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Anna Karenina Principle of UX

Tolstoy opens the book Anna Karenina:

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

For UX, this is:

“Good UX are all alike; every bad UX is bad in its own way.”

There are many ways to break a user experience. Latency, complexity, redundancy, underdelivery. All good UX is fast, simple, logical and rewarding. This doesn’t mean all UI have to be the same: the vehicle of UI that delivers the UX can and should differ.

In order to find out what good UX is, study all UX, including the bad ones. Aim at comprehensive elimination of obstacles.

Also check out Anna Karenina principle on Wikipedia, with the great example of domestication of animals from Jared Diamond. 

Oh and by the way: Anna Karenina: Read the Book, Skip the Movie.

Reverse Planning for Your New Year Resolutions

In 2012 I quit my job and founded a startup, built a team, wrote and published a startup book, produced an indie nature documentary and moved between countries twice. It was a productive year. Here’s what I wrote about my productivity planning exactly a year ago.

New Year forces you to stop and think about what you’ve done, what you haven’t done, and what you want to do. A year ago I chose to put more work into things that matter and less into things that don’t matter. I chose to drop quite a few things altogether. I’ve also chosen to reverse the planning process. Here’s how.

I work with and think about startups most of my waking hours and a few of the non-waking ones, so ‘lean’ and ‘agile’ and ‘iterative’ are thoughts that I’ve applied in my personal routines as well. Two years ago I was even creating an iteration-driven personal productivity system, but I realized soon that it doesn’t work for me anymore. I’ve encouraged and followed the idea of ‘efficient drifting’, where you head onwards with the flow and steer as new channels are revealed (not too far from evidence-based management, or lean principles).

The problem with iterative models both in life and in product development is that it is too easy to bend and change direction. In pivoting a startup, you bend rather than break, and this is good. You get a new direction that is more sustainable, and you head there as long as the evidence and customer adoption is there. Say, a social news service can’t find sustainable revenues, and pivots into a vertical ad network that makes money and is profitable. But what if you don’t like vertical ad networks?

This is where life differs from startups (though, maybe startups shouldn’t differ from life in that – another topic for later). You may not like your direction, or at least all the directions that your various projects are taking.

Reverse planning is one answer. In reverse planning, you set your goal first, and chart your path from that goal to the present moment, in reverse order. I find there are hard and soft versions of reverse planning.

Hard reverse planning – this style has its roots in military theory. There is an exact end state that needs to be reached, and a careful plan is constructed to get to that point. This works on some level.

Soft reverse planning – this is an NLP or self-suggestive practice, where you vividly imagine the goal you want to reach, and equally vividly imagine the steps required to get you there. Visualization, repetition and linguistic enforcement is key here.

I use elements of both without putting either force or blind faith into the process. In setting a long-term goal with reverse planning, you always have to make sure you are dealing with things that have as few immutables as possible. Medium-term goals can have more environmental factors in them, and short-term planning can better take into account contingencies.

Here’s how I follow a reverse planning process for meaningful productivity.

1. Goals: Decide on your long-term goal. Here, we’re talking the the very basics. Happiness? Money? Fame? Expertise in a certain field? Pick it and write it down. Avoid using anything external in this goal – it must come from yourself, and only include yourself. That way, only you are responsible. This is your goal, your decision. This is what is valuable to you. Long-term, here, can mean anything from a few months to a few years, depending what you are applying it to. Give it a deadline.

2. Stages: Break it down into medium-term stages. These are goals, too, but they have instrumental value. They help you towards your long-term goal. They are stages, because they allow you to stop and realize you’ve made your progress towards the end-goal. They all have deadlines. Between stages, you can have anything from a couple of weeks to a few months.

3. Steps: Chart the short-term steps that will take you to the first medium-term stage. These are the exact things you need to do, the actions you have to take, the people you have to convince, the sales you have to make that take you to the end of this medium-term stage. These must be exact, and for these you can use whatever process and productivity method you find works for you (calendar, Kanban, GTD, Agile, Superfocus + Pomodoro…). During the steps, you will steer your course towards the stage.

4. Breather: Once you reach a Stage (a medium-term goal), stop. Look what you did, what worked, what didn’t. Did you reach the stage by the deadline? If not, maybe you are a bit further down the mountain still, but you are heading up (or are you?). Evaluate your next Steps to the next Stage. Chart your path, make sure it leads in the right direction, and that the Stage is still relevant. If you ended up on a different Stage because things have changed, maybe you will have to change your next couple of Stages too, before you get back on track with your planned Stages. Then keep going.

That’s all there is to reverse planning, the way I do it. It seems to work pretty well, and being able to set your own value is powerful. With the advent of lean, agile and evidence-based fly-by-wire management, planning has been getting a bad rap. But efficient planning - making a plan, sticking to it, and hitting your goal - is both powerful and empowering.

A peek into Citibank’s HTML Markup

Here’s just a glimpse of the HTML ingenuity of whoever coded the Citibank online banking system.

How to indicate an empty line or create vertical whitespace between content items:

<tr><td><br></td></tr>

What to do if there is no empty row between content items:

<!- -<tr><td><br></td></tr>- ->

Of course. 

Donating domains TheNewPirateBay.com, .org and TNPB.co

I want to donate my domains TheNewPirateBay.com, TheNewPirateBay.org and TNPB.co for a good cause. Or at least an interesting cause. 

Why do I have them? I wanted to do an experiment where searches would return results from both torrent trackers and from legitimate sites. Thus, a search for the movie “Transformers” would return the torrents, but also links from iTunes, Amazon, Netflix and others. It would then be up to the user to choose which path they would take. The mockups I made had a “left hand path” and a “right hand path” respectively. 

Why am I not doing anything with them? Firstly, I’m really busy with my Vuact, my video engagement startup. Secondly, I’m slightly busy with my book Speed Up Your Startup that gathers tips for founders to accelerate their business without joining an accelerator. Thirdly, I never nailed down an approach I was completely happy with for this concept.

Who will I donate them to? Anyone with an interesting idea. What I described above could be option (though the legitimate sites could try to stop the site from linking to them, or at least block any affiliate payments). Whatever you do, that’s up to you. The initial motivation for registering the sites was really to conduct an experiment – to see whether there a new model of piracy was possible, one that would benefit the traditional content channels in traditional ways, too. TNPB.co is of course meant to be a shortener, so there’s a social, P2P dimension that could be built into this even more than the current sites feature.

Do I condone piracy? I have mixed feelings about the topic. To me, it is more a structural problem than a moral or legal problem. The structure of content distribution and compensation has not kept up with our media. Piracy is not going away, but instead it will change the whole structure. The question is whether it will change the structure by tearing it down or by building it into something new. I’ve written a book, and I’m much more interested in piracy as a distribution and marketing channel than worried about it eating into any sales.

I’m not expecting anything in return, though I’d be happy to be involved on some level we agree on and help with concepting.

Tell me why you’d want them and what you would do with them, either in the comments or connect with @mhj on Twitter.

Startups, please write better emails!

tl;dr In the emails you send about your product, take a moment to remind the recipient what you do and what your value proposition is. Many won’t remember otherwise.  Contains examples.

I’ve signed up to lots of startup announcements, mailing lists and beta-queues. I’m not alone in that. That means I get lots of emails announcing a new product or an update to an old one. Shockingly many share the same problem: they don’t tell me what the product does.

Unless you are emailing a frequent user, don’t assume the recipient knows what your product is and what it does. If you have a ‘creative’ name (goes for most of us, that!), assume you have to introduce yourself and what you do again. And definitely, if you are sending an announcement months after a user signed up to your list, you must remind them why you are emailing them and what you’re about.

Otherwise you completely miss your opportunity to communicate with the recipient. I know you think about your startup 24/7. I, however, don’t. Never assume I know anything. Or that I’ll look at your email for longer than 0.5 seconds.

Ruthlessly, I’m taking a recent sampling from my inbox. For the purposes of this post I checked out the sites to suggest a quick one-liner to include in the email.

Cue 

Got this today. Couldn’t remember what they do. Judging by the features they curtly mention, maybe a calendar or a reminder app? And it’s an update? Did they email me by accident? And it comes from a no-reply@. That’s just spelling “f*** off” to me. The big companies do that. Don’t be like that.

I’d be happier if you started with: “Cue is the best way to know what’s next in your day by giving you an intelligent snapshot of your various services, streams and notifications.” (ok, a bit long, sorry).

Starforce Delta 

Image includes spaceships, thank goodness, wouldn’t know otherwise. Especially since they changed the product’s name. (Ok, these guys I would know since I used to work with them, but unless all recipients are like me, they’ll miss out on a few!).

Try opening with: “Starforce Delta is a deep space role-playing shoot-them-up in your browser. Enroll now for the first wave!”

Avocado 

Against the odds I know what these guys do, though I haven’t used their product. I remember them because they used the word “boo”. Otherwise, the beginning of the email is vaguely descriptive. “Couples”, “calendars” and “reminders” gives you the idea.

Maybe improve by opening boldly with the value proposition: “Avocado is the best way to stay connected with the most important person in your life.”

Learnist 

The name puts you in the right frame, but there are no specifics in the message itself. I don’t actually remember what I’m supposed to do with the app, and I’ve downloaded it. It sounds like it’s for learning, but then the first paragraph tells me it’s more about teaching. Hmm.

How about starting with: “Learnist is the mobile product for curating and following complete learning experiences. Share what you know!”

Medium 

Good and clear. Introduction, and then “new publishing platform”. There’s more to it, but at least I’m in the right frame reading the rest of the message. Medium has the added benefit that they are pretty famous, so they get away with it. I signed up immediately. I won’t attempt copywriting tips to the platform that regularly brings me amazing reading.

That’s it. Now, how’s your email clickthrough been lately?

Edit: There’s a conversation on Hacker News. And I was planning to go out after I posted this.

A YouTube video transcript that’s 83% wrong

Why would you release a product that works only 17% of the time? YouTube’s automatic transcripts are really bad, but just how bad can they get? Here’s an example: Introduction to LiveCode video on YouTube. A screenshot of the first few lines of transcription:

There are about 12 words right from 70. That’s a 17% success rate.

Transcripts work for some spoken content (here’s a good physics lecture), but why let the feature run for content where it clearly doesn’t work? Approximation is not good enough. A wrongly transcribed word is usually completely wrong, especially for a product that monetizes with contextual advertising.  

The Futility of Strong AI

TL;DR: The Singularity won’t happen.

I posted this long comment in the Hacker News thread about Noam Chomsky’s interview in The Atlantic about Artificial Intelligence. Like too often, I paid more attention to thread than the article (which I’m still to read completely). But here are my thoughts on Strong AI and why it won’t work (see the whole thing in context here):

For me, this perfectly sums up the futility of the Strong AI / AGI research project. So much of what we consider to be ‘intelligence’ or repercussions of intelligence are in fact language-based communications and culture - with an immense genetical legacy, bias, and quite frankly, burden. To create human-equivalent intelligence, most or indeed all of these evolutionary biases would have to be built in. 

Consider a different example: constructing artificial vision. Human vision is the result of evolution, of course. It is incredibly inefficient, but evolution is blind (sorry). When we now construct computer vision, we capture an optical image and transmit it optically as long as possible, since this preserves information. The human eye does not: it sends information via neurons to the visual cortex, compromising immensely in bandwidth. That’s why we need visual error-correction mechanisms in the brain, and redundancy of visual information (achieved by the eye moving rapidly many times per second, for example).

When we construct optical computer vision that achieves the a similar thing as human vision, the two have nothing in common. You can’t plug in the artificial front end into the biological back end. The two systems produce literally different images, that are not comparable. The systems will not communicate with each other. We have skipped the legacy of biological evolution completely. To create an artificial system that accurately corresponds to the biological would be an immense waste.

The same goes for intelligence. Our ‘wet’ evolved intelligence is an entirely different picture from the project of Strong AI. They will produce very different manifestations of interacting with the world. Why would the latter ever result in the illusion of free will or the self-referentiality of personal identity, two things we assume are parts of human-level intelligence? They are like the neurological channels for conveying an optical image: hopelessly inefficient, but the ones that make sense in the light of our evolutionary legacy.

As a side note, yes we know of a time when there was no language, but it not a good representation to consider that a binary switch. We know of complex communication between other animals, and given that even current languages are in rapid flux, I think it is is fair to think of the transition from pre-language to language a continuum. Language is still arising. 

Interactive Infographic: Startups and Accelerators

As a part of the research for my new book for startup founders, Speed Up Your Startup, I conducted survey research with other founders. Here are some of the results as an interactive infographic!