Thoughts

Tue 9 Feb 2010

What if restaurants charged non-linear variable pricing for food based on nutrition?

Posted by Bo under Design, Business, Life
[4] Comments

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Mon 31 Aug 2009

Just a feature vs. the feature

Posted by Bo under Design, Life
Comments Off

hybrid is “just a feature” until it becomes the driving feature
Email was “just a feature” until blackberry showed people it was *the* feature to buy for.

Honda thought that hybrid was “just a feature” so they added it to Civic. But for people buying a hybrid to feel good about themselves it reduces the value of the hybridness to a feature and so they buy a prius. The problem is that Civic comes in both Hybrid and regular. These customers don’t want to be seen in a regular car that “could be a hybrid”. Nor do they want to be confronted with “well, I could get the exact same car for $2000 less”… because it confirms in their mind something they don’t want to believe, that hybrid is just a feature. To them, it’s an idea.

Mon 31 Aug 2009

Optimize for acceleration

Posted by Bo under Life
No Comments

We’re bad at adapting to the second derivative. Research that I’m not going to cite here (because I’m writing a blog post, not a NYT article) suggests that if at time t, success is a point in space f(t), then we’re pretty good as a species at adapting to our location f(t). I posit that over time, with consistent performance good or bad we begin to get good at anticipating and adapting to velocity f(t)/d(t). But it’s acceleration that really gets us - makes us super happy or super sad. It’s getting a burst promotion after years of slaving in obscurity, it’s winning a string of tennis matches after months of being just on the edge.

So rather than being born rich and not appreciating it, which is adapting to f(t), or always getting a promo every year and expecting it, which is f’(t), let’s optimize for jumps in performance, f”(t).

Success sometimes comes in quantum - like missing the green light. You work maybe twice as hard to walk 10% faster than the other guy. You pass him. But then, you miss the walk signal by a couple seconds - and a short while later that other guy saunters up, and you ask yourself "what did I work that hard for?"

Then your realize, that if you do it again, and keep working twice as hard, over time you’ll make those walk signals, and pull ahead.

Sat 29 Aug 2009

Watching myself scan an unfamiliar webpage

Posted by Bo under Design, Note to Future Self
Comments Off

Makes me realize 3 things:

I really do scan top to bottom, left to right, exactly like those eye-tracking heatmaps show.
Use of strong colors in certain regions can, to an extent, override this position-based scanning pattern.
I have only about 6-8 seconds of patience before I leave the site, if I haven’t yet figured out why the site is useful to my life in that time. At my 400 words/minute reading speed that’s about 40-50 words, mostly the first couple words of sentences.

Maybe I could convince myself to increase that 6-8 second time by 2X given that I’m way more impatient than most of my friends. But seriously, good reality check next time I design a site. Six seconds.

Thu 27 Aug 2009

A sunset suspended in time

Posted by Bo under Life
No Comments

Flying west from Chicago to Seattle in the early evening leads to the expected but no less amazing phenomenon of a looking out the aircraft window and seeing the orange horizon glowing from a sunset that seems to be stuck. It’s looked pretty much the exact same out there, sun just below the horizon and many bands of orange and red of different hues, for more than two hours now :)

Tue 25 Aug 2009

Low-ramp signup flow

Posted by Bo under Design
No Comments

mypunchbowl.com has a great signup flow – it’s after responding to the invite, which unblocks your primary task for being there. Plus, when you get to it, it’s on a page that does something else (you entering a message to send to the organizer) and below the fold. This means that by the time you see it you’ve already put some effort on that page (witty, heartfelt-sounding response). So, you’re more likely to put in the work to sign up because you don’t want to lose the work you already put in composing that message. A bit conniving, but not in a bad way, especially as people should understand the principle of sunk costs but don’t actually do.

And the kicker: you see a form that has five fields with three already filled in. Somehow this makes the form seem much more complete-able, because it’s already been started for you (and in my case, the data was correct).

Sun 23 Aug 2009

Dev: HTML/CSS: Centering

Posted by Bo under Coding
No Comments

use <center> </center> for horizontal centering only.

Sat 8 Aug 2009

Maybe I should worry less

Posted by Bo under Note to Future Self
No Comments

maybe I would stress less about what others thing. When you really tend to get in trouble is when you really want to impress someone new that you’re not close to, because then you’ll act and do things out of character.

Sat 8 Aug 2009

Things I learned from Tuesdays with Morrie

Posted by Bo under Life
No Comments

People are only mean when they’re threatened, and that’s what our culture does.
High school kids are mean to each other because of this, because they’re jealous.
Pride and Vanity - why do we let these valueless intangible feelings keep us from valuable tangible friendships?

Thu 7 May 2009

Look from the top-down

Posted by Bo under Design, Business, Engineering, Note to Future Self
No Comments

A reminder to myself in the future that features don’t just have value because they tell a great user scenario (though that is of course primary in many cases). But also, there’s the moment users see it for the first time and just think to themselves “huh, that’s pretty cool”. Moments of delight. Something reviewers will call out about your product, even before they’ve used it.

Ideally, you want these moments of delight to morph into sustained regular value to users’ lives. But even if the feature doesn’t as much deliver on that “level” of value prop in its’ current incarnation, especially if it’s because it’s bedeviled by short-term technical constraints, doesn’t mean you necessarily shouldn’t invest there.

There is a fog of war around shaping markets by creating discontinuous products. Sometimes the little voice in your head says “but if we did X it’d be so cool!” That’s okay. Listen to that little voice. Maybe it’s your user empathy leading you to pitch camp out there, in the fog, and though you can’t see it now maybe there’s gold in ‘em rocks over there.

But first and foremost. Don’t get too lost in the details, derailed about strings or specific edge-case behavior, and give up on the little voice.

Thoughts

What if restaurants charged non-linear variable pricing for food based on nutrition?

Just a feature vs. the feature

Optimize for acceleration

Watching myself scan an unfamiliar webpage

A sunset suspended in time

Low-ramp signup flow

Dev: HTML/CSS: Centering

Maybe I should worry less

Things I learned from Tuesdays with Morrie

Look from the top-down

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