Development Blog

I’ve always been an advocate of failures as a learning experience and that my failures should be public but even so, it’s hard for me to admit this: Bumblebee Labs is not working. I’ve tinkered with a lot of ideas and it’s been a formative catalyst for personal growth for me. But, over the last few months, I’ve found my motivation steadily dropping to zero and I’m spending my time finding ever more elaborate ways of procrastinating. To have a startup peter out is one of the more ignominious reasons for failure and, for a long time, I resisted admitting to myself that this is what had actually happened. After trying several attempts to jumpstart my motivation with various tips and tactics, I think it’s finally time for me to admit to myself that I need a change of pace.

Ever since I started Bumblebee Labs, I had always flirted with the idea of working for a large company and that attraction has waxed & waned with the ups and downs of Bumblebee Labs. While I enjoyed the all encompassing education that founding a startup brings, this forced interlude has made me realize how much I miss the luxury of deep thinking. To be able to focus on my original, abiding passion of social design is something that sounds immensely appealing to me at this stage in my life. As a result, I’m formally placing myself out on the job market and I’ve started to actively look for a role that I feel suits me.

My ideal role is to work for a company building interesting social software and to bring in my philosophy around social design, both to help them clarify how to understand the intersection between social behaviors & design (such as thinking about plausible deniability); and also to be a catalyst for novel social interface elements that improves the success of that product (see Friennuendo & Friendbo). My problem is, the type of job I want is not something you can apply for in a job ad. The role of social designer is one most companies aren’t even aware exists let alone one that they need. I figure, my best strategy is to meet face to face with people so I can convince them that they need to create a job that matches my skillset.

I will be down in San Francisco from March 6th to March 21st and then splitting my time fairly evenly between San Francisco & Seattle until I settle on an opportunity. I am available for:

• If you want to meet individually, I’m happy to have coffee with you anytime, just shoot me an email at hang@bumblebeelabs.com and we’ll figure something out.
• If you think your workplace or a group you’re part of might be interested in what I have to say, I have a 20 minute – 1 hour presentation titled “Space & Narratives: Designing for Social Interaction” which I’m happy to give to any audience (even if you have no intention of hiring me, invite me anyway. I’m always happy to talk about my work).
• If you know someone who might be interested in meeting with me, please forward them a link to this post.
• If you’ve been a regular reader of this blog & you’re in San Francisco on the dates that I am there, I will cook for you. That’s right, I will cook for you. Details here

I’m excited about this next phase I’m about to embark on and you should really contact me if you want to embark on it together with me.

The internet is all atwitter about ReadWriteWeb’s article on how a quirk in Google had them highly ranked for the search term “Facebook login”.

It was like we had unearthed a long-lost city, the Atlantis of the Internet. But instead of treasures and gold we’d found a steady deluge of confused and frustrated users who had tried everything they knew to do and just wanted to log in to Facebook, damnit. But how had this happened? It certainly wasn’t that thousands and thousands of people had just started searching for “facebook login” yesterday. This stream of people has been there all along and something is broken.

There is a persistent meme, which this article is only helping reinforce, that user experience professionals are needed because the average user is far less intelligent than the average designer so we need to hire some people who can “think stupid” just like the user. Such thinking doesn’t benefit anyone, developers lose respect for the user and start creating condescending, dumbed down UIs. Users continue to find the new software hard to use because it doesn’t address their core issues.

Users aren’t so much unintelligent as they are distracted and indifferent

Your average user may be perfectly competent and zip through your app like a charm when they’re in a controlled setting, focusing exclusively on your application and incentivized to succeed. But such a scenario is almost never likely to happen in the real world. What’s more realistic is that they’re devoting, at best, 10% of their attention towards your app while they have the TV blaring in the background, an IM conversation they’re also involved in, thoughts about whether that meeting with the boss tomorrow means a promotion or getting fired. Your application is at best, 5th on their priority list and they’re largely moving on autopilot as they navigate through it. Once you understand this basic reality, user behavior becomes a lot easier to understand.

A couple of years ago, a grizzled UX professional taught me one invaluable fact.

Drunk people are a pretty accurate mimic of distracted, indifferent people

This insight has lead to a wonderful technique I’ve been refining over the years that I call “The $5 Guerrilla User Test”.

The $5 Guerrilla User Test

Here’s the 5 second version:

1. Bring a laptop to a bar
2. Offer to buy someone a beer in exchange for participating in a user study
3. Watch your application crash & burn as people do all sorts of ridiculous ass shit they would never do in a lab but constantly do in real life
4. Go back, apply the lessons you have learnt, repeat until you have an app that is 100% drunk person proof

This is the slightly longer version for those who are interested:

• Like conventional user studies this is best done with a group of two, one to run through the script, the other to take notes.
• Approach in a friendly manner, explain who you are and who you work for and ask them if you can have a moment of their time.
• If they don’t seem receptive from the get go, thank them for their time and move on to a different target
• Explain to them that you want some insight on a piece of software you’re currently building and tell them that you’re willing to buy them a pint of beer as compensation for their participation
• If they accept (and 90% of them will), ask them their preference of beer and then ask your partner to go off and order it
• While you’re waiting for your partner, inform them of your data collection policies, the procedure and the standard stuff about how they can quit at any time. It doesn’t much matter what exactly you say to them, the key is to make it boring. This step is key. When you first approached them, you were something novel for the night so they’re interested and motivated to perform. 2 minutes of dull chatter is going to lose their attention and they’re back to being utterly indifferent about your problems again.
• Once your partner gets back, run it just like any other user study.
• At the end, hand them their beer, thank them for their time and drop off some business cards for some easy word of mouth marketing. If you offer any sort of premium features, give them a year’s access to it as a gift as well. It’s a nice surprise and converts surprisingly well.

That’s it! It’s cheap, fast, can be done by anyone and gives you insights you never would have gotten hiring a professional usability consulting firm. Go out and do it!

Here’s a couple more tips I’ve picked up over the years:

• The first time you do it, you’re probably going to be suffering from approach anxiety. Start off approaching a group of the same sex as you so that the encounter isn’t sexualized. Next, move on to a mixed sex group and then finish the night with an opposite gender interaction so you get a nice demographic spread.
• Focus on people who don’t normally get talked to at bars, middle aged people, homely girls, the guy sitting in the corner.
• People alone, reading a book, have a 50% chance of agreeing to participate. People alone, reading a newspaper, have a 99% chance of agreeing to participate.
• If you ever get the feeling that you’re being messed with, politely end the experiment, give them their beer and move on to the next round of testing.
• Groups of all guys tend to be the only ones who ever mess with you. I avoid asking them as a rule.
• You want someone who’s pretty drunk but not completely trashed. A good way to calibrate is to keep on asking progressively drunker people until your results become garbage, then back off one notch from there. After a few rounds, you learn to spot the signs of an ideal participant.
• Conveniently for you, weekdays end up being more effective than weekends so you can do this after work.
• I generally try to keep the entire session down to around an hour which works out to be roughly 4 * 15 minute user studies. Much more than that is tiring and too much data to analyze the next day.
• While beer is good before & after the user study, try and keep beer away during the user study. Spilled beer on a laptop can be an expensive mistake.
• Bars are wonderful at segmenting by demographic. Match the bar you’re going to with the user population you want to target. Different bars will produce slightly different results but the variation is not huge.
• If you’re planning on regularly using one bar to do your tests, tip the bartender well from the start, like, 30 – 40%. That extra $1 you spend isn’t going to break the bank and having a bartender on your side brings all sorts of benefits.
• edit: One extra tip from a friend, mobile app development benefits even more from this technique since mobile use tends to involve even more distraction. Users are using your app while walking down the street, driving, holding a conversation etc.

Anyway, that’s it. I’d love to hear from people how their experience with the $5 Guerrilla User Test goes.

If you ever learn about optimization, the second technique they teach you after “hill climbing” is something called “simulated annealing“. Forget trying to work through Wikipedia’s definition of it, here’s how I mentally visualize it:

Imagine you your job was to find the highest point on a random Frank Gehry designed building, say the Hotel Marques de Riscal. The problem is, you’re blind so you can only determine the height of one point at a time.

Hotel Marque de Riscal

One way to do it would be to take the entire outside shell of the structure and turn it upside down and then drop a ball bearing in it. When the ball bearing stops moving, you declare that point to be probably the lowest point.

Upside Down Hotel Marque de Riscal

In the field of optimization, this is called hill climbing and it sure is fast but the problem with it is obvious: the ball bearing will likely drop into some rut on the side of the building before reaching the bottom (aka: a local minima).

Simulated annealing is like adding a giant paint shaker and imagining the ball bearing getting heavier over time. At first, the ball bearing is light as a feather and every random vibration is going to make it bounce around, sometimes to a lower point but also sometimes to a higher point. Over time, as the ball bearing gets heavier, it becomes progressively harder to jostle out of it’s rut but when it does move, it moves to a lower rut some distance away. Finally, the ball bearing becomes so heavy it’s virtually impossible to budge, at which point, you declare that position to be probably the lowest point. Simulated annealing can still get trapped in local minima but it usually does a hell of a lot better than hill climbing.

Now, imagine that the ball bearing is society and it’s searching for the solution to a problem like, say, attaching sheets of paper together. If you’re living in any time since the 1930′s, it’s overwhelmingly likely that you’ll be reaching for a “Gem” style paperclip.

A Gem style paperclip

What many people don’t realize is that the Gem paperclip wasn’t the only type of paperclip invented. In fact, the 1909 Websters Dictionary entry on paperclips referred to the “Konaclip” version which was considered the prototypical paperclip of the time.

A Konaclip style paperclip

From 1864 when the first paperclip patent was granted, till 1930 when the gem became dominant, there were literally dozens of designs for paperclips (which, thankfully, has been documented on the Paperclip section of the Early Office Museum). But since the 1930′s, technological progress in the paperclip arena has ground to a halt with the entirety of society standardizing on the Gem and every other style dying in obscurity (For a much more detailed look into the paperclip’s fascinating history, I refer you to the book The Evolution of Useful Things).

To explain this history, I refer back to the simulated annealing analogy. In the early days of paperclipdom, society wasn’t particularly attached to any one design so there was very little momentum in the system. Even a tiny vibration was enough to make another design viable. However, as time went on, certain styles of paperclips started to have legacy effects and it became a race between a few, select alternatives, most notably the Konaclip & the Gem. Finally, society had settled so firmly upon the Gem that it it would take the most extraordinary effort to have any other design supplant it which is why it remains the paperclip of choice to this day. In Simulated Annealing terms, the entropy was now so low that it became practically impossible to escape from a local minima.

Indeed, one of the characteristics of simulated annealing is that it goes through 3 distinct phases. A period of fluid, diverse shifting, a long period of stagnation punctuated by occasional radical shifts and then finally stability from which only incremental improvement is possible.

Looking at the pattern of historical developments of other technologies, it’s possible to spot these same shifts in between phases.

Before 1973, there was a diverse ecosystem of physical interaction paradigms for desktop computing. The most notable examples from that era were Ivar Sutherland’s Sketchpad using light pen interaction and Alan Kay’s tablet style Dynabook.

Sketchpad circa 1963

Dynabook circa 1972

Then, in 1973, the Xerox Alto was released and virtually halted the progress of computer interfaces from that point forward. Nearly every desktop computer today is a recognizable descendant of the Xerox Alto.

Xerox Alto circa 1973

The list of genuine innovations in physical UI that have been adopted since the Alto are as laughably few in number as they are trivial in scope. In rough order of importance: Speakers, microphones, webcams, the mouse wheel, wireless networking, higher resolution screens, a numpad, flatter screens & the Windows/Command button (this is not a sampling, it’s the complete list).

The list of potential innovations are as staggering as they are futile: Pen computing, Tabletop computing, Tablet computing, Augmented & Virtual Reality, Touch based interaction, Multitouch, MultiMouse, Bimanual Interaction, Single Display Groupware, 3D displays and the list goes on and on. In the last 37 years, billions of dollars have been poured into these alternative technologies in a vain attempt to supplant the Xerox Alto as the dominant paradigm with pretty much nothing to show from all that work except a bunch of pretty pilot projects.

And with each passing year, it’s become more and more difficult to foster a viable alternative paradigm because more and more gets invested into keeping Alto style computing firmly entrenched. Software is designed for a keyboard+mouse+screen, people have invested time learning the intricacies of a WIMP OS and thousands of companies have a vested interest in keeping the system entrenched.

The same pattern can be found in keyboard layouts with QWERTY, programming languages with C, web standards with HTML+CSS+JS, Office Productivity with Microsoft Office, Email with Eudora and so forth. In every instance, a period of rapid innovation was brought abruptly to a close with a dominant technology and, from that point forward, genuine changes in the status quo happen at best every decade and only after extraordinary effort *.

Almost every discussion of a new innovation focuses on the details of the innovation almost exclusively without considering the broader social context. Such discussion manages to miss the vital point that adoption of an innovation depends only a tiny bit on the actual innovation and almost completely on the current progress of society. Once a technology has reached a certain maturity point, whatever local minima that society has currently reached will establish itself be the dominant technology until the end of time regardless of what technological progress has occurred or has yet to occur. Like a game of musical chairs, it’s all about when the music stops. If you’ve managed to grab a seat at the table, then you’ll stay there forever, if you missed your spot, then it’s going to take extraordinary effort to regain it, no matter how much of an improvement you are over the status quo.

* This same model also explains why European & Japanese mobile & broadband technology is so far in advance of the US even thought the US were the pioneers of both technologies. Because the US started early, it’s industry matured around an earlier technological & social standard which caused it to fall behind the less mature, more technologically limber peers.