Satisfying UI design is often illogical

“Usability tests and theories about interaction are tools. Very useful tools, but still just tools — not purposes onto themselves. The real goal is user satisfaction, and some of that is really illogical and messy.”

The new Tumblr looks impressive

“It’s been six months since we launched Tumblr 2.0. We’ve spent a lot of time looking at the ways you’ve been using Tumblr, want to be using it, and could be using it. Today, we’re delighted to show you the culmination of all your feedback and support. The most powerful and simple application we’ve ever built.”

More on email vs. RSS

“As much as I’d like to see RSS replace email, it’s just not going to happen overnight. RSS has to become brain dead simple to use. When the soccer moms, myspace kids, construction workers, and grandmothers can use RSS, commercial email will give way to RSS. Because RSS is a lot better.”

Book: “The Architecture of Happiness”

“It’s the architect’s task to design buildings that contribute to happiness by embodying ennobling values. While he makes no claim to be able to define true beauty in architecture, he suggests some of the virtues a building should have (illustrated by pictures on almost every spread): order combined with complexity; balance between contrasting elements; elegance that appears effortless; a coherent relationship among the parts; and self-knowledge, which entails an understanding of human psychology, something that architects all too often overlook.”

Dean Kamen previews new prosthetic arm

“Inventor Dean Kamen gives a 5-minute talk about the extraordinary prosthetic arm he’s developing at the request of the US Department of Defense, to help the 1,600 “kids” who’ve come back from Iraq without an arm (and the two dozen who’ve lost both arms). Kamen’s commitment to using technology to solve problems, and his respect for the human spirit, have never been more clear than in this deeply moving clip.”

Dallas P. asks:

Looking back on your history, what was the 1 big, risky decision that you had to make. And how did you come to the answer. (and was it the right answer?)

We take pride in not making big risky decisions. It’s not that we’re risk averse, it’s that we’re small decision friendly. We think the best way to avoid big mistakes is to make tiny decisions.

Molecules vs. Atoms

Big decisions are molecules. Each molecule is made up of multiple atoms. Each atom is a separate decision. We prefer to deal with decisions on the atomic level.

Inertia

The problem with big decisions is that they’re hard to make and hard to change. And once you make one the tendency is to continue to believe you made the right decision even if you didn’t. Big decisions are full of Pride, Politics, Posturing, and Persuasion. Changing direction after making a big decision is admitting you made a big mistake. Humans don’t like admitting that—especially when jobs, careers, and mortgage payments are on the line.

Think big, decide small

Making tiny decisions doesn’t mean you can’t make big plans or think big ideas. It just means that we believe the best way to achieve those big plans/dreams/ideas is one tiny decision at a time. Tiny decisions allow for easy course correction. Changing your mind about something small is a whole lot easier than changing your mind about something big. When’s the last time you really changed your mind about a big decision? It’s rare on your own and ten times as rare in an organization when other people are involved.

You asked for one, I’ll give you two

However, sometimes a big decision is unavoidable. We’ve had two in recent memory. 1. The Jeff Bezos investment in 37signals and 2. Starting Highrise over half-way through the initial development.

1. The Jeff Bezos investment

We’ve always believed that outside money is plan B. We believe in bootstrapping, self-funding, and making your customers your investors. We said no to over 30 VC firms since we first launched Basecamp in Feb 2004. But then we got a call from Jeff Bezos’ people letting us know Jeff liked what we were up to and was interested in investing in 37signals.

We had tremendous respect for Jeff. We loved Amazon, we loved what we’d read about him, we asked people we know who knew him and they loved him too. So we said, sure, let’s see where this goes.

After a couple of trip to Seattle we decided to work out a deal. This was a big (expensive) decision. Time, lawyers, selling a piece of the company—these were huge decisions for us. We’d always done things our way and answered to no one but ourselves and our customers. So this was big.

The decision was based on gut, primarily. We didn’t need the money for operations, but we really valued Jeff’s experience, advice, opinion, and general business sense. He built one of the world’s best retailing operations in a few short years. From an idea, from scratch. He’d been through that we were going through. We wanted a guy like that in our corner. We thought that was valuable so we took a chance on it. As with any tough negotiation there were times when both sides were on the verge of backing out, but everyone persevered for the better.

So far so great. We’re happy with the deal, happy with Jeff’s involvement, and happy with Jeff’s team. Good people, good support, good ideas, and pretty hands off. It feels like an idea situation for both sides.

2. Highrise restart

About half-way through the initial development of Highrise we took a look at the product and didn’t like it. We’d gone to far without Getting Real. We weren’t using it while we were building it, we were “complexifying” simple things, we were saying “wouldn’t it be cool if…” too often.

When we finally got honest about it we didn’t like it. Instead of trying to convince ourselves that we could salvage it, we decided to scrap it and start over. That was a big decision and it was most certainly the right one. The product we would have built would have sucked. The product we did build was great.

The Highrise experience reiterated the advantages of tiny decisions. We let a bunch of tiny unmade decisions snowball into one big critical decision. And then we put off the big decision so long that we’d finished half the product before we got up the stones to say “No, this sucks, we have to stop.” We definitely wasted a lot of time and chipped away a fair bit of morale.

But in the end it was the right decision. We started over, got real with our work, and produced something we’re very proud of.

Thanks for the questions!

So far we’ve received about 75 questions since posting the Ask 37signals announcement. We’ve earmarked a handful of especially good ones to answer so far. We’d love to answer yours. Please send it along to svn [at] 37signals dot com and use the subject “Ask 37signals”. Thanks again!

In Kitchen Nightmares, Gordon Ramsay does make-overs on failing restaurants and turns them into respectable enterprises through a combination of cuisine guidance, managerial pruning, and loads of swearing when things fail to meet his standards.

It’s a fantastic show that gives grim insight to the scary state of affairs of the chosen spots, but it also goes beyond the schadenfreude and saves these places from going out of business.

What makes Ramsay’s approach to restaurant revamping so interesting, though, is how applicable it feels to software design. The characteristics of a failing eatery ring remarkably similar to those of a poorly-run software product:

Everything to no one
Almost all Ramsay’s cases feature an overstuffed menu derived from a misguided notion that more choice is always better and that making every dish under the sun will broaden the appeal of the restaurant. The first order for the cuisine is to trim the choices and go from thirty-some dishes to ten or twelve.

Compare this to a piece of software overflowing with features. None of them particularly tasty, none of them particularly well done, all of them burdening the user with a learning curve and all of them cluttering the interface to the point of mediocracy.

You don’t tickle patron’s taste buds by all the dishes you can make that they don’t eat and you don’t delight users by spreading yourself thin over all the features they won’t use.

Cook what you know
British chefs slicing Japanese Sushi or Indian chefs cooking traditional American cuisine are two examples that Ramsay cracked down on under the banner of Cook What You Know. If you don’t have a strong history of eating and living with certain ingredients and styles of cuisine, it’s much, much harder to reach the upper echelon’s of taste. And why bother? Pick your native ingredients, those in season, and make what you know and can personally appreciate.

The same is true for software. When you create products for yourself, you’ll have a much easier job and most likely be much better at it too. It’s hard to make good food if you don’t know what excellence should taste like and it’s equally hard to craft good software if you can’t appreciate what brilliance looks like.

Passion for your environment
Great chefs care about their tools and their environment. Poor chefs let their kitchens go and don’t cleanup the messes they create. In the world of food that’s not just sloppy, but dangerous as well. One of Ramsay’s common shocks come in the form of “I fucking ate this!!” when he looks at the ingredients and machinery that produced his welcoming meal.

Great programmers are like great chefs. They care about having a clean, productive environment. They surround themselves with beautiful code that they craft with tools that they enjoy. You can’t disregard your tools and think that you can still produce great work. It doesn’t work in cooking and it doesn’t work in programming.

That’s just a small taste of the similarities. Ramsay has plenty of additional lessons to teach software creators about vision, simplicity, and executing on the basics beautifully. I highly recommend setting your DVR to pick up the American version of Kitchen Nightmares on Fox every Wednesday from 8pm. The original British ones from BBC are great as well.

Some recent activity at our internal 37signals Campfire chat room.

RSS vs email

Media descriptions

Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

New Highrise feature: Public tasks
Now you’ll find a checkbox when creating/editing a task that says “Let everyone see this task.” Checking this box makes the task visible to everyone in your Highrise account. So if you have a task to get done, and it’s not private in nature, you may want to check the “Let everyone see this task” so everyone else can see what’s on your plate. It’s entirely up to you.

Kayels offers ideas on how to use Backpack
“What do I use Backpack for? What don’t I use Backpack for? I’m going to go scan my list of pages and give you some examples.”

Layer Tennis uses Campfire as back-channel during matches
The participants use Campfire as a back-channel to discuss the match while it’s going on. Chris Glass, one of the players in a recent match, gave a behind-the-scenes look at what it’s like to “play” and praised Campfire as a better alternative to IM for group chat.

Basecamp is “a great tool for virtual project teams”
“Collaborating with other team members — or our mutual client — used to be a challenge before we discovered Basecamp from 37Signals. Basecamp offers a safe, secure, inexpensive hosted service to coordinate our activities. It’s lightweight, easy to use, and works well for both Windows and Mac OS X users across a range of browsers.”

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A couple of weeks ago I had the honor of speaking at the BIF 3 conference in Providence, RI. Walt Mossberg and I discussed simple software, feature creep, and why the software industry is structured to churn out big software.

Watch the 20-minute interview. Photo by: Michelle Riggen-Ransom.

What’s BIF?

BIF (Business Innovation Factory) is a wonderful organization head up by a great guy named Saul Kaplan. Saul is one of those guys who lives for innovation. He loves seeing it, he loves hearing about it, and he loves implementing it. He embraces Rhode Islands’ main constraint: Its small size. He sees it as an opportunity to position Rhode Island as a controlled testbed of innovation. And the Business Innovation Factory is at the center of this innovation storm.

BIF-3, like BIF-1 and 2 before it, was about stories. Each storyteller had 15 minutes on the stage talking about something that inspired them, something that helped them innovate. Past speakers included Dean Kamen, Richard Saul Wurman, John Seely Brown, Jane Fulton Suri, and plenty of others making a real difference. This year they added interviews by Walt Mossberg and Bill Taylor to the mix.

I didn’t attend BIF-1 or BIF-2, but BIF-3 was amazing, enlightening, and inspiring. The great thing about BIF is that they bring people from different industries together to share their stories. This is not a technology conference, it’s a conference about ideas that can come from anywhere.

Some of my favorite talks from BIF-3

Colonel Dean Esserman talks about knowing your beat cops like you know your doctor. Nationally recognized as a leader in public safety innovation, Providence’s Chief of Police has revamped the city’s crimefighting force and sucessfully replaced the department’s traditional methods with a new community policing concept.

Denise Nemchev talks about inventing a nail that can save billions of dollars and millions of lives. Nemchev is President of Stanley Bostitch, a Division of the Stanley Works. The Stanley Works is a worldwide supplier of tools, hardware and security solutions for professional, industrial, and consumer use. Stanley Bostitch is a $600M division of SWK headquartered out of East Greenwich, Rhode Island employing nearly 3,000 people world-wide.

Clayton Christensen talks about education, health care, disruptive innovation and fearing the 12 year olds. Christensen is the Robert and Jane Cizik Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. His research and teaching interests center on managing innovation and creating new growth markets. A seasoned entrepreneur, Christensen founded three successful companies: CPS Corporation, Innosign, and Innosign Capital. Christensen is also author or co-author of five books and is presently completing two books concerning the problems of our health care and public education systems.

Mark Cuban is interviewed by Walt Mossberg on a variety of topics. Cuban is an active investor in leading and cutting-edge technologies and owner of the Dallas Mavericks. Prior to his purchase of the Dallas Mavericks, Cuban co-founded Broadcast.com, the leading provider of multimedia and streaming on the Internet. Today, in addition to his ownership of the Mavericks, Cuban is also Chairman of the high-definition television station HDNet which he launched in 2001. HDNet is the world’s first national television network broadcasting all of its programming in 1080i high-definition television (HDTV).

More and more

You can see all the talks from the conference online. I would highly recommend checking out a future BIF conference if you can. Providence is a cool town, the speakers are top notch, and you’ll definitely come away inspired.

Also, special thanks to Jack Templin and the Providence Geeks for inviting me to speak at their event while I was in town. Extra special thanks also go out to Tori Drew and Christine Flanagan for their magical organizational efforts.

This is the first in a series of posts showing how we use Campfire as our virtual office. All screenshots shown are real and were taken during one week in September.

We’ve posted photos of our Chicago office before. But this series of posts is about taking you behind the scenes at our real office: Campfire.

Campfire is where our team — local and remote — gathers everyday. We use it to chat, show each other screenshots, get feedback, upload files, collaborate on copy, share code, get alerts when sites are modified, search previous conversations, and much more.

It does so many disparate things that it’s sometimes tough for us to explain its power. People get it but they don’t always really get it. The screenshots and video tour at the Campfire site are a good start. But there’s so much more.

One week in Campfire: How we use it for design
These “Behind the scenes” posts aim to show you 1) how we work and 2) all the little things that we get done in Campfire every day. We picked one week in September and took screenshots of some of our key interactions. This first batch focuses on design.

If you’re a designer (or work with one), the great thing about using Campfire is that you can upload images and view them inline while chatting about them. If you use Pyro, you can even drag and drop the images right into Campfire. Once you share and discuss images so seemlessly, you’ll never want to go back to the old way again. On to the examples…

Tweak a screen’s interface on the fly
Ryan uploads a couple of screens and explains why he prefers one over the other. Jason suggests adding some explanatory text. When it was eventually implemented, it looked like this.

Upload a screen showing what changed on the server
Ryan commits a change. Then he uploads a revised screen and explains what’s different.

Show a programmer a UI and get a time estimate for implementation
Ryan posts a proposed screen change and queries Jeremy to see how much work it will take.

Mike Rohde’s SEED Conference 2007 sketchbook notes = coolest conference notes ever!

In this lecture at MIT’s Sloan Business school, Ricardo Semler, the pioneeering CEO of Semco, says the military-inspired structure of most workplaces is anachronistic. He advises the students to rethink some of the fundamental assumptions they have about organizations, leadership, and life in general.

If you’ve only read about his ideas, it’s cool to hear him speak aloud about these topics. You can really sense the guy’s passion. A few standout points excerpted below.

Most business plans are wishful thinking…

A 5 year plan is just an extrapolation added to wishful thinking. Have you ever seen a business plan that says, “I’m going to go up 5% and then down -14% and then -22% and then I’m going to recuperate a little bit and then it’s going to go to hell?”

‘Cuz that’s what happens. That’s how it looks in practice, but that’s not the way we design it. We’re willing to trick ourselves into thinking we have control as long as we do it with wishful thinking.

Growth is overrated for companies…

The assumption that growth is good for companies is a very difficult one to sustain. There is no evidence whatsoever that companies that grow a lot do better than companies that don’t grow a lot.

Admit what you don’t know…

We don’t know where we’re going, but we’d rather not pretend that we do. Because we think pretending is a lot more dangerous than admitting that we don’t…Talking about specific numbers more than six months out is improbable. Think about the future but don’t write it down. If you write it down, you have to follow it.

We have a slot open for November in The Deck, our advertising network for reaching creative, web and design professionals. Give us a holler if you can pull the trigger quick and we’ll make a nice deal for a first-time advertiser.