When presenting someone with a stimulus results in some kind of reflexive behavior we call it classical conditioning. The most famous example of this is Ivan Pavlov’s experiment where dogs started salivating whenever they heard a bell that indicated that food was on the way.

Compare that to operant conditioning, which happens when someone deliberately alters their behavior because of a stimulus they receive as a result of that behavior. We all know about positive reinforcement[1] - that’s one of the ways to affect operant conditioning in someone. The classic example here is the experiment where rats can be taught to press a lever to get sugar solution delivered down their feeding tubes.

In Unpredictable Rewards, Kevin Purdy applies the theory of operant conditioning to activity streams on Twitter and Facebook. He explains why some people[2] can’t stop looking at their feeds:

Eyal Ophir, primary researcher at the Stanford Multitasking study, believes ticker-style updates are effective in a way familiar to researchers of operant conditioning.

“Unpredictable rewards keep us guessing, so we’ll keep checking long after we’re no longer getting rewarded, because ‘you never know,’” Ophir wrote in an email. “So if there’s one or two exciting tweets, or a rewarding social experience in the Facebook Ticker, and we can never tell when something like that will come again, that’s going to be a good motivator for us to just keep checking. And that’s going to drive up the perceived value of interrupting whatever we’re doing (work, family, etc.) to go and check.”

It’s scary to think about our social media activities in this way, especially if you keep going down the path of operant conditioning. One of the key predictive factors is deprivation: “the effectiveness of a consequence will increase as the individual becomes deprived of that stimulus”. So, the less frequently you see something valuable in your stream, the more motivated you become to keep checking until you find that one valuable piece of information.

It might be time for us to step back and accurately assess the size of the benefit: “If the size, or amount, of the consequence is large enough to be worth the effort, the consequence will be more effective upon the behavior.” How valuable is the number of likes on that one status really? And is it worth checking our phones every 5 minutes in the hope of seeing a change?

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1. When a behavior (response) is followed by a stimulus that is appetitive or rewarding, increasing the frequency of that behavior (via Wikipedia) ↩
2. I’m going to say “some people”, not “I” or “we”. I like living in denial like that. ↩

In The Pummeling Pages, Brent Simmons sums up the experience of reading on the web, which is something I’ve become increasingly frustrated with as well:

I was there because I just wanted to read something. Words. Black text on a white background, more-or-less. And what I saw ”” at a professional publication, a site with the purpose of giving people something good to read ”” was just about the farthest thing from readable.

The site has good writing. But the pages do everything possible to convince people not to try. “Don’t bother,” the pages say. “It’s hopeless. Oh ”” and good luck not having a seizure!”

I see the sentiment echoed everywhere, including tweets like this one by Alpesh Shah:

Just to be clear about what we’re talking about, here are a few examples that illustrate why there is such a growing frustration with reading on the web.

First, here is an article on Harvard Business Review that not only blocks me from reading anything until I click to dismiss the ad, it also messes with the other ads on the page:

Here’s a story from Cracked.com, where in my unscientific estimation about 15% of the page above the fold is devoted to the actual text of the article:

And finally, an example from Search Engine Land that illustrates the following sentiment in Brent’s article:

They’re filled with ads and social-media sharing buttons ”” and more ads. And Google plus-onesies and Facebook likeys. And also more ads. Plus tweet-this-es. Plus ads. (And, under-the-hood, a whole cruise-ship-full of analytics. The page required well-more than 100 http calls.)

Is this the future of reading on the web? I sincerely hope not. I keep reminding myself of these words by Jeffery Zeldman:

Most of all, I worry about web users. Because, after ten-plus years of commercial web development, they still have a tough time finding what they’re looking for, and they still wonder why it’s so damned unpleasant to read text on the web ”” which is what most of them do when they’re online.

The scary thing is that Zeldman wrote that in 1999 (he revised the post slightly in 2005). And many years later the experience of reading text on the web seems to be getting worse, not better. As I wrote in The demise of quality content on the web, I’m worried that the wells of attention are being drilled to depletion by linkbait headlines, ad-infested pages, “jumps” and random pagination, and content that is engineered to be “consumed” in 1 minute or less of quick scanning ”“ just enough time to capture those almighty eyeballs.

As advertising clickthrough rates continue to drop, the ads become more desperate and invasive, and readers are starting to notice and do something about it. I’m doing the majority of my reading in RSS and Instapaper where I can read in peace without being pummeled by distractions.

The thing is, there are better ways to make money from writing - ways that are more respectful of readers. Ad networks like The Deck come to mind, as well as the growing number of sites that offer memberships (like The Loop and Daring Fireball).

It’s time for publishers to think different.

I’ve written about Dhanji R. Prasanna excellent post on Google Wave and working at big companies before, but I wanted to come back to something he said that I just can’t get out of my head. In one section he talks about a topic I care about very much - what motivates people to do great work. I really like his perspective on the importance of incremental progress:

[As] a programmer you must have a series of wins, every single day. It is the Deus Ex Machina of hacker success. It is what makes you eager for the next feature, and the next after that. And a large team is poison to small wins. The nature of large teams is such that even when you do have wins, they come after long, tiresome and disproportionately many hurdles. And this takes all the wind out of them. Often when I shipped a feature it felt more like relief than euphoria.

I like the analogy of these small wins as Deus Ex Machina:

[It means] “God out of the machine”; a seemingly inextricable problem is suddenly and abruptly solved with the contrived and unexpected intervention of some new event, character, ability, or object.

It’s so important for large teams to celebrate those wins with the people they work with every day - and to call out the “characters” responsible for accomplishing Deus Ex Machina. It is hard to get that right in large organizations because the invisibility of individual team members and the pressures to move on to The Next Thing aren’t naturally conducive to this type of behavior. But it’s possible if you work at it.

Whether you keep some champagne in a fridge, send out company-wide emails thanking people personally, or ring a bell every time code gets deployed (ok, that last one is lame, sorry), being in a large organization isn’t an excuse for acting like a faceless corporation.

This is one of my favorite stories in the Steve Jobs biography:

The result was that the Macintosh team came to share Jobs’s passion for making a great product, not just a profitable one. “Jobs thought of himself as an artist, and he encouraged the design team to think of ourselves that way too,” said Hertzfeld. “The goal was never to beat the competition, or to make a lot of money. It was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater.”

He once took the team to see an exhibit of Tiffany glass at the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan because he believed they could learn from Louis Tiffany’s example of creating great art that could be mass-produced. Recalled Bud Tribble, “We said to ourselves, ‘Hey, if we’re going to make things in our lives, we might as well make them beautiful.’”

See also The difference between Apple and Microsoft: product before profit.

John D. Cook writes some scary true words in Productivity and negative space:

People who fracture their time putting out fires seem more productive, or at least more responsive, than the people who block out time to think. It’s harder to notice someone not being frantic. Thinkers don’t fare well in environments that reward activity more than accomplishment.

This is such a huge problem in big corporations today. People who are running from meeting to meeting are perceived to be more productive than those who sit at their desks working all day[1]. And the problem is worse for programmers - very few managers understand what they do, so it’s hard for them to stomach days and days of solid coding without seeing something “tangible” (in their view).

It all comes back the difference between Makers and Managers, and how the Makers should be evaluated on completely different criteria than the Managers. Criteria that reward the quality of what they make, not the number of status updates they give.

(link via Graham Poulter)

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1. I’m not saying that people who have a lot of meetings are necessarily less productive, just that those who are not in meetings are “out of sight, out of mind”, and therefore not seen as particularly productive.  â†©

Rob Beschizza in What the Vaio Z says about Sony’s little design problem, a brilliant article on the difference between taste and design:

Apple competitors are obsessed with copying Apple’s tastes without copying its central design habit, which is solving a problem and then refining the solution until the problem changes.

This is also what makes the HP Envy such a bizarre rip-off of the Macbook Pro. It all reminds me of that scene in Armageddon where the Bruce Willis character blows up at the contractors who tried to build an oil drill he designed:

Let me get this straight. You had me pulled off my oil rig, flown half way around the world, you stole my drill design, couldn’t read the plans right, and did a piss poor job of putting it together!

I can image hearing those same words coming out of Steve Jobs’s mouth if he could see the Sony Vaio Z and the HP Envy.

It’s not possible to get to know a man just by reading a book about him. And yet, that’s what many of us are trying to do with the Steve Jobs biography. To be fair, we do this whenever we hear stories about people. We tend to forget that ther’s more to a person than the scraps of information we can extract about them from others. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but we must place our opinions in the proper context.

I realize that my thoughts on Steve Jobs are not only based on imperfect words on a page, but I’m also reading those words through the biased lens I use to perceive the world. At best, I’m getting an interpretation of a copy of who he really was. And I’m ok with that, because even feint copies of an original can teach us things, which is why we read these human stories in the first place.

So with that disclaimer out of the way, I believe that Steve Jobs’s genius was rooted in two main character traits: Insanely great taste, and an inability to compromise on that taste at all. This inspires me, but the way his unwillingness to compromise came out of him also makes me extremely uncomfortable.

Jobs’s impeccable taste was evident from very early on:

[T]he Macintosh team came to share Jobs’s passion for making a great product, not just a profitable one. “Jobs thought of himself as an artist, and he encouraged the design team to think of ourselves that way too,” said Hertzfeld. “The goal was never to beat the competition, or to make a lot of money. It was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater.” He once took the team to see an exhibit of Tiffany glass at the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan because he believed they could learn from Louis Tiffany’s example of creating great art that could be mass-produced. Recalled Bud Tribble, “We said to ourselves, “˜Hey, if w’re going to make things in our lives, we might as well make them beautiful.’”

He understood the intersection of beauty, art, and technology perhaps better than anyone before him (have you notice how recently everything is starting to look like an Apple product?). But his inability to compromise on his almost-perfect taste manifested itself in being a bit of a jerk sometimes. By now, everyone knows the stories about how mean Jobs could be to his employees. My current favorite is the anecdote of what happened when Bruce Horn decided to leave the company. It summarizes Jobs’s volatility so perfectly:

When Horn went in to say goodbye, Jobs told him, “Everything that’s wrong with the Mac is your fault.” Horn responded, “Well, actually, Steve, a lot of things that are right with the Mac are my fault, and I had to fight like crazy to get those things in.” “You’re right,” admitted Jobs. “I’ll give you 15,000 shares to stay.” When Horn declined the offer, Jobs showed his warmer side. “Well, give me a hug,” he said. And so they hugged.

This kind of story is typical throughout the book. He was able to go from “you’re doing crap work!” to “let’s hug” in less than 10 seconds. What makes me uncomfortable is how effective this erratic management style appears to have been. I almost wish we could point to Steve Jobs and say, “see how destructive it is when you’re mean to people?” But her’s the thing: it worked. The Mac team were some of the most brilliant engineers on the planet, because only the good ones were able to survive Jobs’s wrath. And Jobs knew this:

But Jobs had latched onto what he believed was a key management lesson from his Macintosh experience: You have to be ruthless if you want to build a team of A players. “It’s too easy, as a team grows, to put up with a few B players, and they then attract a few more B players, and soon you will even have some C players,” he recalled. “The Macintosh experience taught me that A players like to work only with other A players, which means you can’t indulge B players.”

Even the team themselves seemed to be ok with this style in the end (yes, they were the A players who “survived”, but still):

“As every day passes, the work fifty people are doing here is going to send a giant ripple through the universe,” he said. “I know I might be a little hard to get along with, but this is the most fun thing I’ve done in my life.” Years later most of those in the audience would be able to laugh about the “little hard to get along with” episodes and agree with him that creating that giant ripple was the most fun they had in their lives.

So the source of my extreme discomfort with the Steve Jobs story is that I so desperately want to believe that being a jerk to people isn’t a good way to get the best out of them. But Jobs showed that it certainly is a way to get extraordinary results from a smart, dedicated team. My sense is that not many people can pull this off because you have to be able to back up that behavior with the level of taste that he possessed. This could be the reason why most managers who resort to jerk behavior don’t get the same results from their teams - they have no taste.

For my part, I’m going to take the safer road and stick with the advice given in What Motivates Us To Do Great Work?:

For creative thinkers, [there are] three key motivators: autonomy (self-directed work), mastery (getting better at stuff), and purpose (serving a greater vision). All three are intrinsic motivators. Even a purpose, which can seem like an external motivator, will be internalized if you truly believe in it.

I probably won’t make as big of a dent in the universe as Steve Jobs did, but that’s going to have to be ok.

Jared Spool in The Value of Appl’s Knowledge Navigator: Gruber Has It Partially Right:

When teams don’t have a vision [”¦], each person is walking around with a different understanding of what the end of the journey should look like. When ther’s no common understanding on what that end point looks like, each decisions is evaluated on a different criteria and the resulting products end up looking like crap.

This is why I believe that product roadmaps are not evil. As I’ve written before, at our company we are very clear that the product roadmap is a flexible guideline that can (and must) change frequently as needed. But it gives the teams (and the management team) something to work towards. It’s a common vision, a sense of direction that’s more than just fluffy language - it’s concrete evidence that w’re headed somewhere good, and we know how to get there.

Bret Victor wrote a very interesting rant a few days ago on the the problem with touch interfaces and the future of Interaction Design. The piece got a lot of attention, so today he followed up with some responses to the questions and comments he received.

I particularly enjoyed his thoughts on the limits of voice control. His argument is that voice is a good way to get information or issue commands (yes, like Siri), but that it’s not very good for creating and understanding:

I have a hard time imagining Monet saying to his canvas, “Give me some water lilies. Make ‘em impressionistic.” Or designing a building by telling all the walls where to go. Most artistic and engineering projects (at least, non-language-based ones) can’t just be described. They exist in space, and we manipulate space with our hands.

It’s obvious, yes, but I think we need to remind ourselves of this. Creating things requires “manipulating space with our hands”, even if that means manipulating words onto a page when they’re stubbornly stuck in space somewhere.[1]

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1. Sure, some people (like John Siracusa) are able to dictate the first drafts of stuff they write, but I’m pretty sure they’re not editing their work through voice control. Editing (which is the hardest part of writing) requires a keyboard and lots of banging your head on it.  â†©

Aaron Swartz in a great piece called Steve Jobs and the Founder’s Pain:

Something that’s perfect just feels much, much better than something that’s almost right. When I’m doing something myself, I can just sit there and work at it until it’s exactly right. It’s embarrassing to launch a product with a bug in it! It physically hurts when I realize that’s what I’ve done. But as projects and companies grow, there are more and more people in between me and those tiny details. And then I face a choice: do I keep complaining until something’s perfect or do I just let go and consider it somebody els’s problem?

The people who are not content to make it somebody else’s problem are the ones who end up changing the world.

(link via @vhata)