Venture Geek

I enjoy listening to This American Life. I don’t often get to it on a Saturday afternoon (when it’s on my local public radio station), but today I happened to catch it. It was all about the people who come in and out of a diner called The Golden Apple in Chicago over a 24-hour period. But, that’s not what this post is about.

No, this post is about rotating desserts. You see, on the day the This American Life crew was in the Golden Apple the dessert case that would normally be spinning desserts around and around was broken. You know, the kind of thing that looks like this:

So, yeah, it was broken — the desserts weren’t spinning. When the desserts weren’t spinning the Golden Apple sold 50% fewer desserts. Think about that for a moment. Take stationary desserts and start them rotating slowly and double your sales.

Why do I care about desserts, rotating or otherwise?

Because this is such a great lesson in why details matter. They matter in retail environments, and they matter in software — and from now on I think I will always think of that as “The Rotating Dessert Issue”. When I used to build custom web applications for a living we were constantly faced with clients looking at the “buy vs. build” decision. One of our strongest pitches was that off-the-shelf systems may get most of it right, but it’s the details that really end up mattering. Now, of course we had a vested interest in taking that stance, and there are plenty of good arguments against building custom software in many situations, but it doesn’t change the fact that details matter.

Aza Raskin has a nice thought piece on a topic near to my heart. His basic argument is that the advent of standardized AJAX toolkits has stunted user interaction innovation on the Web by homogenizing the ways people design applications and, more importantly, doing so in the direction of mimicking desktop PC metaphors.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not anti-AJAX (and I suspect neither is Aza), but I do find that the bells-and-whistles phenomenon has been more prevalent in the last year or so, as the AJAX toolkits become so easy to use. I have seen many examples of UIs that are clearly showing off how sophisticated they can be, even as they break basic web UI paradigms that I find frustrating as a user. Examples include simple things like the “Back” button in a browser — as far as I’m concerned, if you are deploying an application on the Web and it breaks in non-trivial ways because the user hits the “Back” button (or “Reload” for that matter) that’s an egregious bug.

I have to admit that I’m fairly old school when it comes to the Web — makes me feel kinda old just to say “old school” and “Web” in the same sentence, frankly. Personally, I’m the kind of person who opens several windows with several tabs each when using the Web, and many modern web apps make that hard or impossible because all the AJAXy goodness locks me into the user interaction vision of the site’s designer rather than the familiar ways of the Web.

I’m getting away from Aza’s original point (by the way, do check out his slides on the topic of the Death of the Desktop) here about toolkits, and I don’t want to make it seem like I never want to look beyond the clumsy HTML form-drive interfaces that still dominate the Web. I do, though, want to make sure that in the quest to be different developers and designers aren’t actually making their products harder to adopt for people who are just now finally becoming comfortable with the Web.

[I have removed this post at the request of the person who was the subject]

I have been a Flickr user for a while, but I really started using it heavily in the last few months to put up pictures of my kid. When he was born a year ago I was just using my .Mac account using the “Homepage” feature that integrated very nicely with iPhoto. “Homepage” was really not that nice a feature — it was extremely unflexible, had very limited choices for visual templates, and didn’t allow full-size photos to be uploaded. But, it was dead easy — you just choose an album in iPhoto, click the Homepage button, choose a template, and you were done. Even for someone like me, who has the technical skills to build my own photo publishing system or to install Gallery (both of which I have done — neither of which is as efficient as just clicking “Go” to get some photos up for the grandparents to see).

In their infinite wisdom, Apple decided that when they launched iWeb as part of iLife that they would get rid of the Homepage integration in iPhoto and replace it with iWeb integration. iWeb, though, is more complicated — not that it’s complicated as a way to make web pages, generally (my Mom uses it!), but it added extra steps to just get photos up on the web. Add to that complication the fact that Apple provided no way at all to import your previous “Homepage” pages into iWeb (which is an issue because you want people to click around the auto-generated navigation of all your “Homepage” pages) and I was ready to look elsewhere.

I had played with Flickr in its early days, and there are some nice 3rd party tools integrating Flickr with iPhoto, so I decided that was where I’d look. Flickr also has the nice feature of storing full-resolution photos, which is nice for people who want to make prints. And here is where they start to blow it.

My wife was looking at pictures on my account this morning to send some prints to people. She couldn’t see the button to make prints, which was frustrating for her. No problem — I just went into the options for my account to let anyone make prints. But, that’s not actually an option. The most lenient option is to allow any Flickr user to make prints. On face, that’s not a big deal, but then I went back to see what it means to become a Flickr user — what it really means is getting a Yahoo account. And this is where they are blowing it. You see, in order to become a Yahoo user you have to fill out a lengthy form which requires that you share, among other things, your gender, your birthday, and your zip code. It also tries to get you a Yahoo email account by default. I fill in such forms all the time, as a person who basically lives on the web. But, when I think about my relatives having to go through that just to order some prints of photos, I picture a lot of them basically saying, “fuck it”. Not to mention that most of them wouldn’t even know they had to do it in the first place to make prints (that’s something I have to figure out and tell them myself). Why, oh why, would Yahoo want to put barriers up to monetizing Flickr? I would have thought ordering prints wasn’t a “premium service” that warrants people giving up their information goods just to get in the door. I wouldn’t have thought that making prints was something that Yahoo would want to make a complicated process for the uninitiated. But, they did. No wonder PhotoBucket has been getting all the press lately.

Sphere is a relatively new service for searching and understanding what’s going on in the blogosphere. Now, you might say that the world hardly needed Yet Another Blog Search Engine — and in many ways you’d be right. But, Sphere has some interesting twists, most notably they seem to focus on notions of time — the ability to get up-to-the-minute information on what’s happening and search based on time frames.

I have no affiliation to Sphere, but they recently won me over with some excellent service, so I figured I’d share that story.

One of the features of Sphere I like is the custom RSS feed — I can set up a standing query and get a feed of results for that query. Thus, I can work it into my existing habits of RSS consumption. In my case, I was curious to know when people blog about Nicenet, the small non-profit I started many years ago with my friend Ben. Nicenet is a side project for us, but it’s a labor of love, and it grows purely on word of mouth — so, you can see why I might be curious to see when and how it gets mentioned on various blogs.

But, the custom feed I set up for Nicenet was getting an inordinate amount of spam. And worse, it was all porn spam. RSS spam — what is our world coming to? Anyway, needless to say it was upsetting to click through to a site thinking that some teacher was praising our little pet project only to be presented with hardcore action shots (and my wife was left wondering what exactly it was that I was doing on my computer that evening). Now, why porn sites are using the term “Nicenet” in order to attract people to their site is the subject of another post, but it pisses me off.

So, I wrote to Sphere. Not only did they get right back to me, they hooked me up with their experimental anti-spam filtering feeds, where you can set how strict you want your filtering to be. That feed got rid of almost all of the sites promising me hot stud-on-stud and barnyard action (I can’t wait to see the kinds of new Google searches that turn up this blog with that sentence on the page).

Of course, small companies are more able to address individual complaints because they don’t have to scale to thousands of such complaints. But, it’s surprisingly hard to even get a response to a query out of many web companies, so it’s always nice to see a new company take the time to give personal attention to an end user, and I think it’s worth giving a virtual pat on the back with some link love.

Over the last 8 years of living in San Francisco I lived in three different neighborhoods with three different kinds of weather (for those not familiar with San Francisco, I literally mean different neighborhoods in the same town have different, sometimes drastically different, weather). In general, I love the weather in San Francisco — rarely very hot and often just a bit chilly and foggy. When I made my recent move to San Jose, I knew the weather would be warmer, on average, than San Francisco. But, today was downright sweltering. It must have broken 100 degrees, and the forecast shows the highs hovering in that neighborhood for the next several days. Brutal.

So, we broke down this afternoon and decided we really needed to buy an air conditioner right away. So, we hopped in the car (which, of course, has air conditioning, so the trip itself was going to be worthwhile) and headed out to the local Best Buy, since they had such an extensive array of air conditioners on their web site. Of course, given the weather, Best Buy was sold out of air conditioners. And the guy who gave us this news had no sympathy. Tragic. So, off to Bed, Bath, and Beyond up the road. They only have those free-standing air conditioners that cost much too much. A quick poke of the head in the Circuit City next to the Bed, Bath, and Beyond made it clear very quickly that they would not deign to carry mundane home appliances.

I was feeling very disappointed, not just because I was going home to my sauna of a house with no relief in site, but also because I thought one of the points of moving to the ‘burbs was to have ready access to well-stocked big box retail (and their ample parking) without hassles. I mean, isn’t that one of the main reasons to move out of the city and into the world of strip-malls? But, I digress.

So, we’re driving home when I see Sears. I literally didn’t even know they were still in business — I thought for some reason they had gone the way of K-Mart, but thankfully no. So, figuring that of all places surely Sears would have a stock of air conditioners, we pulled into our third shopping complex of the day (and its ample parking — something I do appreciate about suburban land). Sears proved to be one of the nicest retail experiences I have had in a long time. We walked in and immediately were asked if we needed help. We were pointed right to the wall of air conditioning units where we encountered another person willing to help — and get this: the person who offered to help us actually knew something about air conditioners. Not an expert, perhaps, but I have become used to “sales people” in retail stores like that asking you if you have questions, and when you ask the question they add no value to your shopping experience. My favorite flavor of such interactions is when you ask something about a specific product that you are standing in front of and the person offering to assist you starts reading what’s on the box in order to try answer your question. Oy.

Anyway, Sears has plenty of choices and plenty of stock. Granted, most of the choices are their store brand, Kenmore, but at this point just having choices was a nice thing. So, we pick out the two we’re going to buy (a big one for the living room and a small one for the bedroom) and pay for them right there next to where are. We pull the car around to the pick up window, where I scan in my receipt to get on a queue. I wait literally less than a minute and out comes a woman with my A/C units on a push cart. She wheels them out to the curb and puts them in our car, and off we go. The whole Sears experience could not have taken more than 15 minutes in its entirety. Compare that to the nearly 30 minutes I waited last week at Ikea AFTER making my purchase, which was made with no help on the sales floor and after navigating their maze of cross-selling opportunities. Don’t get me wrong here, I think Ikea is one of the finest merchandisers around, but that’s what made the Sears experience that much more remarkable.

The epilogue of this story, unfortunately, is that I’m going to bed tonight without either unit installed. The big one is going to be a non-trivial project (one that caused me to go out and buy my first power drill) that I just couldn’t get into so late in the evening. The small one is too small for our bedroom window (who knew that having a window 39″ across is so unusual?), so it may have to go back — and then I’ll get to see just how good the user experience at Sears really is.

I had the pleasure of visiting Onomy Labs today, as part of a small group of folks from the Berkeley Digital Media and Entertainment Club (of which I am an alumnus). Thanks to Seth Familian for hooking it up.

Onomy was born out of Xerox PARC — when they were downsizing a group of researchers looking at interaction design left to start their own thing, and Onomy Labs is the result. Chief Technical Onomist, Scott Minneman showed us three demos of the kind of work Onomy does. The first was the Tilty Table, which provides a unique tactile user interface experience. They shine an image onto a table top, and you can then pan and zoom on that image (in the demo we saw they were all birds-eye images of cities) by tilting and twisting the table. A+ on the wow factor here, though the real-world usability was questionable for any application that isn’t built around showing off that wow factor. But, we talked about how you could layer on other UI metaphors, like some kind of touch screen to make the whole thing more versatile (and it would definitely provide an awesome experience for the right kind of games). The next thing we looked at was The Interactive Digital Wall. The example they have in their office is one used at TED in 2003. Picture a wall, with, in this case, the various days of a conference and the names of the speakers on those days. Now, picture a large monitor (in this case a plasma TV turned to be in portrait perspective) that rolls on rails along the length of the wall. As you move the monitor along the wall, the content you see on the screen reflects what’s on the wall behind it (here’s a picture of what I’m talking about). Last time I was at The Tech Museum (about a year ago) they had one of Onomy’s walls that had two dimensions of movement of the monitor. The last demo was a rig that could “read” text out loud using cameras, OCR, and speech synthesis, but it was all put into a character of a dog — the idea was to help kids learn reading, I think. The point was that it was the total design of the system, made to appeal to a particular audience rather than just the raw underlying technology, which is often boring at best and intimidating at worst for most non-geeks. In short, Onomy’s core strength is imagining and building unique interaction pieces for museums, businesses, and, well, anyone else with such interests. Pretty cool stuff.

Onomy is a small shop, and they seem to like it that way. Their average project sounds like it’s in the mid-five-figures range, and they are only 7 people on staff. But, with high-profile appearances at places like TED and the upcoming Foo Camp, I would look for Onomy to continue to build a strong reputation with lots of influential people, and hopefully that should bring them much success.