goes over the theory ad nauseam.

The result is that many people posing as knowledgeable on various matters have latched onto this and now add “too many choices” to their canned list of “insights”. I don’t buy it, and others are going so far as to disprove it. I think the real lesson is that choices decrease happiness when you don’t understand them. Asking me if I want my chicken from California or Canada doesn’t mean anything to me if I don’t have strong feelings about those two places, but if you said “would you like your chicken from California, which tends to be more tender, or Canada, which has lower fat”, the choice is now very valuable to me. I’m going to happier than I was without any because I know that I got the tastier or healthier one and made a good choice for me.

You can, of course, have too many choices (televisions, CPUs, wines), and you can also have too few (cable/internet service providers, political parties). When you’re deciding what to offer your current and prospective customers and users, you need to decide what makes sense for your business and them, and most importantly, you need to articulate the difference. If you can’t do that, then you can say that you have too many.

What Startups are Really Like (Really!)

Posted on by Eric F. Savage

Paul Graham has issued another missive about startups called What Startups are Really Like.Obviously YMMV but based on my experience at StyleFeeder, he’s about 1/2 right, and 1/2 wrong, which is par for his course (the 1/2 right part usually redeems the 1/2 wrong part).

1. Be Careful with Cofounders

True. A piece of advice my dad gave me was that you should always try to avoid getting someone else involved if you can.

2. Startups Take Over Your Life

False. You can let it, you can also let a job at a billion dollar company take over your life. You can not let it take over your life. People at StyleFeeder have moved, had kids, done the normal “life” things.

3. It’s an Emotional Roller-coaster

False. You can let it be one, but you’re not really serving anyone’s interests if you are. You might succeed wildly, you might fail miserably. Your life could change for the better, but it’s only going to change for the worse if you’re dumb and you put yourself in that position.

4. It Can Be Fun

True.

5. Persistence Is the Key

True, but this applies to life, not just startups.

6. Think Long-Term

True. Keep in mind that long term means profitable. No matter what’s in the bank if you’re not profitable you’re dying.

7. Lots of Little Things

True. Details matter. Alot. Spend the whole day shaving 10ms off your average response time. Spend a night picking out a font. Argue with your designer over ridiculous things nobody else will notice.

8. Start with Something Minimal

True. Note, this doesn’t mean you should put out unfinished crap and call it “Beta”. Just get it to the point where it’s useful and cohesive.

9. Engage Users

True.

10. Change Your Idea

True. More accurately “be willing to change your idea”. Ideas are cheap and plentiful. I could keep a dozen people busy building things at StyleFeeder that are great ideas, but that’s not how we run things so we need to chart our course thoughtfully and constantly.

11. Don’t Worry about Competitors

False. Feel free to define your competition, but you need some or nobody will take you seriously. Then worry about them because they’re trying to take everything you have.

12. It’s Hard to Get Users

False. Users are easy to get, if you have something worth using. Probably not as many as you want, but that’s why they call it work.

13. Expect the Worst with Deals

False. Be realistic, not pessimistic. Most deals will suck, some will cost you money, some will work out, but without them, you’re likely dead.

14. Investors Are Clueless

False. They can be, but they can also provide valuable perspective.

15. You May Have to Play Games

True. You might, but you shouldn’t. If you’re weak on something, fix it or do something else. Don’t hide it.

16. Luck Is a Big Factor

True. Not everyone founds a company on the right side of a stock bubble and sells it for far more than it could ever be worth. Luck is also a reason not to be pessimistic about deals and opportunities.

17. The Value of Community

True. Overrated, but true.

18. You Get No Respect

False. I get the same or more respect as a key employee at a company trying to do something new than I did as a cog in the corporate world.

19. Things Change as You Grow

True, but if that’s surprising you probably shouldn’t be doing this.

“Unconsciously, everyone expects a startup to be like a job, and that explains most of the surprises.”

False. I’m actually surprised by how much like a job it is, just better.

Idea: DropSteam

Posted on by Eric F. Savage

Valve Software has a distribution platform called Steam. It’s very simple, and very nice. You buy a game through Steam, and download and install it. When you get a new computer, you sign into steam, and re-install all your games. Don’t play a game much anymore? Delete it, you can always go back and get it. No CDs, no need to back stuff up, etc.

Dropbox is a relative new service that let’s me have a folder on my computer at work, and at home. I can put a PDF I want to read later in the folder from work, and it automatically uploads it, and my home computer automatically downloads it. Dropbox also lets me share folders and is starting to integrate with other services.

Both of these services have other features that are nice, but what I’d like to see is something that would basically let me buy a new computer (or reformat my current one in the wake of a virus or spyware or disk failure), and just go through and download the things I want on it. It would also keep things in sync, maintain checkpoints and versions. So my photos are in a folder, but they’re also on Flickr. Changing it in one place changes it in another. My music is there, and can be streamed when I’m at a friends house. The possibilities are pretty open.

It’s basically the benefits of an X-windows remote environment I guess, though that could even be integrated if it had a thin client into a virtualized box you paid by the hour for… I’ve seen lots of pieces of this out there, but nobody that’s really working on the basic central component.

Album of the Year?

Posted on by Eric F. Savage

My venerable iPod had a bad run-in with an open sunroof and some precipitation, and my other one is still packed, along with my music drive. After a couple months of tinkering with Pandora and Last.fm, I needed to go out and find some good music the old fashioned way. That means without the benefit of a recommendation engine that thinks my affinities for various flavors of hip-hop and bands from France (Daft Punk, Air) mean I will like French hip-hop. Which I don’t. Because it’s horrible. French is well suited for poetry and indignation, but rapping … non.

So, I trawled the Amazon mp3 store for a while and ended up with a basket of albums:

1. Lily Allen’s “It’s Not Me, It’s You” – Decent but disposable pop, previous album was far more interesting.
2. Franz Ferdinand’s “Tonight” – Low expectations were met, I don’t even know if I’ve listened to it twice.
3. Andrew Bird’s “Noble Beast” – I haven’t really give this one a chance yet, it’s kind of wimpy and I haven’t really found the right situation to listen to it yet.

Then things started to get interesting.

4. Passion Pit’s “Manners” – As long as you skip the first song, this is a great, fun album. There’s hints of Michael Jackson, Daft Punk, some 70s and 80s pop, but it’s fresh, not retro. I was hooked on it for a week or so.

One of my favorite albums from 2008, though it was released in 2007, was Panda Bear’s “Person Pitch”, which might best be described as listening to a Beach Boys cover band playing at Arlington station while you’re at Symphony. I never realized that Panda Bear was a part of the Animal Collective, but when I found out, I bought:

5. Animal Collective’s “Merriweather Post Pavilion” – This is a complicated album, that I just couldn’t really get into at first, but after a while, I came back to it and enjoyed it much more.

Serendipity struck when I bought the final album in the list, thinking it was another Animal Collective member, which it’s not, but given the name you can understand my confusion.

6. Grizzly Bear’s “Veckatimest” – The first time I listened to this album I was picking on some Radiohead wannabe vibes, but then I tried again and picked up a couple things and liked it more. Then again, and again, and again, for my entire commute to and from work each day. Each day I have a different favorite song. I haven’t enjoyed an album this much in years, probably since Atmosphere’s “Sevens Travels”. If you want something interesting, a little outside of the box but not as weird as Panda Bear or as over the top as Passion Pit, you should definitely check it out.

Fire the user experience designer

Posted on by Eric F. Savage

This post makes a case for having a specialized “user experience designer”. The author makes the case that usability and interaction design is too complicated to be handled by someone responsible for other tasks. This is false.

If you are on a team responsible for a website or something similar, EVERYONE on your team should understand usability and interaction design. It’s not a special skill, it’s core competency, like communication skills and ethics. The real experts out are rare, and I mean “you’ll probably never even meet one” rare. Most people who specialize in it are just washed-up designers or coders.

You need your designers thinking about how people will interact with your program, or you’re going to end up with brochureware. You need you programmers thinking about it or you’re going to end up with a clumsy UI. You need your QA people to think about it or you’re going to end up with spotty test plans. You need your managers thinking about it to understand what’s important. You need your salespeople thinking about it to compare against your hapless competition.

Having someone responsible for it is a bad idea because not only are they probably going to suck at it, it’s just going to make everyone else lazy.

A Salty Moment of Silence

Posted on by Eric F. Savage

A moment of silence please. Not for Michael Jackson. Not for Farrah Fawcett, or Billy Mays, or Robert McNamara. No, this is far worse, a beloved piece of the American landscape has suffered a terrible blow.

The Slim Jim plant … the ONLY Slim Jim plant … has exploded.

It may take months to recover, but we’ll get through this.

Stay strong.

NB: My condolences to the families of the 3 heroes that perished in the incident.

Locked Doors, Open Windows

Posted on by Eric F. Savage

Most people with any clue about interaction design know that Jakob Nielsen is a jackass. There are thousands of other usability professionals who offer opinions as fact, don’t take their own advice, but Nielsen was there in the early days, and for some reason caught on with his obvious or wrong ideas.

His latest “alertbox” (apologies for linking to such a horrible looking site) says that users are so completely dumb and clumsy that they can’t type passwords in correct, and that masking is a bad idea. Wow. I’ve never mentioned or linked to Jakob Nielsen on this blog before, but I feel a duty to contribute what meager link juice I have to making this astonishing bit of advice the highest ranked page on that site. What would cause someone to suggest that this first layer of security is a detriment?

More importantly, there’s usually nobody looking over your shoulder when you log in to a website. It’s just you, sitting all alone in your office, suffering reduced usability to protect against a non-issue.

Really? My apologies Mr. Nielsen. All these years I thought your ideas were bad because you just made stuff up and wanted to sound like you knew what you were talking about. Little did I know that your lack of clue regarding how people use computers is the result of the fact that you don’t work with actual people. You should do one of your infamous studies (preferably of indeterminate size and method, as usual) and see if people log in to websites from exotic venues like the “train station” or maybe even a “meeting”.

Palm Pre

Posted on by Eric F. Savage

Palm PreI was impressed with the iPhone when it came out, but not enough to warrant the expense of the device and the overpriced service plan and dealing with switching carriers (especially to AT&T). I had the Spring PPC-6700 at the time, which was decent and got me hooked on having a mobile calendar and contact database without carrying a PDA. When Palm announced the Pre, I decided I would wait for it, and if it wasn’t up to snuff, I’d cave and buy an iPhone.

Luckily, the Pre is a fantastic device. I haven’t spent enough time with the iPhone to compare it honestly, but it seems like a much more polished experience. It automatically syncs my Google calendar, my girlfriend’s calendar, my work calendar, the Red Sox schedule. It easily unifies contacts from Facebook, Google, AIM, etc. I can send someone an IM, they can respond by SMS, it all goes into a common stream. It comes with both Sprint GPS and Google Maps.

Hardware-wise, it’s a little thicker, and a little shorter than an iPhone, more along the lines of a conventional phone. The screen is fantastic, it works in the sun and is crystal clear. The touch screen is well designed even for my round fingers, it seems to intuitively know what I meant to click on. The keyboard is small, but effective.

Minor issues so far: A bug in the instant messaging client that chews through an entire battery in 6-8 hours. I disabled it and it now goes 2-3 days with light internet usage. Supposedly this will be fixed via software update. Charging uses a tiny USB connector and a cover that doesn’t feel very durable once opened (but very durable when closed). I didn’t get a touchstone (the new induction charger) yet, but I probably will, which should remedy that. The fact that it doesn’t do video is not really an issue for me, my other phone did it and I think I used it once in 2.5 years.

My major problem with now is that for some reason, Palm has not released the SDK to the public yet, and has not accepted my application. This means they missing really useful features like an RSS reader or the hundreds of other standard apps out there. There are only 30 applications to download right now, the iPhone has 50,000. Even if 99% of those are total crap, that’s still alot more than Palm is offering. They really need to open this up soon, while they’ve got some shininess.