Surfacing the Awesome

At its best, the internet is about Surfacing the Awesome.

  • Google finds your treasure in the sea of noise.
  • Twitter helps you make friends you’d never otherwise meet, who post valuable links you wouldn’t otherwise see.
  • Wikipedia surfaces, shapes, and enables the sharing of our collective knowledge. Good social software works like an artificial reef. Good stuff sticks to it, and everybody wins.
  • StackOverflow surfaces the knowledge and idle brain power of the world’s programmers.

Flickr, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, blogs… I could go on, but you get the idea.

There are few key things the best web services have in common, subtle things that make them great at surfacing the awesome:

  1. They honor the link. Links are the fundamental building blocks of the web. Good web services link out generously, and they also provide discoverable, rot-resistant links inwards.
  2. They don’t try to hoard traffic or attention. This was one of Google’s big insights. Sending users away to the value with zero friction fosters trust and repeat business.
  3. They create more value than they capture. Google captures plenty of value, billions of dollars a quarter in fact, but they still generate far more value than they capture.
  4. They provide value first and capture value later. StackOverflow gives the goods up front and for free. You don’t have to contribute, or even create an account, but if you do contribute, good things happen. You might make friends. You might build a reputation as a solid coder, surfacing your code portfolio that would otherwise be buried in a code repository at your day job. StackOverflow benefits from the audience they’ve created with ads and conferences, but only after they’ve provided the world with value first.
  5. They’re serendipity engines. Sure you can rely on these services to give you what you ask for, but they’re also fuzzy enough that good unexpected things happen too. You might make a new lifelong friend you’d never have met otherwise, or you might discover a band that changes your life.
  6. I’m sure there are other ways that awesomeness is surfaced; can you think of any I’ve missed?

This “Surfacing the Awesome” idea has been on my mind for a while, feels good to get it out there.

Also, I needed this post to exist so I can link to it when I write about the Bizarro services that try to capture the awesome instead of surfacing it.

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/ March 9, 2010 / Category: UX Theory

The real meaning of “Real Artists Ship”

Everybody emphasizes the Shipping part, but I think Artist should be the operative word.

After all, just look at the sheer volume of crap that gets made and shipped.

Shipping is common. Artists are rare.

“Real artists ship” sounds obvious and inevitable coming out of Steve Jobs’ mouth, but can you imagine any other tech manager calling their engineers artists?

Would your boss ever call you an artist? Would you ever call yourself one?

In the practical arts like engineering, design, and architecture, an artist is someone who displays an uncompromising obsession with quality, even if their work is invisible, and damn the consequences:

Yvon Chouinard’s hard steel climbing spikes were the foundation of his business, but they damaged the rocks in Yosemite. Instead of taking the easy path, Chouinard stopped selling the old stuff and invented new climbing equipment that sold better, performed better, and saved Yosemite’s rocks.

Steve Jobs is a product genius, and Jonathan Ive is an industrial design genius, but there’s more to it than that. Everything I’ve read about Apple’s culture says that Steve Jobs’ obsession with quality drives everything. So many crap products get made because artists don’t drive most companies: MBAs, lawyers, office politics, bean counters, and shareholders do.

Consider this story about master carpenter Tsunekazu Nishioka:

“I watched four senior carpenters standing at attention, silently accepting a stiff rebuke from the master. Their crime: someone had miscalculated a few millimeters on a hip rafter. The difference was hardly noticeable, even close up, but since the beam was designed to achieve its perfect form only after several years of sagging and shrinking, this small error would be magnified and possibly distort the whole. Fumed Nishioka, ‘They’ll laugh at me. They’ll say, “That’s not the way a hip rafter should look!’ And I won’t be around to defend myself.”

I bet most of us are inspired by that kind of commitment, but we don’t practice it in our work. How could we when most jobs are about not rocking the boat, punching a clock, avoiding blame, and making deadlines. In other words most jobs are about shipping, not making art.

So how do we get from just shipping to shipping art? I’m wrestling with this personally right now, and it’s not easy. The fixes are obvious, but they’re also terribly difficult because they require courage and sustained effort over time.

Notes:

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/ March 8, 2010 / Category: UX Theory / Tags:

Never let them see you sweat

Sprezzatura

“This is an archaic Italian word for being able to do your craft without a lot of visible effort. It’s a combination of elan and grace and class, sort of the opposite of loud grunts while you play tennis or a lot of whining and fuss when you help out a customer.”

— Seth Godin’s blog

I’m glad there’s a word for that. I’ve been thinking about it since I saw Kim Yu-Na win gold in Vancouver.

Her performances looked effortless, while her competitors looked stiff, the effort plain on their faces.

Great performers make their spectacular work look easy, inevitable even.

Listen to Apple’s Jonathan Ive discussing his work in Objectified. He talks about simplicity in design and the illusion of inevitability. Ive is my favorite industrial designer because he puts users first saying, “the terrible struggles we as designers and engineers had in trying to solve the problems” should be invisible.

Otherwise it wouldn’t be magic.

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/ March 4, 2010 / Category: UX Theory / Tags:

The UX Hero Guide to Customer Service

Shortly after I posted about being locked out of Google Groups, Google engineer Brian Fitzpatrick fixed it for me. I’m grateful to Brian, and it’s impressive that Google engineers care enough to patrol the internet’s rooftops so they can help customers in need.

So, while my problem got fixed, and I got personal attention from the guy who wrote the book on Subversion (swoon!), why am I not happy?

Here’s why:

Let’s say my food comes out wrong at a restaurant. I think, “hey, these things happen, I won’t freak out because there’s a protocol for this.” Then I patiently explain the problem to my server, the server cheerfully fixes the issue, and we both get to look like heroes.*

Now, let’s say the server ignores me. At this point everyone loses because it’s not a routine bug anymore, it’s a confrontation. I’ve got to find the manager and dump my problems on her. She’ll have to deal with me, with the server, and no matter how the manager fixes the problem, it can’t make up for the ruined meal and the stress incurred on everyone.

This is exactly how it feels to customers when we’re forced to resort to complaining on the internet because there’s a breakdown in customer service.

The path for users to get help must be clearly marked and well lit. No ambiguity, no forks in the road.

Here’s an example of what I mean, fresh in my mind because it happened yesterday:

  1. I noticed I wasn’t getting Twitter updates, so I went to Twitter’s help site.
  2. Like a good user, I made sure my problem wasn’t on the “known issues” list.
  3. It wasn’t a known issue, so I looked for the “Report a Problem” button and…
  4. Uh oh. No button. Anywhere.

It turns out there is a support form, but I only found it after stumbling around Get Satisfaction. The whole time I thought, “I should just complain directly to @alex, @ev, @biz, @stop, and whoever else I can think of who works at Twitter.” If there’s no official community manager, users will seek out whoever has a public face at the company.

Remember, the key is that the customer and the waiter both know and follow the service protocol. If the customer has to opt out of a dead end service path to complain to the manager, or to the internet, everyone loses.

* I’m serious about the “looking like heroes” thing. Your boss, date, or whoever you’re eating with is watching you. The prime social directive is to add to everyone’s enjoyment while gliding over the potholes. Meanwhile the prime service directive is not just to serve, but to have customers come away with warm fuzzies and maybe even a story about how good the service was.

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/ March 2, 2010 / Category: UX Theory / Tags: , , ,

Google customer support: “WE DON’T CARE. WE DON’T HAVE TO. WE ARE THE ROBOTS.”

A long time ago I created a Google Group to support GTDTW.

Then one day I got locked out of my group and all Google Groups. For any Groups page all I see is this unhelpful roadblock:

Now, I don’t mind being banned by an algorithm. These things happen. What I do mind is that thanks to Google’s robotic customer service I have no recourse. I used their “can’t access Google” help form, and this was their response:

Hello,

We’ve received your report that you’re having trouble accessing a Google product. After completing our investigation, we’ve found a violation of our Terms of Service -OR- product-specific program policies.

As a result, we’re unable to grant you access to this product.

Regards,
The Google Team [screenshot of this email]

The “after completing our investigation” part is rich, as if an actual human took a look at my case. Note that they don’t say why I’m banned, or how I can fix the situation.

Google’s email should have just said, “WE DON’T CARE. WE DON’T HAVE TO. WE ARE THE ROBOTS.”

UPDATE: Google engineer Brian Fitzpatrick reached out and fixed my Google Group ban for me shortly after I posted this. Then I wrote a follow up post about why it’s not good when users have to resort to complaining on the internet in order to get service.

Notes:

  • Google, you’re not making me feel super good about how much I rely on you. With one hand you’re ramming your social media strategy down our throats, and with the other hand you’re capriciously banning legitimate users whose only recourse is to make noise about it on the internet.
  • Google makes billions every quarter, yet somehow they can’t hire any humans to act as a fail safe against their inevitably flawed algorithms. It doesn’t matter how good a company’s technology is, they’ll always need a human backstop for their automated support.
  • Watch for this pattern: Once Google commoditizes a product category, they totally stop caring. Look at Feedburner, Google Reader, Analytics, Groups, and most of their acquisitions: they’re all either stagnant or dead.
  • Why do I care that I’m locked out? Because Google uses Groups to support all their other products that I use. Many independent third party software developers also use Groups as a support forum.
  • Oh, and for the record, I’m a good person, not a bot or a spammer, and I never used my Google Group for anything but supporting my little open source project.
  • What’s with the full on ban? Why not just make Groups read only for me? Lame.
  • Remember when I said “if you can’t spot your community manager, it’s you”? I wonder how much of Matt Cutts’ email volume is just good people reaching out to the only approachable human face Google has. (Just like I’m about to do.)
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/ February 25, 2010 / Category: Bad UX / Tags: ,