Brian Hartsock's Blog

Don is #2 on my list of speakers from Business of Software 2009. Don forces you to understand how people are using your product. It sounds simple, but most companies have a different outlook on their product than their customers. Here are his 10 rules for successful products.

Everything is a product. Everything is a service. You can’t have one without the other. The software you create is a product, but the experience you provide is your service. Don’t forget about one of these principles while focusing on the other.

Don’t be too logical. This might be the downfall of 99% of all developers. We are wired to think about the logical steps to perform an action, but users have emotion which plays the major role in their decisions. Usability testing is the best way to truly see how someone will use your product.

Design systems. Think about the iPod + iTunes + Add-ons or Kindle + Amazon + Verizon. This goes back to the above. Think about the entire service your product is providing, not just the functionality the product contains. A complete system solves the entirety of a customers problem. If you only solve a small portion of their problem, the experience is going to be lacking.

The other main points, which I think are fairly self explanatory.

• It’s all about the experience
• Memory is more important than actuality – Make the beginning and ending memorable
• Complexity is good, Complicated is bad
• Design for the real world.
• Design for the people.
• It’s all about the experience

Check out Don’s books if you want to hear more.

And now for #3 (I paused for a few days over the holidays), Jennifer Aaker at the Business of Software Conference, 2009. Jennifer is a Stanford professor who researches what happiness really is and how we can achieve it. She gives the middle finger to opinions and has a ton of data to back up her thoughts, which is what I found the most interesting.

Immediately, after I got back from the conference I asked myself two questions Jennifer recommended.

• What is the ratio of I’s to We’s? Frequent use of I indicates individuals that don’t connect with the company. We is the opposite. It usually means someone has a sense of teamwork and connectedness.
• What is the ratio of positive to negative comments? 5 positives for every 1 negative is the goal we should shoot for in an organization. The closer to 1-to-1 a organization gets, the more disengaged your employees are likely to be.

While great organizations strive to have happy employees, there is always going to be part of the job that employees don’t like. Things that drain and unmotivate them. These questions help to expose parts of the job that detract from employees experiences.

Jennifer had a few tips to try and improve our happiness throughout each day.

• Time setting – Block off time for certain activities. During that time, protect yourself from email, phones, twitter, etc.
• Reward system – We all need to have personal reward systems. By breaking down the day into smaller microchunks, setting goals, and then rewarding ourselves with activites like a reading break, starbucks, workout, or massage, we can more readily deal with the stress of everyday life.
• Emotional buffering – Certain parts of a job are never fun. When these depleting tasks come up, pair them with uplifting activities. One idea she had was do reviews at Starbucks instead of at the office.
• Team rewards – These are how we get to We

One of the more surprising pieces of information she showed was what doesn’t make people happy. Money, promotions, and religion have little to no effect, and can have a negative effect on happiness. Events like winning the lottery can temporarily improve your mental state, but even after a few days that mental state returns to normal levels. Life changing events like paralysis work the same way. A few months after an accident, victims usually return to the same level of happiness as before the accident.

This is just the tip of the iceberg on Jennifer’s talk. If you want to learn more, you can check our her many research papers.

Joel ends up #4 on my list of Business of Software speakers.  Here is my take on his talk.

Have you ever wondered why UAC in Windows Vista/7 annoys you so much?  Joel tried to delve into this topic and uncover why users hate this kind of behavior. 

To Joel, it really boils down to one thing, Design is the art of making decisions. Good design means the decisions were right, whereas bad design means the opposite.  It is obvious that the UAC design was for security, not for users.  In UI design, we need to be making decisions that help users accomplish their goal. Bad decisions interrupt users and cause them to hate your application.

Even though it sounds simple, most development companies think more about their product’s features than about how users use them.  User’s don’t want a product, they want a solution to some problem!  They might need features to accomplish this, but those features need to align with their goal, and not impede it.

This doesn’t mean we should sacrifice the number of features for simplicity, we should just make sure the features we implement help the users and not impede them. If we can do this, we have created an elegant application.

My favorite example is Amazon’s 1-click purchase button. Making 1-click actually work wasn’t easy. It took a lot of development work to handle all the cases, but in the end, it made accomplishing the user’s goal (buying something) easier than any other ecommerce site. No impedance. Don’t let the amount of work stop you from making the right decision.  Creating an elegant application isn’t easy, but it is possible if you want to make it happen.

Lastly, think really hard about using modal dialogs.

Ryan is #5 on my Business of Software top five speakers, and the first to be reviewed.

Ryan reminds me of a gentle Jason Fried. His outlook on life and software is very similar to Fried’s, except he throws in words like love and treats his customers like gods. Ryan had a lot of great things to say, some quite obvious but good hear. Here are a few highlights from my perspective.

Be a passionate leader. Obvious right? Yes but Ryan backed it up with a couple great examples of things passionate leaders do. Be opinionated and blog about it. Opinions mean you believe in something, and that will be seen by your employees. Taking those opinions and blogging about them creates thought leadership for your team and the outside world.

Love your customers. I think we do a pretty good job at Rackspace and Carson nailed two key attitudes that help make this happen. Never speak disrespectfully of a customer. How many times have you heard a developer say something like That customer asked for what? That’s stupid. While their idea may not align with your direction, it is a real issue for a customer. Understanding that helps you understand your customers better. Also, use your product everyday. Most developers have no idea how much of a pain their app is to use. Using it everyday helps break this wall down. Make a developer go through the signup process or create a new account have them set it up. It will show some interesting insights.

Treat your team like royalty. This is the point of the talk where Carson and Joel held hands for a little bit (that or I need new glasses). It is obvious, but it also isn’t easy. It is good to be reminded that everything begins with your employees. Having great employees is one of the key parts to having a great company.

Invest in good design. and Be more creative than you need to be were two key points that go really well together. This is that extra 10% that doesn’t need to be done, but get’s all the attention. Do things that are a little crazy, a little out there, a little more beautiful than it needs to be, and get great publicity for them. At Carsonified, they take a week and just do something creative every now and again (I forget how often he said). All too often, team’s get stuck in the trenches and don’t get a chance to do something creative. Give them that chance, you will be amazed.

Other key points were Give back to your community, Build kick ass products, and Get good at publicity all of which I agree with.

It is all really summed up by Don’t regret not doing what you had to do to make your company remarkable. Hopefully Neil will be able to post Ryan’s talk soon so that you all can view it.

I just got back from the Business of Software conference in San Francisco. It was a great time and I wanted to share it with the world (or those few poor souls that read my blog regularly). There were a ton of great speakers, but I wanted to highlight who I thought were the top five. Over the next few days, I will be posting about a specific speaker and why I liked them, so stay tuned.