Archives for April 2014

Simple UX up front, smart data in the rear

The mullet is a hairdo that people love to tease. There are a slew of tumblrs to explore the magic that the juxtaposition of a “business up front, party in the rear” style provides.

I am intrigued by another type of mullet, one that pairs simple experiences in the front (client UI) with smart backends.

As the industry evolves we have the opportunity for the best of all worlds, if we set things up just right.

If we look at the various ages of computing, we have seen the pendulum swing several times wrt the client and the server.

• Mainframe: power on the server
• PC: a lot of client centric applications
• Client server: richish clients talking back to a server
• Browser: simple clients connected to the Internet

The Mobile Era

Mobile really took off when a few innovations came together:

• Somewhat viable cellular network with data
• The full Web experience on a phone (iPhone 1.0)
• Rich applications on the device (post-Symbian etc).

We have had a first rush to get a nice front end talking to the backend on the Internet. It drives me nuts when I see applications that aren’t sync’d to the backend in some manner.

I switched from a pen and paper journal to the 5 Minute Journal app and had to use all of the power of “gratitude” to not be maddened when all of my data was lost. No backup. In 2014? I assume that this isn’t the case. Never use user data.

I feel like we are seeing various stages of application in mobile:

Nice mobile UI

We started with a gold rush to take something people wanted, and wrap it in a nice mobile form factor using affordances that make sense. This would get you far.

Nice mobile UI talking to the server

The real power was having the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy in your pocket. Now your mobile application is a view on top of the backend data, so you can do so much more (and access it from anywhere).

Collaboration and multi-user views

Single task apps can be very useful and popular, but I am seeing an increase in great collaborative applications:

• That trivia app is fun and all, but way more fun when you play against your mates.
• Sharing Asana with my family has been fantastic and we stay in sync in a way that would never happen if we had our own silos of tasks and info
• Quip is a great example of a mobile-first, multi-user assumed application
• Avocado is a great app for couples, but it is an example of the silo. What if you want other views and info as a couple? What if you actually want to extend beyond the couple? It feels like a dead end to me.

Multiple apps and views on the same data

This is where I really hope we get too. The mullet of apps. So many of the apps that I use are data silos. Some talk to each other through APIs, webhooks, and IFTTT….. but I need more.

Asana isn’t a task list for me, it is my extended brain. I have a slew of processes that keep it useful and organized, but I only have one client that thinks of everything as a task.

I would love to have various apps and views that take in the different data sets and allow me to interact differently with that data. The app that is aware of my book library isn’t the same as my task list, or my “raw thoughts” or my gift ideas or my decision tracking or my habit checklists etc.

I really hope that someone cracks the nut of having some shared data stores where multiple views can be written on top of them. Smart systems can be put in place to help the data.

I can see this world in my minds eye, and it is a world where the mullet is beautiful.

Perceived performance and using asynchronous actions to make users happy

As an engineer I care about the perceived experience for my users and speed is a key part of the experience. A common practice is to build your programs to be as asynchronous as possible. This has always been the case in client UI development and is very much en vogue on the server (evented architectures using technology such as node.js as an example).

On the server you don’t want the program to wait and you want to be able to parallelize as much as possible. For users? Don’t make them wait or stare at a screen.

Of course, you often may be waiting for critical content that means you can’t act on the current path until it comes back but there is often a way to improve even those use cases. The key is “perceived performance”. Something can often take longer in actual time, but due to some other factor it can feel faster.

ASIDE: The type of spinner you use matters too! Facebook found that users blamed them for slowness when using a custom control and the platform when using a standard control!

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That Felt Faster (because I was doing something)

One example is the notion of the self-checkout line (I work in retail ☺). Most people feel like their checkout is faster when they are going through self checkout, but often it isn’t the case at all. The customer feels more productive when doing a self-checkout vs. standing their watching someone else (often times not knowing what to do!)

How can we take that same effect to software experiences? We can asynchronously load data in the background and let the user keep doing something while they wait.

There are plenty of examples of this, and the classic case is: “Open URL in a new tab”

Nine times out of ten I open a URL in a new tab. Why? Sometimes I am in the middle of reading something and I am saying “I want to read that later” and this adds the reading to the stack. At other times I know that it will take some time to load the other item, so my desire is “I will keep poking around here until it is loaded thanks”.

There are other cases where you want to add something to the stack. For example, “add to reading list”, “add to playlist”, and “add reminder”.

A Blank Stare

I really despise watching paint dry, and I feel like I have to do that regularly when I tap on a link, see a blank white page, or a spinner, or notice that a @font-face hasn’t loaded! This tends to happen a lot when I am in an application that launches a web page in a WebView.

It goes beyond reading too. In the same spirit of the “Add to playlist” (or “play next”) I often find myself in an audio application (e.g. podcast app) wanting to tell the system “go ahead and start downloading this and when it is done jump over to it to start playing please”. Instead, I get frustrated when it jumps to the new item and I am listening to crickets as it downloads the new content. This is common when I am listening to something already downloaded (e.g. audible book) and want to start listening to a podcast that isn’t downloaded yet.

Maybe we want to be in a bubble

A fantastic example of the asynchronous loading taken to the next level is LinkBubble. As soon as I saw it I wanted all of my platforms to support this style. Let me fire off the new action (open a link), give me an indication to the progress (in the bubble), and let me jump to it when it is done.

This can even go beyond links, and could be a new interaction model, one that lets the user tell me when they are interested in some new data, but continue doing what they are doing until they can instantly act on it.

When I look at the interactions that I provide the user, I now try to let them be productive even when their primary action requires some time.

Get good and repairing it and you will be set for the long term

I really believe in the power of a daily habit. Whenever I have started with lofty goals versus a daily habit, I have been overwhelmed.

Conversely when I have started with “lets just do it every day” I have seen success. This has been true in my real blogging days. On TheServerSide and then Ajaxian, it started with “write something every day”. That became four-ish a day, and once mature there were goals around quality, but that was after the habit was born (and months or years passing!).

Jony Ive talks about how delicate ideas are and how they can easily die early. The daily habit allows for the ideas to grow without pressure sucking the life out of them. Kinda like how you shouldn’t put too much pressure on your kids as they grow right? ☺

Jerry Seinfeld Productivity

Much has been made of Jerry Seinfeld and how he doggedly would write material every day. What if you have a creativity / writers block? Just write.

Jerry emphasized this by saying:

“Don’t break the chain!”

I found this amusing when I first heard of it as I often recall the Seinfeld episode where he and George procrastinate rather than ever work on writing for the show. I imagined Jerry and Larry David doing just that as they wrote the show. Huh, what really happened with Jerry over the years?

I would love to ask him what be did when he broke the chain, as I am sure he did.

Aside: maybe not. A neighbor has gone for at least a 30 minute run every day for over 30 years. Never even let any sickness stop him. Wow. What will happen when he does break it though?

For me, the chain has been powerful, but has also had interesting side effects that are not always positive.

For example, I beat my Nike Fuel goal for a couple hundred days and then the thing lost its juice one day and boom, the chain was broken. I was so demotivated to start from zero that I tossed the darn thing in disgust.

Aside: To be fair it wasn’t just the streak that caused this change. I also seeing that he streak and the tool was owning me vs. the other way around. Rather than hitting the weight room for some much needed high intensity training, I would run to get in more steps and hit the goal. I have to admit to also being a bit of a [bracelet wanker] and moving my arm to get some final points. Who am I cheating here but myself?

Repairing the Chain

With this history, I started to focus on having systems to get me back on track again when I inevitably fall off the wagon. They can be quite simple and obvious:

• I have a personal trainer twice a week, so if I am out of town and miss a work out, he is waiting for me as soon as the next session comes around. People are great motivators. If I can’t make a badminton foursome with mates, they are ribbing me for letting them down and I better show up next week.
• If I miss a day of DuoLingo, I still have time schedule the next day to get back in the game. The same is true for my other “quick” daily habits. For example, my gratitude journal app (5 Min Journal) will send me an alert the next day.

To make sure that I would be setup for the long term, I often start and break a chain early in the process to teach myself that it is OK, and that it can be repaired. By growing strength in repairing the chain I feel like I am better set for long term success. After all, if you get good at repairing something rather than just building it from scratch, you will have so many more options.

The Meta Process

I have ended up having a process for every habit. We have learned how we get decision fatigue, so I try to minimize spending mental energy on anything minor. For example, I have processes for:

Supplements (Vitamins++):

Not only do I note what I take every day, I also define how to buy them, how I can fit two bottles in one for some of them, how I fill up my weekly pill tracker box, and also track data on why I take what I take, why those particular ones, and any data that is important to me on supplementation (eg, mapping to my own health scores on WellnessFX).

Check lists:

I have daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly check lists that I schedule in my calendar. These make sure to kick me back in gear. There is only so many times “meditate already!” can ping me daily and I ignore it 😉

These check lists also get me to the quantitative path. Once I have gotten started with “do one more push-up every day” I can then get to more measurements around strength so I can make sure I am spending time making a difference..

This only happens once you have given yourself a chance to see that you can do what you thought you couldn’t.

I knew I wasn’t a runner…. that it wasn’t my thing. Then I decided to try running every day. No goal around how far or for now long at first. Just: “get out of the front door with your running shoes on”. Once there you end up running. Once running every day you see yourself improve. Fast forward a bit and you realize that you are a runner.

You can do anything, and you put some simple rules in place that got you to showing yourself once again that you have a growth mindset, and destiny awaits.

With a growth mindset all of the attributes that you applied to yourself become malleable. I used to have a fear of heights and even that has largely gone away with the mental strength to grow. Food that I didn’t like have become ones that I love, because I had the will to try them again, and appreciate what they do for me.

What’s your next habit?

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Huh, I just realised that this is my second posting that relates to Jerry Seinfeld! In the first one I related his views of one man show comedian to comedy show producer to software teams:

Do you want to work on a large production or a small team? If you are in software, like Jerry Seinfeld you can own your choice