All web apps are trying to suck. They are trying to be bloated. They are trying to be unstructured. They are trying to be confusing.
You are the stopgap. You are the one who stands between order and chaos. You are the sniper who must pick off every distraction, unneeded feature, and extra word that doesn’t absolutely have to be there.
You must be a killer. You must say no. You must anger those who disagree with you. That is the only way to make something great.
It’s not just software that’s this way. It’s true for anything you make. This American Life’s Ira Glass talks about it in this interview (below). He says that to succeed as a storyteller, or in any creative endeavor, you’ve got to enjoy killing (the part about killing starts around 1:30 in).
This idea that entropy is the enemy when you’re building something really makes sense: The universe is fighting against you. It’s trying to make whatever you’re creating chaotic and disordered. Everything will decline and degenerate unless you stop it from happening.
Greatness come from being a ruthless killer. Without vicious editing, your creation is destined to wind up the same as all the other crap that’s already out there.
About 3 hours into my flight it dawned on me. I had to take a leak. I wasn’t expecting a rendezvous with great design, but there it was in the most unlikely of places. The airplane lavatory (and, BTW, why don’t they call it a bathroom or restroom or toilet — who calls it a lavatory in everyday life?).
When you lock the door the lights turn on. When you unlock the door the lights go off. Perfect. It’s sorta like being in a huge refrigerator, but in reverse. In this case when you close (lock) the door the light goes on.
Anyway, I thought it was great design. Why should two things that always happen together (lock the door and turn on the light) be a two step process with different controls? Just make it one step, one control. Lock and light, one switch. Great thinking. I wonder who invented that.
Constraints force brevity
In No Resistance Is Futile, Paul Ford talks about how constraints (write without the letter “e”; use only one-syllable words; make every sentence exactly N words) can force you out of windbaggery.
Now when I face a new writing project, I open a spreadsheet. I want a grid to keep track of sources and dates, or to make certain that the timeline of a story makes sense. The grid imposes brevity. Relationships between sentences are exposed. Editing becomes a more explicit act of sorting, shuffling, balancing paragraphs. In this spirit, I’m rewriting some blog software to read directly from Excel. We’ll see how that goes.
It’s not “I have a nightmare”
In Challenges to Both Left and Right on Global Warming, a pair of young environmental thinkers argue that gloom and doom environmental messages will fail if applied to global warming.
Instead they call for an aggressive effort to invest in energy research, while also building societies that can be resilient in the face of the warming that is already unavoidable.
In a recent interview, Mr. Shellenberger reprised a central point of the essay and book. “Martin Luther King didn’t give the ‘I have a nightmare’ speech, he gave an ‘I have a dream’ speech,” Mr. Shellenberger said. “We need a politics that is positive and that inspires people around an exciting and inspiring vision.”
Get hated Polarize Me says, “If you want people to like you, first decide who needs to hate you.”
As a dater on Match.com, you have two key ways to communicate something quickly about yourself: a picture and a headline. The pic, of course, should embrace the social norm and be from 10 years and 20 pounds ago.
With the headline, you can start from scratch. Given the stakes, these headlines should really zing. They don’t. We examined more than 1,000 Match.com ads—from men and women, old and young. Our search yielded headlines like this one: “Hey.” Folks, if your opening line is “Hey,” you better be hot.
Another said “Looking for love.” Well, duh, you’re on Match.com. At least two-thirds of the headlines said nothing—and did it poorly.
Why do these headlines suck so much? Fear. Fear of saying too much. Fear of saying something clever that someone might think is stupid. Fear of saying something revealing that might turn someone off. The headlines try desperately not to exclude anyone. In doing so, they succeed at boring everyone.
Man… I just adore simple solutions like Muxtape. Here’s a sample muxtape for reference.
Dead simple, absolutely clear, quenches a common thirst (sharing a collection of songs with a friend), can’t-mess-up easy (username, email, password then upload MP3s). For a tiny touch of personality you can change the color of the strip at the top of the screen.
I imagine this could get shut down, but I love the exercise in simple execution. There are so many ways this could have been complicated. Muxtape’s elegance demonstrates the power of sticking to the point.
Since you can buy just about anything on Amazon, I’ve noticed lately that those little recommendation algorithms are slipping out of tune. Specifically, the “Buy Together With” recommendations that pop up when you’re viewing an item someone else may have recently purchased. Sometimes these recommendations are spot on and I really did want to buy a pack of decaf coffee pods with my regular coffee pods, thank you very much. But sometimes, and perhaps more often than not, I’m staring at the screen saying, “Really, Amazon? Really?!”
Like when I was checking out this cool New York motif mug and Amazon suggested I buy it with a coin bank. Perhaps this makes sense in a robotically comical way. Perhaps Amazon is thinking, “Well, if you’re going to New York, start saving your pennies!” or something equally cheeky and annoying.
Just a quick observation: writing software is like carving. You start with the computer and all of its potential, and you whittle away the possibilities, constraining the program until you get what you envisioned.
SvN reader Michael P. sent in an interesting link this morning to the Skyline Review. This site shows the rental rate, building shape, parking rates, and space availability by floor with an innovative graphic display:
The light grey represents available space. Black is occupied. Pretty cool way to get a quick feel for how full a building is and which floors have space available.
In this Newsweek article from 1995, Clifford Stoll suggested it would be unlikely we’d buy books over the web or read newspapers online.
But he didn’t stop there. He didn’t think internet shopping would work because the internet was missing salespeople:
We’re promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obselete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet — which there isn’t — the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.
Anyway, 1995 was definitely the early days. Plenty of predictions were wrong. Who knew what was going to happen. We can’t fault him for having an opinion.
But reading his opinion today does highlight just how far we’ve come in such a short time. Just about everything in his piece — from news to shopping to government — has been fundamentally changed by the web. What he thought wouldn’t work has actually worked so well that it’s hard to imagine our lives without it.
Further, his article shines a light on the burden of assumptions. Stoll assumed one of the reasons online shopping would fail was because it lacked salespeople. That was an assumption tied to his present day experience; a person had to sell you something.
How much of what you say can’t change is tied to your present day assumptions? “We can’t do that in our business” or “That would never work here” or “We have to have that” or “We need this in order to do that” or “That’s just how its done.”
Vision is about demolishing today’s assumptions and recognizing that new things are possible. It takes real guts to fight for the side of the non-obvious.
It also reminds me of one of my favorite quotes by Daniel Burnham. I usually just excerpt the first part of this quote, but in this case the end is what’s relevant:
Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big.
As far as the internet goes, we didn’t have to wait for our sons and grandsons to surprise us. We surprised ourselves.
On the bright side, it seems Clifford has come around. He sells Klein Bottles over the web. Curiously, doesn’t it look like his site was designed in 1995?
“We in IT are addicted to complexity. And our addiction to the complex, the expensive and the clunky is increasingly indulged at our own peril. That’s because business people have discovered that consumer IT is better than corporate IT. It has more features and is more responsive, easier to use, faster to install and a whole lot cheaper to operate.”
“Chang opened Momofuku Noodle Bar in 2004 after having an epiphany: ‘Why can’t I cook something simple? I’m not an awesome cook—I just want to make noodles.’ MacFarquhar writes, ‘The idea of Noodle Bar from the start was to take the humblest meal—a bowl of noodles, a pork bun—and, with a combination of obsessive devotion and four-star technique, turn it into something amazing.’” [via JK]
“For the millions of people who don’t get enough sleep because their commute to work is too long, or they spend too many hours at work, or they just want this lifestyle of go, go, go, it’s convenient to say, ‘I’ve learned to live without sleep.’ But you bring ‘em into the laboratory – and we have an open challenge to any CEO or anyone in the world, come into the laboratory – we don’t see this adaptation.”
“Every four years presidential candidates are given satiric makeovers and in this spirit I asked four caricaturist/illustrators to describe the most critical feature needed to achieve the likenesses of John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and whether or not a single pose best defines the candidate.”
