Giff Constable makes the case for validation and learning in the product development process before you launch something. From You Are Spending 3x-5x More Than You Should:
Agile/lean has helped people debunk the “big upfront design” phase, but far too many replace it with nothing. I agree that waterfall-style, big-upfront-design is a waste of time and money. I do believe that getting into the market with a designer and an engineer and learning is a critical use of time.
Lee Hutchinson, who was a system administrator at Boeing at the time of the space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003, looks back at that tumultuous time in a long but absolutely fascinating article for Ars Technica:
In August 2003, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) issued its final report. Behind the direct cause of the foam strike, the report leveled damning critiques at NASA’s pre- and post-launch decision-making, painting a picture of an agency dominated by milestone-obsessed middle management1. That focus on narrow, group-specific work and reporting, without a complementary focus on cross-department integration and communication2, contributed at least as much to the loss of the shuttle as did the foam impact. Those accusations held a faint echo of familiarity—many of them had been raised 17 years earlier by the Rogers Commission investigating Challenger’s destruction.
The report also asked a team at NASA to figure out what a rescue plan might have looked like:
To put the decisions made during the flight of STS-107 into perspective, the Board asked NASA to determine if there were options for the safe return of the STS-107 crew.
The rest of the article explains the possible rescue plan in detail. If you have any interest in science or space exploration this is a must-read.
I found the article particularly interesting because I had just finished reading my favorite novel of the year so far: The Martian by Andy Weir. The article echoed a lot of the concepts mentioned in the novel, which gave me a new appreciation for the story. I highly recommend this surprisingly plausible and funny book as well.
One of my favorite articles of the year so far is Zachary Crockett’s The Invention of the AeroPress:
The AeroPress was conceived at Alan Adler’s dinner table. The company was having a team meal, when the wife of Aerobie’s sales manager posed a question: “What do you guys do when you just want one cup of coffee?”
A long-time coffee enthusiast and self-proclaimed “one cup kinda guy,” Adler had wondered this many times himself. He’d grown increasingly frustrated with his coffee maker, which yielded 6-8 cups per brew. In typical Adler fashion, he didn’t let the problem bother him long: he set out to invent a better way to brew single cup of coffee.
It might sound like an article about coffee, but it’s more about entrepreneurship, product design, and the sheer tenacity of true inventors. Great read.
A few months ago I wrote about the forces at work when people choose a product. I discussed the Jobs-To-Be-Done concept of Progress-Making Forces, and shared this diagram to illustrate what happens when we try to get people to use our product instead of someone else’s:
In this article I want to discuss this framework in the context of a practical example: WhatsApp vs. Instagram Direct (now both owned by Facebook). I started thinking about this recently after MG Siegler wrote his post Going Against The Grain:
We’re seeing over and over again now that the behemoths can’t simply add a startup’s functionality into their own app as a feature and kill said startup. But it’s equally important to note that if you are able to establish your startup, especially those in app form, it may be hard to get your users to do anything other than what they originally came to do. Especially if the new functionality is against the grain in any way.
So, let’s consider this statement in the context of the Progress-Making Forces, and apply it to Instagram’s decision to add private photo sharing with Instagram Direct. First, let’s talk about existing photo sharing behavior. How do people currently send photos to each other? Facebook used to be the king of photos, but people are increasingly using messaging apps for this instead:
WhatsApp is processing 500 million images per day, compared to 400 million Snapchat (“snaps”) per day, which could include photos or videos. For its part, Facebook processes a comparatively paltry 350 million photos a day.
Enter Instagram Direct, a way for Facebook to try to claim back some of the private photo sharing pie. That’s the new behavior in the context of the the forces diagram. So the big question for Facebook is this: How do you get people to move their private photo sharing from WhatsApp (existing behavior) to Instagram (new behavior)? According to our framework, the progress-making forces need to be stronger than the progress-hindering forces, so let’s look at each force in turn:
This analysis clearly shows that while the progress-making forces for moving people to Instagram Direct are relatively weak, the progress-hindering forces are extremely strong. This keeps people glued to WhatsApp, and it explains Instagram Direct’s apparent failure.
So what happened here? I think Facebook realized that they won’t be able to change people’s existing photo-sharing behavior. And that’s why they bought WhatsApp.
I really enjoyed Nick Stockton’s exploration of the space syntax concept in architecture in There’s a Science to Foot Traffic, and It Can Help Us Design Better Cities. He explains:
Space syntax [is] the science of how cities work. In the late 1970s, British architects Bill Hillier and Julienne Hanson hit on the idea that any space within a city — or the entire city itself — could be analyzed in terms of connectivity and movement. They reasoned that a city’s success depended largely on how easy it was for people to move about on foot.
This wasn’t a huge revelation. Studies reaching as far back as 1960s have shown walkable cities have higher property values, healthier residents, and lower crime. What set Hillier and Hanson’s ideas apart was the notion that a city’s geometry did more for movement than any other design factor. They argued that every other cog in a city’s engineering depends on the walkable grid. Cars, buses, trains, and bikes play a role, too, but only as much as they transport people to places where they then proceed to walk around.
There’s some great examples in the article, including a case study on the redesign of Trafalgar Square in London.
Peter Seibel discusses data-driven design at Etsy in his post Building websites with science. After going over the dangers of relying solely on A/B testing for product decisions, he concludes:
Ultimately the goal is to make great products. Great ideas from designers are a necessary ingredient. And A/B testing can definitely improve products. But best is to use both: establish a loop between good design ideas leading to good experiments leading to knowledge about the product leading to even better design ideas. And then allow designers the latitude to occasionally try things that can’t yet be justified by science or even things that my go against current “scientific” dogma.
This echoes Julie Zhuo’s thoughts in The Agony and Ecstasy of Building with Data:
You can’t A/B test your way into big, bold new strategies. Something like the iPhone is impossible to A/B test. If you had asked people or invited them to come into the lab to try some stuff out, they would have preferred a physical keyboard to a virtual one. If you had them use an early prototype of the touch screen where not every gesture registered perfectly, it would have felt bad and tested poorly. […]
Data and A/B test are valuable allies, and they help us understand and grow and optimize, but they’re not a replacement for clear-headed, strong decision-making. Don’t become dependent on their allure. Sometimes, a little instinct goes a long way.
This all relates back to the difference between variation (trying out different ideas) and iteration (small changes to improve an existing idea). A/B testing is great for iteration, but not for variation. For variation we need our brains, and lots of paper and pencils.
A big thanks to Creative Labs for sponsoring Elezea’s RSS feed this week with their AXX 200 sound system!
We believe there’s so much more that your portable wireless speaker should do for you. That’s why we made the AXX 200.
The AXX 200 is a Bluetooth wireless speaker + Sound Blaster audio processor. This means a portable wireless speaker with power for real-time audio enhancement.
Intelligence. That’s what the AXX 200 brings to the table.
It’s for work, it’s for play.
It can be everything you need it to be.
The AXX 200 is now on sale for a limited time at Creative.com and Amazon.com.
Cap Watkins in Just Ship*:
We work in a world now where fast isn’t good enough. Where quantity is fairly regularly getting edged out by quality. You shipped twelve just-good-enough things this year? You’re about to get smoked by folks who shipped three of those things thoughtfully and holistically. Where you cut corners on twelve projects to get them out the door, someone else crafted three focused experiences and left themselves little-to-no design or technical debt.
This also describes why arbitrary release dates are poison to good quality products. It forces teams to cut corners to hit a date, which puts them in a more vulnerable position than if they just took the time to do things right.
Also:
Why do we never have time to do it right, but always have time to do it over?
— Alan Skorkin (@skorks) April 10, 2013