Saying no the right way — taking things away from people while keeping them on your side — seems like it’s becoming an increasingly crucial skill. Came across three bits in the last few days that echoed this idea…
1) Marco says, “Making a product better often requires removing features.”
Dealing with the negative feedback is tough. Every feature removal, even if minor, is greeted with an initial barrage of emails from people whose lives I have just completely ruined by this change to my free website or my $5 iPhone application…It’s especially tough with web and iPhone apps, for which there’s no good way, or no way at all, for the offended customers to just keep using the old version.
But the result, once the fire has died down, is a much better product for the majority of customers.
If I could never remove features, I’d never add any.
2) A day after reading that, I heard Thomas Friedman discuss how the next generation of political leaders will need to focus on taking things away from voters.
We’re entering an era where being in politics is gonna be, more than anything else, about taking things away from people.
You think it’s tough removing a feature from an iPhone app? Try being a politician that takes away a group’s pet entitlement program.
The hardest thing in the world is to simplify your life. It’s so easy to make it complex. The solution for a lot of the world’s problems may be to turn around and take a forward step. You can’t just keep trying to make a flawed system work.
There is a wonderful rigor in free-market economics. When you have to prove the value of your ideas by persuading other people to pay for them, it clears out an awful lot of woolly thinking.
Summary
Jason and David respond to criticism of REWORK. Is it a rehash of previously covered ideas? Is it irrelevant for traditional businesses? Etc.
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Comparing web apps. Found one that seems really good. Go to plans page. Ah, they actually charge for the product, as opposed to other free ones I had looked at. Immediately think, “So that’s why it’s good.” Interesting how having to pay can actually make you feel MORE comfortable with a product.
A transcript of the most recent edition — “Episode #13: Addressing criticism of 37signals (Part 1 of 2)” — of the 37signals Podcast is now available.
This week we’ll be conducting interviews to be used in future podcasts with the design team and the support team here at 37signals. What question(s) would you like to hear them answer? Leave it in the comments (anonymous questions won’t get answered btw).
Struck me how it looks like something from the 1940s (in a Tucker kinda way) or modern (like a recent version of the Batmobile) but not like what I think of as a design typical of 1962, the year the plane first flew.
Former Air Force pilot Brian Shul calls it “the most remarkable airplane of the 20th century.” It remains the fastest and highest flying air-breathing production aircraft ever built. if a surface-to-air missile launch was detected, standard evasive action was simply to accelerate. On March 6, 1990, it made its final flight and set a record — Los Angeles to D.C. in 1 hour, 4 minutes.
Interesting story to how it was built too. Flying at over Mach 3 generates some high temperatures. So the plane was made from titanium. But it turns out titanium is a real pain.
Titanium was difficult to work with, expensive, and scarce. Initially, 80% of the titanium delivered to Lockheed was rejected due to metallurgical contamination. One example of the difficulties of working with titanium is that welds made at certain times of the year were more durable than welds made at other times. It was found that the manufacturing plant’s water came from one reservoir in the summer and another in the winter; the slight differences in the impurities in the water from these sources led to differences in the durability of the welds, since water was used to cool the titanium welds.
The titanium being manufactured in the United States in those days lacked the required purity. The only source of purer titanium available was located in the Soviet Union. So, according to the tour guide at the museum, the CIA set up dummy corporations in Europe and bought titanium from the Soviet Union. The Soviets had no idea they were helping the US build an aircraft that would be used to spy on them.
He had the reputation for judging a photographer by looking at their contact sheets upside down. He would always say you should look at a picture upside down because you can see the construction. You can see the way the photograph is being composed much better than the right way up.
Responding to negative feedback
Jason and David respond to online criticism of 37signals. Topics covered include picking a firm from Sortfolio to redesign Signal vs. Noise and whether or not VCs are evil.
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Subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or RSS. Related links and previous episodes available at 37signals.com/podcast.
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Speed is the most important feature. If your application is slow, people won’t use it. I see this more with mainstream users than I do with power users. I think that power users sometimes have a bit of sympathetic eye to the challenges of building really fast web apps, and maybe they’re willing to live with it, but when I look at my wife and kids, they’re my mainstream view of the world. If something is slow, they’re just gone.
