No Schedules, No Meetings talks about Best Buy’s Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE), the subject of a new book. Here’s an excerpt that explains why you should put on your “blizzard goggles” before attending a meeting.

One day, before ROWE, Phil was unable to come into work because of a snowstorm, which in Minnesota is perhaps the ultimate in socially acceptable excuses. Phil had six meetings scheduled for that day that were canceled because everyone was having trouble getting to the office. When he returned the next day, four of those meetings were never rescheduled. One was resolved with an e-mail, another with a phone call.

He had spent much of his “snow day” worrying about those six meetings. He was ready to drive in and brave the weather in order to have them. Now that he’s in a ROWE he thinks about that snow day a lot. When an invitation to a meeting comes up or when he’s thinking about scheduling a meeting, he puts on his “blizzard goggles.” Is this meeting really necessary? If there were a snowstorm today, would that meeting fade away, or could it be taken care of with an e-mail, or, would it in fact prove to have genuine value?

Sometimes it takes some snow to put things in perspective. [tx BL]

Related
Hepatitis leave: Ricardo Semler says, “When people tell us they don’t have time to think, we ask them to consider what would happen if they suddenly contracted hepatitis and were forced to spend three months recuperating in bed. Then we tell them to go ahead and do it.”

When designing a UI we usually go right from a quick paper sketch to HTML/CSS. We skip the static Photoshop mockup.

Here are a few reasons why we skip photoshop:

1. You can’t click a Photoshop mockup. This is probably the number one reason we skip static mockups. They aren’t real. Paper isn’t real either, but paper doesn’t have that expectation. A Photoshop mockup is on your screen. If it’s on your screen it should work. You can’t pull down menus in a Photoshop mockup, you can’t enter text into a field in a Photoshop mockup, you can’t click a link in a Photoshop mockup. HTML/CSS, on the other hand, is the real experience.
2. Photoshop gives you too many tools to focus on the details. When you use Photoshop you can’t help but pay attention to the details. The alignment, the specific colors, the exact shapes, the little details that may matter eventually but they certainly don’t matter now. The start is about the substance, not about the details. Details are for later.
3. The text in Photoshop is not the text on the web. Once you’re looking at a static Photoshop mockup you can’t quickly change the text without going back into Photoshop, changing the text, saving the file, exporting it as a gif/png/jpg, etc. You can’t post it online and tell someone to “reload in 5 seconds” like you can when you quickly edit HTML. You have to say “Give me a few minutes…”. Also, type in Photoshop never seems to be the right size as type in HTML. It just never seems to feel the same. It doesn’t wrap the same, it doesn’t space out the same.
4. Photoshop puts the focus on production, not productivity. Photoshop is about building something to look at, but about building something you can use. When you’re just worried about how it’s going to look, you spend too much time on production value. HTML/CSS lets you be productive. You’re constantly moving forward towards something more and more real with every change.
5. Photoshop is repeating yourself. Ok, so you’ve spent 3 days on a mockup in Photoshop. Now what? Now I have to make it all over again in HTML/CSS. Wasted time. Just build it in HTML/CSS and spend that extra time iterating, not rebuilding. If you’re not fast enough in HTML/CSS, then spend the time learning how to create in HTML/CSS faster. It’s time well spent.
6. Photoshop isn’t collaboration friendly. I sorta touched on this before, but let me hit this point again: HTML/CSS lets you make a change, save, and reload. That’s our collaboration flow. “Here, let me change this. Reload.” These changes take seconds. “Here, let me float this left instead of right. Reload.” Seconds. No selecting a tool, changing a few items around manually, saving, exporting, uploading, giving people the new file name, etc. HTML/CSS is build for rapid iterative prototyping while Photoshop… isn’t.
7. Photoshop is awkward. You can’t help but know your way around Photoshop after working in it for 10 years, but I still find it awkward to get simple things done. Working with a pen feels so much more natural to me than going back to the toolbar over and over. A pen can draw anything, but in Photoshop you need to use the text tool to type, the shape tool to draw a shape, the menu bar to adjust this or that, etc.

None of this is to say we think Photoshop is bad or a waste of money or time, but for us we’ve found that going straight into HTML/CSS affords us the best iterative and creative experience. HTML/CSS is real in a way Photoshop will never be.

I just got back from RailsConf in Portland. It was really fun to be a designer among a sea of programmers. I spent a lot of time talking to programmers about what designers do on a Rails team and how we should work together. A number of those ideas worked their way into an interview with Geoffrey Grosenbach of PeepCode. Listen to the podcast at Rails Podcast.

UPDATE: Here are some quick video interviews with Ryan, Jeremy, and David from RailsConf 2008.

Ryan Singer


Jeremy Kemper


David Heinemeier Hansson

There was a lot of interest in the Amazon S3 statistics that we posted a while back, so I thought I’d follow up with some more current data. Here’s a quick summary that I whipped up this morning showing our Amazon S3 usage stats since the beginning of the year.

Apple search
Apple.com’s quick search pulldown is an innovative way to present online search results.

FriendFeed
Narendra Rocherolle writes:

I don’t know if it actually works or on what interval, but [FriendFeed’s] idea of sending email for notifications if “I haven’t logged in recently” is pretty clever.

Borders Magic Shelf
Christopher Jobson writes:

Borders launched their first ecommerce site in 7 years and they feature a new heavily-visual search tool called “Magic Shelf”. Other than an unfortunate name, it’s a fun little tool, reminiscent of Apple’s methods for searching through albums in iTunes. Once you create an account you can change the parameters used to propogate potential items. Though not good as a primary search tool, it’s engaging enough to pull me into the site for a bit.

My favorite quarterly magazine is American Bungalow. It’s small, niche, and expensive, but it’s worth every penny for articles like the one in the summer 2008 edition titled “Brining Back Stinesville.”

Nancy Hiller wrote this amazing piece on the town of Stinesville, IN and the preservation group Bloomington Restorations, Inc. In the 1990’s Stinesville’s population had dropped to around 200. The buildings were deteriorating, commerce was lacking. BRI is the patron saint of the dying small town, its chief goal to convert run down, abandoned and dilapidated buildings into affordable, historical housing. BRI came to Stinesville.

BRI isn’t a housing developer. They aren’t making millions on tract homes in cookie-cutter developments. They are revitalizing small towns using the existing community and in turn preserving the history built by past residents. What’s old – in some cases very, very old – is quite new again indeed.

Retail politics – a type of political campaigning in which the candidate focuses on local events and meeting individual voters

It always seems weird to see presidential candidates shaking hands, kissing babies, and working rope lines. But even when you’re running for the highest office in the country, you still have to get out there and press the flesh.

As a business, it’s a good idea to recognize the value of retail politics too. There’s no match for meeting someone in the flesh. You can broadcast your message to a huge audience via the web, but you can’t replicate the interaction you get when you meet someone in person and explain to them exactly where you’re coming from.

For example, 37signals is out in full force right now at RailsConf (David, Jeff, Jeremy, Mark, Ryan, and Sam are all there). Other recent appearances: Ryan spoke to a large agency in Germany and Jason spoke to AIGA/NY at Smart Models (a good summary here).

Admittedly, RailsConf is speaking to the choir. But we also make an effort to talk to general business audiences, students, and other people who don’t normally get to hear our way of thinking. In fact, presenting new ideas to those sorts of crowds can lead to the most interesting conversations.

Actually, that’s another benefit to retail politics: It’s a great way to present controversial ideas. A lot of our opinionated comments make people think we’re too arrogant or dogmatic. Yet their tone usually takes a 180-degree turn when they meet us in person.

Eye contact has a way of diluting harsh views. In person, it’s a lot easier to separate the human being from his/her opinion. You get less of the animosity tone that reigns on blogs, etc.

Bottom line: Don’t forget the power of retail politics. Sometimes getting out from behind the keyboard and attending a Meetup, conference, or similar gathering can do you, and your business, a world of good.

In this excerpt from “A Pattern Language,” architect Christopher Alexander explains that plans of buildings should be loose and fluid so they can adapt easily.

Along the way, he compares the work of a fifty-year-old carpenter with the work of a novice. The difference: The experienced craftsman plans less because he has learned to do things in a way that lets him make small mistakes. This gives his work “unconcerned simplicity.”

Why does the principle of gradual stiffening seem so sensible as a process of building?

To begin with, such a structure allows the actual building process to be a creative act. It allows the building to be built up gradually. Members can be moved around before they are firmly in place. All those detailed design decisions which can never be worked out in advance on paper, can be made during the building process. And it allows you to see the space in three dimensions as a whole, each step of the way, as more material is added…

The essence of this process is very fundamental indeed. We may understand it best by comparing the work of a fifty-year-old carpenter with the work of a novice. The experienced carpenter keeps going. He doesn’t have to keep stopping, because every action he performs, is calculated in such a way that some later action can put it right to the extent that it is imperfect now. What is critical here, is the sequence of events. The carpenter never takes a step which he cannot correct later; so he can keep working, confidently, steadily.

The novice by comparison, spends a great deal of his time trying to figure out what to do. He does this essentially because he knows that an action he takes now may cause unretractable problems a little further down the line; and if he is not careful, he will find himself with a joint that requires the shortening of some crucial member – at a stage when it is too late to shorten that member. The fear of these kinds of mistakes forces him to spend hours trying to figure ahead: and it forces him to work as far as possible to exact drawings because they will guarantee that he avoids these kinds of mistakes.

The difference between the novice and the master is simply that the novice has not learnt, yet, how to do things in such a way that he can afford to make small mistakes. The master knows that the sequence of his actions will always allow him to cover his mistakes a little further down the line. It is this simple but essential knowledge which gives the work of a master carpenter its wonderful, smooth, relaxed, and almost unconcerned simplicity.

Related
An Introduction to Using Patterns in Web Design
Getting Real: Built-in seats in “A Pattern Language” [SvN]

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

Extras
Dashboard widget for Backpack Journal
You can post your status and create new journal entries right from your Dashboard thanks to Roobasoft.com’s Dashboard widget.

Case studies
How eduFire operates as a virtual company using Basecamp, Campfire, and Highrise
“We needed a piece of CRM software that would allow our team members to add contact information, make notes and share contacts remotely…We needed it to require as little training as possible (many of the people inputting data on the tutors were part-time workers or interns). Before Highrise, there wasn’t anything that would have worked (I know…we looked!). Using Highrise we were able to recruit hundreds of tutors and manage their information very efficiently.”

Buzz/press
Washington Post: Highrise “does nearly everything a personal secretary might do except go out for coffee and pick up our dry cleaning”
“We can’t afford to hire an administrative assistant, which is why we use Highrise. Nominally an online CRM tool, 37signals’ clever Web app does nearly everything a personal secretary might do except go out for coffee and pick up our dry cleaning…Highrise makes the job easy: Just bcc e-mail messages to a special ‘dropbox’ address, and your recipient’s address joins your contacts database automatically. You can then copy and paste their phone number, physical address, and other info at your leisure.”