Drawn to Simplicity

Turning a product idea or feature into reality usually starts out with a sketch (see 37 Signal’s Sketching with a Sharpie), and then all hell breaks loose. Depending on who’s involved, deciding whether to shape and communicate the idea by powerpoint, wireframe, clickable prototype, and visual design (to name a few) is the tip of the iceberg. If you go down the path of wireframes, it’s debating between low-fidelity and high-fidelity wireframes, placeholder content vs real content, real vs fake photos….well, you get the picture. The trouble is that how you communicate your ideas depends as much on who’s looking at the picture as it does on what stage the picture is in.

The reality is that wireframes (of the low- or hi-fidelity variety) are meaningless to most people outside the information design world. Most people, especially marketing and business types (i.e., those who can’t read latin or understand lorem ipsum), have a hard time imagining what a wireframe design is supposed to do or will look like in real life. They judge it based on what else they’ve seen. It’s the equivalent of an architect handing you a blueprint and asking you what you think of the bedroom windows.

I generally find that with new feature ideas or enhancements that break with the current way of doing things, a rough sketch or high-level wireframes will do to ground the design. At this point, you’re looking to make sure that the design approach is consistent with the product strategy. In other words, design is the tactic that makes the product strategy come to life. If the strategy is weak, so too is the best executed design.

The first step of visualizing the experience is to ensure that the problem and strategy are well defined. Often, the problem is general enough where the designer and product leads must work closely together to iterate on the design concepts. Both inform each other to arrive at something that neither alone could have come up with, almost like the left and right sides of the brain working at full tilt. And because you’re working closely with one or a few individuals, the design sketches can be seen in context, brainstormed and analyzed in-depth. At this stage, as a designer, you’re looking to identify the right visual metaphors and concepts to achieve the product strategy and business goal. You’re also testing the limits of the technology itself, its constraints and opportunities. Ideally, you’d also include an engineer to brainstorm ideas with. You’d be surprised what’s possible to build, which even the best designers can’t imagine.

At this point, increasingly, traditional low-fi (i.e., black and white) wireframes are useless unless you’re designing a content-heavy, CMS-driven site. Even high-fidelity wireframes are just that, wireframes, which don’t do much more than polish up the sketches you just made earlier. Instead, low-fidelity visual designs are the way to go, done by user-focused visual designers with a good grasp of HTML and CSS. It’s a new breed of designers that can do it all.

With design influencing so much of a product — from the interaction and usability to performance and branding — the days of highly specialized design skills may be numbered. Instead, companies (mainly startups) are looking for product designers who resemble renaisance men more than traditional designers with a beautiful portfolio. As an example, Quora’s job posting expects designers to have a “strong portfolio including self-started projects” plus the “ability to build what you design.” Most information architects, interaction designers and visual designers I know wouldn’t fit the bill.

The other design trend is the need to iterate quickly on product ideas. This is driving the need for designers to wear multiple hats to try new things, while being flexible and grounded in product strategy and user-centered design principles. Put another way, to create innovative products, designers have to be more than creative visually, but technical, business-minded, and able to understand what motivates people to use a product.

I’m a big fan of discovering new food, and seeing how it’s made, the cultures that influenced it, and lately, the science behind it (thanks to Alton Brown). When traveling, I usually learn more about a place through its local food than any other aspect (see any episode of Anthony Bourdain for proof). In other words, you can call me a foodie. But then again, I’m not quite sure what that means any more — but I digress.

I’m also in technology — product design and strategy to be exact — and after years of advising companies about user experience, I decided to take a crack at building apps on my own, bootstrapped and all. As a non-techie founder, this meant putting my money where my mouth is, and hopefully learning a few things in the process.

My first foray was a food and wine pairing app for the iPhone and Android that received some good press from the New York Times, Mashable and others. This led to my recent venture into Web-based apps, Foodfolio, a place to put all the things you love about food in one place — recipes, food photos, bookmarks, etc. I wanted to solve a nagging problem I had which was the inability to easily store, find and share recipes with friends and family. Most of the ways to do this are closed systems which revolve around cookbooks with sticky notes, a notebook, binder with sleeves, recipe box (one if you’re lucky) or software in a box. I wanted something different, something open and out of the box if you will.

It had to be a tool that lived and breathed online, accessible from anywhere. It also had to make adding recipes a snap, so Foodfolio lets you import recipes from popular recipe sites like epicurious.com and allrecipes.com with just one click — of course you can also manually add recipes, too. I also believe that food should be shared. So we created the Foodfolio profile page (my Foodfolio page), where you can share your favorite recipes with the world. And lastly, it had to be easy to use and interactive. For that, you be the judge here, but we took great pains to create a fast, lightweight design that was both functional and visually appealing.

Foodfolio is currently in beta, and we’re busy working on a new release, complete with even more ways to store and share your food. When we started, our goal was to cook up something in between Flickr and Tumblr (cookr and eatr were taken), that made cooking, eating, discovering and sharing one’s food a joy, which is what it should be.

Let us know how we’re doing, and what we can do better. It’s still early in our lifespan, so some things on the site might be a little funky tasting, but we can take the heat.

(If you’ve read this far, you deserve a reward with this amazing feat, creating noodles by hand in minutes)

I recently realized that people don’t use products online, they use sites and apps. The distinction is not trivial. Products are like software or physical objects, they are an integrated whole, tending to look inward, and rarely talk to other products. While most things online are either sites or applications, most companies still think in terms of discrete product offerings.

There are a lot of successful products out there, but increasingly, as more technology services are available, people are looking away from products toward sites and apps to distract or solve their problems. Does this mean the Web is Dead? No. It just means that users expect everything to just work together if they carry the same brand.

Driving this is the all pervasive need of social, which provide services that seek to be ubiquitous, forcing it to be all things to all people. The multiple touch points of the services force it to play nice to others, while providing an integrated user experience.

Facebook has succeeded by creating both a platform for others to play in, as well as features that play well together. When you’re on one part of Facebook you don’t think to yourself, wow, I like this product…you think of it as a site with great features. On the other hand, on Google you tend to think of them as discrete products joined under the banner of a brand. And while Google provides robust APIs for others to play nice with it, ironically, products within its umbrella usually are separate and distinct. That approach plays well when you’re engineering something to solve a problem in a vacuum (aka an app), but not so well when users are overwhelmed with technology.

An example that brought this home to me is the difference between using Maps on the iPhone (powered by Google) and Google Maps online. On the iPhone, typing in a friend’s name in the search box auto suggests my friend’s address without re-typing their address. That’s because the friend is in my address book. The same search on Google Maps online treats that friend as a complete stranger, even though they’re in my Gmail contact list. This is not just a bad user experience, it’s a chore, forcing me to go to the address book, copy their address book and shift back to Maps to paste their address and search. Another example from Google Contacts is the inability to easily follow or see prior Buzzes from friends. I’m forced to go to Buzz, find them, and add them completely outside of my contact lis.

I think more and more, we’ll see those who integrate their offerings the best into what used to be called a “portal” will win. Others, will die like, well, portals.

Nassim Taleb’s Notebook:

(Barbells are more robust than monomodal strategies.)

Walk most of the time, sprint as fast as you can on the occasion; never jog.

Fast for long periods of famine, then feast; never diet.

Endorse Nick Clegg & David Cameron, in combination, never labor.

For social life, a linear combination of Fat Tony & philosophers outperforms the frequentation of middle brows.

Go for city-states under loose empires, never nation-states.

Be a flåneur, lounging most of the time; then work as intensely as possible for a maximum of one hour; never work at low intensity –the 4-Hour Workweek.

Do nothing most of the time, then workout like a nut as intensely & unpredictably as possible.

Invest mostly in close to no-risk, (cash inflation protected, 80-90%), and maximal risk securities (10-20%); never in medium risk.

Read trashy gossip magazines and classics or sophisticated works; never the New York Times (or something even more aberrant, Newsweek).

Talk to graduate students or the highest caliber scholars; never, never, never medium academics.

Lose all your money, never half of it.

Respect those who make a living lying down or standing up, never those who do so sitting down.

Separate the holy and the profane.

Do crazy things (break furniture once in a while), like the Greeks and stay “rational” in larger decisions.

If you dislike someone, leave him alone or eliminate him; don’t attack him verbally.

I love my Google apps  and my iPhone. If they could only work together, natively, then we’re talking. Great software meets great hardware is what we all want. For now, we’ll have to make do with this.

In this age when time is measured in seconds, not days or weeks, a curious thing has happened to the notion of response time.  It seems the world is split between almost instant responses and the 4-to-6 week variety.

You remember when 4 to 6 weeks for delivery was the norm, and apparently it still is in many industries (think furniture). But then comes along companies like Ikea where they promise you instant availability, customized to suit your needs.

The split in response times can be seen not only in companies, but in people. Some people take it as a badge of honor to respond to any communication in the shortest amount of time, no matter how busy they are. These are also the people who expect the same in return. While others only remember to respond, but fail to remember the time part of “response time.”

Same is true for customer service. Ever tried to email or call with a complaint or a question. Some companies practically thrive on getting back to you as quickly as possible, while with others, your message seems to languish in an ever growing, ever more hopeless queue.

The problem is not knowing on which side of the response fence your dealing with. If you share this angst, I welcome your response/tweet/comment/call.

Defining the iPad by what it’s not or should be misses the point. You need to see (and try) it for what it is.

The blogosphere and techies have listed ad nauseam its technical specifications (battery life, weight, chip speed, OS) and what it’s missing (flash support, multi-tasking, wifi weakness, camera, closed platform). But we must remember that it’s a bold, new category entirely.

It’s like comparing an espresso machine with a french press; both produce coffee, but would you ding the espresso machine because you can’t see its internal plumbing? With the iPad, the mistake is to compare it to a computer. A computer in the traditional notion it is not — and for many, good riddance. Once you drop that notion, it can be judged for what it is: a game changer for consuming most forms of content.

What the iPad got right is that it’s fun to use, fast, and does a few things incredibly well, namely:

1. It’s the first truly great group computer, ideal for doing things together, like viewing photos, playing games, and watching video. Laptops come close, but not nearly as intimate in group settings. Having tried the iPad, I can easily see it as my go-to for viewing photos, a modern day photo album.

2. It’s the first truly great personal digital device, capable of delivering high-quality content and games. Whether it’s videos, interactive games or music, iPad form factor and 3rd party apps will make this a must have.

3. It’s the first truly great ebook reader, with the best chance of replacing printed content for a majority of people. Flipping a book is so lifelike, and the font so readable, it might easily change how we read.

Many diehard techies bemoan the fact that they can’t tinker with its hardware and software, to see what makes it tick. It’s a peculiar interest given no one says that about most other devices, like the TV or microwave.  But like those two, I predict the iPad will become another must-have appliance for the home. In some respects, it’s taken the best of the iPhone (the apps and user experience) and removed the worst (small screen, speed) to deliver the ultimate distraction machine.

Priced to move is an old line to sell a lot of something. And it appears that Apple learned a thing or two from the iPhone price cut. At $500, the iPad is priced to move.

As a strategy for growing and getting more customer feedback, it certainly helps. So, how should you price your product?

First, find a way to give it away for free or even at a loss. That’s the best way to see if there’s a market for your product.

Once you have a market, next comes building a passionate customer base. This is perhaps the hardest and takes a lean, flexible start-up, able to listen and anticipate the needs of their users.

If you’ve done both well — identify the market and build  your customers —  you can test various business models on those customers to determine how palatable they are.

So if you’re looking at how to price your product, first make sure you have the customers and they’ll tell you. In other words, build it and if they come, monetize.  If they don’t come, no matter how you price your product, it won’t move.

Pairing food and wine has always been a mystery to me. Whether through sheer frugality or inertia, I always took the road most traveled: pairing white wine with fish or chicken and red wine with meat. Next came the choice of varietal, with the honors usually given to the smartest wine guy on the table, usually the waiter. On those rare times I dined in a restaurant that had a sommelier, I bestowed on to him god-like powers to grant us the perfect wine. And of course, price mattered as much as anything. There didn’t seem to be any reason to change.

But curiosity got the best of me. So, late last year, I decided to tap a friend and Sonoma County chef who specialized in wine pairing to build an iPhone app. The idea was to create something people would need on the go, whether to help with picking a wine in a restaurant or at the grocery store. The app would need to provide suggestions by dish, not food category — that would’ve been too easy. I mean, we don’t eat just chicken, we eat BBQ Chicken.

Together, we built Pair It! with over 20,000 pairing suggestions. You can search, shake or browse for a pairing by food or wine varietal. And if one strikes your fancy, you can save it as a favorite. And rather than making pairing suggestions based on some formula, we decided to hand select all 20,000 pairings to ensure every dish had wine pairings that made sense.

And even with that, it turns out wine pairing is fairly complicated, subjective and not all that consistent. But guidelines matter. Edward Behr of the Art of Eating magazine wrote:

I’m fascinated by the interactions and finding what broadly works.

If you ask most foodies, they’ll tell you general suggestions and tips is all they need. For example, what goes well with spicy food? What about white cream sauce? And that’s another thing. It turns out that a dish’s sauce has more to do with the pairing selection than the meat or base of the dish.

So, if you’re looking to go beyond traditional white and red wine pairings, we’re giving away two free copies of the Pair It! iPhone app. Just leave a comment on this post answering the following question:

What’s your favorite food and wine pairing?

Giveaway closes Wednesday, February 24th at 9PM PST.

If you’re not into giveaways and or just want to try it out, you’ll find it at the iTunes Store.

Google was probably shocked (pun intended) at the blowback from its privacy snafu, as well as the instant popularity of Buzz, which compounded the problem.

The primary culprit for the privacy miscalculation was not under testing but over confidence. Unlike other products, Buzz was only used internally and skipped beta altogether. But the reality is that testing in a corporate environment, where everyone is a co-worker and nothing is personal, is very different from testing a wider audience, where email is mostly personal and frequent contacts are not necessarily “friends.” (No hard feelings Mr Accountant.)

Another miscalculation is a slightly naive understanding about people, which is that most are control freaks when it comes to their privacy. They’re sticklers for who gets in and out of their circle of friends. Stripped of anonymity, it’s surprising how careful people become about what they show and tell.

Google’s ambitions were big in launching Buzz, but in so doing, over played their gmail hand and didn’t play it safe. Discretion is indeed the better part of valor.

But as quickly as they got into this problem, Google’s genius is that they listen to their users and are quick to fix a product they deem a priority.  Given the speed of the fixes, we can assume that the technology was built with a lot of flexibility to turn things on and off as needed. Users, on the other hand, are less flexible with their privacy. They demand transparency and control, and may not be as willing to be as trusting next time.

One problem and opportunity for Buzz is that everyone — I mean everyone — is comparing it to the features of Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. And there’s a lot of things they can learn from those services. But Buzz is really quite different; it’s an integrated communication system. By embedding it into gmail, it turns gmail into a familiar wave of sorts, centralizing all your back and forth communication. Buzz conversations then become something fun and social that you can participate, listen, or simply mute out.

By being location-aware on mobile devices, you can see public buzzes from those around you, not just friends.  That’s what I mean by an integrated communication system.

Buzz’s biggest challenge will be how to control all the “noise” that will naturally result when everyone is running on it full tilt. How will they do it? With novel approaches to filtering and search, and layering on-demand information and add-on features, which is something Google excels at.

Once Buzz gets past these growing pains, they’ll need to focus on what got them here: organizing information, empowering users, and wowing them with engineering brilliance.