- Eric Schmidt on enterprise customers vs. consumers
- “We used to think that the enterprise was the hardest customer to satisfy, but we were wrong. It turns out, consumers are harder than the enterprise because the consumer will not give you a second chance. And by the way, I would argue that we in the industry forgot this. We became as a group – certainly I did – consumed with the complexity of the systems that we were building for powerful corporations, and we forgot that there’s a much larger market around consumers for simple solutions.”
- How We Learn
- According to William Glasser, we learn “10% of what we read, 20% of what we hear, 30% of what we see, 50% of what we see and hear, 70% of what is discussed with others, 80% of what is experienced personally, and 95% of what we teach to someone else.”
- Participation isn't huge on web 2.0
- “Only .16% of visits to YouTube, .2% of visits to Flickr and 4.59% of visits to Wikipedia are ‘participation visits’. Wikipedia numbers break down to show that older users are the ones doing the editing…There is one new blog being created every second somewhere in the world. Posting volume has also gone way up with 1.5 million posts per day. Dave said that 21% of tracked blogs are active down from 36% in May of last year. He gave us a rundown of things the top bloggers do: Post frequently, stay at it and don’t be intimidated. Japanese is the largest language in the blogosphere with 37% of posts in Japanese.”
- Play-Doh interface
- “As I twist the Play-Doh and take bits away, the film reacts accordingly in real-time. Add too much Play-Doh and the film rapidly speeds up. An intimate connection is made between the user and the media. Every action has a reaction in the digital space. No scary buttons to press. No instructions to read. It’s just Play-Doh.”
- Coda integrates file browser, text editor, terminal, etc. into “a single, elegant window”
- “While you can certainly pair up your favorite text editor with Transmit today, and then maybe have Safari open for previews, and maybe use Terminal for running queries directly or a CSS editor for editing your style sheets, we dreamed of a place where all of that can happen in one place.So, that’s what we’ve built. Coda has a complete file browser (and the ability to work locally or remotely), publishing, a full-featured text editor, a WebKit-based preview, a CSS editor with visual tools, a full-featured terminal, built-in reference material, and much more.”
- A “unified theory” of information software design
- “The long-standing focus on ‘interaction’ may be misguided. For a majority subset of software, called ‘information software,’ I argue that interactivity is actually a curse for users and a crutch for designers, and users’ goals can be better satisfied through other means.”
- Canon 3D Papercraft
- “Nearly everyone has made paper airplanes or tried origami when they were children. Take these memories further when you download dozens of 3D-Papercraft projects for free.”
- The path to greatness hasn’t changed
- “Scott discusses a time when presidential debate questions were answered in hours instead of a couple of minutes (and the whole debate lasted half a day). He contrasts that to today where we do things in the smallest amount of time possible so that we can do other things (or multi-tasking) and presidential debates last an hour…If we want to achieve greatness that we should pay attention to how the great people who came before us paid attention—by blocking distractions out and focusing on the task at hand.”
- Car keys on the way out
- “Today’s keyless models use a fob — the small remote control device that most modern cars use to lock and unlock doors — but it performs the additional duty of sending a signal to the ignition. For the car to start, the fob has to be somewhere near the dashboard, perhaps stowed in a cup holder.”
- Animation of flight patterns
- Ghostly and cool animation of flight patterns.
- Dilbert on naming a product
- Company lawyer: “I did a trademark search on all of the excellent product names you suggested. Every one of them is taken…”
- A List Apart web design survey
- “Participate in our first annual survey to increase knowledge of web design and boost respect for the profession.”
Eric Skogen
on 24 Apr 07Bret Victor, the author of the “Magic Ink” essay, extracted a lot of his conclusions from his experience designing the BART Widget.
That widget is like cliffs notes for the essay. He’s really designing this way, right now, and coming up with great user interfaces.
I’ve still got a few pages to go, but it’s really inspiring me. So many fresh ideas about software design all in one document.
-DjD-
on 24 Apr 07Schmidt’s quote is on point but I honestly wish Google Docs and Spreadsheets or Google Calendar would take this to heart a bit more. To me, Docs / Spreadsheets / and Calendar try to be too much like Office and Outlook and get cumbersome. I still use at least one of those apps every day but I hope as the development continues, they scale it back a bit and focus on the “simple solutions”.
Scott Meade
on 24 Apr 07If we want to achieve greatness that we should pay attention to how the great people who came before us paid attention—by blocking distractions out and focusing on the task at hand
As an experiment, I started forcing myself into strict single-tasking last week. At first it was very, very hard not to sucumb to the habit and flip over to peek at email or a blog entry while waiting for a webpage to load, for tests to run, or while talking with someone on the phone. Yet I quickly noticed how much more productive the primary task seemed when it had 100% of my attention. I found I was not having to reread or repeat tasks and found that estimates of how long a task would take were more accurate.
The most surprising benefit though is that I no longer feel so overwhelmed with everything that needs to get done. By single-tasking, the mind has one thing at at time to consider instead of being overloaded with multiple concerns. Single-tasking is giving me a feeling of calm and order combined with increased productivity.
Tim Ferriss, lifestyle guru and author of “The 4 Hour Workweek” has a blog entry today relevant to this topic. It’s on the study of the distracting effects of e-mail and ringing phones compared to marijuana at http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/04/24/marijuana-trumps-blackberries-for-productivity-and-amazon-challenge/ and another one on how to firewall out distractions http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2007/04/20/how-to-firewall-attention-and-reclaim-time/.
JF
on 24 Apr 07Scott: I totally agree. I find singletasking significantly more effective and satisfying.
Benjy
on 24 Apr 07Am I missing something in terms of the keyless ignitions? What’s the big benefit with this “advancement?” If we still require a fob, then there’s still something to lose. And if we now just stow it in the cupholder, then we can’t use the cubholder… or we risk it slipping between the seats, etc. At least with an ignition key, we know where it is and it ain’t going anywhere while we’re driving. Even if we could simply put it back in our pocket/purse, is it really any less work pushing a button than turning a key?
Bryan Zug
on 24 Apr 07The “How We Learn” quote attributed to Glaser is largely a myth, as far as I can tell. I found this page while trying to track down a source for the “People remember 10%, etc.” quote for a conference presentation last year.
http://www.willatworklearning.com/2006/05/people_remember.html
From that post by Will Thalheimer of Work-Learning Research, Inc. —
sloan
on 24 Apr 07You all should check out the rest of Aaron’s work, we had him in our office to talk about some potential work and I have to say he’s a really nice young man and is very bright and generally interested in exploring “stuff”. By stuff, I mean simply he is not one dimensional… http://users.design.ucla.edu/~akoblin/work.html
Ryan Heneise
on 24 Apr 07To help me single-task, I often set time limits on specific tasks. I have a little OS X program called Timer, which lets me set countdown timers and alarms with specific names. Watching the time count down serves as a motivator, reminding me to focus on the task at hand before the time runs out.
http://www.robbiehanson.com/alarmclock/index.html
Mo
on 24 Apr 07I think the “fear” of Keyless Ignition comes from lack of knowledge.
You don’t need to put the key in the cupholder. You can just leave it in you pocket or your purse or whatever. As long as the key is in the car it will turn on and remain on even if you walk out of the car with the keys.
The biggest benefit is that if you are carrying bunch of stuff in your hand (like me with my Macbook, water bottle and whatever else I am trying to juggle) than you don’t have to look for or try to push a button or whatever to get into your car, you just pull the handle and the door opens.
As fas as losing it, I don’t see how it is any different than regular keys.
Another neat feature that Lexus has is that when you get close to the door at night and the fob is in your possession, the side lights turn on. I thought that was cool.
Anonymous Coward
on 24 Apr 07Coda looks awesome
will
on 24 Apr 07Thanks for linking to Coda. This looks like it could be a nice addition to my tool set. A little bit of wysiwyg without being bloated. I love the user interface too.
-DjD-
on 24 Apr 07Re: Mo and Keyless Ignition “Fear”
The concept is certainly a good one but I think the fear stems from not knowing what’s happening behind the scenes. With a tangible key, I know I have it in my possession and that no one else does. Yes there are ways to duplicate my key or hotwire my car but somehow I perceive these physical barriers as more secure.
I love things that ‘just work’ and are nice and simple to use, but in this case, for me at least, not seeing the mechanism behind the key means you need to do a better job conveying how it works, otherwise I’ll be skeptical.
brad
on 24 Apr 07Coda is awesome, although it’s a shame it has taken so long for someone to come up with a well designed and well-thought-out Mac version of Homesite, which in many ways is what Coda is. As far as I know, Homesite was the first good app on any platform that seamlessly integrated all the activities that a web manager/coder was likely to do: site management, coding, and FTP. But it was only ever available for Windows. The best Mac programs only did pieces of the puzzle: TextMate or BBEdit for coding, Transmit or Fetch for FTP, etc. I find it puzzling that it has taken this long for someone to come up with an elegant Mac solution like Coda.
I keep hearing people complain that Coda won’t work for them because it doesn’t have “SVN hooks.” At first I thought, “what, Signal Versus Noise?” Now I know it’s Subversion, but I still don’t know what that means, so I guess Coda will suit my needs just fine. ;-)
freaktopia
on 24 Apr 07“It turns out, consumers are harder than the enterprise because the consumer will not give you a second chance.”
Duh. The consumer is an indvidual instead of an enterprise so there are a lot more of ‘em and their tastes vary far more greatly and care more about their money than their company’s money.
Hey, I also heard grass is green and the sky is blue – check into it.
Eric Mill
on 24 Apr 07The statistic that 4.59% of Wikipedia visits are “participation” visits is actually shockingly high. Can this possible be true? That’s nearly 1 in 20 visits, are for more than just reading the page.
Eric Mill
on 24 Apr 07I’m not proud of the grammar in that last post.
sloan
on 24 Apr 07Keys don’t need batteries and the more electronic we make things the more they break down or malfunction. Remember reading about Land Rovers having issues with their computerized suspensions? I think any time we add more gizmos people are worried about them breaking because things are built to fail so often. Is the thing battery operated? Or is it like RFID and passively powered?
Ethan Bauley
on 25 Apr 07I think that the Participation/Web 2.0 stat is pretty misleading. Granted, I don’t know what the context is. But, I have uploaded a bunch of videos to YouTube and comment and rate often. Still, most of my visits are viewing videos.
I guess I’m saying I’m more interested in what % of peeps who are visitors have commented/rated/uploaded.
Maybe another thing that would be interesting to look at would be # of people participating vs. 1998 [when there was, basically, zero people participating, x/c media professionals].
There are a zillion statistics out there that will paint the picture: lots of people make art on lots of levels [and I can only imagine that forthcoming generations will be even more media literate and participatory].
For example, 50% of all households in America have someone in it that plays a musical instrument. That’s a lot of peeps.
Chad Allen
on 25 Apr 07If Coda had SVN hooks, it would be fantastic. I have been using it for the past few days and enjoy working in it much more that radrails, textmate, and especially (bleh) dreamweaver. I did have to modify the color coding to suit my liking.
nakliyat
on 27 Apr 07thank you very very nıce thank you very very much…
This discussion is closed.