PDX Web Innovators

TiddlyRose will be an informal meet-up of TiddlyWiki enthusiasts. It is timed to coincide with the OSCon 2008 conference, which is being attended by Jeremy Ruston, the original creator of TiddlyWiki, along with some of his colleagues from Osmosoft.

The event is open to the public, and all fans of TiddlyWiki are welcome to attend! Meet in the Jax Bar on the roof terrace.

http://jaxbar.com/

Look for Phil: he'll be wearing a black polo shirt, with Osmosoft written on the front, and the BT logo on the back.

And if you're wondering where we got the name TiddlyRose...you can find out how on the Portland Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland%2C_Oregon

Official Google Blog: Google learns to crawl Flash
Now that we've launched our Flash indexing algorithm, web designers
can expect improved visibility of their published Flash content, and
you can expect to see better search results and snippets.

Wow, this is big! There goes one of my main arguments against primarily Flash driven sites. I expect as the ability to properly index alternative types of media, that is items other than text and images such as Flash, video, and SilverLight, it will slowly and fundamentally change the way websites are developed, or even thought of for that matter. Why bother a traditional, hierarchical website when you can just invite chaos and allow your users to explore through a semantic search? Think Gmail vs. Hotmail.

SAO Social Network Celebration

Date: Thu, Jul 24th
Time: 9:30am-11:30am
Location: Intel - Ronler Acres Campus Auditorium 2501 NW 229th Ave. Hillsboro, OR 97124

Cost: $0 for members
Registration Deadline: 07/24/2008
Topic: SAO Social Network Celebration

Speaker: Timothy Chou, Author, “Seven”, Software Business Models
Timothy Chou (the former President of Oracle on Demand) has over twenty-five years of experience in the technology business. Chou has been recognized as an industry visionary on the evolution of the software industry from the traditional model to Software as a Service (SaaS). Seven is a follow on book to The End of Software which predicted the rise of software delivered as a service. Now that this transition is happening Seven provides a framework for the producers and consumers of software to take the next steps.

Presented by Jen Young & Matt Arnold, Second Story

Museums and cultural institutions are increasingly required to balance visitors' expectations of interactive presentations in the museum with the institutional goal of promoting forms of social interaction that enrich the visitor experience. To meet these needs, institutions are turning to multi-user, or group, interactive scenarios.

Jen and Matt , members of the stellar Second Story Studios team, will show how understanding people’s needs and tendencies—and the learning curve for people that must be managed in multi-user experiences—can be squared with innovations offered by ever-changing technology and hardware, design obstacles and opportunities, and the desire to wow visitors while offering designs that are appropriate to the content.

If you are interested in multi-user interfaces, social media or interactive display design, please join us!

SCHEDULE:
5:00 pm:
Join us for a bite to eat before the meeting at CHIFOOd
(dinner at New Seasons Market, Cedar Hills Crossing)
6:30 pm:
Registration, networking, and announcements at Tektronix Bldg. 38
7:00 pm:
Program and Q&A

LOCATION:
Events are held in the Calgary/Alberta room of Building 38 on the Tektronix Beaverton campus.
See map: http://www.chifoo.org/pages/map.html

COST:
Programs are FREE for CHIFOO members; non-member admission is $5.

JOIN:
Annual CHIFOO membership costs just $20 and offers benefits galore. Join CHIFOO now and attend all meetings in 2008 for free!

I hate doing the same stuff over and over. Since I’m a technical guy, I often create ways to make myself more efficient. Outside of work, this looks fairly mundane: stuff like buying only one type of sock, so I never have to search for a pair.

Michael Lopp writes about the geek phenomenon of being efficient in Saving Seconds. It begins as a rant against the mouse, but really gets somewhere when he writes about creating a new email message:

“There are two types of people. The ones who waited for me to say Go to compose a new mail and the ones who read ‘compose a new mail message’ and pressed the three keys that are necessary, from anywhere in the OS, to fire up a new compose window.”

I think Web people bring this desire to be efficient into our work, mostly for the better. Finding and eliminating repetition is an excellent way to streamline your product. Why make a user click twice if once will do? (Lopp might also say, why make a user click at all?)

Of course, everything in moderation. One can certainly be overcome when constantly striving to be most efficient:

Paying attention to productivity is a slippery slope. The system efficiency addiction associated with saving time can become so compelling that your process begins to control more of your time than your product.

Sound familiar to anyone?

There were some great comments on the unopenable mint container post. I wanted to share a few of them.

Most people agreed that once someone learns the trick, the container is simple. Brent Logan downplayed the effort needed to learn how to use the mint tin, then came up with some great additional reasons why the time spent learning is worth it:

I’d say opening this mint container IS simple, because once you know how to do it (and it can be documented in just two simple pictures), you can open it:

• one handed
• without looking
• with ease

Justin Thiele liked the mint tin, but wouldn’t call it simple:

What if Microsoft Word decided on a new way to copy text? No more Command C (Ctrl C for you PCs). Instead copy would be F1. F1 is simpler, only requires pressing one button, no keyboard dexterity required, and much easier to say to somebody. But now the process of remembering that Microsoft Word uses F1 and every other program uses Command C, becomes more involved. If other programs begin to take these same liberties then complexity abounds.

It sounds like Justin is worried about consistency, which I think plays a large part in simplicity. Certainly being consistent within a context (such as your own website) is important. But there’s also consistency between contexts, such as your website and my website. If you underline links and I underline everything except links, one of us will probably be confusing people. And if there are enough people making changes like this, we may all begin to confuse people.

A few weeks ago I bought some mints at Powell’s bookstore before a meeting. I didn’t want my breath to stink. As I was walking to the appointment, I struggled to get at the mints. It turned out this container required me to read the directions.

See the unopenable mint container in action in this video:

Since I discovered the secret, I’ve been pretty taken with the mint container’s simplicity. Still, I think back to my struggle in downtown Portland. It was not intuitive to open that container.

The fourth law of simplicity states:

“Knowledge makes everything simpler.”

What do you think? Does needing to read the directions eliminate the chance for it to be simple?

Come see the great stuff your fellow Portlanders have been working on. Several ten minute demos of new products and side projects.

Confirmed Demolicious schedule:
* Matt King, Interface Content Management Framework
* Don Park, Do-it-yourself Friendfeed
* Lev Tsypin, Green Renter
* Kevin Chen, Metroseeq
* Mounir Shita, GoLife Mobile

Find out more about showing off *your* project here:
http://www.pdxwi.com/blog/adamd/2008/06/demolicious-show-your-latest-project

This last Thursday and Friday was the annual WebVisions conference here in Portland. 2008 marks my 4th year in attendance, and I definitely look foward to it every year. You can’t beat the price, it’s one of the cheapest conferences around and with it being local, there’s really not much excuse not to come and check out at least a few sessions and a keynote. Plus it’s a great chance to catch-up with my local developer and entrepreneur friends and meet some new ones.

My main point of feedback for the organizers if they read this. PLEASE PUT KEYNOTES IN THE MORNING!

All in all, WV was pretty good, though it didn’t feel as inspiring as the last couple of years. After last year, I made sure to avoid the workshops. As far as the sessions go, I was entertained and picked up some great info and good tips to follow-up on, but nothing that made me want to carve out a day or so to really think through. I can’t quite figure out why exactly, but one thing that I noticed that I didn’t read a single live-blog or blog post during the conference, it never even occurred to me. That’s a major shift from years past. Why didn’t it occur to me? Make a guess, Twitter. In years past, reading about the conference, during the conference has always kept that mind-buzz going.

Twitter is now the primary forum for conference back channel and instant recaps. Only problem was, Twitter was down for a good portion of the conference, so there was little in terms of immediate response loop. The conversation has migrated from the blogosphere to Twitter, but when Twitter is down, the conversation dies.

Here’s a quick round-up of the sessions I attended. Slide decks for at least some of these available on SlideShare. Other roundups can be found on the Silicon Florist.

RSS: Bleeding Edge Tips and Tricks
I only caught the last half, and I’ve seen Marshall talk about RSS before, but even then I still managed to pick up some new ideas, a testament to Marshall’s ability to keep finding new ways to digest more information, faster.

Drupal: This Aint Your Father’s CMS
I’ve just picked up Drupal in the last couple months for a project at Strands and this was my first opportunity to hear about it and ask questions after having actually spend considerable time working on it. I missed most of the actual presentation, but there was lots of time for q & a which was well worth it. Plus, we got to learn a little bit about OpenSourcery, which was new to me.

Going Fast on the Slow Mobile Web
Great update to Jason’s talk in February at PDX Web Innovators. Cloud Four has been doing a lot of research on the performance capabilities of mobile phones, and a lot of that fresh new data was included here.

So You Want to Run a Startup
The startup story of SlideShare. This is my first time seeing Rashmi speak and I think it was a good session. Focus on metrics to measure success, understanding the size of your market, pros/cons of different business models, adapting plans to how the business/site/community take-off, and developing key advisors/investors. SlideShare is the poster child of web 2.0 in that it is a pure ad-based business model and its marketing strategy was to get on TechCrunch. They may just have been one of the few to succeed at that, as it they seem to growing nicely.

Star Wars Kid Is Your New Bicycle: The Changing Lives of Memes
Andy Baio’s talk attempting to identify how memes spread. This was definitely the most entertaining session, and I have to admit I hadn’t heard of a couple of the ones mentioned. But, I certainly remember Star Wars Kid and Numa Numa. Bottom line, I don’t think we can ever predict what’s going to truly go viral.

WebVisionary awards
I was excited to finally make it to an after party for WebVisions for the first time. This was a fun event and I managed to meet several tweeps for the first time. But, something that I’ve gotten used to with WebVisions, the online component of these awards is lacking (no nominees or winners listed as of now, but the lack of online presence is something that WV overall has struggled with to the point of giving up this year IMO, and this is a web conference). There was no transparency on nominees and with a couple multiple-award winners (Substance and Colour Lovers) I have to question the value of these awards. Not to take away from the winners, but with that, the apparent lack of nominees and the entry fee the awards just seemed kind of cheap. I suppose that’s why they rushed through them so fast. The ceremony itself was well done though.

I enjoyed writing the series of posts about Designing the Obvious, the guide to creating sites and applications that keep both developer and user sane.

My favorite part was reading what others thought about it in the comments. Three were randomly chosen to receive autographed copies: Aaron Hockley, Bram Pitoyo, and David Frey. I hope we get to hear more about what they think when they read the entire book.

Thanks also to the author Robert Hoekman, Jr., who supplied the books, and agreed to answer the following questions about his work. If you’re still itching for more Hoekman, he has a new book, Designing the Moment, that is full of examples of his concepts put to use.

How do you determine what is essential and what is nice-to-have?

As I touched on in Chapter 2, I take an activity-centered approach to design, which is to say that instead of focusing on a narrow range of audience types, for most projects I focus on the activity an application is meant to support. In doing this, I study the essential elements of the activity, document them, and then work to justify every item on the list.

So, as I study an activity, I create what I call an “Activity Grid”, which is basically a 3-level outline you can create in any word processing application or outlining tool (such as OmniOutliner). At the top of this document, I write a description of the activity the application will support, then I break the activity down into outline form. The first level is a simple list of tasks, which could be something like “Find photographs” in a photo-sharing application. Tasks then break down into actions, which are itemized accounts of the steps you might take to find photos, such as “Search by member” or “Search by subject”. Finally, these actions break down into operations — the lowest level of detail. Operations can be things like “Enter a search term” followed by “Click the Search button”.

When I start studying an activity, I identify the major tasks — the ones most essential for completing the specified activity. Once I have that list, I detail the actions that comprise each task. From there, I can detail exactly what operations must occur for the actions to be completed. By the time I flesh out the Operations level of the activity grid, I have a fairly detailed set of design instructions. For example, the “Enter a search term” operation tells me I need an input field in the interface, and that there will be a search feature.

Once I finish this list, I start my design work. But instead of setting the activity grid in stone, I review it throughout the project, continually re-justifying everything that made the cut to see if anything is missing, can be stripped out, or needs revision.

With all this in mind, there are many ways to determine what’s essential and what needs to hit the cutting room floor. For example, Joshua Porter’s book on social web design offers a very different approach where you identify the objects needed to complete an activity and then devise your feature list out of that list. I think it’s a smart approach and am planning to try it out soon.

You rely on use cases in your work. How to you maintain a balance so your process can simplify things instead of make things more complicated?

The use cases I write are a little different than the typical “user story” you might see in a lot of development processes. First, they’re very detailed. Instead of a single line that describes only the action the user will take, I describe each step of each action. Second, these use cases are very much an extension of the activity grid. So, I design all the screens and screen states I need to fulfill the activity grid, and then I stick them all into this Powerpoint/Keynote template I created and write the use cases in a sidebar, right alongside each wireframe. I call this a Design Description Document (DDD) — in fact, you can grab the template from my site.

This can definitely sound like a complicated process, but depending on the activity, an activity grid can be created in a matter of hours in a lot of cases, and the DDD can be done just as quickly. Instead of a long, dry technical specification, I use this DDD, which can be created and updated in extremely little time, and does a more effective job of communicating to stakeholders and developers exactly how everything should work so they can build it all out.

I’ve been using this set of solutions for a while now, and it’s proven to be very efficient for me, but I’m always looking for ways to simplify the process and get the right messages across to clients, so I could just as easily change it all tomorrow.

The real key is to be flexible. Don’t lock yourself into anything, because there’s always an improvement to be made and you don’t want to miss it by getting too focused on one way of doing things.

Do you find making your personal workflow simpler makes your products simpler?

Oh, definitely. The more I simplify my own process, the more I’m able to quickly identify areas of a design that need to be created or improved, and the more readily I can do that, the simpler the outcome. For example, by using an activity grid and a DDD, I can determine what needs to be designed and document every detail of it very quickly, which enables me to spot trouble areas or gaps in my thinking so I can revise the designs.

How do you avoid the curse of knowledge and think like a user?

Great question — and the answer is actually a little ironic.

When it comes to designing usable and enjoyable software experiences, the principles of design are simply restatements of human behavioral patterns and psychology. For example, we know from observing people use software that they tend to blame themselves for mistakes when error messages come popping up time after time, and they can end up feeling dumb, as though they’re simply incapable of understanding how to do something correctly. We certainly don’t want our users feeling dumb as a result of using our products, so all you do is restate the problem as a principle. Once you know that users blame themselves for mistakes, even when it’s not really their fault, the design principle becomes, “Prevent errors, and handle those that cannot be prevented as gracefully as possible.”

Because the role of design is to support human behavior and because the principles behind good design do exactly that, there is no “curse of knowledge”. The more you know about human behavior, the better you can design to support it — to work within those constraints.

Why did you write Designing the Moment?

I wanted to pick up where Designing the Obvious left off. The first book was about core tenets — the high-level things that are simply essential to good web application design. But beyond those principles, there are a whole lot of very specific problems that come up when you’re shoulder-deep in the details of a design, and I wanted to talk about the principles and practices that address those problems. The best way to do this was to talk about them in context — to describe specific instances where I was faced with a common (or uncommon) problem and then walk through the principles and such that I applied to solve them. So, Designing the Moment is a collection of stories from real projects where I talk about the design problem, the steps I took to start and improve the design, and the concepts I used to make each decision.

The really fun part was that I got to tell all these stories about projects I’ve actually worked on and how I got through them. Of course, that’s also the really scary part. Designing the Moment is an educational tool, sure, but on a personal level, it’s also sort of a journal of these little bits of designs I’ve done over the past year and a half or so. It never really occurred to me while writing it, but once it was released, I had this realization that I’d just put all this work into print. It’s out there to be judged by anyone who picks it up. That’s a scary idea! I’m glad I didn’t have this realization while I was writing it, else I might have panicked and scrapped the whole book.

Too late now!

The next couple weeks are going to be busy around these parts and just wanted to share some of the events I’m planning on attending.

WebVisions
Always one of my favorites and it’s cheap! Starts tomorrow.

Strands Portland Meet-up
Think Strands is all about Music and now Money? Think again. This meet-up will be a chance to preview the all new strands.com and meet more of the Strands team.

Portland Lunch 2.0 @ Vidoop
The Lunch 2.0 series continues at newly re-located to PDX Vidoop

Andy Baio talks side projects and acquisition at Portland Web Innovators
We’re thrilled to have Andy Baio, founder of Upcoming.org leading the discussion. Should be awesome!

Hard to believe it’s been 6 months since my last post, but what can I say, I’ve been busy! Not only have I been silent on this here blog, but for those that I have talked with over the last few months can attest, I haven’t talked a whole lot about what I’m working on. Today is the day I get to tell my story. NetworthIQ has been acquired by Strands and I have joined the Strands team to work on moneyStrands, the upcoming personal finance solution. For info on how this news is going to impact NetworthIQ, be sure to read the post over there. This post contributes my personal perspective. Needless to say, I’m pretty excited about it.

It was just over 3 years ago that we started working on NetworthIQ. It was a bit of a bumpy ride. In the first couple months, I wasn’t sure if it was going to make it, but with a couple of high-profile press mentions we were off and running. The idea for NetworthIQ was pretty basic, apply the popular Web 2.0 principles of the time (social networking, public sharing, collective intelligence) and apply it to personal finance, something that hadn’t been done before. There was the occasional “this is the dumbest site ever” comment, but for the most part we always got great response and feedback from those that signed up, which was what kept me going.

Hard to believe that with the web being as global as is now, that the company that came calling was practically in your back yard. I spent two terms at OSU, and went through the disappointment of seeing my baseball career die, but now I’m back in Corvallis living out the dream. Pretty ironic. Not only that, as an active follower of the Silicon Florist and Silicon Forest, I already knew who Strands was and was following what they were doing.

So, how and why did NetworthIQ and Strands come together? Up until a few weeks ago, the face of Strands on the web was MyStrands, the social music site. It may seem odd for a personal finance site to come under that umbrella. But, now that moneyStrands has been announced, I think it starts to make a lot more sense right? Strands is starting to take the personalization and recommendation technology that they’ve built in new directions and personal finance was one of those directions. My primary job now is to channel my knowledge of the personal finance market gleaned from building NetworthIQ into the moneyStrands roadmap and keep NetworthIQ humming along.

Though it was a few months ago, it was sad to say good-bye to TransCore, I had many great opportunities to transition into software development (I started as a financial analyst) and got to work on some fun projects with great people there. But, when an opportunity to work on something that you are personally passionate about full-time and still allows you to support your family, it’s something worth making the jump for.

As for Corvallis, yes, I commute. Quite a bit different from my old commute (though I’m now even more disappointed in Oregon drivers). But, it’s only two days a week normally and the rest of time I’m up north here at home, or enjoying the quiet confines of the Sherwood public library (gotta love a city that provides free wi-fi. Even if its only downtown), or I’ve even been known to drop in on fellow web innovators and do a little co-working. I’ve also been able to make it to more events around PDX like PDX Web Innovators, Lunch 2.0, InnoTech, and BarCamp since it’s good to get out of the house a bit when working at home. However, after commuting 3 hours one day, I’m not exactly eager to make the drive into pdx proper that often, but it’s fun when I do.

Just wanted to add a personal thanks here to Todd, Jeff, and Aaron, my partners in crime at Fourio. Though we certainly had our struggles, the fact that we saw our first released product (a side-project no less) through to an exit is something to be proud of. I don’t want to make this into an academy speech, but I haven’t shared in a while, I should mention that my wife has been great through all of this, supporting my crazy/obsessive side-project turned startup dreams and for that I am extremely grateful. See honey, it wasn’t a waste of time :-).

The good folks at jadedPixel (the team that brought us Shopify) published an interview with Matt today! He talks about our business, our clients, and why we recommend Shopify so damn much. Check it out, and join me in a rousing chorus of “woo hoo.”

We just launched the new site for Munchkin Designs, and I couldn’t resist placing an order - you know, just to test the system. It came a couple of days ago, and check out the cuteness:

Lisa Komer, Munchkin Designs’ owner, makes the most adorable custom-designed printed materials. And her site is pretty cute, too, if we do say so ourselves. Drop by and check out her new line of tees!