Des Traynor shares some insights on how he works with startups in Asking Questions beats Giving Advice:

The first question I ask (though sometimes I just ask myself) is an easy one: is this viable, feasible, and desirable? The answer has to be yes on all three counts—no two are enough. In fact, pick any two, and you’ll think of a start up that failed because they missed the third.

This approach shares parallels to the “problem frame diagram” approach I discuss in Usable yet Useless: Why Every Business Needs Product Discovery. The goal with that approach is to identify the user needs and business goals of the product, as well as the core competencies of the organisation.

Des goes on to describe some of the key things you have to think about before launching a product. If you do Product Management on the web, his post is highly recommended.

Micah Baldwin in Silent But Deadly:

Yet, there is something amazing, maybe even beautiful in execution. In silently creating something of immense value without the need to be everywhere to be seen by everyone. That our worth as entrepreneurs is built through our products, not through our names.

It’s a great story and a great post.

(link via @PaulCartmel)

In a response to a series of posts on eBook pagination vs. scrolling (including mine), Dr. Drang presents the strongest argument against pagination that I’ve seen so far. From Scrolling or paging?:

Authors don’t write in pages, they write in sentences and paragraphs, neither of which are honored in a paged interface.

That’s a really good point. Pages artificially break up authors’ thoughts. Pagination is the hurdle-race to scrolling’s 400-meter dash. Everything is a trade-off though, so for the time being I will stubbornly stick to my preference for pagination, because as I said, I just find it easier to deal with.

I want to challenge Dr. Drang on one point, though. He says:

As for the sense of accomplishment, I am, if anything, even more dubious. Flipping a page, whether in a physical book or an ebook, has never charged me with a feeling of achievement. In fact, in paged ebooks I seldom have any sense of how far along I am—in physical books there is, at least, the thickness of what’s in your left hand compared to what’s in your right.

I don’t agree with that. Most eBook readers have sorted out the “sense of place” problem, and now provide both visual and text indicators to help you figure out how far along you are in the book you’re reading. Below are the interfaces for iBooks and Readmill:

Note the text-based information about the number of pages that have been read, and how many pages there are in total. The visual indicators, in turn, give you a sense of the “weight” of the number of pages you’ve already read — Readmill does a particularly good job of this. And iBooks even tells you how many pages you have left in any given chapter. Those indicators combined serve as a worthy replacement for “the thickness of what’s in your left hand compared to what’s in your right”.

Kontra wrote a great post on the real problems Apple needs to address in their software and operating systems. Apple’s design problems aren’t skeuomorphic starts with a statement everyone needs to take to heart:

The current meme of Ive coming on a white horse to rescue geeks in distress from Scott Forstallian skeuomorphism is wishfully hilarious.

Exactly. As Gruber pointed out:

The speculation regarding skeuomorphism as a factor in Forstall’s ouster has gotten out of hand. That’s not what this was about. This is about Forstall’s relationship with the other senior executives at the company. Personalities and politics, not rich Corinthian leather.

Anyway, moving on. Kontra goes on to list some of Apple’s current software issues, and concludes:

In the end, what’s wrong with iOS isn’t the dark linen behind the app icons at the bottom of the screen, but the fact that iOS ought to have much better inter-application management and navigation than users fiddling with tiny icons. I’m fairly sure most Apple users would gladly continue to use what are supposed to be skeuomorphically challenged Calendar or Notebook apps for another thousand years if Apple could only solve the far more vexing software problems of AppleID unification when using iTunes and App Store, or the performance and reliability of the same. And yet these are the twin sides of the same systems design problem: the display layer surfacing or hiding the power within or, increasingly, lack thereof.

Read Apple’s design problems aren’t skeuomorphic.

Jenna Wortham shares some fascinating stories in How New Yorkers Adjusted to Sudden Smartphone Withdrawal:

On the scale of hardships suffered in the storm and its aftermath, these were more like minor annoyances. But the experience of being suddenly smartphoneless caused some to realize just how dependent on the technology they had become. […]

“It’s strange, how in the end you feel like a prisoner to your device,” [Steve Juh] said. “It’s the one thing you wanted to work, more than anything.”

What most people find most disconcerting is the sudden lack (and unreliability) of information. As one person said, “You had to make plans and stick to them. It felt so old-school, like we were back in 1998.”

(link via The system that breaks is not the system that repairs)

In Bridging the gap between humans and computers Heather Kelly takes a look at some recent ethnographic research on our relationship with technology. It’s full of interesting stories like this one:

In one experiment, Ju’s group rigged automatic doors to open in different ways: Some would open slowly, then pause before fully opening; others would immediately jerk all the way open. The people walking by the doors assigned them different levels of intelligence, and thought the doors that opened in two steps just seemed smarter.

It turned out that adding the pause gave illusion of forethought, even though it was just an extra programming step. People thought the door was more intelligent because it appeared to think before carrying out an action.

One of my favorite books on this topic is Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. The first half of the book is all about our relationship with high tech “things” — what we find creepy vs. comforting, how different cultures behave differently, etc. Highly recommended.

Spencer Beacock takes on those who criticize Instagram as “bad art” in Instagram, Emotional Metadata & Ubiquitous Sharing. He starts by redefining the purpose of the photo-sharing service:

Instagram is a tool and a model for easy, non-verbal sharing of experiential and emotional data. It is image-capturing for pseudo-ethnographic recording, rather than image-capturing for beauty or composition.

His take on the much-discussed filters is really interesting as well:

Like a regular photograph, the base data is visual data. However, unlike a traditional photograph, Instagram captures all of the regular metadata and then goes one step further, giving people the opportunity to assign emotional metadata about their experiences, in the form of its seventeen different filters.

The filters are visual representations of all of the other sensory and emotional data that gets connected with the images in our minds.

Spencer gives some great examples of what he means by this, and then closes the piece with a discussion of Instagram’s role in identity creation.

Read Instagram, Emotional Metadata & Ubiquitous Sharing.

Ben Bleikamp is spot on in his post Skeuomorphism is not the problem:

The problem with all bad design, skeuomorphism included, is taste. It’s fun to make fun of skeuomorphism but when I glance at Dribbble I see a lot of it done tastefully. I also see a lot of beautiful flat design. It’s because a particular strategy or aesthetic isn’t really the problem with bad design, it’s a lack of taste.

Good taste is harder to learn, but it’s what prevents things like iCal from happening. iCal’s design isn’t awful because it’s skeuomorphic, it’s awful because it’s skeuomorphic in a tasteless way. A more subtle texture, a less harsh gradient, and more cues from other OSX apps could make iCal less of a laughingstock.

And while we’re at it, let’s also clear up what skeuomorphism is (and isn’t), courtesy of Sacha Greif.