Keren, Vanessa, and Warren of Triple R 102.7’s Byte Into It interview us about the lineup for the Products Are Hard Melbourne conference, our take on the Melbourne startup scene, and where that catchy name came from.
Listen to a stream of the interview (requires Flash player). Our segment runs from minute 21:00 to minute 33:00.
Rose Powell of Australia’s StartupSmart interviews us on situating Agile and Lean in a holistic product practice.
Beyond lean and agile: Finding a more holistic approach to start-up creation
You need to step right out of it and remember no one’s goal is to use your product. They want to get something done. Does your product do that in the best, most efficient way possible?
Dig the conversation? Fancy being in Melbourne, Victoria on October 30? Join us for the Products Are Hard conference, Australian edition.
Google wants real identities on G+. No pseudonyms. (After enduring enough protest, they relented for those with established pseudonymous public personae.) And yet, Google also gently but persistently harasses you to setup a G+ identity for every Google account you have. At the moment I have two personal Gmail accounts and three Google Apps work accounts. Google keeps insisting that I make a G+ profile for each one of those accounts, either by pestering me upon login or by disabling key features of applications like Hangouts for accounts without a G+ profile. I now have five G+ identities to manage. I can laboriously recreate my “circles” on each one and flesh each of them out, figure out some way to syndicate one of them to the other four, or simply ignore most of them, leaving them to molder as dusty ghost profiles. It’s hard to see how this is good for the health and vitality of G+ as a community or social network except to artificially juice the number of users.
Which technology is best to use in launching a new site or web application? There was a time when I would answer this question by getting into the details of the various features and performance characteristics of a given platform, but over the years I’ve realized it’s really not a technology question; it’s a people question.
The issues are: who is going to build it, and who are you going to want to hire to continue to build it. Anyone who has been around software engineers (or any engineers) knows that a truly great engineer is worth many mediocre engineers, so if you’re starting a technology-intensive business, it’s critical that you be able to attract high caliber people. For instance, Adobe ColdFusion (formerly Macromedia ColdFusion, formerly Allaire ColdFusion) is an extremely productive platform for building web applications — in terms of getting something done quickly it’s great, but good luck finding great engineers who want to work with ColdFusion. Deserved or not, ColdFusion has a reputation in the industry for not being a “real” programming environment (there’s a whole other discussion to be had about the perversely inverse relationship between the ease-of-use and productivity of a programming environment and the credibility it receives in engineering communities). Most software developers wouldn’t want to be forced to work with ColdFusion for fear their other skills would atrophy. This is not a statement about how good ColdFusion is as a technology; it is a statement about the realities of putting together a team.
This is a nuance lost on a lot of entrepreneurs and managers who haven’t done hands-on coding before — the tools you choose define the nature of the team you will build moving forward, and in most cases it’s extremely difficult to switch gears. To be fair, this nuance is also usually lost on engineers, who can easily burn a lot of cycles debating the merits of Ruby vs. PHP vs. Java vs. ColdFusion vs. every other thing. In the end, the tools listed here, among many others, are mature enough that they can all serve well to create web-based applications. Some might take longer, some might not scale as readily, some might not integrate with other technologies as easily, but from the standpoint of “can it be built in a reasonable amount of time and be production-ready and reasonably scalable” the answer is yes in all cases. The best technology to choose is the one that creates the culture you want.
A few days ago I advocated using the word “human” in place of “user” when thinking about crafting experiences. In short, such language would make it easier to remember we are making things that people will enjoy or value, especially in relation to the Minimum Human Experience (as opposed to the Minimum Viable Product). Rather than first focusing on optimizing the numbers flowing into an analytics system, we should instead ask what it is that actual humans would want.
Today I came across the most striking example I’ve seen yet of an experience decidedly not human:
Badges. For reading the news. Really. You can earn badges by reading certain kinds of news.
Who wants this?
This feature was created not by thinking about humans but rather by thinking about metrics and advertisers—gamification increases metrics such as number of page hits per session and frequency of sessions. Quantifying readers’ interests is beneficial to advertisers—if they know I’m interested in certain kinds of news, that is a valuable bit of targeting data (though they’d know that anyway, so the badges seem more about encouraging me to click more links). When people say that Google is an engineering-driven organization that doesn’t understand people, this is exactly what they are talking about.
Prediction: we will see increasing apathy and backlash to this kind of wanton use of game mechanics in domains that are neither competitive nor driven by external motivators.
I’m hardly the first person to complain about the word “user” to describe people who do stuff with software. But, in the “User Experience” community it is rare, at best, to see anyone questioning what the “U” in UX stands for. Call it quixotic, but I think the term HX (human experience) would be much better. People don’t think of themselves as “users” and as practitioners we do ourselves a disservice to employ that dehumanizing term. In all other contexts the word “user” is not generally positive and certainly not evocative of the kind of intimate, day-to-day relationship we’d like our work to have with the people who interact with it.
This applies as well to the “Minimum Viable Product” – lately there have been a number of folks pointing out the term “viable” is too often ignored, resulting in the release of products that are simply not ready for human consumption. Perhaps if we all thought of it more as the Minimum Human Experience (hereafter referred to as MHX) we’d be less likely to release products that aren’t ready just to get them rushed out the door and instead focus our thinking on what the smallest coherent and valuable experience for a real person would be.
Whether or not you call what we’re in a bubble (which depends on what the meaning of the word “in” is), you can’t deny that Groupon’s June 2nd kimono-opening in advance of its IPO revealed, if nothing else, some interesting numbers.
Between the straight-up doublespeak of Adjusted CSOI and the chutzpah of trousering almost the entirety of their recent billion-dollar round, Groupon gave journalists plenty of material for scathing articles (including articles about the articles).
Of course, until recently, the preponderance of the press about Groupon was glowing.
Or, as Merlin Mann inimitably put it on Saturday:
For months, EVERYONE LOVES GROUPON! I didn’t care. Today, EVERYONE HATES GROUPON! I don’t care. If you were one guy, I’d totally punch you.
If Steve Jobs is Oprah for men, Groupon is Lindsay Lohan for tech journalists. Despite its German name, schadenfreude is one of the most American of pastimes. We love nothing better than to build someone or something up and then find reasons to tear them down. Are we that fickle? Does our adoration really turn to scorn that quickly? Maybe. But that scorn is an expression of something deeper and more powerful. Envy. If this is the land of opportunity, then there’s no reason you can’t be as successful as that guy. Except, shit, he got there first. He’s counting his millions while you’re reading an article about him counting his millions.
It’s not entirely in our heads. Lindsay made genuinely terrible choices, and Groupon’s numbers do indeed look like a trainwreck well underway, but lots of people screw up and lots of companies fail, and most of them go unnoticed. It’s not a rational Puritan thing—punishing the unworthy and praising the elect. It’s a much more fundamental, animal thing. If I can’t have what she has, then I’ll tell myself I don’t want it anyway.
We’re not going to stop celebrating people and then vilifying them. It’s what we do. But as someone who makes things, or sells things (or makes things that people sell, or sells things that people make), you shouldn’t take the hullabaloo for more than what it is. Having the media and the public turn on you doesn’t inherently mean anything. You’re not necessarily a victim, nor are you necessarily winning. Find another compass to tell you whether you’re doing well or poorly, doing right or doing wrong. The adulation or loathing of crowds is just noise. The only difference between Business Insider and TMZ is—well, actually there isn’t any.
