I was privileged to speak at Tech4Africa 2011 about a topic that I care about a great deal: how our environments and the way we work impact the quality of the software we produce. The talk came out of a question I keep asking myself over and over: why, despite our best efforts, do we still too often produce low quality software? Here’s the talk summary:

Why do we see so many web applications with inferior user experiences? Why do UX designers often get stuck being asked to “make the design pop a little more,” with no room or incentive to innovate? Why do some web developers feel demotivated and unable to break out of doing things the way they’ve always been done?

In this talk I explore some of the main causes of ineffective software development, and discuss practical recommendations on how to improve team structures and development processes to build high quality software that users care about, want to use, and that therefore makes more money for the business.

I discuss how designers and developers can work better together, how to ensure everyone gets input into the roadmap without it becoming chaos, and how to make sure that the business benefits are clearly articulated and communicated.

So here are the slides from my talk - I hope you find it useful. If you’d like to read more about this topic, you can check out a two-part series of articles that I wrote for Smashing Magazine.

W. Brian Arthur wrote a very interesting article for McKinsey Quarterly called The second economy (h/t to @justinspratt for the link). Registration is required to view the article but it’s worth it.

Much has been written about digitization and technology’s impact on society, but Arthur takes a fresh approach by looking at the digital economy as an unseen layer underneath the physical economy. He starts by defining communication for this (second) economy:

[Processes] are “speaking to” other processes in the digital economy, in a constant conversation among multiple servers and multiple semi-intelligent nodes that are updating things, querying things, checking things off, readjusting things, and eventually connecting back with processes and humans in the physical economy.

You know, like Siri does. In fact, notice how perfectly Siri fits into Arthur’s central thesis about the second economy:

If I were to look for adjectives to describe this second economy, I’d say it is vast, silent, connected, unseen, and autonomous (meaning that human beings may design it but are not directly involved in running it). It is remotely executing and global, always on, and endlessly configurable. It is concurrent””a great computer expression””which means that everything happens in parallel. It is self-configuring, meaning it constantly reconfigures itself on the fly, and increasingly it is also self-organizing, self-architecting, and self-healing.

These last descriptors sound biological””and they are. In fact, I’m beginning to think of this second economy, which is under the surface of the physical economy, as a huge interconnected root system, very much like the root system for aspen trees. For every acre of aspen trees above the ground, ther’s about ten miles of roots underneath, all interconnected with one another, “communicating” with each other.

Arthur makes it clear that he’s not interested in the realm of Sci-Fi and AI. He’s not sharing a completely improbable vision of the future (well, with the exception of driverless cars, depending on how much of a Google believer you are). And even though nothing he describes is brand new, this idea of a silent, interconnected layer underneath the physical one gives us a new lens through which to view the digitization of our lives.

I don’t want to get all “The End Is Near!” on you, but I’m currently reading Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together - Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, and Arthur’s article reminded me of her words of caution:

Now demarcations blur as technology accompanies us everywhere, all the time. We are too quick to celebrate the continual presence of a technology that knows no respect for traditional and helpful lines in the sand.

[A] stream of messages makes it impossible to find moments of solitude, time when other people are showing us neither dependency nor affection. In solitude we don’t reject the world but have the space to think our own thoughts. But if your phone is always with you, seeking solitude can look suspiciously like hiding.

Hopefully there will still be places to hide once the second economy has fully established itself.

I love the Automattic Creed that all their employees have to sign before they join the company:

I will never stop learning. I won’t just work on things that are assigned to me. I know ther’s no such thing as a status quo. I will build our business sustainably through passionate and loyal customers. I will never pass up an opportunity to help out a colleague, and I’ll remember the days before I knew everything.

I am more motivated by impact than money, and I know that Open Source is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation. I will communicate as much as possible, because it’s the oxygen of a distributed company.

I am in a marathon, not a sprint, and no matter how far away the goal is, the only way to get there is by putting one foot in front of another every day. Given time, there is no problem that’s insurmountable.

(h/t to @SwimGeek for the link)

This is going to sound like such a lame “management guru” thing to say, but it’s true: the cultural fit of the people you hire is more important than their past experience or absolute skill level. I’ve seen this time and time again. If I have a choice between hiring someone who is highly skilled in their work but doesn’t display humility and a genuine drive to learn more, and someone who knows enough to know that there is much to learn and they’re hungry to get there, I’ll choose the latter every time.

We recently went through an exercise to define our team values, and in many ways it’s similar to Automattic’s creed. I won’t bore you with the whole thing, but here are the main points. This is how we want other people to describe our team:

• We are zealots about quality
• We have autonomy to do what’s best for the product, its users, and our business
• We have a high fix:complain ratio
• We have a healthy work/life perspective
• We are empathetic to the core

The relationship between a healthy culture and doing great work is causal, not simply correlation. Good culture is the prerequisite for great work to happen, and actually causes it. Alan Cooper recently address this issue in a great article called The pipeline to your corporate soul:

If you want to improve the quality of your website, app, or software, you need to also improve the quality of your organization. You need to ferret out the people who play politics but don’t get things done. You need to squash bureaucracy that stops innovation with doubt and red tape. You need to eliminate the energy drains, systemic distortions, and toxic people that force others to act like corporate drones instead of like entrepreneurs with a vested interest in success.

If you put a bunch of talented, energetic, ambitious people together and make it easy for them to collaborate and do great things, they will. I haven’t seen a single example of great work preceding a clearly defined and healthy culture - even if it’s just an unspoken understanding between two startup founders. Spending time on getting your culture right is worth the effort.

Dhanji Prasanna wrote a great article about his experiences on the Google Wave team, and the difficulties of working in large development teams. He brings a particularly interesting perspective to UI engineering:

To say we should have been better prepared or organized is to miss the point - large teams starting on a new project are inherently dysfunctional. One common consequence of all this chaos is that experienced engineers seclude themselves to their area of expertise. At a company like Google, this generally means infrastructure or backend architecture. A major externality of this is that fresh grads, and junior engineers are shunted to the UI layer. I have seen this happen time and again in a number of organizations, and it is a critical, unrecognized problem.

UI is hard.

You need the same mix of experienced talent working in the UI as you do with traditional “serious” stuff. This is where Apple is simply ahead of everyone else - taking design seriously is not about having a dictator fuss over seams and pixels. It’s about giving it the same consideration that you give any other critical part of the system.

I’ve experienced this first-hand, and I’ve also seen what happens when backend developers are forced to do UI work (which can happen for a variety of reasons). I’ve heard developers say that they don’t like to do UI work because “it’s not real programming”. They prefer to focus on the real stuff, not this fluffy CSS/JavaScript thing.

Whether or not their perception is accurate is only one part of the discussion. What I want to point out is this: If you make backend developers do front-end work that they’re not passionate about (or worse, work they find embarrassing to do), they’re not going to be motivated to expand their knowledge and do a good job. That’s unfair to everyone and disastrous for the product.

It’s essential to have dedicated UI engineers in an organization so that everyone can focus on the technologies that they’re obsessed with.

I remember exactly when I decided to stop reading Mashable. I saw the headline Facebook Users Beware: Facebook’s New Feature Could Embarrass You on Twitter, clicked through, hunted for the words of the article among the sea of ads and social sharing icons, and then closed the tab after realizing it’s just another rehash of Facebook frictionless sharing (albeit in a tantalizing way). I went back to my Twitter feed and unfollowed them.

I’m sure the article was great for traffic, though. It is the perfect linkbait title backed up by a perfect SEO-ified URL (/new-facebook-feature). Here’s a screen shot of what’s visible above the fold:

You can’t see a single word from the actual article without scrolling. It reminded me of a comment that Merlin Mann recently made in his typically funny and obnoxious style:

I think I’ve finally hit the limit of my tolerance for web content that’s designed to make advertisers happy. I have no problem with working hard to build an audience - I have a blog, after all. But we seem to be in this bizarre race to the intellectual bottom to write the most generic article in the world so that everyone with an Internet connection will click through. And the only purpose seems to be to keep the advertising monster fed, fat, and happy.

I’m worried that all the noise makes it increasingly difficult for quality content[1] to be seen. Worse, I’m worried that it’s discouraging the creation of quality content because what’s successful (i.e. what gets the most clicks) is mostly lowest-common-denominator blog post titles that either start with a number or end with a question mark. James Bridle sums up this problem so well in The New Value of Text:

Like over-stuffed attendees at a dull banquet, the mind wanders. We are terrified that people are dumbing down, and so we provide them with ever dumber entertainment. We sell them ever greater distractions, hoping to dazzle them further.

Or as Marco Arment put it: “Anti-intellectualism is one of my biggest fears for our society.”

Yet despite all the evidence to the contrary there is still a common refrain on the Internet that quality content will always find its way out of the depths of obscurity. Kristina Halvorson recently complained about the fact that computer-generated articles are gaining traction. Joshua Porter responded: “Re: quality content…there is always room at the top.” My response to that was cynical, but borne out of the type of regurgitation you see everywhere:

I used to believe that if you write with passion and clarity about a topic you know well (or want to know more about), you will find and build an audience. I believed that maybe, if you’re smart about it, you could find a way for some part of that audience to pay you money to sustain whatever obsession drove you to self-publishing (and to do it without selling your soul in the process). There are certainly examples of that out there (Daring Fireball, Shawn Blanc, Ben Brooks, etc.), but I’m not convinced any more that such an option exists for anyone who works hard and gives it a solid go.

The problem is not that people don’t have enough time, it’s that people don’t have enough attention. Like an oil well there’s only so much there, and once the well runs dry you don’t have a lot of options:

So one effect of Peak Attention is that every human mind has been mined to capacity using attention-oil drilling technologies. To get to Clay Shirky’s hypothetical notion of cognitive surplus, we need Alternative Attention sources.

The wells of attention are being drilled to depletion by linkbait headlines, ad-infested pages, “jumps” and random pagination, and content that is engineered to be “consumed” in 1 minute or less of quick scanning - just enough time to capture those almighty eyeballs[2]. And the reality is that “Alternative Attention sources” simply don’t exist.

I don’t know where we go from here. I just know that I’ve stopped reading sites that cater more for advertisers than for me as a reader. It won’t make much of a difference, but it will hopefully help me sleep better.

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1. Of course, we’re never going to agree on what “quality content” means. It’s one of those “you know it when you see it” things, and everyone’s definition will be different. Still, my personal view is that quality content presents two or more of the following components: (1) new information, (2) interpretation of information, and/or (3) a well considered personal opinion about what the information means.  â†©
2. Wait, who am I to decide what people should and shouldn’t read? You’re absolutely right, I can’t do that so I should get off my high horse and let people read whatever they want to read. This is an opinion piece.  â†©

It’s amazing to see the outpouring of condolences and memories and stories about Steve Jobs and the effect that he’s had on our lives. What’s most telling to me is the countless people - myself included - who feel like we have a connection with him because of the products he brought into this world. That’s extraordinary.

This morning I counted the number of Apple products we have in our house (12), and I realized that Steve Jobs and those products helped me figure out what I want to do with my life. He showed us the power of beautiful design, and he built products that want you to succeed in whatever it is that you choose to make.

I think Seth Godin said it best:

Steve devoted his professional life to giving us (you, me and a billion other people) the most powerful device ever available to an ordinary person. Everything in our world is different because of the device you’re reading this on.

What are we going to do with it?

I made this on a Mac. And this Mac will continue to inspire me to make better things.

Thank you, Steve.

Update: Of course Frank Chimero would come along and say what I was trying to say, only much better:

That sadness [you feel] is for the loss of a man who unabashedly devoted his life to making things that helped others live well.

We all have that same opportunity. Take a moment to consider your job. Boil it down to its essence: you make things for other people. The most important concept to learn from Jobs is embedded in how we feel after using one of his products. That very same thing is happening now in his wake. Look closely and you will see it: wonderful experiences have an afterglow to them. The delight we find in what we do is in some way lost in the moment, but captured in our memories.

Update 2: There are so many amazing tributes coming through that it’s hard to keep up. I want to preserve the ones that spoke to me in some way, so it might as well be in this post. Here is Michael Lopp:

My first thought as I stared long and hard at Appl’s home page yesterday wasn’t a specific Steve story or one of his many insightful quotes. The thought was”¦

You are underestimating the future. You are fretting about the now; worrying about little things that don’t matter. You are wasting precious energy obsessing over irrelevant details. You don’t believe that a better future is out there and can be built, that it can exceed peopl’s expectations, because you’re spending so much time considering the truth of the present and the seemingly important lessons of the past.

You are underestimating the future because you believe you cannot see it, but you can - you’ve seen it done before.

Update 3: Ok, just one more (I think). Here is Shawn Blanc in 3rd-Party Family:

You and I are on the same team. We all are. We may link to the same articles, review the same products, develop apps for the same market, and design with the same intense perfectionism, but we are a community. Let’s continue to fight for each other, encourage each other, and work together to make amazing things.

We are the 3rd-party family of Apple nerds. Let’s make a dent.

I’ll drink to that.

Jason Mesut made quite a few waves this week with his presentation Truth and Dare - Out of the echochamber into the fire. It’s definitely worth your time so I recommend you click through and read it before you continue here. Ther’s a lot to like and a lot to think about.

Jason explicitly asks for feedback and counter-arguments, so I do want to address one slide in particular, shown below:

Now, I might be putting the puzzle together wrongly here, but since these slides came out right after I published a two-part series on Smashing Magazine called “Breaking Down Silos”, I’m going to assume h’s talking about those articles. If my assumption is wrong this is going to be really awkward, but oh well.

So, let’s look at why Jason is calling this concept “naive”. I wasn’t at the presentation, so all I have to go on is his bullet points.

Organisations are complex

Of course organizations are complex, and if anyone tries to argue otherwise they’ve never worked in one. But I never said that this is simple:

There are no shortcuts to breaking down silos. You can’t fix the environment if the organization doesn’t understand the problem. You can’t improve the development process if the right environment doesn’t exist to enable healthy guidelines. You have to climb the pyramid brick by brick to the ultimate goal: better software through true collaboration.

I don’t propose “7 steps to a happier you” in the article. I propose a process of understanding the problems and unique needs of the organization, followed by a tailored solution that takes those unique needs into consideration.

People are better in small groups

I absolutely agree, and that’s why prioritization at an organizational level needs to take this into account and empower small teams to do the work without interference. Her’s what I said in the article:

[Once strategic priorities are set], projects would move to small dedicated teams, which would have complete ownership of the design and implementation. The product council sets the priorities, not the details of implementation”Š””“Šthose are up to the teams themselves.

I go on to talk about the importance of autonomy and the meaning people find in their work when they work in these small groups.

Change takes too long

I don’t understand the argument here, so maybe this is one of those “voice-over required” points. But if the argument is that change takes too long so we shouldn’t even try, I don’t buy it. Her’s how I end the article, again acknowledging how difficult it is:

Building collaborative environments is not easy, because change management is not easy. But the positive outcomes of doing this far outweigh the pain of making it happen. You’ll end up with happy, creative teams that feel a sense of ownership over what they’re building and a sense of pride in its quality.

I’d also like to point out that I wasn’t being academic in these articles. Everything I wrote is based on principles we’ve tried and applied in real life in the organizations where I’ve worked. There’s always room for improvement and growth, but this wasn’t a theoretical exercise.

I know this doesn’t matter that much in the bigger scheme of things, and I admit that the only reason I’m even writing about it is a slight irritation with the word “naive”. But if Jason is indeed referring to my article (again, this is going to be really awkward if he’s not) I at least wanted to clarify my viewpoint.

So there that is.

Frank Chimero reflecting on Facebook’s advances in “frictionless sharing” of content:

Any physicist knows that it’s impossible to exist in a frictionless universe, and that friction hasn’t been diminished with Facebook’s sharing model so much as transferred the work of making sense of things from the one sharing to the audience.

I recently mentioned that reducing the effort needed to share and communicate with others might be inching us closer to a post-literate society. Frank’s remark adds another consideration: the reduced effort required to share information places the burden of understanding much more on the audience than on the person sharing.

“Frictionless” sharing of what song you are currently listening to sounds interesting at first, and then it just starts to sound creepy. But even if you can get beyond the creepiness factor you’re faced with the fact that it becomes the audience’s responsibility to make sense of that information. How interesting is knowing what song I’m listening to without an explanation why I’m listening to it and what it means to me?

At what point will all this lazy sharing result in lazy audiences who can’t be bothered to go hunting for the meaning in the information? At what point does the audience become mere “consumers” of content in the true sense of the word - “to destroy or expend by use” - and end up in a similar situation as the obese passengers on the Axiom?

Somehow my wife and I found our way to The Coffee Roasting Company at Lourensford Wine Estate on Saturday. We’ve never been there, and the experience was fantastic. I recently referenced an article on how architecture can be used to influence behavior, and this place is a prime example. The coffee shop is designed to encourage talking and not rushing.

You’re greeted with the almost-overwhelming smell of different coffees blending together. Next you notice the unpretentious, “we’re just here to brew good espresso” decor, followed by the rustic tables and stacks of well-read books about coffee scattered all over. This is how coffee should be enjoyed.

As my wife and I settle in to wait for our cappuccinos I pick up a book called Coffee by Claudia Roden. I read out loud to her:

In Turkey at one time, a man promised when he married never to let his wife go without coffee, and it was considered a legitimate cause for divorce if he neglected to do so. So important is coffee in Oriental life that it is common for beggars to ask for money to buy it. It is inconceivable that they should go without. Business and bargaining are always done over a cup of coffee served before the argument starts. Whether in a shop or a market stall it creates a bond and an obligation between buyer and seller.

The author goes on to say that coffee houses “required a certain leisure” since it took time to roast and prepare coffee, so people got accustomed to waiting and filling their time with conversation. As I read those words I think about something my dad brings up a lot. As a geographer he is very interested in “sense of place” and always encourages us to try to understand the soul of a town or a building. From Wikipedia:

Places said to have a strong “sense of place” have a strong identity and character that is deeply felt by local inhabitants and by many visitors. Sense of place is a social phenomenon that exists independently of any one individual’s perceptions or experiences, yet is dependent on human engagement for its existence. Such a feeling may be derived from the natural environment, but is more often made up of a mix of natural and cultural features in the landscape, and generally includes the people who occupy the place.

That’s what I felt as I sat there reading, drinking coffee with my wife, taking it all in. There is a strong sense of place not because of one single thing, but because of how the people, the smells, the architecture, and of course the coffee come together to create an undeniable identity.

What does this have to do with design? As my thoughts drifted I was reminded that all design has a sense of place - even web design. The interactions, typography, copy, images, etc., come together to create an experience. You can analyze a design in pieces, but you can only experience it as a whole.

We tend to break up the different functions of user experience design, and that’s fine. We need User Researchers, Information Architects, Content Strategists, Interaction Designers, Visual Designers, and [insert latest job title here] who specialize in what they do. But it’s fallacy to think that they can work in isolation as if each is building one piece of a puzzle that can merely be assembled once all is said and done.

For a design to have a strong and desirable sense of place a natural ebb and flow between the different aspects is essential (even if it’s all done by the same person). Turning a wireframe into a high-fidelity mockup isn’t a one-way activity - there will always be things to reconsider about the interaction or the content (or a multitude of other aspects). As I’ve written before, designing in isolation can be dangerous and very unsatisfactory for everyone involved.

I’ll add this: designing in a place like this is way better than designing in a cubicle. Creative spaces beget creativity.

Also, that coffee was amazing.

Here’s Mashable in an article with a title that sounds like it was created in a random buzzword generator: Facebook Open Graph Seeks to Deliver Real-Time Serendipity:

Facebook felt constrained by the Like button because it was an implicit endorsement of content. Facebook wants users to share everything they are doing, whether it’s watching a show or hiking a trail, so it decided to create a way to “express lightweight activity.”

So in essence they’re saying that clicking the Like button is too much of a commitment; the action is too heavy. We need something a little more indifferent and “lightweight”.

With the Like button you already didn’t have to use words. With Facebook Open Graph you grant permission to an app once, and then it silently and passively starts broadcasting what you’re doing. No thinking required.

By continuing to reduce the effort needed to share and communicate with others we seem to inch ever closer to a post-literate society.  In his essay Like, the Post-Literate Society, James Shelly discusses this phenomenon and quotes Bruce W. Power:

What happens to thinking, resistance, and dissent when the ground becomes wordless?

He goes on to say this:

Thus I ponder: do we become a post-literate society at the moment we manifest an incapacity to discuss our own potential status as such? If so, are we already there?

These are good questions on a day like today.