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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.
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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…

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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.

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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.

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Meetings: Important to Whom?

Those who know me know that I am and have long been a zero-meetings enthusiast. I used to blame it on a short attention span, which I figured was also the reason that school became more suffocating to me every year I attended. It started in high school, when I learned how to expertly use every last one of my 12 permissible absences per semester while still maintaining passing (read: nearly perfect) grades. In college, the problem worsened to the point that during my last two years, I averaged about 10% attendance across all of my classes. Many classes I attended only on the first day and on exam days. And then I wrestled with myself over whether the first day was really necessary. I did not have a problem walking in, leaving my homework in the teacher’s hands, and walking back out of the room. As I did this, I made sure to take a deep breath of fresh air while the doors to the building swung closed behind me. My thoughts and prayers were with those countless captives now listening to the daily administrative agenda as I headed home to further my daily personal agenda.

I would imagine that nowadays, a student who approached school as I did would be stamped ADD and given the proper medications to fix it.

But the more meetings I skip at work, and the more crucial tasks I get done during those skipped meetings, the more I think that my loathing for meetings and classes is my subconscious’ not-so-subtle way of guiding me away from non-productive BS.

Now, I will readily acknowledge that there are some who learn best when they have a person standing in front of them reciting. But, for the rest of us, there is no need for classes that are graded on attendance, or meetings announced by an overzealous HR director or boss as “mandatory attendance.”

Objectively, which of these options make more sense?
Captive Audience
Option 1 — Information communicated by word of mouth. Information is delivered at the speed the orator remembers or reads it, in the way that orator chooses to present it. Information does not exist tangibly, so listeners must take notes, and then organizer those notes, to have the data, if that data later becomes relevant. Similar to commercials on TV: many nuances bombard you, few of them resonate.

Option 2 — Information communicated by a Wiki or web page. Information is presented in visual form, with clear delineation between topics and sections. Illustrations and cross-references are provided to be accessed on demand by learner. Learner can navigate information hierarchy to jump to whatever information is relevant to them, and refer to it at any future time to verify that they understand correct details when correct details are necessary. Similar to the Internet (uh, because it is the Internet??): learn what you want, when you want, how you want.

I point this out here because I think it’s important that others fight the teacher/boss/HR person who chooses audience captivity over audience productivity. That feeling of displeasure you have during a meeting? It is your subconscious productive side pleading for the madness to stop.

And if said teacher/boss/HR person has the gumption to remind you how “important it is for you to attend their meeting, like everyone else,” respond simply: “Important to whom?”

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Sleep Management

Is there any literature yet devoted to the subject of “sleep management?” I have heard plenty of unnuanced opinions that lack of sleep causes diminished energy, herpes, death, or what-have-you; but I can not recall having read much literature about how one can step past those generalities and make their sleep schedule work for them.

From what I can tell, there is a pattern of trade-offs that correspond with different sleep frequencies. I’d roughly summarize my own trade-offs as follows:

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The major takeaway being that, except in extreme (< 5 hours) cases, it is usually fine to queue up sleep during the weekend and use it during the week. This is the driving principle behind how stuff gets done here at Bonanzle. But it’s astounding to think how much more could get done by those that are gifted by only needing to average 6 hours or less per night. It’s a real shame that science hasn’t come to the rescue with the insta-rejuvinate pill. Sleeping is so old fashioned. Productivity enthusiasts shudder at that wasted 33% of all time every day.

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Admitting You’re Wrong is the First Step

It takes a lot of courage to acknowledge how screwed up you are, eBay. I applaud you. But one problem: the same way that AltaVista couldn’t be a search engine and a content portal and an everything-else, neither can eBay effectively be a collector’s site and an online store hoster and an average Joe’s auction source (amongst about 1000 other things that eBay currently “is”). Complexity is inherently part of their scope, and I’m not sure that adding a social networking layer and mobile apps is the solution to that.

If eBay is trying to figure out what happened to the wind in its sales (sic), they might want to take a look at the Etsy and edgeio traffic growth over the last year. Those several hundred percent growth rates are being reaped by sites that understand how to do one thing really well, rather than doing everything mostly OK.

I’ll be frank here that sometimes I wonder whether being in the same market as the Internet’s fourth-largest site was a good choice for my first true, large-scale business. I have to think that there are businesses out there that don’t have to constantly look over their shoulder at what is being done by the several-billion-dollar behemoth. But at the same time, we are jabbing a target so large that it takes years to swing back, if it even notices it was hit. For those that get to help build our alpha into a beta version starting next month, you will see a creative market opportunity that wedges between the cracks a giant can’t fit into.

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The Slow Learning Advocate

What does experience buy an employee? It buys a body of knowledge to draw upon. Reflecting upon the nebulous “things that went wrong,” savvy veterans can provide great value to a company by using the lessons learned from past failures to steer clear of disaster on future projects.

But this is only in the perfect case.

In the real world, most people do not have the capacity to remember specific examples of what they’ve seen. Instead, most leaders that I have worked under develop a “gut feeling” that guides their judgement. If asked to substantiate the gut feeling, these leaders can be evasive, because without being able to remember the examples, one might not be sure what specifically led to that feeling being formed. Instead of the example that brought about the feeling, they will more often cite a recent-but-not-too-relevant example that comes to mind.

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As a leader, I have found that I am as guilty of this as the leaders before me. I do not have the ability to remember every situation that has led to my gut feelings, and so I can sometimes find myself unable to substantiate even my “stronger” gut feelings.

Now, the fact that we tend to develop a gut feeling that we can not explain is not in itself a problem. If your gut feelings are correct within the context that you assert them, fine.

But here’s a little secret that I think is the key failing of many highly experienced leaders: their gut feeling is to avoid risk, and while that gut feeling is understandable, it is also stupid.

Think about it: indiscriminately avoiding risk is the natural culmination of years of collecting examples of things that go wrong. First you work on a project that was overly ambitious and got overscheduled, so you remember to keep your scope refined. Then you work on a project that used very elaborate systems that caused you to run out of memory, so you remember to avoid very elaborate systems. On a third project, you try a new 3d algorithm that ends up being thrown out during alpha because of low-level incompatibilities, so you remember to be wary of new algorithms.

Combine all of those lessons into one lesson and what do you get? At the most abstract level, all three of these examples suggest that by taking a risk (large scope, elaborate systems, new algorithm) the project suffered.

This is why I believe that many experienced people learn to avoid risks as a habit. And this is why I make it a point not to learn from my mistakes.

You can not make significant innovations without taking significant risks. Yes, you expose yourself to second-guessing, particularly if your risks have failed before. And yes, it is far more difficult to implement a nuanced risk-aversion plan that considers the specific reasons behind past failures, rather than simply avoid all possible risks that could beget failure.

But as an employer, I believe that the holy grail of maximal ass-kicking job applicants are those that have been through projects before, failed, but are just as willing to push the envelope as they had been during their first project. They need to have learned something from their failures so as not to be derelict, but learning to simply avoid risk is the recipe for perpetual sterility.