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Notes from the SXSW Tuesday Keynote: Jane McGonigal presentation

Instead of making more powerful AI, Jane McGonigal focusses on making reality more like gaming.

But let's start with happiness. There is an increasing large body of research into the science of happiness. This new focus will shift the focus of businesses to design for happiness.

Predictions

• Quality of life becomes a primary metric for evaluating interactive experiences
• Positive psychology is be an increasingly explicit tool in design
• Communities form around different visions of real worth living
• Value will be defined as a measurable increase in real happiness, or well being

Happiness has changed

It isn't a warm fuzzy thing any more. It is instead a complicated set of qualities. It is about having meaningful things to do that make you feel successful. It is about being a part of something bigger.

Multiplayer games, in this view, are the ultimate happiness engine.

In games we can be good at things that we can't be good at in real life. In World of Warcraft there are legions of people there who want to collaborate with you. The system gives constant feedback about your improvement. Game worlds are designed to make you feel good at something. The real world isn't set up this way.

1. Games have better instructions
2. Games give constant feedback
3. Games have better community

A global mass exodus

It started in North America but its spreading. There is a global mass exodus to virtual worlds from the real world. This isn't bad, per se, but it is happening.

• See economist Edward Castronova

We can create the same values that exist in the virtual world in the real world. People who shift to virtual worlds are making rational choices. The calculus would shift if the real world were designed with the same values in mind. The real world can be made more adventurous. People can be made to feel that they are as good at real life as they are at games.

But there's some bad news. Games are great but they are too narrow. Its as if we invented the written word and decided only to write books. Words outside of books are transformative. Games could have the same impact.

• See Chore Wars
• See Zyked
• See Seriosity

To imagine the future, always look back at least twice as far as you are looking forward.

Looking backward to see an analogy for the situation is to look back at soap in 1931. The headline reads "Soap Kills Germs." Soap had been around for thousands of years but it took a long time for it to become ubiquitous. Similarly, "Games Kill Boredom." Games kill alienation, they kill anxiety, they kill lack of confidence, and they can kill depression by giving purpose and community.

Alternate reality game designers are trying to embed these happiness engines into everyday life.

The concept "alternate reality" comes from science fiction. Alternate, not alternative. This terms comes from the community and it is called Alternate because it is an alternate way of experiencing this reality, not an alternative to this reality.

World without oil

• See World without Oil

It was a global simulation of an oil shock. Players lived their real lives as if this were their reality. They were given fictional parameters for their geography and documented experiences in this context.

The alternate reality lasted for thirty days.

A soldier in Iraq wrote a live journal about what it would be like to fight war without oil. People made videos of themselves actually changing their trucks to biodiesel. People did man-on-the-street interviews with non-players to get people thinking about what it would be like if the world ran out of oil.

Research

When you match the strengths of alternate reality games with the science of happiness you see some very interesting overlaps.

1. Mobbability: good at coordinating groups quickly
2. Cooperation radar: able to know who would be good collaborators for particular missions
3. Ping quotient: ability to reach out to others in a network and likelihood to respond
4. Influencing: how easily you can persuade people of something in specific contexts, a fluid sense of getting people to band together and work with you
5. Multi-capitalism: an understanding of the different value systems that people trade in; social capital, environmental capital, etc. As large groups band together, understanding this is very important.
6. Protovation: rapid fearless innovation, the feeling that failure is fun because it means that you're learning. Quick frequent failure is the point because you're constantly trying new things.
7. Open authorship: comfort with giving content away and knowing that it will be changed. A design skill for creating things that won't be broken with changes.
8. Signal/noise management: an ability to handle a high volume of noise and know which bit of information is relevant right at this moment.
9. Longbroading: the ability to think in bigger systems; longer time systems or big communities
10. Emergensight: the ability to spot patterns as they bubble up, comfort with the messy complexity of new things at large scales

These ten things amplify our natural tendency to the optimal human experience.

Where do we go next?

What is the infrastructure for this? Twitter is a natural interface. The Nike iPod is a useful tool for this. Trackstick is a way to map your location to a map with GPS. The console in the Prius is a video game. Virgin is putting really interesting communication systems on the plane. This is an opportunity for social games that will improve reality.

Look at places like dog parks. You can make that environment into a virtual game.

The lost ring

This is an alternate reality game for the 2008 olympics. It is a way for people to discover old olympic sports that nobody knows how to play any more. This is a way for people to participate in something that they could be the best at in the world.

Takeaways

1. soon enough, most of us will be in the happiness business so look at the books about the science of happiness
2. game designers have a huge head start because they've been doing this for twenty years so look to games for inspiration and research
3. alternate realities signal the desire, need and opportunity for all of us to redesign reality for real quality of life

Q&A

Q: The military has been very aggressive in using video games and politicians have used videogame language. What is the impact of games on these big issues?

A: It is important to differentiate between different kinds of games and different components of games. The military has been using games to make it easier for soldiers to go to war. This isn't the "best" use of games but it is significant because it points to the same trend toward gaming. It is important for game developers to work toward benevolent causes.

Q: To what extent are things like gaming substitutes for absences in life or building on top of life?

A: Blogs work better for conversations for people and the same is true with games. Not all bloggers or gamers have lives that need fixing but some gamers are replacing their broken realities with games. It is important to have a real conversation about this. Game makers need to take this seriously and work to build games that make reality more survivable.

Q: Most ARGs seem to be more narrative driven. What is the direction?

A: Much of the press around this has focussed on the web but there is a rich history of these things happening in the world real.

• See SF0

Q: The best ARGs seem to be big productions but they are also temporary. How do we get these things to keep going?

A: This is a business model problem. Right now people see these games as part of a marketing strategy which will end. The pay-to-play model offers an interesting model for ongoing games but this is still being sorted out.

Q: One sponsor of The Lost Ring is McDonalds. How do reconcile this?

A: It could be a way to change McDonalds but it is also a chance to make this biggest best thing possible. The designers aren't thinking about the sponsor, the sponsor is enabling the project to happen.

Business model questions are always tricky. You need money to make things but it is moving in the direction of TV. We understand that TV is funded by sponsors but still engage with the content.

Q: Games change how we see our physical spaces.

A: Yes. Once you've had an ARG somewhere it changes the way you interact with a space. The idea that you can overlay a sense of confidence and adventure in a real space is a wonderful thing.

• See Tombstone Hold'Em

Q: How do you balance individual creativity and rules?

A: It is important to have top-down structure to start but then can open up as the game evolves. If you are trying to solve a problem with a game you need to do plenty of research and use that to push the gamers in a direction.

Q: What about things like "The Game" which encourages men to game women?

A: It is important to define the kind of game you're playing. Games need to be collaborative. This behavior is a game that isn't apparent to everyone involved. As games become more situated in real life it might help this by making it more apparent that this isn't fair or fun for everyone. It is important to separate real games from metaphorical games. We should realize what games we are playing and play them fairly to create engagement where there used to be disengagement.

Q: Given the reaction of states to older forms of happiness seeking do you suspect that there will be a crack-down?

A: The state will either crack down or co-opt. It is important to explain games to people who are in power so they are not scared of them. We need to make game powerful media for good and game developers need to be involved in the conversation.

Q: What about gender?

A: This gets into interesting issues about subject matter and the media itself (2d vs 3d). Guys tend to be more into dwarves and stuff. ARGs offer more diverse subject matter and modes of play.

Notes from the Ten Tips for Managing a Creative Environment presentation at SXSW

Thesis: Looking at how other groups that make creative work effectively can teach us lessons for managing design.

Hard deadlines
Repetition
Trying to do something different with the creative process

Organizations sampled

• Neo-Futurists: Every sunday they have the audience roll dice and that determines what the performance contains. They spend from Sunday to Tuesday writing, editing, and rehearsing. They effectively and effectively create new content on a schedule year-round.
• Aqua Restaurant: Michelin rated restaurant in San Francisco
• Orchestras: Large organizations with long tenure that stay creative
• The Job Factory: screenwriting collective
• Steppenwolf Theater: Select group of actors who have tremendous creative freedom.
• Avenue Q: Broadway musical starring profane puppets.
• Web Techniques/ New Architects: magazine from the first internet boom.

The tips

Cross-train the entire team

Give all members of the team experience with the tasks performed by other members of the team.

In the neo-futurists, they explicitly select for people who can play multiple roles. Each member is a director, actor, tech, critic, etc. All have empathy for the experiences of other members of the team. This helps everyone understand what is possible.

Rotate creative leadership

Leadership depends on where the ideas come from. This changes person-to-person, day-to-day, etc. Each neo-futurists is a writer/performer who has ownership of their performance. This gives a sense of security because everyone knows that they will have a sense of ownership. They also have a voluntary conductor role. This individual facilitates the rehearsal process.

Actively turning the corner

In any organization there is a period of divergence and a period of convergence. The divergent period is the creative period, where new spaces are being explored. This is typified by a sense of possibility and unlocking ways of thinking. The vocabulary for this phase is always different but it is always present.

All groups also moved from this phase to the phase of production where convergence results in editing and making it happen.

Problems occur when people are in one phase but think they are in another. This can go both directions with shutting down brainstorming in divergence and moving targets in convergence.

But how do you know where you actually are? The neo-futurists organize it by having a hard physical break. They rehearse in an open fashion, take a smoke break, and come back to converge.

Orchestras do this by moving from early rehearsals to later rehearsals.

Know your roles

Successful teams know what they are supposed to do, they turn into hierarchical systems when it is time to converge. They trust each-other to make the right decisions.

Restaurant kitchens are the perfect example of this. When a restaurant is in service, every movement is precise and succinct.

Avenue Q is an interesting example because the writer said that once they went into production his job was to shut up.

In orchestras, each section leader is responsible for coordinating with each-other and the director to determine bowing patterns and to communicate that back to each performer. Once they are in rehearsal it is about becoming a unit.

Practice, practice, practice

This is not abut just improving individual skills but also about improving team skills as a unit. You need to have confidence in the people around you.

The neo-futurists do this by repeating their process again and again. When a group of people work together every week for a long time the process is different than in an organization that is always brining in new people. You deal with this by looking for opportunities to practice to gradually bring in new people or to try new methods.

At Adaptive Path they experiment with the idea of a design sprint. You set up a repeated schedule where you decide what you'll work on, start working on it, go into a room with the client and keep sketching and evolving the ideas with the client in the room. The design thus evolves in different ways than when you all go separately and come up with solutions.

Make your mission explicit to the whole team

Avenue Q took over two years to create. This resulted in a massive amount of material. They made a choice to have the lead character find his life purpose. This gave them a rubric by which to evaluate content and helped the team make editing choices.

As designers communication is critical to the success or failure of a project. The tricky part is that in the course of a conversation people can talk past each-other. There is an enormous amount of work out there about this. Having an explicit actionable mission helps to avoid this problem.

The neo-futurists have a clear set of artistic values that define the organization and the individual within the organization. This set up rules sets the boundaries for their creativity.

Clear constraints are essential to effective creative production.

Killing your darlings

You need reliable systemic ways for getting results out that are respectful and responsive. This means saying no to something in a way that treats each individual with respect.

In design we talk about "phase 2" or in the "parking lot."

The neo-futurists do this by starting with 30 plays and then cut down to 12. They used to have longwinded debates about this but realized that this risked creating a hostile environment. They switched to a system where they read out titles and if someone says "keep" to a title it goes in. If nobody says anything it doesn't go in.

Leadership is a service

Leadership is successful when it is seen as the ultimate support position. Avenue Q hired a director to run the show. They started by having each person go through and list everything they did, all of their investment in the project. This made everyone feel listened to and helped later when cuts needed to be made.

In publishing this happens when an editor helps the author make their words better.

By viewing yourself not as a dictator but as a facilitator you can be more effective. The goal is to give people the space to do their best work.

A good conductor bring an orchestra together as a unit and connects to the music in a way that makes for a better performance. A leader looks for people who are unhappy and wants to understand why before making a decision.

See a book called The Art of Possibility.

Generate projects around the groups creative interests

At Steppenwolf the members can propose plays and choose to work together. The same is true at Adaptive Path. When they get new projects they think about what the project contains and connect it to people who are interested in that subject.

If you pick projects for money or to get a client on your portfolio you won't do as well as picking projects because they are what your team wants to do.

Remember your audience

Make sure that you do something that actually is great for your audience. Creative work is for other people and you should never forget that while you are working.

Restaurants segment the audience between regulars and new diners. Regulars must be kept happy because they are the bread and butter of the restaurant. The chef cares about making new people happy and being new and different. This can be adversarial or complimentary but good organization work to represent both well.

The neo-futurists work hard to create a complete audience experience. They open the bar early, create a situation where the audience can interact before the show, and bring people up or involve them in the performance. This keeps the idea that they are both in service of the audience and their own creative vision.

Find ways to celebrate failure

Failure is an essential byproduct of creative activity. It should be ok to fail, to really fail.

At the end of a project take a moment to review what went well. Adaptive Path calls these "after-parties." Look for learning opportunities and learn those lessons. Ask what worked, what didn't, and what you learned. This sets you up to find constructive ways to resolve these issues.

If you don't take risks you'll just do the same thing again and again.

Q&A

Q: What if you all know the disciplines but have to do them all on the same project?

A: That goes to the issue of knowing your role. When it gets bendy. If you do a little of everything it can get fuzzy. Role definition conversation should happen more often. As you get to know them better you don't need to talk as much but you need to know what's happening.

Q: How do people who aren't managers make this happen?

A: Use guerilla techniques. Find like minds at your level and projects that let you make progress. If you're in a creative environment that won't let you try new things you should quit.

Q: How changing leadership mid-project can work?

A: Each project should have someone who clearly leads but everyone can work on different projects in different capacities. Let people step up and take the lead on a phase or for a whole project. Once you have a shared vision you can trust people to lead. This needs a comfortable egoless leader but is very healthy for organizations. You have to have someone who is the decider because that role adds important clarity. This is a fine line and should be treated delicately.

Q: How do you keep a project from becoming stagnant?

A: Avoid always talking about the same unsolvable problems. Having someone strong in the room is important because their role is to say what isn't working and that something needs to change. Pass out stickies and have everyone write their answer to the question without talking and use that to step back, resort, and readdress the approach to the problem. The goal is to fundamentally change the dynamic of the conversation. Go to a second location, bring someone from the outside in, or anything that will work.

Also avoid projects that are defined by moving away and do projects that are about moving toward something.

Q: When you practice music the goal is to do it without thinking. In the design world the equivalent is doing something in photoshop or code automatically. But we don't typically make time to develop this mastery with throw-away tasks.

A: Prototyping is a way to do that. Try to force time into your day to practice. Try to figure out how to build that play time into projects. Sketch, iterate, prototype, whatever. Cyclical iterative approaches can make it easier to take a number of stabs at a problem.

Notes from the A Critical Look At OpenID at SXSW.

SSO with single authority betrays the core principles of the web. OpenID is a shared standard that uses URLs as identifiers. The OpenID protocol lets you prove that you own a URL. This means that OpenID can be used an authentication token.

Overview

When logging into to a new third party site with OpenID you are bounced to the authority for your URL. That URL then can remember that you trust this other application and bounce you past if you are still cookied into that other site when you come back later.

This can also be used for registration using the Simple Registration functionality of OpenID. This allows users to select attributes that will be exchanged with the third party site.

In OpenID 2.0 users can enter the address of a provider instead of a provider. The provider will then ask for your username and password or allow you to choose between multiple identities.

OpenID is very similar to Email

• Pick a provider to trust
• Users of different providers can interoperate
• Can be used for SSO (email is used for remember password communication)
• user@URL.com means that user is associated with URL.com

Although these are similar in this metaphor, OpenID is both a better user experience and much more secure than email if SSL is used for OpenID authentication.

One critique of OpenID is that it allows a single point of failure. This is no different than the current situation because your email address is a de facto SSO if the same address is associated with all of your accounts.

Security

Providers are now beginning to compete on anti-phishing and security features. Users can be protected by second factor strong authentication

The OpenID community can also whitelist providers which will help manage the business risk.

Yahoo Example

Yahoo is an OpenID proverider but does not support OpenID for Yahoo properties. Yahoo only supports OpenID 2 and will not suport OpenID 1.

OpenID 2 is supported by Drupal, Plone, and Wordpress.

Ingestion

37Signals support is significant because thir support of the spec has encouraged support in an ecosystem.

Q&A

Q: Identity Theft

A: Fail over to other systems helps with identities dissapearing. The theft issue is harder and OpenID is, at least, not worse than the current system.

Q: Future of attribute exchange

A: Getting better but not widely supported yet. Simple Registration has been around a while but only supports a fixed set of nine fields.

Q: Barriers to use

A: Usability, security, and technology are the key issues. To solve usability issue, one method is to connect the service their using with specific other providers. Providers can also work hard to educate users that they have a highly portable ID.

Notes from Magic and Mental Models: Using Illusion to Simplify Designs with Jared Spool at SXSW.

Our field is now deeply into a stage known as Experience Design. To do this work we need our teams to possess a number of skills but the one we're going to talk about today is "Magic."

The idea here is that magic brings a level of delight that we don't see in other places. So what we're going to do here is go through a few magic tricks, deconstruct them, and talk about how this can apply to design.

Jared is doing magic tricks. Awesome.

Magic creates experiences that are different from what is actually occurring physically. Illusion separates the user's model from the designer's model.

This is different than most design. Typically we try to make these models be as similar as possible. In an illusion we don't want to communicate what is actually happening.

When magicians talk about tricks they talk about the effect. Think about the Haunted House at Disneyland. You leave the Haunted House having seen ghosts and floating candelabras and all the other amazing sighs and sounds. The designers have a completely different perspective. They are focussing on how the effects are created. The sounds designer doesn't want you to know that he or she is even there. They are designing for full immersion, for an experience that isn't designed because it is real.

Think about deleting a file and the crunching noise that Apple makes when you delete. There aren't "files" and there isn't deletion. The disk has data all over it where "files" are split up all over the place. Moving, copying, and deleting are all illusions and its been that way for years. Its just how it works.

When we build things like this we have to understand that users only know what to do when they believe that there is a file. All kinds of things fall into this category.

Spool plays audio of Marissa Mayer talking about how Google Search works.

The point here is the balance between simplicity and complexity. What happens when you hit search is amazingly complex but for the user the search is amazingly simple and fast.

The user doesn't need to know what's actually happening to accomplish their goal. They hit search, get results, and that's the end of it.

At flickr the same magic happens. The URL of everyone's homepage is www.flickr.com and as you navigate the site you get nice pretty URLs that include your name. This has nothing to do with their actual data storage system.

The Netflix recommendation system works in a similar way. They don't really know what movies you like, they're just doing data analysis and showing a guess. The problem is that people don't realize how magical the system is, users dismiss it as simple when it is actually very refined.

Designers can suggest a mental model that is different from actual implementation. When done well it can simplify but when there are holes the user will not believe and intuit something else.

Perception is the most important piece of illusion.

Excellent trick where you see a rotating spiral and then switch to looking at someone's head. The effect is that the head first shrinks and then enlarges as your eye muscles react

Perceived performance is how users interpret the length of time that an activity takes. In a study, users across a number of interests agreed about the perceived performance of sites. Amazon, the slowest site in the study, was consistently perceived as the fastest in the study.

When they mapped perceived performance against task completion they saw the cause of the perception. When users are able to complete their task quickly on a slow site they will perceive the experience as fast. Time passes quickly when you are accomplishing your goals.

At YouTube they take advantage of this by autostarting the video while it is still loading. You get pieces of the film before you can watch the whole thing. This creates the illusion that it is faster than it would otherwise be.

How far apart can you separate elements before they no longer appear to be related?

When Facebook changes the News Feed they initially confused users. People started seeing names that they didn't recognized and misunderstood what was happening.

Designers must understand how users perceive designs. Simple tricks can make a design feel more responsive than it is.

Look up the Kano Model, a two-by-two measuring user satisfaction and quality.

In the Performance Payoff, as you add more features and quality you get more satisfaction from users. But there is also a scenario where you add more things but can never improve satisfaction. The third area is called Excitement Generation where you are able to combine the right features in a way that creates genuine delight.

One way to create delight is to be whimsical. Twitter, for example, has had error messages involving cats fixing servers. Flickr has a dialog that reads "Embiggen small photos to fill screen."

Another way to get delight is through attention. When you plug a pink iPod into a Mac, iTunes shows a little pink iPod. At Best Western's website, they let you type in a city and then it autocompletes the other fields for state and country even if they don't have an hotel in that city.

The last way to add delight is through functionality. ProFlowers.com works not only because the site is nice but because the flowers are amazing. Farecast also does this by showing you data and occasionally tells you to wait to purchase. You can even buy a guarantee.

The idea of delight is really quite important but you need to get the basic expectations in place. No matter how great the sound is, a clock radio needs to keep time.

Things that are delightful today before basics over time.

The important point is that designing for magic involves creating a mental model for users that is different than what is actually happening in the background.

Notes from Everyone's A Design Critic with Jason Santa Maria and Rob Weychert at SXSW.

When designing a solution it is important to show the client options to evaluate the direction. You need a process that gets to the right answer and avoids Frankenstein's monster.

Think holistically when designing and talk holistically to the client about the vision for each solution.

Pre-crit

• Do your homework; Make sure that you incorporate everything you've already heard and presenting clear options.
• Gather as much information as you can in advance
• Make sure everyone has what they need
• Know the purpose of the crit

In crit

• Don't take it personally
• Stay positive
• Avoid jargon
• Find common ground, speak in a language that everyone there understands

Top 5 client requests

• My unqualified fried has different ideas; talk about how the idea fits into the vision you've worked with the client to map out
• Purple is my favorite color; talk about this in terms of personas and what they need and expect. Come back to your research and their branding.
• We need more stuff above the fold; We all know that the fold mentality is outmoded but it is important to let people know that scrolling isn't the problem it used to be.
• There's so much empty space, can't you fill it?; Whitespace contributes to the overall hierarchy of the page making the design more comfortable. Jamming stuff into empty space confuses the structure.
• Can't you make the logo bigger; No. The logo isn't the content, the content is the brand.

Post-crit

• Evaluate: Make sure that you know everything that was discussed and needs to be changed.
• Document: Do this for yourself and for the client.
  *Follow-up: Actually do what you said you would and connect it to your documentations.
• Wash-Rinse-Repeat

This is an ideal framework but is a helpful baseline. Use this on your projects to make sure that you get the feedback you want and make the best decision you can.

Q&A

Q: What if the client keeps pointing to other sites?

A: Try to focus on how they are different and a solution that is right for their needs. Talk about what they like in other sites but the goal is to get them to something right for them.

Q: How do solve the bigger logo problem?

A: Try to find out in advance and do user research to test how people respond differently.

Q: How much do you show in advance?

A: Show in the meeting and not before. Set it up so you get the first impression and let that drive the conversation. You also want to make sure to direct the crit. Make sure that your points are heard and that the client isn't distracted.

Notes from The Contextual Web with Nick Finck

Context is important to design. As an example of environment, technology, and other principles let's look at the iPhone

Scenario: Shopping for tea but can't find it so trying to find a store that carries it while on the road.

Load up the Whole Foods website. This site is non-mobile. Some sites are smart enough to know that you are on a mobile device. Exploring the site on the iPhone is very difficult because it is not designed for this experience. The site is slow and it takes too much time to find out that they don't list the brands they carry. This site doesn't work well in a mobile context.

Fitt's Law matters in mobile. The size of the target and the distance to it is essential to connecting users t information on small screens.

Loading time also matters here. You want to send the user markup optimized for their device and context. The interface should also adapt itself to the medium.

So let's do a deep dive into mobile.

Content is one of the most problematic areas in mobile. Readability and page width are the biggest problems in this space. Interaction is another big area for improvement in mobile design. Navigation on NYTimes Mobile, for example, is a big list. The hotspots are close together and it is hard to hit the right item.

Pagination is also very difficult on mobile devices. In the case of facebook, Ajax is used in combination with a big hot spot to add more content to the current list. Search is also difficult because typing is expensive. Search ahead display is helpful because it makes it easier for a user to go back and fix a typo before submitting their search.

Lastly, screen size is a major issue. Although we've been talking about the iPhone, there are many devices coming that require us to take the issue of screen size seriously. Know the context in which your product will be used and design for it.

Resources

Books: Contextual Design and Observing the User Experience

Download the slides for more links.

Q&A

Q: What about showing photos that are very large?

A: Use thumbnails intelligently and pare down your content to what makes sense for this environment.

Q: What about technologies like Flex and other emerging development tools?

A: The iPhone represents the new direction for these services. The primary interaction online is clicking on things and ingesting content. You'd have to talk to the developers of these other technologies for how they fit into mobile but HTML, CSS, and Javascript are very powerful tools for creating rich interfaces for mobile.

SXSW 2008: Notes from Design is in the Details with Naz Hamid. The slides are very descriptive so be sure to find them if Naz posts them.

This panel isn't about tips and techniques, it is about an approach.

• Critical thinking
• methods
• concepts
• ideas

for doing detailed design.

Tips and techniques fortify the toolkit but critical thinking is most important.

God is in the details and Design is in the details

The small parts make up the whole

You, the designer, are the sum of all parts and so is your design.

Less is more

Editing and being critical about not putting too much in are essential to good design.

This isn't MS Word with all the toolbars on or the cover of a magazine like Details. It is a product like "PINCH" by Craig Berman. Good design is highly functional. The beauty emerges from the functionality.

Examples in food with photos from Alinea, a Halloween costume that Naz designed, and other images of detailed design.

So what about interactive designers? We sit at meetings with the comps on the screen and decision makers start noticing the things that aren't there. People start nit-picking and focussing on the small details that the designer should have taken care of. You go into a meeting thinking that you're 60 or 70% done but that isn't enough. Take it all the way.

So how do you get to this? Here's a handy checklist.

Experiment

Mix and match your ideas to let new things emerge. Don't commit to early. Explore different directions to see what happens. Avoid falling back on what you've done before, on solutions you've seen, by playing.

Princeton example.

Choices

We make choices all the time in design. Pick the simple solution. Pick things that you can defend and explain. Go with what works and what is functional.

Stay consistent

But once you make your choices, stay consistent. Be transparent in your design by holding everything together. Don't give you client an in to critique things you already know how to solve.

Completeness

In a similar vein, make sure that your work is done to the best you can do. Take pride in your work. Your first draft should contain all the details up front and carry that through to the end.

Kellog School of Management example.

Step in, step out step back, balance

Give yourself a break from your work so you can come back and see your work for the first time. Take a few days off and forget about it. Learn to look critically at your own work. Note what stands out and fix the things that look odd. Come back and pay attention to your first impressions because your client will see the flaws too. See your mistakes, your shortcomings, and do something about them.

Take your work all the way but be willing to change it up.

Be your own critic

If you're familiar with the client, the team, and the problem, you have what it takes to see the problem yourself. Take these insights as far as you can. Trust yourself to anticipate questions and come up with answers. Know what people will get hung up on and take that into account.

My note: It seems to me that you want to do this so that showing your work to others involves getting the most from their feedback as possible. If they only tell you things you already know then you are wasting everyone's time and not improving the design.

Yale Library example

Complexity in simplicity; Less is more

This isn't just about stripping things down, this is about leaving in only what is needed. You are delivering a final product not just trying to make yourself happy. Don't use Ajax if you don't have to. Don't just throw in widgets because they are cool, use things that solve the problem.

Showed an early comp for Humanized as an example.

Obsession is healthy

Be willing to look at something for an hour or two. Take the time to do the best you can. Let the problem seep into your mind and carry it with you. Make time to focus on the details.

Q&A

Q. How do you balance this with having a limited number of billable hours?

A. If I'm at the computer, I bill. If I seriously think about if for half an hour or more, I'll bill for that. However, some projects do have limited budgets. If I want to take it the rest of the way, I don't bill the extra time.

Q. What kind of activities do you do to get inspiration?

A. Spend a lot of time on the bike. Cycling is a source of inspiration. It helps with mental clarity. But really you want to look at anything you're interested in. Look for the details in everything you do.

Q: How do you defend the details to a client?

A: If you meet one-to-one its much easier. If it is a large organization there are more people to convince and having everything in place makes the conversation easier. Know why you are doing what you are doing and stand by it.

Q: How do you know when to stop waiting for inspiration?

A: Set a deadline and goal for yourself. Wait for it to come but be ready to go when it hits.

Q: What if you don't have good photos?

A: Make it clear that you need certain things to make it work. Insist that you can't start working of you don't the source material you need.

[Notes from this panel with Bruce Sterling]

Last year he talked quite a bit about RFID and the virtual as the new actual. The bleed-over from the Internet into the world.

There is more to say about this but he will only point out that SXSW badges have RFID chips in them. They say that they aren't connecting this to all the other day they have on you. They aren't doing this.

This year is the year of video. Video is kind of a stupid medium. It is the dumbest medium so this is a dumb year. There isn't much happening in the waning years of the Bush administration.

People are popping up out of the woodwork asking to video him.

Viacom is suing Google for a billion dollars. It's not about media convergence. They don't converge. Broadband eats everything. The old guys are trying to live on artificial scarcity. They are piling up the DRM and it is a terrible weird thing to see.

People get spooked by it. If large three initial corporations are trying to oppose something then it will get squashed. But the teens are coming. Time is not on the side of the incumbents.

There are trend-drivers here that seem interesting. A guy like Henry Jenkins who was here is part of our societies intellectuals establishment. His book is an important book.

Yochai Benkler (sp.) just released a massive book like Das Kapital not in its substance but in the depth of its analysis.

Another guy is Lev Manavich (sp.) who has been doing papers lately on hybrid media.

These guys name check each-other but they are coming from three different worlds.

A guy like Richard Stallman comes from a different perspective. (I missed something here)

Perhaps there is a new approach that will increase the wealth and power of average people.

Information is free now in a profound way. As a journalist he was struck by the incredible torrent of information coming out of Google. You put Google and Wikipedia together and it is game over for any aspiration founded in the 80s. Information is no longer an area of struggle.

You hang out in the second or third world and you realize that the second world is missing and there is a fourth world that is profoundly separate.

The world that is global capitalism is the first world. The second world is all forms of governance from democracy to Islam. The new third world is what Benkler would call common-space peer production. It is a new thing. It isn't the market. It isn't the state. It is growing fast and is becoming a factor in the plans of the good and the great. You can use google as a verb. There is a new world of "didn't you just." There is a commons based "we" world.

Then there is the fourth world of disorder that don't have any of this. This is the fastest growing part of the planet.

In ten years this will be more obvious.

The third world is more powerful than people give it credit. It is Hobbsian and very old. It just has never been put into mass scaled production. It isn't a good thing, it's just a new thing.

The arguments made by these luminaries are very fearsome because they see their baby as being under threat. These new structures are not all that fragile. They won't be the be-all and end-all of the world but they are resilient.

Things that are now business will stop being businesses.

People don't get Craigslist because they don't get Craig. He isn't interested in a business. He just wants 200 million friends. He has fundamentally gutted the newspaper industry and doesn't think of it as a business in anything remotely close to a traditional sense.

Journalists don't understand why they have joined the global precariate. It just isn't a business any more. They don't understand why they have to live like Wikipedia authors. It is deeply threatening when the workers do a better job than you without doing it professionally.

P2P networks will just out-ship anything ever built without a dime spent.

This isn't a golden opportunity. There are downsides to this.

It is a new world of laptop gypsies where there used to be professionals. It is a world vulnerable to lynch mobs and charlatans.

Fan art is terrible. It is not good and it never will be good. You will never see a painting by committee the way you see Wikipedia. Repurposes Harry Potter characters will never be great writing. It is new but not good. It is just aesthetically objectionable and there is no way to tart it up. It is a sow's ear. You just can't make a category error and say that your pig is made of silk.

Mashups are a new vogue. People pretend this is a raw source of creativity. Mashups are novelty music. It is like the Monster Mash. They have no musical staying power. It is pastiche. It is like magazine collage. It is good for what it is. It is not tremendous creative work, it is just tremendous creative power.

We need honesty when we confront things like this. We need to see what is an epi-phenomenon and what is a real cultural advance.

Digital tools are melting media down into a slum gully. It used to be that you were working in video or audio or photography. These distinctions just go away when you have powerful compositing tools.

The effects are becoming the means of production. In a contemporary Hollywod product there is not an untouched frame.

These devices become ever cheaper over time. This means that media are not converging, they are just becoming different flavors from the same mixing machine attached to ever better broadband.

What we thought were different forms of media are just different browsers through which to look at a stream of 1s and 0s. We don't understand what this actually means.

When you have a laser, everything looks laserable. Phil Torrone from the other day

It is a new capacity but it doesn't make it better.

Electronic art stinks.

Deviant art is a huge site. There is interesting stuff there, not great just interesting.

Maybe it has something to do with the ease of production. It is electronic folk culture. It is a real precious and valuable thing but the downside of folk culture is that its for hicks. They exist and they're fine but what we need is a new form of media criticism. We need to abandon film studies and media studies because they are just going away. We need some rigor and discipline to deal with the realities on the ground. To valorize them because they are shiny and new fails to look at effects.

55 million blogs and some of them have to be good blogs. Who knows if they are passing or not. Blogs are not people logging their web activities, which is like watching someone get beaten to death with croutons, instead they are used as a platform for something.

It is hard to find a blog that will make you cry or that has the effect of fine art.

The kind of discourse where it you have three paragraphs, embedded video, two paragraphs, flickr photoset and a dig this link.

How do we tell if we've done this well or badly? Barely do we have a web design critique that tells us if we are doing it properly or not.

It is deeply worrying that we don't have our head around it and we may not be able to do this before it turns into something else. It may not aspire for greatness because the ground is being eaten out from under it. This is the nature of folk culture.

You try to bamboozle people by using the processing power of a machine and then pretending that it is a mode of self expression. Generative art is worth taking seriously but it needs to be understood for what it is. It is mostly a form of semiotic pollution. Spam is the best example of this. What kind of medium would do this? Imagine if you had a TV, you turned it on, and someone immediately tried to rob you, or if all the ushers in theaters were pickpockets.

See: Reed Hundt, former head of the FCC

He has the weary look that you see on Washington political figures. They always look like sewing scissors that have been used to cut barbed wire.

He was one of the guys involved in auctioning spectrum. This is like chloroform in print. Nevertheless, this guy has come up with a mad scheme to steal, err, sell the 700mhz spectrum to police and other users (you). The idea is to take this away from broadcast tv (which nobody watches).

Broadcast is for the semi-education, the shut-ins, and a kind of lower-end evil medium that debases the poverty stricken people who watch it. It's true and we all know it. It was bad before American Idol and now there's just no budget left to produce even Dallas which was at least globally popular.

Take those wavelengths, which were chosen because they aren't junk spectrum, and just put the internet on them instead of TV. Just saturate TV areas with broadband internet. Should this happen so many of the distinctions between the Internet and other media would just go away.

There is no technical reason why this can't be done. It would just take a few channels worth of spectrum to saturate a whole city. Hunt's coalition involves the security services and that is very powerful. He thinks they have enough muscle to push Congress to act.

This guy has been around enough to seriously think that this could happen. This would take American from 22 in broadband to the forefront. We are the birthplace of the Internet not the vanguard. There are semiliterate divorcees in Korea with better broadband than the best in America.

Check out his web site, it's boring, there's no dancing bologna but its very good. Hell, volunteer to jazz it up for him.

So Yochai Benkler.

Socially motivated commons based peer production. How to do it.

First you have to divvy up the work. You aren't the state and you aren't the market. You have to suck them into it somehow.

It has to be granular, modular, and integrate-able.

Even five minutes of work will contribute merit. It has to be divided up into projects that are properly sized and measurable so people can see what it takes to get there. It then has to turn into one thing that actually achieves something within the broader concept of society.

• Business doesn't do this. Government doesn't do this.
• Self-selected, people are choosing to join you. No draft, no pay, no arm twisting. There has to be some membrane of differentiation. You want to suck them in fast but not trap them inside. You need a two-way in/out membrane of differentiation.
• Communication, a platform for fast efficient communication.
• Humanization
• Trust Construction, lot's of people are charlatans so you need confidence building measures that get everyone to really work together, to do one thing and hand it off to someone else
• Norm Creation, how do people behave to fit in, different schemes have a different folk culture vibe, what's normal behavior here
• Transparency, you can't do it from behind the curtain like the wizard of Oz, people will question your motives, think of the way people hassle Catarina Fake
• Monitoring, you do need a police force, people whose business it is to make sure that others aren't just screwing up the system
• Peer Review, you want people to know who is good at it and who is a slacker
• Discipline, this is Achilles heel of peer production, how do people discipline themselves
• Fairness, Marxists are very upset about web 2.0 because you don't want to make giant exploitation machines, you don't want to just be lining your pockets
• Institutional Sustainability, how long can you make this happen, how long will this paradigm continue

There are lots of things that used to be professions that are just melting like the Artic. Some think that these means of production will be made into businesses but the opposite is happening, things that used to be businesses and professions are vanishing.

Benkler does not look at Al Qaeda which is probably the most powerful example of this model. They don't rat each-other out, you go in and come out in a box, they've created new norms, they spend a ton of time on video, they seem to be very good at monitoring, somehow people get promoted, they sure have discipline, fairness maybe not, but they are pretty damn hard to kill because if you kill them more come pouring through the cracks.

They are military, they are religious, and they are kind of state based but they are proof of the potency of this kind of organization.

Computers are platforms for self-expression, not well-behaved appliances.

Designers get upset about this raggedness but it is the way it is. Everything is challenging, filled with barbed wire and endless betas, they have a steep learning curve, they are not an appliance. When see something that barely works like Ubuntu Linux you are seeing an example of peer production because it hurts to use it.

There is one other thing about this. Benkler distributed his book via pdf all over the web and then opened a wiki to explore this change. But there's nobody there. It's easy to start a wiki but it's not easy to be as smart as Yochai Benkler. There's a vast echo.

But you can go to a lefty pajamahadeen web site anywhere in the world you see a torrent of agreement of the most inane opinions in the world.

Here you see one of the most brilliant guys around today sitting alone in his wiki with nobody to engage in a discussion with him that actually advances his thinking.

He's just out of everyone's league. If you're in his league, go help him.

Last year he read a poem to end his speech about how tough and bitter everything is.

He wants to change it back by reading a poem by Czes?\xC7aw Mi?\xC7osz about serenity and fulfillment.

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over the honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw blue sea and sails.

[Notes from this panel with Alex Steffen]

This talk is about the tools available to make the world a better place.

We inherited a broken future and need to fix it. The future looks grim. One large symptom of this grimness is climate change. It is here. It is real. It is dire. We are causing it.

It will impact every aspect of our daily lives.

If left unchallenged it will, according to the British government, be the greatest economic catastrophe in history.

Meanwhile we live on a planet full of children. Many of our fellow human beings are eager for prosperity. Billions have seen the affluence of the developing world and want something like it. This is entirely reasonable. Billions more are struggling merely to survive.

The UN terms many of these people as environmental refugees to be as their suffering becomes compounded by ecological collapse.

The ramifications are not merely predictable, they are predicted.

We are racing to what one report called a global Somalia. We must demand a currently unimaginable future.

We must design a one planet prosperity. Everyone in this room has a ten planet footprint. We need prosperity that fits in the earth's limits.

We need to include everyone. We need to rebuild our entire material civilization.

So what is World Changing? An NGO that hunts down and shares tools to help build this better future.

People are hungry for a better future. There is a profound sea change in public opinion about sustainability. The debate is over and we are left with two side: people who understand the practical limits and people who are fundamentally wrong.

Why can't we build buildings that use no outside energy? Why can't we have kites that provide wind-power? Why can't we build cities that work with natural systems? Why can't we grow rooftop gardens with rain instead of treating rain as waste to be drained away?

We also need to move quickly. To move as quickly as we need to, to change deeply enough at the proper pace.

Look at Netflix. Think about how we used to rent movies. You used to get in your car, drive to a big box store, and walk into a building with hot lights, HVAC, etc, hunt down the movie you like, go home, watch it, and then repeat the whole process. With Netflix the mail carrier, who is already going to your house, is eliminating not only the trips but the store itself. Netflix delivery is a fraction of the environmental footprint of the old model.

The point is that there are ways to get what we want without the baggage of our current systems if we think intelligently.

We can dematerialize all the extraneous stuff that gets in the way of the life we want.

One big step is compact living in well designed cities. People have access by proximity in these structures. Cities are tools for making your life greener if they are done well.

Compare old development to new and measure how far you can get in a 1 mile walk. Suburban patterns that don't use a grid are profoundly wasteful. City grids have lower rates of automobile trips.

We are getting better and better at knowing where things are. Think about Ze Frank's If the Earth Were a Sandwich project. This is a great example about how well we know where things are in our world. This knowledge can help us.

Many things are only garbage when they are in the wrong place.

See: Garbage Scout
See: Freecycle

Car sharing is a great example of this. It stagnated for a long time but technology has allowed the experience to change so completely that the structure now works. Car sharing has real benefits. About half of the energy and most of the materials that go into using your car will be used in the car's production. The more people who use the car, the less of this energy is spent. The ratio of cars taken off the road to shared cars ranges from 6:1 to 20:1 in more dense cities.

This can save you money and reduce your ecological footprint.

Moreover, you are a more efficient driver and trip-planner in a shared car so you use less gas to get the same or more done.

When you share, it is easier to use things more effectively.

Think about a power drill. The average power drill gets used between 3 and 20 minutes in its lifetime. Most of us keep the drill around for years on end looking for opportunities to make holes in the wall. This is the epitome of unsustainable waste. While there is emotional satisfaction to owning the drill there is no reason to own it. We are simply looking for the ability to make a hole in the wall when we need to.

There are ways to do this better.

When you start to think of things differently you can do things differently.

In the UK they found that by moving the energy meter into the home from outside reduces energy consumption by 10% without doing anything else. Observed flows can be made beautiful. Design can reveal the true impact of our actions to us and help with realtime decision making.

Using wastewater to grow plants where the water is wasted reminds us of what we are doing.

Why do you need to own your carpet? Interface will lease you carpet. When you are done they will come pick it up. They will swap out worn out pieces and remanufacture old pieces into new pieces.

We feel no attachment to the airplane pillow. When we are done with things why can't companies take everything back?

Most electronic devices are hard to recycle. If you are a cellphone producer and you have to take it back at the end of its life, you will make that cellphone differently.

When we start to think this way we gain the ability to think through the cost of our lives.

What if products came with environmental nutrition labels? We should demand a back-story to our products. We want things around us that tell better stories.

It is easier to make things that tell better stories. Why cant everything we do be done better?

We realize that redesigning everything around us is not impossible. It is something we can do if we think differently. We can make our lives better and the world better at the same time.

This does mean a massive change. We need to retool all of our systems.

Do we have to leave behind those of us who are not in a position to get rich off of this?

No. A bright green future can be enjoyed by everyone. The models we are creating are being replicated elsewhere. If we design better systems, the tools available to others will be better.

We are learning how to share tools more effectively. We are learning how to understand that we can work with people seen as "victims" as partners.

From solar powered street lights that are also wireless base stations to the mine detecting flower the world is full of amazing game-changing innovation. Pot-in-pot non-electric refrigeration. Rainwater harvesting systems. The Lifestraw filters water as you suck water through it from a stream.

See: Plumpynut
See: Roundabout Play Pump

It is within our capacity to see that people in truly dire situations are given more alternatives and to empower them to create solutions we alone would never have thought of. Instead of giving the developing world the oldest technology, we give the newest. There are 100 million cell phones in Africa because cell phone towers are cheaper than land-based wiring. This "leap-frogging" allows true innovation to happen. Farmers can now call into town to find out prices so they are not cheated by middle-men. Distance medicine allows rural woman to get health information for their families. Cell phone minutes are being used as a form of currency.

See: Acumen Fund

There are ways of helping people who are already trying to do something good that helps them do it more effectively.

We can either resign ourselves to the ruinous future we face or we can imagine a truly better future.

Smart people with creative minds need to start thinking about how we can do things differently. We must actively grapple with the realities that undermine our world.

The more you use World Changing resources, the more a pattern will appear that wasn't there before.

You are brilliant and the earth is hiring Paul Hawken

Be a role model in your life for other people. Bike when you can. Green the things in your life that you are passionate about. Green your car or your garden or your kitchen or your business. Do carbon offsetting even though it isn't perfect. The point isn't to be a martyr, it is to do everything you can and to be very creative.

It is impossible to separate issues of social justice, equity, and civil rights from the issue of sustainability. The book deals with these issues of democracy promotion, non-violence, and fairness. the problems we see in terms of poverty and oppression are all symptoms of one larger problem which that we have screwed up and allowed people who profit from bad decisions to continue long after we have realized our mistakes.

We cannot build a world that is more sustainable and unfair. We need to make altruistic gestures to everyone else in the world and we need them to be altruistic back. Everyone needs to participate in making a better world.

Most of the efforts to green computers and electronics are half-measures. This is still part of the ecological nightmare. Hopefully we will see big strides in coming years. One basic thing is to extend the usable life of your computer as long as possible. Even if you upgrade, pass your old one along to an NGO so it will keep being used.

By hitting people over the head with catastrophic information we have made a grave mistake by not leaving them with something meaningful to do. An Inconvenient Truth is a great example of this. It is 90 minutes of information about the ecopocolypse without much help.

Everyone knows that recycling your cans will not save the planet but we still only tell people to do this as if it were a gateway drug. We need to encourage people to green whatever they are passionate about in their lives.

It is a big problem that so many of our visions of the future are post-apocalyptic. Our literature tells us that society will fall and then be reborn. This is dangerous. We can get people to change by showing them a better alternative to which they will wish to defect. We have a profound lack of visions of a truly better future that is deeply enticing. We need serious compelling dynamic beautiful visions of where we might be headed.

Companies must realize that everyone is going in this direction. Regulation is moving in this direction already. There are cars manufactured in the US that cannot be sold in some countries. This trend will accelerate. We will see a global cap and trade system. If you make things that are carbon inefficient you will hurt your competitive ability in the near-term.

[Notes from this panel with Nick Bradbury, John Gruber, Shaun Inman, Michael Lopp]

Indie development is where the cool happens, it's where the great ideas come from.

So let's start with some context.

Developer

The goal of the developer is changing. What is great about SXSW is that designers and developers are hanging out in very meaningful ways. Everything is blurry here. Most in this room are a little of both because the lines are blurring in the whole industry. This is the present and the future of the web.

Death of the start-up

Indie developers aren't as interested in the IPO. Now we have companies that are fine as three people. Getting boughts isnt the driving philosophy any more.

Level playing field

Mindshare is truly egalitarian. Dig and Boing Boing and all these other sites shoot people from zero to hero in no time at all.

It's a small world

So what's design?

No way can we define that. But that doesn't help so what is it.

See: Architecture of Architects

The iPod giggle is when you give someone an iPod and they just start to use it. When people figure out the little things about it they have a genuine emotional reaction, they giggle.

Design is a pile of iterated decisions. This isn't trivializing, this is really hard. You want to through out 80% of your ideas.

A set of guiding principles underlying and guiding the work of a particular artist or movement.

So what about Indie?

These developers are building for themselves. They are scratching an itch, solving a problem for themselves.

So what are the lessons learned from this kind of indie development?

How do you make hard decisions as a lonely developer?

Start with how you would like it to work. It sounds selfish but if you are building something that you need, you should take yourself seriously as a user. Blog about what you are doing and take comments seriously.

Anything that ends up being successful is something that started as a problem that obsessed the developer. It doesn't matter if you are in your pajamas, it is something you are thinking about from morning to night until it is a solved problem.

Conversation with people who share your interests or who are using an early version really helps to whittle down ideas to see if they fit.

So what is the dev cycle? Do you use spec?

It always starts on paper. Get a new notebook for the project and start drawing sketches. Wait until you see one that you'd really like to build.

Start with learning. Don't worry about having the skills required, don't let your skill-set limit your solution. Find a problem, find a solution, and then learn the tools you need to build it.

Build it twice. Start writing hackish code to learn from as you go and then throw it away and build it properly.

So when you need to bounce an idea off of what do you do?

It's much easier now than it used to be. Blogging makes it so so much easier. You can write about a feature before it exists and get feedback on it.

It depends. Sometimes you just use your iChat buddy list to get feedback on a spark of an idea. Scan the list and see who might have something interesting to say about what you are trying to do.

People who you know are a real asset, they will give you honest feedback.

If you do your own support you hear the problems first and can fix them since you do that too.

What constraints come with smallness?

Time is the biggest constraint. If you are working for a bigger company you have pressure to ship from someone else. When it is just you there is nobody else to blame. If you fail it is you.

What lessons from big corporations influence indie work?

Proved that doing indie development was better. In corporations there is less direct contact with users, it is sometimes harder to give them what they want.

If you aren't a team player, if things stay in your head, it is easier to be indie.

How do you measure success? Revenue, buzz?

Buzz is part of it but if nobody says anything it might mean that you are successful. Most feedback is negative.

Most success is hindsight. You look back and see how it went and realize if you were right or wrong. It depends how long this takes. It could take a month or longer.

Insulating yourself from a large audience is important. A polarized audience can be good. If half love it and half hate it you have people to learn from and you have an audience that really cares.

It's a like playing in a live band. If the audience is sitting down you are doing a bad job. At a corporation it's like being a studio musician where you don't get that immediate feedback.

What need would you hire to fill?

Sending t-shirts out.

Support is a serious issue because you want to get every question answered but you don't want to be separated from the users.

Once you get enough users where the income is enough to be a business you end up spending your whole day supporting them instead of coding.

How do you structure your day given that you are working at home?

Structure the day around kids. Take them to school, come home, and get to work. Having an office that feels like you are in your own world helps.

Working at home can be a blessing because you get to see your family all the time.

You do get more interruptions, and with kids they are normally not the kind of interruptions you get in an office, but you do get interrupted in an office setting too. Just like in an office, if you need to shut out the world just close the door.

The biggest complaint about working at home is that it is more tempting to work too long and not to call it a day.

When you are in an office you get to go home and be done. This is really hard to do at home if the flow is going. You should stop but there is nothing there to force you to stop.

You could wake up at 3am with a great idea and just start coding. You won't do that in an office.

How do you manage the risk of supporting yourself with your development?

As a salaried employee it is too easy to lose sight of the goal. If it is all on you then you can't stumble, you just keep going.

If your development emerges from your other freelance career you can fall back on that. Mint and Basecamp were both born as side projects.

Was there a moment where you decided that your work was success?

Went Mint launched within the first week it far exceeded expectations. At this point he had to start turning down freelancing gigs.

Do you have an exit strategy? Do you want to get bought or is the goal to stay small?

If you really like being small you should stay small.

There is a great quote from Walt Disney.

I don't make money for the sake of making money. I want to make money so I can make more pictures.

The point is to do what you want to do. Follow your tangents and keep doing that. If you are better on your own, stay that way.

The goal is not to make it big and then stop for the rest of your life. The goal is to keep doing what you love. More money just buys you a bigger monitor to work on.

How do you compete with larger companies who have more resources?

If you are smaller you can be quicker. You don't have meetings to decide on features, you just build them.

You also don't tend to target larger markets. If you are small you can find a niche and make it work enough to keep you going.

With Mint the differentiator is design. It is an opinionated application and if you have a different opinion it isn't for you. The business model doesn't need everyone to love it. Google Analytics can't compare to the simplicity. Most people in this room use Mint for a reason. You look at it and it feels better. The best way to sell Mint is to compare side-by-side.

Google Analytics is for a different market. Mint decides what is important and shows you that. Google Analytics shows you raw data, Mint presents formatted data as information.

There are tons of free feed readers but there is a reason people use FeedDemon and NetNewsWire, they are just nicer. If you don't see the difference the product isn't for you.

Design or code first?

Always design first to get to the simplest solution. There is the wireframe part of design but then there is the question of skinning. Just making it blue doesn't change the interface. You want to have an interest in both the interface layer and the graphic layer. You want to build them to work together. It is a combination of how it feels and how it thinks.

Where do you draw the line when you listen to haters?

You just have to use your own internal compass to decide what is and isn't helpful. If you are your own user you know what will and won't fit. People want multiple user logins to Mint but this would open to a new market that just isn't right for the application.

You have to listen to the people with complaints and requests. The people who love it don't have any help to offer. You have to listen to the complainers but still be ready to say no more often than not.

Complaints are kind of a compliment. Someone is saying that they like your product so much that they want to make it better.

Have you ever had a feature emerge from an argument with a user that you didn't want originally?

You fight it and fight it but if your beta testers are clamoring for something give it a try and see what happens.

When building Joyent the idea was the email, calendars, and contacts would be shared with the team. So should things be shared by default? The original inclination was to be private by default but this didn't fit into the vision. The idea is that this is team email and they built it to be open and it is just smarter. They realized that if you see email as part of the teams work instead of individual silos you get to a totally new way to collaborate.

So you like to follow your tangents. Are you afraid that you won't have time to follow the next tangent because the first one has gotten too big?

That is always a fear but the original fervor will settle down and you'll have time. If you really get tired of something just open source it or sell it to someone else.

Where do you find inspiration?

Copy the things you admire. Find a small problem that you have and try to solve it.

Start small with something you intend to give away for free. You will learn lessons this way and can then move on to something better.

Do you have any strategies for avoiding pitfalls? How can you efficient while throwing things away as you go?

You can't do it without making mistakes and then starting over. You have to find the failures through trial and error.

Think of the first try and a distinct thing. Code to learn. Throw it away. Write it again with great commenting so someone else can read it.

If you get too invested in the first try it gets too hard to throw it away. Fail early and often.

What kind of mechanisms do you use to communicate with users? Forums, blogs, direct email?

Started with email support and this was a terrible mistake. It is totally unmanageable for one person.

Web forums are the best way to do this because you don't have to answer the same thing a thousand time and you can build community. Blogs are useful as a FAQ.

Forums only work once the bugs are worked out but when you are asleep misinformation can spread and you'll have to clean it up the next day. The same symptoms can represent different problems and you have to work hard to keep the communication clear.

The best thing you can do support wise is to try to anticipate where the pain points are in the application. If something is too complicated to use and support just don't do it to begin with.

How do you determine pricing?

It depends on the product and how quickly you want the user base to grow.

Your instincts are probably wrong, they are probably to under-price. Look at what other people are doing and fit yourself in deliberately.

Make it more expensive than you think it should be. If your product is too cheap people think it is too cheap. Pricing higher can set you up as a quality product. Cutting the price later is much easier than raising it.

You have to take maintaining the product into account. Don't promise free upgrades for life.