Anti-Pattern: Idiot Boxes - Yahoo! Photos

In Alan Cooper's About Face 3 book he states a simple principle:

Don't stop the proceedings with idiocy.

In the context of flow he describes the scenario:

One form of excise is so prevalent that it deserves special attention. In the previous chapter, we introduced the concept of flow, whereby a person enters a highly productive mental state by working in harmony with her tools. ... Interrupting a user's flow for no good reason is stopping the proceedings with idiocy and is one of the most disruptive forms of excise.

I call this the Idiot Box Anti-Pattern.

One of the clearest examples of this was with the Yahoo! Photos 3.0 product (which has been replaced by flickr).



What follows are two idiot boxes. The first asks the user if they really meant to carefully select three photos, drag them carefully over the album and drop them there? :-D



The second one tells them that the system really put the photos where you dragged them to.



Now feedback is good. But only in carefully measured doses. This is overkill. But simply removing the idiot boxes leaves you with an interface that has no feedback. What we need is more nuanced feedback during a few of the drag and drop interesting moments.

The first moment is when dragging over a valid target (the photo album). A simple highlighting of the album (there are many options, this is just the simplest) on drag over would let you know you are successfully targeting the album and that it is receptive to photos being dropped there.

The second is immediately after the photos are dropped into the album. A simple feedback would be to always show the number of photos in the album. Once the drop occurs update the tally beside the album and perhaps temporarily spotlight the change area.


On the drop there is no feedback in context. Instead two back-to-back idiot boxes are displayed


A revised design uses highlighting, running tally and spotlighting (fade technique) to give appropriate feedback

Using an interesting moments grid is a nice way to think about every possible place you can engage the user. Just in time feedback, in context is a powerful way to engage a user and eliminate heavy-handed approaches -- like idiot boxes.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Anti-Pattern: Pogo Stick - Google Blogger vs. Backpackit

In my previous article I ranted about Google Blogger. Let me rant some more :-)

Besides being a good example of the One at a Time Anti-Pattern it is also a good example of the Pogo Stick Anti-Pattern (I first heard this term from Jared Spool). I define it as:

Requiring the user to go down a level or two, perform an operation, come back to the top and then have to go back down again. The name comes from hopping up and down through the site.

In the Google Blogger example I described the process of deleting comments requiring a multi-step process:


Pogo Sticking in Google Blogger

It takes three page refreshes to complete the operation and return to where you started.

Compare this to the way you can delete in Backpackit.


Backpackit provides an in page one step delete

What to do about delete confirmation?

1. Don't provide one. If the item is trivial (like an item in a list) you can just let the user delete it without bothering them with an idiot box (pointless confirmation).
2. Provide one. In Google Reader they use the standard Alert mechanism. This is less than desirable since depending on the operating system the confirmation can appear far away from the deleted item. On the Mac, the alert slides out under the title bar which forces the user to move the mouse far away from the delete operation. Another approach is to provide a lightweight overlay (with a DIV or iFrame) to confirm the delete. They can appear quickly and in context with the operation.
3. Provide an Undo. Google does this in several of its products. In Google Mail if you delete a mail message you get a chance to undo the delete.

Deleting mail messages can be undone in Google Mail

This is a clever way to present a one-time undo by tying it to status messaging (along with contextual help).

By using a direct In Page Action pattern, the Pogo Stick Anti-Pattern can often be eliminated.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Anti-Pattern: One at a Time - Google Blogger, Reader and Backpackit

Ok, I really shouldn't use blogger. I mean I get a disdainful look from most other bloggers. How can I have a serious blog on blogger? And at times some of its deficiencies drive me completely nuts. I keep planning to move to WordPress but inertia keeps me using blogger.

But one thing that drives me completely bonkers is the administration of commenting. I recently was spammed like crazy across all my articles. For some reason I stopped getting notification after the new Blogger was released (even though I had the "send me email when I get a comment" option turned on.) Needless to say I have it set so that I have to moderate all comments (unfortunately).

So when I did find out about the spam, I had to go to every article (still not done) and delete the spam one comment at a time.

Here is the process:

1. Go to blog article and find spam comment
2. Click on trash can icon to delete
3. Get taken to another page
4. Click the "Remove Forever" checkbox
   
5. Click the "Delete Comment" button
6. Click the link to go back to my blog article
7. Scroll back down and find the next article, repeat steps 2-7 as needed.

This is a classic Anti-Pattern that I call "One at a Time". It's when you force the user to only be able to act on a single object at a time.

Steps 1 & 2:


Steps 3-5:


Step 6:


Now imagine having to do this for 50 spammed comments. Now you can get a feel of how painful the One at a Time Anti-Pattern can be. This also illustrates the Pogo Stick Anti Pattern -- forcing the user to go back and forth through several page levels to accomplish a single task.

This makes my original example in my Anti-Pattern talk look very paltry. I used a very simple example from an early version of backpackit.



Clicking on Lettuce requires the user to wait a second before hitting Tomatoes to avoid a race condition. Now this is a minor nit and only comes into play when you are clicking several to do items in succession. Note in the latest version of backpackit this is not an issue since the time it takes for an item to respond that is is checked is almost zero seconds.

But this does show up in other places with varying degrees of annoyance. Often there is no way to do a bulk operation like delete all items. Here is an example from Google Reader.

In this example from Google Reader, they do provide a way to remove multiple feeds. In my original comments on this interface I missed the bulk remove since the use of the trash can and the unsubscribe button don't match each other well -- leading me to originally miss the bulk remove. Thanks to Dan (comment below) for catching my mistake.



To delete you have to click the trash can icon. For each click you must confirm the delete.



Hopefully you will not have to do this for a bunch of feeds. Your best bet is to export the OPML file and edit the XML directly :-)

There is also a mixture of interaction idioms employed on the same page:

• Direct In Page Action. 
• Delete. Action happens immediately when you click on trash can tool. Follows the One at a Time anti-pattern.
• Rename. Action happens immediately when you click on 'Rename'. Follows the One at a Time anti-pattern.
• Change Tag (Folder). 'Folder' equals 'Tag'. Unlike the select then tag, this allows you to add or remove a tag by selecting/deselecting the tag/folder from an individual drop down list for each item.
• Action on Selection. 
• Tag. Select items with check box then click the function to start the action on the selection with the Drop down (More Actions...). This is is especially confusing since you are led to think the drop down would be a filter since it lists all your tags (and is sandwiched between two filtering mechanisms).
• Unsubscribe. The Unsubscribe operates on selected items (not to be confused with the visible filtered items).

It's not all bad to mix these idiom styles. I think the use of a trashcan for unsubscribe is what is most confusing.

Even with the bad labeling this is better than Google Blogger which provides me no way to delete except one-at-a-time.

Ok, so I feel a little better after all this ranting. Now I can get back to deleting the spam comments -- One at a Time.

Blogged with Flock

Pattern: Refining Search

Theresa Neil has another great post this time on The Ultra Rich Search Experience.

She finishes up the article with a stab at redesigning the carmax.com search example more as a true car finder using a pattern I tend to call Refining Search. Others have called it a Faceted Search. Theresa describes it as an Ultra Rich Search. The best example of this is in kayak.com and roost.com (which has an absolutely superb house finding tool).

  
Theresa applied a real-time, iterative filter refinement ala roost.com

Where this type of patterns is really useful is when there is a large body of items that have clear facets (like size, color, brand, flight time, price, #bedrooms, texture, etc.). The mistake that most people make when implementing a refining search is not following some simple rules:

Refine in real-time
Clicking a bunch of check boxes or changing text parameters and then having to scroll down and find the Submit button is a ridiculous exercise to put the user through. The user is in an exploration flow. Don't break their flow with needless hunting for the submit button. What is the purpose? Hunting for product or hunting for your interface elements?

This is the ebay model. While it does a good utilitarian job of refinement... it is painful to experience.


eBay requires you to hit the submit and get a refresh to see next iteration

Avoid one-at-a-time experience
Some choose to avoid real-time filtering since it can be noisy to continue to refresh the display on each click (I talk about this as an Anti-Pattern, called One-At-A-Time-- forcing users to wait for updates on each click.) This is easily resolved by waiting to trigger the search until the user has not clicked for some small amount of time. With this mechanism you can click, click, click, pause... then search instead of click...search..click...search...click...search. We employed this technique on Yahoo! for Teachers.


In Y! Teachers you can click multiple filters without a reload. Waits for activity to stop.

Keep it smooth
Use Ajax or other in-page remote scripting to smooth out the load. Don't refresh the page! You will break the user's flow. The page will probably bounce back to the top. It will suck. Don't do it! Use a simple progress animation overlayed lightly on the content area to direct their attention to where the results will be.

Make the filters easy to Tweak
Try to avoid making the user type in values. Use sliders where it makes sense. The problem with sliders is the granularity of control and dexterity it requires to manipulate them. But if the values are large (like house prices) or there may be confusion about how to input the data (like using comma or not or whether to include the last 3 zeroes on house prices) a slider can avoid the ambiguity.

Make the filter controls easy to manipulate
Using simple check box on/off is the simplest approach to binary filters. You can visually treat them to make them not so busy... but keeping it looking like a checkbox is good since it is easy to understand.


Roost provides nice filters that are easy to work with

Keep the Context
Watch out for too many collapsible areas. Don't use accordions. Nobody wants to have to open an close each area one at a time to do filtering. And you need to see the full context to know how you have it filtered.


Y! Autos Car Finders uses large, klunky collapsible areas partly to hide a very large set of filters

Make it easy undo filtering
Just an undo all filters is a nice way to start a search over.


Roost has a simple reset

Provide a way to save & compare items for later
Being able to select items that get found, save them for comparison later is powerful for product choices. Roost lets you "highlight" properties. It remembers all hightlighted properties and at any time you can choose to view only those you have saved in this manner.

Blogged with Flock

Anti-Patterns: Talk at eBig 2008

Had a great time last night giving a talk at eBig, forum for Web Devs & Designers in Emeryville. Nice attendance. Lively discussion and great Q&A afterwards. You can find a PDF version of the talk online.




I continue to refine this talk on anti-patterns. The next time I present this is at Jared Spool's Web App Summit 2008 in Coronado Island, CA.

Blogged with Flock

Online Advertising Stunt

Pretty fun stunt. Clever use of animation. Kind of a Rube Goldberg effect.



Try it out. It's for their main site http://hema.nl. Certainly something viral. I mean I'm blogging about a dutch catalog company store in the Netherlands!

Roundup: Feb 8, 2008

Javascript and CSS

• John Resig - The Performance Paradox
• Ajaxian » jQuery UI and jQuery Enchant Alpha Versions Released Today
• danwebb.net - Event Delegation Made Easy In jQuery
• Surfin’ Safari - Blog Archive » querySelector and querySelectorAll
• John Resig - Tracing JavaScript
• John Resig - JavaScript Library Loading Speed
• Ajaxian » Firebug 1.1 and getfirebug.com
• John Resig - Sub-Pixel Problems in CSS
• SitePoint Blogs » CSS Reset Reloaded. Again.

Design

• SitePoint Blogs » Oprah’s Book Club? I don’t think so…

Cool Stuff

• Farecast Now Offers International Flight Price Predictions
• PMOG as a kind of Augmented Reality
• FriendFeed: Ex-Googlers Create Social Network Experience Using Feeds - ReadWriteWeb
• Google Android - a sneak preview | Reg Developer

Funny

• map of springfield
  
• 5min - How to Negotiate - Tips for Yahoo! - Video
• Flickr: The MICROSOFT: KEEP YOUR EVlL GRUBBY HANDS OFF OF OUR FLICKR Pool

Interesting News

• Television New Zealand Gives Up on DRM
• Rural Texas Gets Superfast Wireless Broadband - GigaOM

Roundup: Feb 1, 2008

Some interesting announcements around jQuery

• Ajaxian » jQuery Validation Plugin v1.2 Updated
• Ajaxian » jQuery UI Lead is hired by Liferay
• Ajaxian » Dreamweaver Users Rejoice! Support for JS Libs Now Available.

General interest

• Ajaxian » YUI Grid CSS and Grid Builder
• Julien Lecomte’s Blog » YUI Compressor Version 2.3 Now Available
• molly.com » W3C HTML5 Working Draft Published
• The New Browser War: Mobile Firefox vs. Opera Mini - ReadWriteWeb
• Ajaxian » Rhino on Rails: JavaScript MVC on the server
• Have Facebook Apps Peaked in Popularity? - ReadWriteWeb
• SitePoint CSS Reference

Design

• Ajaxian » Seek or Show: Two Design Paradigms for Lots of Data
• Ajaxian » Dominos: Changing the feedback model
• Tufte iPhone video

And on the funny side

• Dateline Hollywood » Blog Archive » CONGRESS AND PRESIDENT BUSH AGREE ON NETFLIX REBATES FOR AMERICANS DURING WRITERS STRIKE

Design Paradigms for Lots of Data

Theresa Neil (longtime friend, co-conspirator on Open Rico, Sabre UX team and various other projects) has posted her first blog :-) Yes folks there are still a number of really smart people who don't take the time to blog.

Anyway she has a very nice post about two design paradigms for navigating through lots of data.

• The Seek Paradigm: Have the user ask for what they want.
• The Show Paradigm: Display everything up front, and let the user explore and organize it.

The first is usually more prevalent on the web. The latter usually more prevalent on desktop or deeper web applications. Theresa lists 10 different patterns illustrating Seek and Show.

Really Super Cool Job Opening @ Netflix

Update: Position is filled.

We are looking for the following engineer:
This is a research opportunity on a small team trying to build the next generation of the Netflix user experience. The team is comprised of a designer, a UI engineer, a product manager and you. You’ll be working quickly to prototype and research user interaction models for new platforms for the Netflix service. At Netflix we intend to get our electronic movie delivery service to every screen hooked up to the internet. Many of those screens will require a very different site experience, and you will be part of this small team crafting that experience here at Netflix.

To this challenge you’ll bring strong Java, server and scalable systems development. You will need to help move our server architecture forward to allow for us to leverage existing personalization technology on brand new platforms. As the only software engineer on this team, you will be driving the server architecture powering this user interaction research.

Also, we need a really awesome analyst for tearing into all of our A/B testing data. You would be working with our Sr. Analyst, Lisa Mesh.

If you know of anyone that fits either of these jobs please contact me: b dot scott at yahoo dot com.

More New Jobs at Netflix

Update: Positions have been filled.


Nancy Mott recently joined Netflix to head up the design team. She is in the process of expanding the team. Netflix is in the midst of a lot of exciting new directions for the site that you can be on the ground floor creating.

Here are the jobs currently open:

Senior User Interface Designer

Senior Interactive Designer

Senior Visual Concept Designer

And in the world of web services, we snagged Michael Hart as Director of Community Engineering (formerly of MSN/Web Services). He is building open APIs so we need someone who is skilled at creating public developer APIs. If that is you then this job is for you:

Senior Software Engineer—Community Systems (Developer APIs)

All four positions will have a significant impact on Netflix going forward. If you are interested contact me at: b DOT scott AT yahoo DOT com.

Anti-Pattern: Chart Junk - Virtual Pizza Pie Chart - High Tech Chartjunk

Another anti-pattern we should consider relates to how we use visualizations or present charts.

Edward Tufte calls the clutter that often obscures charts or visualizations chartjunk.

Usually it's meaningless colors or styles that hinder rather than help clarify the actual meaning of the chart. But what happens when chartjunk meets high-tech? It gets even more useless. During the CNN coverage for the Iowa Caucus, Anderson Cooper introduced "The Magic Pie Chart". This has got to be one of the silliest abuses of technology I have seen in a long, long time. I can't wait to see what the networks come up with for the 2008 General Election.



What I love is how the technology completely takes over. It pops out and looks like it could hurt someone. Then it obscures the rest of the panelists. And finally Anderson is so enamored with trying to keep it from bursting again that he is using all his brain cycles to keep the 3D virtual pie chart on that silly piece of cardboard.

Here is a more traditional example of chartjunk from Tufte's site.

Anti-Pattern: Missed Moments - Roger's Chocolates

Anti-Pattern: Missed Moments

Recently Tim O'Reilly pointed out the nice Ajax interface that Roger's Chocolate employs. While I think it is pretty cool it does exhibit a common anti-pattern.

As Tim points out "to build a custom assortment of your favorite flavors, you first place an order for the standard assortment, then click on items to take them out of the box, and choose from a list to put others in."



Once you know that process it is indeed fairly easy to customize a box. The problem, however, is that it is not immediately obvious that is the process. Here is how you remove candy from the box (clicking on the 4th candy on the top row will delete it).

And now to add a new candy in it's place you need to click on one of the candy links on the left

The anti-pattern in operation is Missed Moments.

Missed Moments -- Not providing feedback throughout an interaction. Missed moments will confuse the user about what to do during an interaction.

In this example we have two actions we would like to cue the user to do. First, how to remove a piece of candy and second, how to add a new piece of candy in it's place. The current interface tries to do it through help text (a sign that there are no other cues to how to customize your box):

We know that users rarely read instructional text, so a better way to handle this is to provide some timely cues. We can do this through the use of invitational patterns -- inviting the user to perform an action at the moment the action is available.

For delete we can provide a type of invitational pattern, the In-context Tool. In-context tools provide actions near the object being hovered over (the focus of the current action). In this example, when the user hovers over a piece of candy we can show a Delete action represented by a delete icon in context. Here is one way this might be represented:

Compared to just the cursor changing:

Another obvious improvement is to place an invitational message in the empty area once the candy has been removed.

Here are some things I don't like about this. And some alternate suggestions.

• When you hover over the links they show up in the candy slot but don't stick till you click. Hover actions on links are usually confusing (another anti-pattern, Linkitus)
• Referencing another interface element way to the left in the nav list is problematic due to related elements being so far apart. The rules of proximity argue for it to be close by for the action.
• You could just use drag and drop of the flavors. Ideally it would be the candy items you would drag over into the box. But drag/drop is not highly discoverable.

Pulling it Together
Another approach that pulls proximity, invitations and in-context tools together would be to provide the choice for a new flavor like this:

Other ideas for improvement?

Events This Week - Dec. 2nd

Events This Week - Dec. 2nd

Attending & Speaking at Web Builder 2.0 this week in Las Vegas, NV (Dec. 3-4).

Later in the week I will be one of the judges for the PhizzPop Design Challenge (sponsored by Microsoft) down in Los Angeles, CA. That will be Thurs night, Dec. 6.

I also did a podcast with Jared Spool (UIE.com) on Friday. It was about the upcoming Web App Summit 2008 in Coronada Island, CA where I will be giving a talk on "When Designers Get Too Clever: Avoiding the Traps of Bad Design". We chatted about Yahoo!, Netflix, Patterns, Anti-Patterns, Yahoo! Teachers and so on. Always a blast to chat with Jared. Should show up here when the podcast is live.

Look me up if our plans intersect.

Anti-Pattern: Misguided Misdirection - DirecTV

Ok, so I moved to the bay area a couple of years back. I am from Dallas. So with the cowboys doing such an incredible job and the local teams being so horrible I decided to watch some "good football". So I added the NFL Ticket to my DirecTV. As a "bonus" they give you NFL SuperCast. Its a way to watch football online when you are traveling, etc.

So after logging in to the DirecTV site and digging around in the left nav I found the SuperFan (also called SuperCast :-) Login link. Here is the page presented to me:

Apart for the confusing use of "SuperFan" and "SuperCast" here was my thought process:

• I am logged in (A)
  
• It recognizes me as a Registered DTV customer (B)
• But wait, it is asking me if I am registered (C)
  
• Does that mean I am not registered with the SuperFan service? Because it surely knows I am registered (since I am logged in)
  
• Am I a Sunday Ticket SuperFan subscriber? Heck, I am logged in-- you don't know? Yes of course I am.
  
• Hmmm... maybe I need to "Register" my DTV account with the SuperFan service? (D)
• Its also asking me if I am even a DirectTV customer. Huh?
  

At this point I clicked "REGISTER" (thinking I need to register with the SuperFan service).

Did you catch the error message?

You are currently logged in or we are recognizing someone else that has been using this computer. At the top of the page you can either log out or let us know if we are recognizing you or not.

Huh?

Ok, so my problem is I was reading too much in the first page.

Notice the message "Not a DirecTV customer" (E) and the "Order Now" (F).

Even though I am logged in (and thus registered) and have SuperCast/SuperFan the rest of the page does not know if I am registered, if I have SuperCast or even if I have DirectTV!

This is an example of the Anti-Pattern: Misguided Misdirection. It happens when a page has misleading cues, calls to actions, etc. leading the user to do the wrong thing. Notice the large call to actions on the page are "REGISTER" and "ORDER NOW". In reality since I am logged in and a SuperCast member and a DirecTV customer, I don't need all the advertising pleas to get me registered and to buy DirectTV.

What is even more frustrating is after calling the customer support line I suggested they put a note in for the web team to fix this incorrect messaging. I got a "cold shoulder" response and it was obvious that DirecTV did not have a process for this to happen nor did the customer support person care in the least that this page creates a lot of unnecessary calls to their call center.

At Netflix we try to listen carefully to our call center. One recent example was our reps telling us (in a focus group) that they were getting frequent calls with users not being able to find the Member Login link when they come to the Netflix site logged out. The fix? Real simple. Enlarge the "Member Login" link and change the background making this easier to find. The good news-- It worked!

Anti-Patterns: Talk at Web Builders 2007

Earlier this year I started giving talks on Anti-Patterns for Interaction Design.

What are anti-patterns?

Anti-patterns, also called pitfalls, are classes of commonly-reinvented bad solutions to problems. They are studied as a category so they can be avoided in the future, and so instances of them may be recognized when investigating non-working systems. The term originates in computer science, apparently inspired by the Gang of Four's book Design Patterns, which displayed examples of high-quality programming methods. - Wikipedia, Anti-Pattern.

I think of Anti-Patterns as pitfalls with a pithy name.

Like the software anti-pattern counterparts, the following anti-patterns are common pitfalls to avoid when designing interactions.

In the weeks months years :-) to come I will discuss a number of these anti-patterns with real-world examples.

If you are at Web Builder 2.0 in Las Vegas, NV next week I will be giving the Anti-Patterns talk there as well as my Designing the Rich Web Experience Talk (Principles & Patterns).

We are Hiring

Ok, so I am still new at Netflix. But thought it might be interesting to write up my first impressions.

Sean Kane, my predecessor did a really great job of helping me understand the culture so there have been no surprises. No surprises, but a good bit of delight.

Here are some of the ways I would sum up what I have seen so far.

Treated Like Adults
This is a really important cultural trait. It starts with salary. You choose the mix of $ to equity and have the flexibility to switch it around from year to year. We pay extremely well (hey we even brag about it on the site). But it goes beyond that. It works it's way into HR, recruiting and all the other parts of the company that in other places tend to be out of sync. We don't make a bunch of rules. The HR policy manual is extremely small.

Transparency
There is an amazing amount of transparency of how the business is run as well as successes and failures. This makes it a great place to learn and thrive.

Blend of Science & Art
Truly it is consumer science here. A lot of experimenting and analysis. It is very intriguing to work at a place that really gets the importance of a great interface as well as balances it with the realities of business.

And did I mention that we have some of the most incredible work policies and pay anywhere in the country? And we are doing very well?

Ok, so we are hiring!

I am looking to fill two positions immediately on my team.

Sr. Staff UI Engineer
This is a senior position in which you will work closely with me and my team of engineers to improve, architect and code integral solutions that impact the whole site. This is a really key role that will take our site to the next level from a web development best practices, performance and infrastructure perspective.


Senior User Interface Engineer – Customer Service
This is a new position that we are opening up this week. In this role you will help re-design and engineer a new web based customer support center. We will put the same care in this site that we do with the main Netflix site. Many of the ideas, solutions may find there way into the general Netflix site as well. If you love building great web applications then please give me a ping.

Other Positions in Other Teams
Adrian Cockcroft, former Sun Distinguished Engineer and eBay research labs member is just one of the luminaries here at Netflix. Adrian has two immediate openings on his team.

Creative Director.
Yes, we are looking for a talented creative director to work directly with with our VP of Product Management, Gibson Biddle, on taking design for Netflix to a whole new level. Up for the challenge? Let me know.

Sr. Marketing Graphic Designer
Barry Enderwick is looking for a talented graphic designer to work in his team. Barry's team creates the brand, the advertising, the badges, the printed material, etc. If you are a graphic designer this is an awesome opportunity to work on one of the most recognized brands in America.

For all of these positions, feel free to email me. You can reach me at b dot scott at yahoo dot com.

Netflix Here I Come!

Over the last 2+ years I have had the honor and pleasure of working for one of the greatest companies on the planet and with some of the greatest designers & engineers on the planet.

Yahoo! has been a great place for me. I learned a lot. Feel like I contributed a lot. I have had an honored position as a mouthpiece (a genuine one) for Yahoo!

Now its time to move on to the next challenge.

I am excited to announce that I will be joining Netflix as the Director of UI Engineering. Netflix is one of the most amazing companies to work for. And I think the most exciting days are ahead for Netflix. The challenge of digital delivery is something that I think they (we) are ready for.

I am succeeding the excellent Sean Kane who is in stealth mode, co-founding a new startup. I wish Sean amazing success and am looking forward to applying my talents and energies to the world of movies!

MIMA - Jason Freid

Finally got to hear Jason Fried (37 Signals) in person.

I know that Jason is controversial and his stance on team size, ways of working are controversial and cannot (I believe) be applied in every situation.

Its a lot like Extreme Programming. Back at Sabre I lead two engineering teams and we were doing full on XP, agile methodology. As long as it was not treated like a religion but was a set of principles to inform your work I found it to be really useful.

Onto the talk. Jason had some great points. Lots of things that I agree with.

Keep your team small

• Forces you to focus on what's important
• Clearer communication comes for free
• "Communication usually fails except by accident"

Collaboration is about communication, not control

• Keep your team apart. Interruption is not collaboration. Interruption is the enemy of productivity.
• Encourage alone time
• Stay away from each other as much as possible
• Communicate more passively, less actively.

Meetings are toxic

• Usually a symptom of a problem, not a solution. Mentioned a business leader in Brazil who advocates that all meetings are optional.
• Meetings convey an abysmally small amount of information per minute
• Require thorough preparation that people rarely do
• Tend to procreate
  

Instead make tiny decisions

• Decisions are progress
• Progress is great for morale

So I am a realist. Organizations do grow in size. So you have to work hard at keeping teams small. And we should avoid meetings wherever possible. However (and Jason talks about this) you need to communicate with each other in ways that are least disruptive. Meetings do have to happen (Jason is not saying never have a meeting... just they are very infrequent and really are more working sessions).

In different teams I have led I have instituted things like "No Meeting Days". No one is allowed to call a meeting on those days. Or "Work from Home Days". They were all designed to give designers & engineers "flow time". Time to get into the flow of what they are doing and stay there.

If you can have a few hours of non-interrupted productivity it is amazing what you can accomplish. I have had people remark at my crazy "weekend projects". What happens is I get off by myself, no interruptions, no IM, no email and just get into the flow of what I am working on. That zone is the same thing a runner feels with they get that "glow", the groove of running.

Jason talked about the power of REM sleep and compared it to REM Work. Uninterrupted flow. What is interesting is I have over the last few years biased toward open office arrangements. I am beginning to rethink this. Why? Its too easy to interrupt your co-workers with trivial stuff that doesn't demand immediate attention. And verbal communication can be very redundant and time consuming.

A couple of months back I was trying to get a lot of stuff done. So instead of checking email every 15 minutes (!) I decided to check once in the morning and once in the afternoon. Man, I cannot tell you how it changed my day. The ability to get into some work without interruption was exhilarating.

If nothing else, Jason's talk was a wonderful reset for me to think how I manage and remember my number one priority is to make those that work for me successful, productive, motivated and appreciated.

My MIMA Talk

For the folks at MIMA (or others interested), the latest version of my talk Designing for the Rich Web Experience is available for download.

Thanks for all the wonderful comments and discussion afterwards.

I also gave this talk at Yahoo last week. Look for it on the YUI Theatre in a few weeks.