Letters of Note continues to be a source of endless delight. Monday’s letter is another great example. In The morning mail is my enemy, E.B. White describes with painstaking clarity how distractions ruin our ability to be creative. It was written in 1961, but replacing “mail” with “email” makes it feel like it was written yesterday:

So in the long run, although I’m not immune to praise and to friendliness, I get impatient with the morning mail, because it is, in a sense, my enemy—the thing that stands between me and a final burst of creative effort. (I’m sixty-one and working against time.)

Greg McKeown’s The Disciplined Pursuit of Less is an article about careers, but his solid advice also applies to software product development:

If success is a catalyst for failure because it leads to the “undisciplined pursuit of more,” then one simple antidote is the disciplined pursuit of less. Not just haphazardly saying no, but purposefully, deliberately, and strategically eliminating the nonessentials. Not just once a year as part of a planning meeting, but constantly reducing, focusing and simplifying. Not just getting rid of the obvious time wasters, but being willing to cut out really terrific opportunities as well. Few appear to have the courage to live this principle, which may be why it differentiates successful people and organizations from the very successful ones.

Kyle Baxter discusses what makes Twitter great in Twitter, Utility:

[W]ith over a hundred million people on it, you can quickly find almost anyone you’re interested in, listen to them, and communicate with them, all in a very lightweight, non-intrusive way. That’s incredibly powerful, especially because what it does is allow communities to form that are incredibly intimate but also very open to others.

The whole article is great, so I encourage you to read the whole thing. I find the phrase “lightweight, non-intrusive” particularly interesting. I’m probably really late on this insight, but the core of that truth only recently struck me.

Twitter is lightweight in the sense that there is very little commitment required to write 140 characters and click the “Tweet” button. The character limit also means that you don’t feel pressured to write more (which is a complaint you hear about blogging quite a bit). And it’s non-intrusive in that you can follow/unfollow anyone, and the rules of engagement are such that whoever you talk to has very little obligation to talk back.

I turned off satellite TV at our home about 5 months ago. This wasn’t some moral stand against the horrors of technology. It was simply a matter of return on investment. Satellite TV is ludicrously expensive in South Africa, and my wife and I are so happy with our Apple TV setup that I couldn’t justify the cost any more. I wondered if we would have some withdrawal symptoms, but I can honestly say I’ll never go back to satellite. I do miss the odd live sporting event, but that’s not compelling enough to fork out a gazillion dollars every month just to see some guy yelling about cake.

The side benefit of this decision is that we haven’t seen a TV commercial in 5 months. Combine that with my practice of doing most of my online reading in Instapaper, and things start to get interesting. The sheer volume of advertising I used to be bombarded with forced me to tune it all out. But now that it’s a bit scarcer I notice every ad I come across. And I don’t like what I see. It’s especially jarring on Facebook, where “Promoted pages” are starting to annoy the crap out of me. I used to scroll through them without a second thought, but now I grit my teeth as they fly by.

This got me thinking about the current state of traditional marketing, and what a future without it might look like.

RIP traditional marketing

I believe that marketing as we currently know and practice it is well on its way to extinction. That’s certainly not what ad agencies want you to believe, but the evidence is all around us. Marketing is losing its ability to convince people to buy things they don’t need. Jason Calacanis sums it up perfectly in The Age of Excellence: “If your product sucks, it’s over. Transparency is a bitch.”

We discuss products and services everywhere we go, and our friends and followers are listening. “Word of mouth” marketing isn’t new, but the tools to spread our views about a company or experience are now within everyone’s reach. And boy, are we reaching. Even a cursory look at Facebook’s usage metrics shows the staggering amount of time people spend there.

What frustrates companies, of course, is that they can’t control the conversation any more. They’re powerless against an angry mob of consumers who spew vitriol about their products all over the Internet. This is ultimately a good thing, because it will slowly scare companies into taking some of their marketing budgets and spending it on making better products instead. Because that’s where profit and sustainability will come from.

This doesn’t mean I don’t want to know about new things. I still want to find out about cool products or services that I might be interested in. But I don’t want to see it on TV or in a sponsored link on my Facebook page. I want to hear about it from people I trust. That can be through a tweet or blog post about a good experience, or even a paid ad related to a topic I care about (like the advertisements on the 5by5 network).

I’m not averse to marketing messages. I’m averse to being manipulated into buying something that won’t live up to its promises. When’s the last time you read the back of your shampoo bottle? Do you believe that the right shampoo will give you “gorgeous, luxuriously soft” hair, or maybe “the hair nature didn’t”? No? Then why are we ok with these ridiculous marketing messages? Why don’t we call companies on it when they do things like promise “everything you could ever want”?

The future of marketing is product

There is no traditional marketing in the future I’d like to see. There’s no professional advertising TV spots, no billboards, no videos created to be “viral content”. Instead, companies take the money they save from paying ad agencies, and spend it on building great products.

In this future, the people who work on products aren’t faceless entities. They are individuals who hang out online, who write on their blogs about their journeys, and who are active in the industries they operate in. Since they’re focused on providing value to others, they have a large enough following so that when their product launches, they can promote it to their networks without being overbearing. And if the product is good enough, that message gets amplified through the various networks to acquire customers. If it’s not good enough, they get the negative feedback and try again.

The outcome of this vision is that the products we use are made by people we know, and promoted by those who want to spread the word about something they like. I don’t think we’re even that far from being able to create this future. I’m happily unaware of TV advertising these days, and most of the things I buy are based on recommendations on Twitter or in offline conversations.

Granted, we need more success stories to convince companies to buy fewer ads and hire more product-focused people. And we need all those product people to start contributing to their communities and talk about what they’re working on. But the puzzle pieces are all there. We just haven’t finished putting them together.

I just received an email from Pinterest to let me know that one of my Facebook friends has joined the service. I found the email odd, because I specifically remember turning off all email notifications (since I don’t use the site any more). I clicked through to “change notification preferences”, and saw this:

Ah, I see. This is a new “feature” Pinterest added, so they decided to turn the email notification on by default. I immediately thought of Vibhu Norby’s words:

Private is an ethical default. Public is not.

That principle should also go for email notifications from any service. “Off” is an ethical default. “On” is not. I’m picking on Pinterest because it’s the most recent example, but this has become common practice on the web. The irony is that sending me email I didn’t explicitly ask for makes me less likely to engage with a site, not more.

Cole Peters believes the user experience community has relegated aesthetics to a second-class design citizen. From his essay Form Worship:

Despite my challenges with designs that score (theoretically) high on experience and low on beauty, it’s not hard to understand their genesis. UX inherently promises its clients an influx of users, and generally promises increases in conversions (and sales) by inference. The pursuit of aesthetics doesn’t promise to bring more customers through the door or more dollars into the business; in fact, it’s so subjective that it’s tough for it to promise anything at all. What place, then, should it have in today’s business-driven design industry?

Cole goes on to make a case for the importance of aesthetics in design, which I agree with. I do, however, want to add some thoughts about this statement:

We need to stop looking for promises in Design. Design should never be approached as a programmatic practice, like some machine that, given the right ingredients, is guaranteed to spit out a delicious loaf of success.

I love the sentiment, but from a practical perspective we don’t have the luxury not to make promises of success in design. As Brandon Schauer said:

There is no reason for a company to support a great experience unless it makes money. If there is no economic incentive, it either can’t exist (unsustainable) or it’s art.

This leads to my next point, which is that conversion/sales increases aren’t the only design promises we can make. Beautiful design can improve businesses in a variety of ways. Cennydd Bowles has a great piece related to this called Why aren’t we converting?. You should read the whole thing, but here he explains some of the other “promises” of design:

I do suggest seeing user-centred design as something wider than just a means of optimising a conversion rate. While there may not be a noticeable uplift in any specific metric, the raw material of design is frequently intangible: trust, loyalty, engagement, etc. These things are much harder to measure, but they still make themselves felt indirectly in other metrics: support costs, referral rates, customer retention, and so on.

So here’s the thing. UX people who don’t take aesthetics seriously are doing it wrong. As I’ve written before, a focus on good aesthetics helps a design to fit the brand promise and elicit appropriate emotional responses from users¹. In fact, there is a strong argument to be made that aesthetics are becoming essential to the survival of any product. Since most products now have a baseline quality that is good enough, users come to expect products to be beautiful, not just functional.

The aesthetics problem in design exists not because UX precludes a focus on beauty. The problem is that not all UX people take the long and difficult road to convince clients and stakeholders of the very real business benefits of good aesthetics.

Anil Dash discusses App.net in You Can’t Start the Revolution from the Country Club:

In today’s world, where the social web is mainstream, innovating on the core values of tools and technology while ignoring the value of inclusiveness is tantamount to building a gated community. Even with the promise that the less privileged might get a chance to show up later, you’re making a fundamentally unfair system.

I am genuinely confused. If you take this argument to its logical conclusion, is he saying that everything we make should be free so that it doesn’t exclude anyone? Isn’t that how we arrived at the current situation where advertisers call the shots on major social networks?

I didn’t back App.net because I hate Twitter and want to move somewhere else. I love Twitter, and I have no problem with anyone who uses it because I get to choose whose tweets I see. I backed App.net because I want to see what innovation comes out of it. To illustrate my point, in 1970 a NASA director attempted to make the case for space travel to a Nun who asked how he could suggest spending billions of dollars on space projects at a time when so many children are starving on Earth. From Why Explore Space?:

I believe, like many of my friends, that travelling to the Moon and eventually to Mars and to other planets is a venture which we should undertake now, and I even believe that this project, in the long run, will contribute more to the solution of these grave problems we are facing here on Earth than many other potential projects of help which are debated and discussed year after year, and which are so extremely slow in yielding tangible results.

I understand that comparing an app to space travel is silly, but if you read the whole letter you’ll understand the sentiment that prompted me to back App.net. I believe that a community of passionate developers can use the platform to develop ideas that not only solve existing problems with web publishing, but also meet some as-of-yet unknown web user needs.

For me, it’s not about excluding people, or sticking it to The Man. It’s about funding a playground for innovation¹.

Alex Maughan adds his thoughts to the “fast web” discussion in The Slow Web and the Thievery of Fast Lifestyles:

We are philics of immediate gratification, ticket holders impatiently awaiting our entrance into the never-ending show of serial distractions. Far too many of us are phobic of the good stuff. The stuff that takes emotional maturity. The stuff that takes time, and doesn’t constantly pat you on the back for every small thing you do. The stuff you don’t find on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Dribble. The stuff that requires you to exist without constant, yet ultimately spurious, forms of reinforcement; without any distractions; without the need to bolster your perceived self-worth by harvesting as many Likes as you can for every little asinine thing we spit out onto the Web. We increasingly shy away from the stuff that requires a longer form of consideration to ripen.

The post ends with some guidelines that he’s setting for himself to fight this problem. It’s worth reading.

Just over a week ago Frank Chimero tweeted, “Time to close the computer.” He then deleted his entire tweet history and unfollowed everyone he used to follow. Today that tweet is gone as well, his avatar is a dog, and he follows 3 very different people and 1 bot (@Horse_ebooks, of course).

I don’t know if that story means anything, but Frank is a pretty famous designer, and all I’m saying is that something is going on. Everywhere I look I see people behaving like they just fell off a chair on the Axiom only to realize that staring at a screen all their waking hours isn’t as fantastic as they thought it was.

Maybe it is time to close the computer.