The price of shipping is imperfection. If you wait for your product to be perfect, you’ll never finish it. Fortunately you can decide which features should be closer to perfect and which can slack off a little. The Kindle DX is a good case in point. Reading and flipping pages on the Kindle is a wonderful experience. On the other hand, using the keyboard is painful. The keys are hard to press. The modifier keys are confusing. Mistakes are easy to make, slow to spot and hard to correct. Yet despite all these problems, I still love the device.
A good way to square the great overall experience with a bad feature is the “suckage to usage” ratio. You can take any feature and say “it sucks,” but that doesn’t tell you anything about the whole product until you factor in how often you use the feature. Have a look at this unscientific chart.
Feature
Suckage (1-5)
Usage
Contribution (1-5)
Reading
0
90%
0
Typing
5
3%
0.15
Switching books
1
7%
0.07
Total suckage
0.22
Suppose reading on the Kindle doesn’t suck at all (0 out of 5), typing sucks maximally (5 out of 5), and switching between books sucks a little (1 out of 5). Considering I spend 90% of my time just reading on the device, the contributions add up to a total suckage of only 0.22 out of 5. Inverted, that’s 4.78—basically a 5-star product.
It’s rational for the Kindle designers to skimp on the keyboard when every feature takes time and time is scarce. Maybe the third or fourth generation Kindle will change such that keyboard input becomes more important. Pressures do change over time. But for now, it’s a fair trade.
It’s easy to accept in theory that some parts of your own product won’t be up to standard. In practice, it’s hard to drop the sword. Nobody wants to release a feature that you know could be better. When this happens, try adding a factor of usage to the equation to see if perfection is really worth its price.
Next time you want to illustrate a flow or concept with a diagramming tool, throw away the source file as soon as you export the PNG or PDF. If you’re afraid to throw the source file away, you spent too much time on it.
Here are the top 20 Signal vs. Noise posts of 2009 ranked by number of page views. (Posting will be slow until the new year.) Thanks to everyone for reading!
In hindsight it was an obvious idea but I’ve yet to see anyone else do something like this before.
Neat idea and executed really well. Plus the photos are terrific.
The story behind the iconic design of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” (from this documentary about the album’s creation). The direction given by the client: “Simple, bold, and dramatic.”
If your company is so big and impersonal that you call the people you have assets, resources, bodies, or any of the many other degrading terms available, you’re doing it wrong.
When you talk about people, it’s clear that they’re neither interchangeable or mechanic. When you talk about people, you’re almost bound to care. Who cares about an asset or a resource? Everyone cares about Peter or Amanda.
This language of impersonality usually comes from visions of growth for its own sake. Not because Eric needs some help and Lindsey might be a good choice. It comes because you’re envisioning a project so big and complicated that keeping names in your head would just make it pop. That’s a bad way to hire.
Instead, push hiring down to the people who will actually care about names. So you might be building a 200-man mega project, but the team responsible for the design of the turbines are the ones in need of a few more hands. Not The Project.
It’s with great honor that we’re announcing our latest addition to the programming team at 37signals: Pratik Naik. I’ve worked with Pratik through the Ruby on Rails core team for almost two years. He’s been a top contributor with about 400 commits since 2007.
We first started working with Pratik as a contractor on Haystack, which he built the backend for. He has also worked on the new Campfire API that was rolled out recently. All great work. A perfect manager-of-one example. We can’t wait to put him to work on all the awesome things we’ll be bringing to light in 2010.
Pratik will be starting full time on February 1st. He will be the 17th signal. The second currently residing in Europe (Pratik is in London, Joshua Sierles in Spain).
37signals ID 37signals ID begins rolling out
Here’s a list of many of the major changes that come along with the 37signals ID username and password system upgrade.
37signals Launchpad: A video walkthrough
The Launchpad lets you access all your 37signals products from a single screen. Move between them with a click, jump back into each app where you left off, rename, reorder, and organize your workflow.
How to: Merge multiple 37signals IDs together
We launched a feature that lets people merge/link different 37signals IDs together. This is helpful if you’ve created two or more different 37signals IDs by accident. Or maybe you created separate identities on purpose originally but would prefer a single ID instead.
Quick tips for accessing your new 37signals Launchpad
Have you transitioned your account to a 37signals ID? If so, here’s a shortcut to the universal login and Launchpad: http://37s.me. And if you’re a Safari user, try this: Add the 37s Launchpad as the first item in your Bookmarks Bar. Then hit cmd+1 to quickly load it up!
Highrise Car accident? Highrise cases are perfect for handling the aftermath
A car accident is a real pain to deal with on many levels. One way to make the process easier is to use Highrise to collect all the information you’ll need to track: details on the other driver/car, witnesses, passengers, accident location, insurance, attorneys, and more.
Multiple products Why Basecamp and Campfire would be a better learning management system
“At our university, we use Blackboard as a Learning Management System, and I can’t say that it’s good at all. In this post, I outline the most important shortcomings of Blackboard, the benefits of Basecamp and Campfire, and why the latter would be a better fit for our classes…The thing is that [37signals] products are not designed for education, they are designed for business. Yet, Basecamp and Campfire would be a much better overall fit than the Blackboard we currently use.”
Over the last few years I’ve noticed that as I’m giving a talk or a workshop, everyones’ antennas perk up when I turn to an example. It’s been a personal goal of mine to cut out as much preamble as possible and get straight into examples because they change the mood so drastically. Walking through an example says “here comes some reality.” You can theorize all you want, but examples force you to show that your theory holds. They allow the audience to test if what you say is true or not. And best of all, they turn the focus from abstract concepts to the mess and color of the real world.
I couldn’t help but think of the power of examples when I ran into this whirlwind talk about Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgement illustrated exclusively with comic book art.
Would you have thought Kant could be so entertaining?
