I’m seeing this sentiment about Slack quite a bit these days:

Am I the only person who feels like Slack has turned into an even less controlled, one-more-thing-to-check, inbox?

— Craig Mod (@craigmod) June 2, 2015

I am now on nine Slacks and I get DMs in all of them and this is rapidly becoming untenable

— Erin Kissane (@kissane) June 2, 2015

This is such an interesting side effect of being successful. Slack is an amazing product, and the way they’re building it is nothing short of remarkable. From their launch strategy to the way they keep innovating, it’s a wonderful case study.

But now something else is happening. Slack is so successful that public groups have exploded, and it’s not uncommon for people to switch between 5 or more Slack accounts during any given day. I think we’re now learning that the thing that makes Slack so useful also requires it to remain a relatively small part of one’s workday.

Slack is a great communication tool, with integrations that make it possible to reduce the amount of time spent on other services. But once you have multiple accounts and multiple rooms to contend with every day, it has the potential to become worse than that technology we all love to hate—email. At least with email there’s an assumption of asynchronous communication. With Slack there’s always an expectation to get an answer immediately, so the stress it induces can really skyrocket out of control.

What a predicament. This is a product that is incredibly useful, but that needs a relative measure of quietness to remain so. This means that explosive growth actually hurts its utility. What an interesting design problem to solve…

If you’d like to receive these updates in your email, you can subscribe to the newsletter here.

My friend Gio tells me he liked the tone of the last newsletter. Sure, it’s a sample of one, but I like writing how I talk, so I guess I’ll keep going—until I get a request to be a little more “corporate”, in which case I’ll start using words like “engagement” and “take it offline”. I refuse to use “ask” as a noun, though. One has to draw the line somewhere.

Anyway, the quote I can’t get out of my head this week is from Madeline Ashby’s No one cares about your jetpack — an article about the relative box office failure of the movie Tomorrowland. The whole thing is good, but this paragraph stands out:

In the end, the lacklustre performance of Tomorrowland at the box office has nothing to do with whether optimism is alive or dead. It has to do with changing demographics among moviegoers who know how to spot an Ayn Rand bedtime story when they see one. There are whole generations of moviegoers for whom jetpacks don’t mean shit, whose first memories of NASA are the Challenger disaster. And you know what? Those same generations believe in driverless cars, solar energy, smart cities, AR contacts, and vat-grown meat. They saw the election of America’s first black president, and they witnessed a wave of violence against young black men. They don’t want the depiction of an “optimistic” future. They want a future where their concerns are taken seriously and humanely, with compassion and intelligence and validation. And that’s way harder than optimism.

I’ve felt for a long time that what people (I agree with Rebecca Onion that we need to ditch generational labels) now crave the most is authenticity. We’ve learned how to see through most flavors of BS, and we are drawn to people situations that don’t try to dress things up to hide the truth. In short, we prefer “I made a mistake” to “Mistakes were made”.

I love What exactly are our rules comprised of?, a story in The Economist about a guy who believes his grammatical mission in life is to remove every Wikipedia instance of the phrase “comprised of” that he can find. And then there’s the guy who doesn’t believe in the past perfect tense. We should all have this much conviction about something in our lives.

In The Web of Alexandria (follow-up), Bret Victor continues a very interesting discussion about the role of the web to both preserve knowledge (the idea of a “common record”) and forget certain things (ephemeral discussions). He draws the following, well-argued conclusion:

[The web] currently has the property that it forgets what must be remembered, and remembers what must be forgotten. It manages to screw up both the sacredness of the common record and the sacredness of private interaction.

Mike Errico looks at the economics of music streaming, and those who try to game the system, in Everything in the Music Industry Has Changed Except the Song Itself. There’s a fascinating story about a band who made $20,000 by releasing an album of silent tracks and convinced their fans to stream it while they slept. It’s a weird new world in this industry.

Here’s an upside down thought. Clive Thompson asks us to consider that maybe when people text and drive, the most important of the two activities isn’t the driving, it’s the texting. So maybe we shouldn’t stop people from texting, but rather look for ways to get them to stop driving. Park the Car, Take the Bus is a very intriguing take on this topic.

And finally, in honor of Google I/O this week, I’ll leave you with this:

Let us know everything about you. We promise it’ll be worth your while. http://t.co/vJv4ucoZmt

— Josh Clark (@bigmediumjosh) May 29, 2015

Happy weekend, everyone!

Michael Sacasas has an interesting viewpoint on the “machines are taking our jobs” argument. In Machines, Work, and the Value of People he argues that since we’ve so closely linked our value as human beings to the work we do, the issue of machines taking over hits us pretty hard:

So, to sum up: Some time ago, identity and a sense of self-worth got hitched to labor and productivity. Consequently, each new technological displacement of human work appears to those being displaced as an affront to the their dignity as human beings. Those advancing new technologies that displace human labor do so by demeaning existing work as below our humanity and promising more humane work as a consequence of technological change. While this is sometimes true–some work that human beings have been forced to perform has been inhuman–deployed as a universal truth, it is little more than rhetorical cover for a significantly more complex and ambivalent reality.

On the surface, Ian Bogost’s Video Games Are Better Without Characters is a nostalgia piece about SimCity:

Such was the payload of SimCity: not a game about people, even though its residents, the Sims, would later get their own spin-off. Nor is it a game about particular cities, for it is difficult to recreate one with the game’s brittle, indirect tools. Rather, SimCity is a game about urban societies, about the relationship between land value, pollution, industry, taxation, growth, and other factors. It’s not really a simulation, despite its name, nor is it an educational game. Nobody would want a SimCity expert running their town’s urban planning office. But the game got us all to think about the relationships that make a city run, succeed, and decay, and in so doing to rise above our individual interests, even if only for a moment.

But later on it turns into a strong argument for games that are about bigger issues in society. Games not about fighting one’s way out of a prison or getting off a deserted planet, but games that focus on living systems, politics, and the economy. Great article.

Meta-Moments: Thoughtfulness by Design is a great post by Andrew Grimes on the benefits of making users pause and think in certain areas of an interface:

Meta-moments can provide us with space to interpret, understand, and add meaning to our experiences. A little friction in our flow is all we need. A roadblock must be overcome. A speed bump must be negotiated. A diversion must be navigated. Each of these cases involves our attention in a thoughtful way. Our level of engagement deepens. We have an experience we can remember.

John Naughton wrote another interesting “the machines are coming for our jobs!” article¹. This one is from the angle of “combinatorial innovation”—the idea that innovation happens when a bunch of disparate advances in technology come together in an unexpected way. His point in We are ignoring the new machine age at our peril is that it’s hard to see the implications of this kind of innovation:

The implications of [the self-driving] vehicle stretch far beyond the future of the automobile industry or even the future of transport. What it signals is that vast swaths of human activity – and employment – which were hitherto regarded as beyond the reach of “intelligent” machines may now be susceptible to automation. So we need to revise our assumptions about the future of work in the light of combinatorial innovation.

This is sure to be a bit controversial, but Jon Kolko makes some great points about design-led vs. lean development in Lean Doesn’t Always Create the Best Products:

And with this, we arrive at perhaps the most important distinction between an empathetic design-led approach and Lean. Lean is fast. Design is slow. Design is more contemplative, reflective, and because it demands systems thinking and marinating in the ambiguity of cultural data, it simply takes longer. The benefit is in producing emotionally sound products: products that people love, not just products people use. Increasingly, people expect more from the products and services they engage with. They expect quality, and use it both as a selection criteria for purchase and as a constraint for sustained use.

I don’t think Lean principles are necessarily in conflict with design principles (there is, after all, a thriving Lean UX movement). But the part that resonates here is the speed pressure that the Lean movement has placed on design activities. All research, prototyping, and graphic design is expected to happen much faster now. Speed is good, but not if it comes at the cost of not truly understanding the problems and user needs you’re designing for. And that’s where Jon’s points are worth taking to heart.

Kate Heddleston makes some great points in The Null Process:

When people say they don’t want process, what they’re really saying is they don’t want formalized process. There is really no such thing as “no process.” A process is simply the steps it takes to complete a task, so if a task is completed then by definition a process was used. Without formalized process everyone does things their own way, and there is no documentation for how problems are solved. This informal, undocumented process is the “null process,” and, if used incorrectly, the null process can have major implications for a company.

This reminds me of two things. The first is Rebekah Cox’s definition of Product Design:

Design is a set of decisions about a product. It’s not an interface or an aesthetic, it’s not a brand or a color. Design is the actual decisions.

What this implies is that everything you do in product design has a consequence. So just “letting things happen” is also a decision. It’s just a pretty bad one. Maybe that should be called “null design.” I don’t know, I’m not good at naming things¹.

The second is Michael Lopp’s The Process Myth. The whole thing is great, but this quote in particular has always stuck in my mind:

Engineers don’t hate process. They hate process that can’t defend itself.

Also this advice:

Healthy process is awesome if it not only documents what we care about, but is willing to defend itself. It is required to stand up to scrutiny and when a process fails to do so, it must change.

For more reading on what it takes to build good processes (because let’s be honest, what else are you going to do on a Friday night?), I recommend Adam Wuerl’s Avoiding Process Hell and Jeff Gothelf’s Applying Product Thinking to Process Improvement.