Communicating ideas and, frankly, persuasion are becoming more vital in the work place. I’ve grown to realize this in the past few years. Made To Stick by Chip and Dan Heath is a wonderful book summarizing the best concepts around making your ideas stick in other people’s minds.
If I had to give a singular tweet for a review, it would be this:
Abstraction is the luxury of the expert. The Curse of Knowledge prohibits simple concreteness.
It really does come down to that. Remember that you had to gain a lot of expertise to come to “The Answer”, but then that time and expertise works against you when telling others about it. You can communicate effective strategy or make an idea stick by focusing on the “Telling Others” part, not finding “The Answer” precursor.
There were some really good nuggets in the book:
Good metaphors are generative
Metaphors are the Holy Grail of simplicity (pretty meta)
A way to keep people’s attention is to create a need for closure
Language is often abstract, but life is not
Concreteness is the root of making ideas stick. So what is concreteness? If you can examine something with your senses, it’s concrete.
Belief is one thing, but to persuade action, people have to care
The one reliable way of making people care is invoking self-interest
Features aren’t emotional, but benefits are
If you’re a great spotter, you’ll always trump a great creator
Strategy is a guide to behavior; thus a bad strategy is one which doesn’t drive action
Mostly, the book provided great anecdotes and analysis on: Keep it simple, keep it concrete, tell great stories, be unexpected, emotional, and credible.
I strongly recommend the book to everyone. It’s a quick, valuable read.
I recently stumbled across two inspiring examples of clear, simple user interfaces. (Hat tip: RJS.) Both are mobile apps, but perfect representations of what a UI should be.
They were also great reminders of the tools we as designers have and often forget about, including myself. First, the products:
Designers have a toolbox. Inside are tools, which include:
Contrast
Color
Grid
Proportion
Line
Shape (and iconography)
Sound
Consistency
Motion
Texture
Photography
And others I’m sure I’m forgetting
(Some may argue that all of these are subsets of Contrast. I personally don’t use proportion enough.)
The clearest, simplest, most effective user interfaces relentlessly focus on the minimal execution of these basic tools. It’s when we as designers make complex combinations of these tools that the UI begins to muddy. The higher level concepts like affordance, heuristics, taxonomy, and so forth—although valuable—often help us forget the effectiveness and elegance of the simple use of these core tools.
The apps shared above are wonderful examples of using these core tools in the best fashion possible.
I’m a sucker for books on design. In high school and college, I’d read as many as I could whenever I had time. Throughout the years, though, I’ve noticed less challenge and inspiration derived from these books. This is probably because I’m reaching a rate of marginal return on the subject, yet I admit there is a lot I still have yet to learn. Further expansion of growth will not be from reading design books anymore, but rather practical application and practice of the concepts.
So the past few years I’ve avoided design books or articles with beginner to intermediate content. But Design for Hackers: Reverse-Engineering Beauty by David Kadavy caught my eye. The promise of a programmatic (or better yet scientific) approach to the touchy-feely explanations of design concepts from past books excited me.
Regrettably, the book was still a level or two below the challenge I sought. There was not much new to me, although I did find the chapter on proportions to be enlightening. I appreciated the amount of scientific explanation on the design fundamentals, but just about all of it was material I’ve read somewhere else. The most entertaining part of the book for me were the examples Kadavy used to explain composition, color theory, etc. It was fun to analyze Seurat’s painting along with him.
With that said, I do think the author’s real target audience will find immense value in the book. Developers (or hackers) who want to understand the most important fundamentals of design should read this book. I have no doubt it will be the best book they can find to help them level up several steps. Even design novices will find it engaging. Design professionals, however, should probably stick to Python tutorials and your 2012 resolutions.
It was a fairly weak year in music, in my opinion. I thought there were some outstanding efforts submitted, but overall the quantity of quality was lackluster compared to 2007 through 2010. I think it’s because I found less new artists. I’m finding myself now looking more forward to new albums of recent favorites, such as Grizzly Bear, Bear in Heaven (lol at bear references), Floating Points, Luke Abbott and more in 2012 than I am new artists out of the blue.
I flip flopped between Real Estate and Washed Out for months. I loved both releases. In the end, I thought Real Estate did some things that will make me listen to the album a lot more 10 years from now than Washed Out, and it was the difference.
Julian Lynch is one of the most underrated artists out there. He has a completely unique style. Terra is his best record to date.
Twerps and The War On Drugs were good finds for me this year as well. Very happy I found them.
Real Estate – Days
Washed Out – Within And Without
Julian Lynch – Terra
Twerps – Twerps
The War on Drugs – Slave Ambient
Songs
Individual songs that stood out to me. Bon Iver’s album is highly celebrated, as well it should be. But the album as a whole had gaps, which kept it off my top 5. “Holocene” though is my favorite song from this year, and shows why people are going crazy for Justin Vernon. I applaud his new celebrity!
Cass McCombs is one of my favorite artists, period. He had two albums this year! Many good singles, and “The Same Thing” was the best.
Gold Leaves was a pleasant find this year. “The Silver Lining” was an exceptional take on an “Arthur and Yu” sound. The Rapture had a very weak follow up release this year, but the single “How Deep Is Your Love” was my favorite party jam. tUnE-yArDs is as unique as it gets, and “Bizness” is a jarring yet fun exploration on being yourself.
Rdio playlists of my favorite songs from Fall and Winter. (I didn’t start Rdio until half way through 2011. I recommend it to all!)
Movies
I missed a lot of movies this year, I admit. My list is probably missing some really good ones.
Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
Hanna
Bridesmaids
The Ides of March
Anonymous
Articles
I read a lot of long-form articles, which is different for me from years past. I would like to thank Instapaper for this lifestyle change. Here are the five best articles I read in 2011.
I originally wrote a lengthy review for Flow from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. But then I realized everything could be said in just a few paragraphs.
Psychology has traditionally been considered a soft science, but that has since changed since the first dot-com boom. Flow is a shining example of this new-found scientific legitimacy.
A few weeks ago I heard an entrepreneur say that the best innovation we can do in the next decade is to make everything we’ve made in the previous decade more usable for more people. We don’t need new technology; we need current technology to be better designed.
Csikszentmihalyi’s book is the blue print for that idea. It can be summed up with this illustration.
If you give people too much of a challenge for their skills, they will have anxiety. If you give them not enough, they will be bored. It’s only with the proportion is just right for the task at hand that they will accomplish the task and feel good doing so.
The technology we’ve made so far has suffered from being outside of the flow channel. Csikszentmihalyi’s findings give us insight, as designers and developers, on how to make our products more useful. His recommendations will lead to higher adoption and retention rates.
Psychology has real, growing practicality for technologists. I recommend everyone who works with software to give it a quick read through.
I used to be a Path fanboy. It became the first application which got right everything other social networks got wrong:
There was zero concern about who would see what.
It allowed me to connect with my tech savvy friends yet finally include my mother and mother-in-law, who will never sign up for anything except an email address.
It removed all noise social networks typically inject. Instead, it’s only the most important moments in life.
It added sound to life casting, which invokes a more emotional memory.
Using Path was so ridiculously easy. Take a picture or 10-second video, pick a group of nouns (people, place, and thing), and you’re done.
And, most importantly, it made viewing past moments easy. You ever notice how anything you create in Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or whatever is impossibly lost? They are moments in time that are digested and thrown away within minutes. Forgotten forever. Good luck trying to find anything. (This is why Facebook is making a push to the “timeline” feature—it realizes it has no time axis, which I’ve called the “z-axis” to its social graph for years.) Path made it so I could browse these important moments in genius ways.
Recently, Path upgraded to a second version. It has been heralded as a design masterpiece. I think it has wrecked the magic.
They are attempting to be more like Foursquare, Facebook, and the like. The level of noise is absurd. I could care less about when someone went to sleep or where. I could care less what song they are listening to (I have social music services or personal conversation for that). I could care less about integration with other social networks. I could care less about the passive “check in” system a la Foursquare, which basically creates a moment only scoped to the “place” noun, and does it automatically whenever you check Path.
Path is about the simple capture of life’s most amazing moments, an easy way to share them regardless of digital divide, tight privacy, and easy access to those moments sometime in the future. Version is lost this vision.
And, regrettably, Version 2 is buggy as heck. I haven’t been able to post a moment since updating because the app crashes. This is so sad that yesterday at my extended family christmas, my mother and grandmother both asked “why they don’t get those cool emails anymore with the fun pictures”. Path has changed their lives too.
I would have paid $/mo for the old Path. Now, they are just another also-ran social network who lost what made them magical.
I can’t help but shake this observation that hyperbole has been sewn into our society’s fabric with some kind of super thread, incapable of being torn.
The source is unclear. (Most obvious answer is it’s a by-product of social media.) But its utility is crystal clear: if you are going to talk about yourself, you better make an impact.
Call it the new social darwin trait; the next evolution from the cynicism of the past decade. We all know you’re speaking in hyperbole, but if you didn’t, you’d lose credibility.
An observation on the heels of (yet another) Facebook privacy shake-up:
Web users are fickle when it comes to our identity. We have very conflicting desires.
Desire 1 – Know Who I Am
Please instantly know who I am. I hate logging in with some password I created a long time ago and can’t remember. I’m me, Kris. Whether I’m buying something, checking sports scores, commenting on some blog, or communicating with friends, know who I am!
Desire 2 – Please Don’t Invade My Privacy
I don’t trust you. You seem to be getting too much power. You tend to know who I am on every site I go to. You’re tracking me, my every move. You don’t seem to understand that’s my data that you own. Why are the pair of shoes I just looked at on Zappos an ad on a NY Times article about crappy Republican presidential candidates? And then how did that article show up in my Facebook newsfeed? You know too much! I’m quitting your service because you’ve crossed the line.
The Outcome
One of the biggest shifts on the Internet in the coming years will be a consolidated identity. The government wants it, and our social networks, tools, and entertainment hubs want it.
As a developer, I welcome it. My life is easier because one of the greatest hurdles to my application’s / service’s / site’s success is overcoming the on-boarding experience.
As a web user, I’m terrified. I feel as if my digital soul is being sucked dry.
As a businessman, I know it’s coming. I know that, for a fact, every large company who wants to be anything has one large objective: obtain a list of every human.
I wonder how all developers and web users will react when that day comes. They’ll probably be appalled that their privacy and sense of self has been digitally breached. But then they’ll be upset they need to reset their password again on the latest cool site that doesn’t use Facebook to authenticate because those developers understand and don’t want to be a part of the social giant’s web of prying eyes. Oh, we’re so fickle.
Like many, I spent the better part of this fall engrossed in the life story of Steve Jobs. Walter Isaacson’s biography of this century’s greatest visionary thinker does a good job of creating drama and intrigue. For fanatics of Apple’s history, there isn’t anything new or groundbreaking. But for those wondering who Steve Jobs was and what it would be like to have him in your life, this book does not disappoint.
And, after finishing, who would want Steve Jobs in their life? The author’s portrayal of Job’s continual gruffness and complete lack of tact was cringeworthy at times. But was it accurate? I highly doubt it. My main issue with the biography was how Isaacson made Jobs to be some hellbent monster, and nothing but. Readers walk away thinking Jobs was the antagonist of his own life story.
You could tell the book was rushed due to Jobs health. The author and his constituency say it was because Jobs wanted to see it published in his life time. But I can’t help but have a cynical view—the publishers saw an opportunity to sell a lot of copies at the height of his popularity riding the coat tails of his death. The end result is a terribly rushed book that didn’t seem to do justice to the man.
But there were some interesting insights.
Insight 1: Jobs iterated a lot, and it just might be the hidden secret to his success.
From his first blue box project with Woz to the polished process at the time of his death, Jobs iterated a lot. What struck me was the time frames of his iteration. In the early days of the Apple I, he would iterate almost daily. His process looked like this:
Hire a strong team and trust them to get work done.
At the end of the day, review what progress they made. And not just casually look, but actually use heavily the prototypes they created. This meant a clear requirement existed: don’t deal in hypotheticals.
Give feedback on what to change for tomorrow. If it was big enough changes, teams would have to work all night.
Start the day over in the same manner.
Intense. The reason why I think this is a sneaky secret to Apple’s success is because I believe strongly what Tim Hartford says in his TED Talk, embedded below. In short: The best advanced throughout history are due to heavy trial and error experimentation.
I disagree with Malcolm Gladwell’s synthesis of Isaacson’s book, and I think Jobs’ innovations is due to heavy trial and error experimentation. He did not steal existing ideas and simply implement as Gladwell states. He truly innovated, and I believe it was due to this process.
I plan to break my development process into smaller steps with better checkpoints so I and my team can iterate better.
Insight 2: Everything is a negotiation. Accept that fact and then learn how it’s done.
A maxim coined long before Jobs, but emphasized throughout his life story. Jobs was a master negotiator, and all of his huge successes were not just due to his skill as a product guy. All included an element of good timing and negotiation that put Jobs and his party in a place to succeed. The Pixar stories best illustrated it.
I often wondered while reading if the reason for Jobs disconnection from the emotions of others was because he was always negotiating. Separating yourself from the how others feel or what they think about you is a real key to negotiating. Perhaps Jobs took it too far.
I certainly plan to be better at this skill. Step one is being better at caring less about what others think about me.
Insight 3: If you want to do great things, it’s really important to have a broad background.
And no I don’t mean we all need to take trips to India for a year. I’m referring more to the liberal arts emphasis Jobs had throughout his career. I totally agree with him, and always have.
Far too often, I run into an engineer or programmer who isn’t versed about the other side of the coin. You know, the stereotypical IT vet who has zero empathy towards the world he is building for.
Or on the opposite side, I’m disheartened by the volume of art/english/design/music/psychology/theater/etc type students who have zero experience or interest in technology. Too many of them are going to end up as a barista with impossible student loans wondering what happened. Some of them will make it without ever having to touch a computer, but everyone else would have a better chance at changing the world by embracing technology.
I’m by no means an all-star on both sides of the isle. But I embrace liberal arts and have a genuine interest in just about everything. I wish more students understood the value in combining art and science.
Summary
You could read this book. But if you didn’t I wouldn’t be heartbroken. Instead, you should take an hour out of your day and watch this recently unearthed interview with Jobs from 1995. Or this one where he digs for carrots.
Titles can be used as a quick way to gain insight to the importance of regulation within economics.
Now that more entrepreneurs than ever are young, free to call themselves legitimate, and can quickly create a business for next to nothing, many self-proclaimed titles float about.
Today, I was researching a new product—which shall remain nameless out of respect—because I liked some of the marketing and design I saw. Poking around their site, I found some information on the folks behind it. When I research companies like this, I always hunt for the “About Us” section because I love seeing names and faces and finding out where the contributors are located. Much insight is gleaned from how they describe themselves and the business.
Well, this particular start-up had three people listed. Obfuscated out of kindness:
John Smith – CEO and Co-founder
Tim Rose – COO and Co-founder
Eric Brown – CTO and Co-founder
All three guys were younger than 23 years old. This was their first job. I have tremendous respect for their desire to take on starting a business, and frankly it looks pretty cool, but they are a prime example of how titles are becoming irrelevant. Specifically, title weight or prestige is becoming cloudy.
When anyone can call themselves a C-level executive, the meaning of a title deteriorates. Much like the old joke goes how everyone at a bank is a vice president, the tech start-up scene has gotten to the point where a title means nothing to me. More so, if I see a 21-year-old call himself a CMO, I’m closer to discrediting that he “gets it” rather than be impressed.
In a regular economy, market correction would occur. But the normal rules don’t apply here, so regulation is needed. A trusted, central authority is needed to disperse officialdom. (VeriSign is a real life example.)
Quick disclaimer: I can sympathize with the necessary requirement for a title with things like contracts, fundraising, marketing and so forth. My title at HarQen is technically “Director of Product Development”—but I refuse to introduce myself by that unless absolutely required to. Instead, I prefer to explain what I do, as evidence from my bio. With that said, I hope no double standard has been made. I am simply commenting on an observation I have.
