Gary Graham writes about some of the dangers of the smart city movement in Too-smart cities? Why these visions of utopia need an urgent reality check:

Ideally a future city will have inner-city areas that are sustainably created through private, for-profit initiatives, and investment based on genuine competitive advantage — not through artificial inducements, charity or government mandates.

The people living in cities far outnumber the people making decisions about what those cities should look like in the future. They are disconnected from the plans being made by companies and even governments on their behalf.

We need to start working with everyday citizens to find the right questions — and then work with them towards developing solutions to the problems they raise.

The article also mentions the city of Brasília as an example of a failed experiment because it didn’t take the needs of its citizens into consideration. That’s a topic that’s near and dear to me:

Together, we can avoid building digital Brasílias — projects that generate buzz, but don’t meet the needs of the people who live there.

Tim Wu brings up some interesting points in Why Making Technology Easier to Use Isn’t Always Good:

We make ourselves into what we, as a species, will become, mainly through our choices as consumers. If you accept these premises, our choice of technological tools becomes all-important; by the logic of biological atrophy, our unused skills and capacities tend to melt away, like the tail of an ape. It may sound overly dramatic, but the use of demanding technologies may actually be important to the future of the human race.

Wu explains that if everything is easy, we’ll simply stop learning things. So what are these “demanding technologies” like?

Three elements are defining: it is technology that takes time to master, whose usage is highly occupying, and whose operation includes some real risk of failure. By this measure, a piano is a demanding technology, as is a frying pan, a programming language, or a paintbrush. So-called convenience technologies, in contrast — like instant mashed potatoes or automatic transmissions — usually require little concentrated effort and yield predictable results.

danah boyd wrote an interesting op-ed for TIME called Let Kids Run Wild Online. She argues that restrictive monitoring software is not the way to go to keep teens safe online:

The key to helping youth navigate contemporary digital life isn’t more restrictions. It’s freedom plus communication. Famed urban theorist Jane Jacobs used to argue that the safest neighborhoods were those where communities collectively took interest in and paid attention to what happened on the streets. Safety didn’t come from surveillance cameras or keeping everyone indoors but from a collective willingness to watch out for one another and be present as people struggled. The same is true online.

This navigation article by Gerry McGovern is from 2006, but it’s still so spot on. I’ll quote this one bit from Web Navigation is About Moving Forward, but you should definitely read the whole thing:

Navigation should primarily be about helping us keep on going in the direction we have chosen. If I choose a link for “notebooks” then I have made a decision. Continuing to present me with links for servers and desktops decreases my ability to focus on the notebook direction I have chosen.

When I choose a link for “ultralight notebooks” that indicates that I am not interested in multimedia notebooks. Once I arrive at the ultralight notebooks webpage, the overwhelming focus of the navigation must be to help me find the right ultralight notebook.

Good web navigation design is not about giving people lots and lots of choices. It is not about second guessing decisions we have made. It’s not about asking what if we want to get back to where we were. It’s about looking forward, not about looking backward.

This is unfortunately still such a common practice on e-commerce sites. Why continue to show users unrelated product ads once they’ve made a decision on what they want? Here’s the search results page on Kalahari.com when I do a search for “Samsung TV”:

This isn’t the time to punt apps, newsletters, and the marketplace. I’ve indicated that I want a Samsung TV, so sell me a Samsung TV!

In WordPress: How It Came To Be And Where It’s Heading Alex Moss interviews Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, the two cofounders of WordPress. The whole interview is interesting, but their approach to technical debt caught my eye in particular:

We rewrite or refactor about 10 to 15% of WordPress in most releases, so that we can keep users getting updates and new features quickly, while doing the “ground up rebuild” incrementally in the background, fixing bugs and getting feedback as we go.

This is, in my experience, the best way to handle technical debt: pay down a little bit of it in every release. To steal a slide from my Product Management course, here’s my general rule of thumb (and of course there will be exceptions) for balancing a product roadmap:

Take care of the people you love, and try to make yourself known and understood. Dial it down, work with your hands, keep it quiet, and share what you know.

— Frank Chimero, This One’s for Me

In 16 days our family will walk out of an empty house in Cape Town and get on a plane to Portland, OR. It will be a one-way journey. I’ve been searching for the words to write about it, but I haven’t quite found the right ones. So I guess these ones will have to do.

I started my first blog in 2004. It was hosted on Windows Live Spaces, and it was terrible. I called it Leave The Great Indoors (yes, because of the John Mayer song and we just moved countries and just roll with it ok?). I have no idea what I wrote about back then, but I must have felt that there was something to this writing thing, because a year later I moved it to Blogger (because more features!). It still exists, but please don’t tell anyone.

The writing thing kept growing on me, and a couple of months later I started a UX-focused blog called UX-SA (because User Experience, and I’m from South Africa, and yes it’s a stupid name for a blog). That one also still exists, but again, please don’t tell anyone.

It was only in late 2009 that I got serious about it, bought a domain name (I don’t know what I was thinking — no one can pronounce Elezea), installed WordPress, and got stuck in. I proceeded to go through several identity crises, which included a move from Silicon Valley to Cape Town, 2 kids, and realizing that I’ll never learn how to deal with angry comments so I should probably turn those off.

One day I wrote a post that got mildly popular, and Jim Dalrymple linked to it from The Loop. He also must have subscribed to my RSS feed, because he has linked to the site a few times since then — something I’m still surprised by and incredibly grateful for every time it happens.

Some time after that a guy I’d never met, who lives in Portland, started following me on Twitter. He’s a regular reader of The Loop, and he decided to check out this guy who has the same last name as he does (let’s call him Rudolph, because that’s his name). We started chatting a bit, and when he came to visit his extended family in Cape Town we caught up for coffee. We kept in touch, as like-minded people are prone to do.

Last August my wife and I went to San Diego for a family reunion. I also set up some interviews because we were strongly considering moving there. But we took one look at California and realized we won’t be able to live there again (Cape Town kind of gets you addicted to leafy mountain beauty, and well, California). On a whim I gave Rudolph a call, and asked him if he thinks we should move to Portland. I’d been following him on Instagram for a while, and it looked like a nice place.

So this random guy I met on the Internet went to work and helped us figure out if Portland might be the city for us. A few months later I started looking for jobs there. Since I’d never been to Oregon I took a one-week trip to check it out and speak to some people in person. Of course I stayed with Rudolph and his lovely family.

I talked to several companies in Portland, but the conversations that kept sticking in my mind were the ones I had with HealthSparq, a healthcare transparency company that’s part of Cambia Health Solutions. I never thought I’d work in the healthcare field, but the team’s passion and vision won me over. So on April 13th I’m starting at Healthsparq as a Director of Product. Healthsparq’s president, Scott Decker, wrote a post the other day that’s a pretty good summary of why I decided to join them. From Health Care Transparency: Opening Up the Market:

It’s important that these new transparency tools provide robust information that people want to know in a way they can make actionable. While more and more health care data is being generated and released — from personal tracking devices to government and payer data — the information won’t be useful unless it is understandable and easy to navigate. These new transparency tools should provide as complete a picture as possible of price and quality, from the moment a person begins receiving care for a specific condition to the time when they no longer require treatment.

That’s a tough UX problem, and a vision I can get behind. I’m excited about the move to a new city with new beginnings and new things to explore — and a product I can believe in.

Anyway, I’m telling you the strange story of how this all happened because I’m worried that we don’t always appreciate how cool the internet can be. My decision to start a crappy blog in 2004 eventually led to a bunch of connections with fantastic people who decided to give me a shot (remind me to tell you about the day that Francisco sent me a DM to ask if I’d like to write for Smashing Magazine). This move wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t met Jim and Rudolph online, and if they weren’t such nice people, and I can’t quite get my brain around how great that is.

We give the internet a lot of crap, and yes, it can be a vile place sometimes. But we’re moving to Portland because of relationships that were started and cemented on the internet, so I’m going to remain in awe of this technology that has the power to help us make each other’s lives so much better.

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.