Computers Driving You Mad?

Even the best of us can be taken by our technology.

Enjoy!

Personal Technologist on Lab with Leo

A few months ago I taped a segment with Leo Laporte for his show Lab with Leo. The show airs on various techy TV outlets in Canada, the US and Australia. Because of the delay from taping to airing and then encoding for the web, I hadn’t seen the segment until I found it last night on Google Video.

I’ve included it below, if you’re at all interested. The experience of doing the segment was excellent fun, and I’d recommend it to anyone. I even had makeup applied.

Lab with Leo Laporte Episode 135 — James Sherrett talks about the Personal Technologist:

Special thanks to Ryan Yewell, a Chase Producer for Lab with Leo, for stickhandling the whole process and my anxious questions. Thanks, Ryan!

My Basecamp feature request: view by person

To manage all the different Work Industries projects I use a web-based project management tool called Basecamp from design firm 37 Signals. 37 Signals are widely known as proponents of simple, clean software. In fact, they say as much on their front page:

We believe software is too complex. Too many features, too many buttons, too much to learn. We build web-based products that do less, work smarter, feel better, and are easier to use. We pay enormous attention to the details, interface, and overall customer experience of our products.

I’ve appreciated their simple approach to software with Basecamp, but one thing kept coming up for me. There is no way to see in one view all of the contributions of a person on a project. I found I remembered who had done something but not exactly when they had done it or how they had titled it. I wanted to be able to trace back their contributions.

Here’s my note to 37 Signals requesting they consider creating a way to see contibutions to a project by person.

Hi 37 Signalers,

I’m really enjoying using Basecamp and I have one thing that I’d love to be able to do - see the contents of a project by the contributor.

So the files, comments, messages - everything, really - viewed by who did it. I find I’m often (a couple of times a day) looking through messages or files for a particular contributed item that I know who contributed it but don’t know it’s title or when it was contributed. And I can’t always rely on others or myself to categorize things properly. So I’d love to be able to see the project by person.

That’s all. Keep up the excellent work!

~James

I’ll be interested to see what happens. I saw Jason Fried, 37 Signals’ founder, speak at the Web 2.0 conference back in 2004 and his plea for simpler, clearer software really struck a chord with me.

I tried to implement a similar philosophy in my web product management position at the time, but over time realized that the throughput of features was the core way a product manager was evaluated, as if we were in a manufacturing industry shipping widgets to stores instead of designing an interaction environment where each new feature had to be measured against the existing ones. I won’t go into detail about the type of innovations invented to keep the assembly line humming.

Has anyone else found they wanted to see their Basecamp project by person? Or, has anyone found a better way to do this already that I haven’t discovered?

Could David Pogue use a Personal Technologist?

More from the TED blog, a video of NYTimes tech columnist David Pogue on the inanity of software complexity that does a good job of ridiculing some of the accepted practices of software.

Highlights include an impression of Steve Jobs singing ‘Don’t Cry for me Cupertino’ at the 17 minute mark, and a demonstration of voice-recognition software with macros for spoken shortcuts to frequent responses (think about that one for second - say a short word or two and whole sentences can appear).

I’m particularly receptive to Pogue’s message because it points well to a need for a personal technologist / personal technology advisor, a service I offer through Work Industries. Here’s the pitch:

Who Needs a Personal Technologist?

If any of these symptoms sound familiar, we recommend considering a session with a personal technologist.

• Overwhelmed by the flood of information?
• Anxious about what you don’t know?
• Frustrated by gadgets that don’t work?
• Keep meaning to figure how to get that thing to work properly, if only you had the time?
• Caught yourself saying, ‘It can’t be this hard to…’?
• Not even bothered to call a customer service line?

These are the reasons that drove us to start a service to deal with technical overload, the personal technologist.

Modeled on the personal financial advisor, the personal technologist navigates the muddied waters of technology to take the pain out of technology and make the gadgets work for you.

Take the first step to technological freedom and learn more about Work Industries’ personal technologist service.

‘The Joy of Painting’ Video Game

Growing up one of the most memorable programs on PBS was Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting. I watched the show between other channels or while bored. It featured a white man with a beard and an afro painting incredible landscapes in half an hour. Sounds dry, but the effect of watching the painting come together is incredibly compelling.

Ross’ technique and TV persona was instantly recognizable. Talking to a few friends last night, we all knew The Joy of Painting and Bob Ross. We all had watched the program and remembered the ‘happy little clouds over here’ and the way Ross would ‘just pull this together across the water.’ He had little phrases for his techniques and he made it look effortless.

We got so into the conversation last night that we had to look up the show on the web. We found The Joy of Painting website and there was Bob’s smiling face, just as we remembered, with his landscapes. We browsed to the News sections and: whoa! What is this?

The Joy of Painting is becoming a video game! First thought: Odd! Second thought: Who will buy this? Third thought, after reading that the game was being developed for the new Nintendo Wii: Ohhhh. Yes. I see. With that new cool controller, painting makes sense. This could reach a whole new audience for video games. No longer just boys in different stages of emotional development that every other video game platform chases, but a new age group, gender, interest type. Very cool.

Will it work? Don’t know. What do you think?

Nature versus Nurture in Music Recommendations

Steve Krause writes a lengthy review / overview of two different approaches to music recommendations: Pandora and Last.fm. As he sees it, Pandora‘s algorithm-based approach is equal to the nature school of thought while Last.fm‘s behaviour-based approach is equal to the nurture school of thought.

Algorithmically, Pandora versus Last.fm is something like the nature versus nurture debate. Taking the nature side, Pandora’s recommendations are based on the inherent qualities of the music. Give Pandora an artist or song, and it will find similar music in terms of melody, harmony, lyrics, orchestration, vocal character and so on. Pandora likes to call these musical attributes “genes” and its database of songs, classified against hundreds of such attributes, the “Music Genome Project.”

On the nurture side (as in, it’s all about the people around you), Last.fm is a social recommender. It knows little about songs’ inherent qualities. It just assumes that if you and a group of other people enjoy many of the same artists, you will probably enjoy other artists popular with that group.

Like Last.fm, most music-discovery systems have been social recommenders, also known as collaborative filters. Although much of the academic work in the area has focused on improving the matching algorithms, Last.fm’s innovation has been in improving the data the algorithms work on. Last.fm does so by providing users an optional plug-in that automatically monitors your media-player software so that whatever you listen to—whether it came from Last.fm or not—can be incorporated into your Last.fm profile and thus be used as the basis for recommendations. Compared to relying on users to manually provide preferences, this automatic and comprehensive data capture leads to far better grist for the data mill.

I don’t have any experience with either music-recommendation system, but I love the way Krause connects software product design, data mining of enormous sets and basic psychology so people can understand the respective approaches. To me, this is one of the finest things an expert can do - make a subject approachable and comprehensible to a wider, general audience.

For some background on the N-vs-N expression, check out the nature-versus-nurture wikipedia entry.

Oxo Reinvents Kitchen Devices

My tongs, the tongs that I use almost every day, are Oxo tongs. They are wonderful tongs. I use them on the stove, when roasting in the over, on the barbecue grill. I also use them to serve guests. I use them for salad. When cooking and serving, my tongs act as an extension to my hand. I like them so much that when we closed up the Work Industries offices recently for ski days in Fernie, I brought them with me to cook there.

So I read this LA Times article about how Oxo has reinvented kitchen devices with some personal bias. I wanted to like the article because I already like the tongs. I like them so much I travel with them. Okay, I’m a cooking nerd. But I don’t think about them much when I use them. And I hadn’t really appreciated all the consideration that had gone into their use until I read about it, which I suppose is a measure of how well they’re designed.

In the LA Times article I love the story about how Oxo came upon the breakthrough that helped them build a superior measuring cup, and I love the way they sweat the small stuff and make things for people, with people involved in the making:

...people are often better at showing than they are at telling; mostly they could only articulate that the problems with the traditional Pyrex measurer were that it was “glass, hot, greasy.” But watching them struggle with the cup revealed the ultimate flaw: You cannot tell how full it is without lifting it up to eye level.

The Oxo measurer has markings down the inside, large enough to read without glasses. And the latest version is made of a hard plastic that stands up better to repeated runs through the dishwasher. (Improvements in materials and technology account for many Oxo upgrades—the silicone potholder can now be bonded with fabric; plastic can adhere to stainless steel in a mixing bowl.)

The measuring cup is one of five Oxo products that were not in-house eurekas but came to the company from outside in the last 10 years. “We have some very passionate consumers,” said Gretchen Holt, who handles media for the company, demonstrating to editors why “they should give a damn” about an Oxo breakthrough. Ideas also flow in from retailers and wannabe inventors.

I love it! There are always more smart, capable people with insight outside of whatever organization houses the creation.

As someone who cooks a lot, Oxo products have become a relied-upon standard, and, now that I’ve read about products like the cutting board that doesn’t slip on the counter when you cut on it, I will seek out other Oxo products because of my excellent experiences.

I’m pointing out the Oxo article because I think some great parallels can be drawn between how they design kitchen tools and how I believe web tools and websites should be designed. In particular, the article demonstrates the following guidelines.

• Better tools equal fewer tools. The better your tools are at doing their job, the fewer specialized tools you need to do portions of that job or similar jobs. Or, put anther way, the better the execution, the less need there is for alternate yet semi-same tools.
• Big ideas and breakthroughs are rare while small, incremental improvements are always available to be tackled. Whatever diety your ascribe to, we need to recognize that godliness and goodness lives in the details.
• Sometimes people don’t know they want a better product. Not until they’re presented with a better product, at least. For instance, I wasn’t really dissatisfied with my steamer basket - it’s the typical spaceship-style, unfold steamer that sits in about an inch of water, with a peg in the middle and a ring through the top of the peg - until I read in the article about the Oxo steamer. I never thought about using that peg for anything, it was pretty unusable. But because of the peg, I have to break my asparagus (a common steamed items in these parts) in half to fit in the steamer. Oxo has created a steamer with a removable peg that folds flat when not in use. Brilliant!
• Tools need to be designed with a relentless focus on serving people. Sounds simple, but it can never be repeated often enough.
• People come in all manner of varieties but tend to do things in common ways.
• Tools come with inherent biases and their design shapes the possibilities of their use.
• A rich interchange is happening between professionals and amateurs with both benefiting from the exchange of information and practices. At the same, a new type of person (user) is arising, variously called the pro-am or prosumer, someone between the professionals and the amateurs. As tools for everyone get better professionals have less tool-based advantage and must rely on craft, experience or knowledge-based advantage. Think of photographers, journalists, athletes and chefs. The amateurs are catching up faster than the professionals are pulling away. A key driver of this trend is the web. The web, as a tool, offers the following biases: transparency, decentralized coordination and constant feedback loops. Consequently, we see cheap coordination of resources, anywhere-to-anywhere networked communication, and increased access and storage of information.
• Connected Consumption: As the exchange of information continues to accellerate, and people have greater access to timely, contextual, peer-reviewed information, they purchase habits become more responsive and changeable. Most of the time I’ve seen this phenomena expressed as an increase in the fickleness of consumers, and this can be true, but I also believe that companies that deliver on their promise develop greater momentum and loyalty. The same way that someone who always sticks to their word becomes more trusted.
• Others I’m missing? Please comment.