Some recent posts at the 37signals Product Blog:

New Highrise feature: Dates to remember
By very popular demand we bring you a new feature in Highrise: “dates to remember.” The dates to remember feature lets you keep track of important dates for each contact. You can add their birthday, anniversary, date hired, date fired, date granted a promotion, or whatever other date you want.

Springloops = a subversion host that integrates with Basecamp projects and todos
Cliff Spence writes, “I’ve been using an incredible compliment to Basecamp called Springloops.com for the past few days. If you aren’t aware of it already, it’s a Subversion host with some seriously tight integration with Basecamp’s projects and todos.”

Vector uses Basecamp to communicate with clients, track bugs, and eliminate unnecessary emails
Vector is a New York based web development firm that specializes in making complex solutions seem simple. We talked with Vector’s Matt Weinberg about how Basecamp helps his team communicate with clients, track bugs, and eliminate unnecessary emails.

Campfire is “the businessperson’s answer” to the chat dilemma
“A tool this powerful has the ability to impact traditional forms of communication.”

Greatascent aims to bring Highrise straight into your Mac
Greatascent, in private beta, is a simple application to bring Highrise straight into your Mac.

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I hate paper mail. Even when I filter out the spam, the credit card offers, and the endless stream of catalogues from places where I once bought a pencil sharpener, it’s still bad. Because what’s left is usually somewhat important. Bills, receipts, or documents that should otherwise probably be filed properly some where.

For me, that somewhere was always The Pile. A bottom-less pit of guilt that would build up over a few weeks until I would rip through it and find that I was two days over due on paying $14.59 to People’s Gas.

Enter the tag team of organization: The Fujitsu ScanSnap document scanner, a shredder, and a solo Highrise account.

The beauty of the ScanSnap is its utterly brain-dead simple mode of use. You feed it a document, click the scan button on the device itself, and a PDF lands on your desktop. No continuous configuration, just one-click-straight-to-PDF goodness.

After the document is PDF’ed, it goes straight to the shredder. No clutter, no pile, just the pleasurable sound of paper I don’t have to worry about any more.

The final step is upload to Highrise. I have contacts for all the major bills I pay. So one for AT&T, one for People’s Gas, and so on. They’re all aggregated by the bills tag, which with the new tag streams allow me to see everything going through. I also have accounts for all the major service providers I use. There’s one for the lawyer, one for the mechanic, one for the doctor.

With the rhythm of “document goes in, follow-up task is set, and paper is gone” I’ve finally been able to beat The Pile and achieve the same level of inbox-zero zen that I have for Mail.app.

Most of the posts in our Design Decisions series have been about visual design. Why is this pixel here, why is that button there, why does this read like that?

In this installment we want to share some of the thinking behind the execution of a specific feature. It’s not so much about the visual design as it is about the functional design.

Initial import

When we launched Highrise we offered vCard and Basecamp import. You could upload a single vCard with many people, or many vCards with individual people. And if you had a Basecamp account you could pull all the people you created in Basecamp over to your Highrise account.

But that’s wasn’t enough. Well, it was enough for an initial launch. Hundreds of thousands of contacts were imported over the next few weeks. The options we offered were working for plenty, but requests for additional import options began to pile up.

Hearing without listening

This is where we got lost. We heard, but we didn’t listen. We heard “I need to import from…” and lumped all the “froms” into a single pile. Some people wanted to import from Outlook, some from Excel, others from apps that spit out data in CSV (comma separated values) format, and others from other generic CSV sources. So we thought, ok, let’s kill all these birds with one stone and build a generic CSV import tool. Upload your file, match up the fields, and we’ll take care of the rest. That should be easy, right?

What we missed

Here’s what we missed: In a statistical romp, the number of people who wanted to import from Outlook trounced the number of people who wanted to import from other CSV sources. But we didn’t listen to that. We just heard “import from CSV” and we set off to build the generic CSV import tool, cause, ya know, it should be easy, right?

Well, it turned out not to be very easy at all. It was easy enough to get clean data in, but when people sent us sample data it was pretty dirty. Some was encoded wrong, some wasn’t encoded at all. Some was quoted correctly, some was all scrambled up. Some had the same number of columns per row, some was variable. It was a total mess. Not an impossible mess to deal with, but maybe not one worth the effort right now.

Three weeks was two weeks too long

So three weeks in we said what the fuck? Why is this taking so long? Why aren’t we done yet? And it turned out we weren’t done because we hadn’t listened. We didn’t chop the big problem into smaller, more prioritized problems. We didn’t Judo it.

What we should have done

What we should have done was first build an Outlook importer. That was the biggest pain point for the most people. It was our customer’s top priority and it should have been ours as well. Focusing on a single file format removed 95% of the uncertainty. We knew the column names, we knew the file structure, we knew what to expect. When you know how the parts fit together it makes it much easier to build something. You can add value quicker. Maybe not all the potential value, but most of it for most people. That’s a quick win.

Judoed

And so that’s what we did. We put on the brakes, turned the wheel, and pointed our efforts at an Outlook-only importer. It took about a week, we launched it, and we made a lot of people very happy very quickly.

Then we looked at the next most popular import request. It turned out to be ACT 9!. So we grabbed some sample ACT 9! export files, mapped the format, and launched ACT 9! import next.

Lesson learned

Listen, don’t just hear. And don’t lump a bunch of related small problems together—it just makes one big problem. One big problem requires one big solution, and big solutions take a long time (and often don’t go right). You’re better off chopping big lumps of problems into smaller chunks until you’re able to knock them off one at a time. Add value sooner by solving the highest-priority/smallest-problem first. Then move on to the next one. And then the next one. This way you can provide a long chain of value, one link at a time.

Today at the An Event Apart Chicago conference, Liz Danzico wondered aloud what “seamless” means. You hear it bandied about often—especially in the form of a “seamless user experience.”

So, in 10 words or less, explain what “seamless” means in the context of the often-promised “seamless user experience.”

Crain’s Chicago Business recently posted a video interview with Jason where he discusses avoiding structure, how interruption is the enemy of productivity, why it’s a good idea to emulate drug dealers, the secret to competing with free stuff, and more. Check it out.

Harry Houdini was more than just an escape artist. He was also a master of self-promotion. I caught a great documentary on him yesterday and it was interesting to see how much of his success was due to his marketing hustle and constant showmanship. Some lessons from the escape king:

1. Focus on the killer bit
When he started out, he was doing a bunch of tricks and escaping from handcuffs was just one in the batch. A vaudeville bigwig saw him do his act and told him that no one cared about any of the tricks except the handcuff escape. Houdini dropped the rest of the tricks, did a show that focused exclusively on escapes, and flew to stardom.

2. Judo big problems into small ones
Handcuff “hacks” let him workaround difficult locks with ease.

If presented with a particularly difficult lock, he might insist it be placed higher on his forearm, then simply slip these cuffs over his wrists once the easier cuffs placed there had been removed.

3. Beat copycats by innovating
Copycats constantly threatened Houdini’s success. At one point, he couldn’t get booked in some areas because there were so many people there already doing his act. His solution? Innovation. He constantly elevated his game and pioneered new tricks. His escapes got increasingly extravagant, from handcuffs to straitjackets to water tanks. That ensured there would always be demand for the real Houdini, not impostors.

How to start writing

“Like a flea market or garage sale, let ideas feel cheap, light and easy to throw around. If you can do that, new work will get off the ground almost on its own.”

The most underappreciated fact about gender: the ratio of our male to female ancestors.

“While it’s true that about half of all the people who ever lived were men, the typical male was much more likely than the typical woman to die without reproducing. Citing recent DNA research, Dr. Baumeister explained that today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men. Maybe 80 percent of women reproduced, whereas only 40 percent of men did.”

Raymond Loewy

Designer of the Coca Cola bottle, Air Force One, Lucky Strike, Greyhound Bus, Pennsylvania S-1 Locomotive, Exxon and Shell logos, NASA interiors for Sky Lab, and the Avanti, the only automobile to be exhibited in the Louvre.

Typography in “House of Leaves”

“The text of the book is arranged on the pages in such a way that the method of reading the words sometimes mimics the feelings of the characters or the situations in the novel. While characters are navigating claustrophobic labyrinthine sections of the house’s interior, the text is densely, confusingly packed into small corners of each page; later, while when a character is running desperately from an unseen enemy, there are only a few words on each page for almost 25 pages, causing the reader’s pace to quicken as he flips page after page to learn what will happen next.” [tx NM]

iPhone Calculator and Braun ET66 similarities

“Yet another great design tidbit that makes me love my iPhone more and more every day. The GUI is a definitive tribute to Dieter Rams and Lubs Dietrich circa 1977 ET44 and ET66 calculators by Braun.”

The Real World must be a truly depressing place to live. It’s apparently a realm where new ideas, unfamiliar approaches, and foreign concepts always lose. I’m told that the only thing that works in The Real World is what its inhabitants already know and already do. No matter how flawed or inefficient that way may be.

People who live there are said to be living Real Life. An existence filled with pessimism, despair, and every shade of pitch black imaginable. Yet strangely, these people living Real Lives seem not to be interested in getting out. They are not looking for a change of scenery of the dreary Real World.

Instead, they’re actually trying to recruit! In arguments everywhere, they’re trying to convince those of a sunnier demeanor that they must convert to Real Life or perish. That resisting the Real World is futile. This call persists even in the face of contrary experiences. Tales of people who actually did things differently and still lived to see the sun rise in the morning.

Please don’t be fooled, there’s nothing even remotely attractive about The Real World. It’s a bleak mirage suitable only as a place of communion for those who have lost all hope.

Related: Definte the real world in 10 words or less

There is undoubtedly a time and a place for a buyer’s agent when purchasing real estate in the US. Maybe you don’t know the market, exactly where you want to look, or even what to look for. Getting an agent to help you out can certainly ease your search.

But don’t for a minute buy the baloney that your agent is free. In Chicago, the buyer’s agent picks up 2.5% of the sales price. And that’s how the myth of free lives on, since it’s the seller that actually pays for your services (don’t even get me started on how lopsided that is). The thinking goes that if you’re not using an agent to buy, the seller’s guy gets the full 5%.

Right. Just like everyone actually starts their bidding at the asking price. Of course that fee is negotiable. And by “negotiable”, I mean saying “I’m not represented by an agent, but I want the commission due none the less” and the seller saying “Sure!” (as based on anecdotal, personal experience dealing with 4 sellers in Chicago).

To fellow Danes — and I assume many other countries in the world with no defacto price-fixing on real-estate commissions either — this comes as no surprise. We never had a wide-spread concept of buyer’s agents.

For US buyers who know where and what they want and are willing to do a little work yourself, I suggest you ignore the myth and pick up that $10,000 commission check on a $400K house yourself. That’s probably the best hourly rate on work most people will ever see.

I stumbled across this poem by Stéphane Mallarmé recently…

...and was impressed that the innovative layout was created back in the 19th century.

Some digging reveals Mallarmé was a French poet who often used interesting layouts and “typographical idiosyncrasies” as part of his poems. His style wound up greatly influencing how words were displayed in poetry and beyond.

His fin-de-siècle style anticipates many of the fusions between poetry and the other arts that were to blossom in the Dadaist, Surrealist, and Futurist schools, where the tension between the words themselves and the way they were displayed on the page was explored. But whereas most of this latter work was concerned principally with form, Mallarmé’s work was more generally concerned with the interplay of style and content. This is particularly evident in the highly innovative Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (‘A roll of the dice will never abolish chance’) of 1897, his last major poem [above].