My Transition from Developer to Manager

The last few years have been quite busy (it’s always good to have more work than you have time, than the other way round). Some things I’ve done but haven’t had the time to write about yet:

• I finally got around to experimenting with a Raspberry Pi I had bought a couple of years ago
• I installed LiteCoin Core and wrapped my head (partially) around Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies
• Got a new gaming laptop and HTC Vive VR headset to get to explore the current state of gaming, simulation and VR

But most importantly, the event that led to maximum learning was my transition from being a software developer to managing a team of software developers. I wrote about it on Medium here.

I’m hoping to write a bit more this year. Most likely random, experimental writing on this blog and more solidified thoughts on Medium.

An Exercise in Analytics: Using Microsoft SandDance to Visualize Trends at CraftConf

I’ve been lucky to attend every CraftConf Budapest since its inception in 2014.  It has always been a mind-expanding experience, with a healthy mix of established and newcomer speakers from the tech industry worldwide. Although Craft, as the name suggests, is focused on Software Craftsmanship, the specific topics of talks vary each year as industry trends fluctuate. I was interested in taking a deeper look at trends of technologies and paradigms as they become more or less popular over time, and to find those, if any, whose popularity has remained more or less constant.

While doing some research into data analytics for a project at work, I came across Microsoft SandDance. My interest in the CraftConf data was the perfect opportunity to teach myself SandDance (and some Python as well). So I put together a quick experiment: Using Martin’s excellent tutorial on Web Scraping with Python as a reference, I wrote  a Python script that scrapes CraftConf’s talk descriptions (using archives from 2014, 2015 and 2016) and produces a CSV file of the most frequently occurring words. Obviously standard English language words like pronouns, days of the week, and so on are ignored. What we’re left with is a list of top 100 words for each year, and their frequencies of occurrence, which can be visualized  in SandDance.

Although this approach is quick and more or less effective, the limitation is that it may not accurately reflect trends for phrases like “Agile Methodology” — the word frequency of “agile” may not be the same as that of “methodology”. But that’s something that can be worked on later. So although I would take this as a good indicator (which meets my purpose), I wouldn’t use the analysis outcomes as a serious reference.

What the Data Tells Us

Here are some interesting findings from the first pass (150 of the most frequent words selected, out of those 100 produced after filtering out common and punctuated words):

• “Product” showed up 26 times in 2015 and nearly doubled to 51 in 2016 (a growing trend: no talk, some talk, twice the talk…)
• “Functional” [programming] appeared 16 times in 2014, and not in the other 2 years (something that’s coming and going?)
• Similarly, “Architecture” showed up respectively 15, 37 and 23 times (up and down)
• “DevOps” was an equally hot trend in 2014 and 2015 but didn’t show up in 2016 (presumably because the hype is over)
• “Microservices” appears 29 times in 2016, but didn’t show up in the previous years (so there is a recent spike in popularity)

 

Tim Steigert’s Closing Keynote at CraftConf 2016

See for Yourself

As a fun exercise in data visualization and trend analysis, I encourage you to try it out for yourself, using the CSV file produced by my script. To start with:

• Load the dataset: Dataset > Web > CSV file (Keep “First line is header” checked)
• Set the URL to the CSV file link above, and click Load
• View as: Column
• X Axis: Keyword
• Sum by, Facet by: None
• Color by: Keyword
• Sort by: Frequency
• Set the X axis bins to: 100

The typical way to drill down using SandDance would be:

• Select a keyword (say “lean”)
• Click Isolate. Everything else gets filtered out (note the “Filtered” count increased from 0 to 2)
• Now you can check “Details”, or “Facet by…”, for example
• To go back, simply click “Filtered” to clear the selection

Isolating the keyword “Architecture” in SandDance

Isolating the “Other” keyword will reveal a whole lot of keywords that don’t show up in the first 100 bins. You can also take the SandDance tour (by clicking on Tour) and discover many other interesting ways of playing with SandDance.

You can find the source code in my Git Repository WordFreqCount. If you find it useful, please feel free to reuse, derive from or improve it. Note that credit goes to Martin for the original code on web scraping using Python and Beautiful Soup, which I largely adapted from. And of course, thanks to Microsoft for making the elegant and powerful SandDance available for free!

“Agile Architecture”: Is Your Product’s Architecture Simply a Reflection of its Release Schedule?

After recently reading George Fairbanks’ Just Enough Software Architecture and obtaining 90% in my TOGAF 9.1 Foundation Certification exam in Enterprise Architecture, I’ve naturally been thinking about Software Architecture a lot. The other day a friend and I were talking about a typical scenario, involving large scale products with multiple sprint teams on a tight delivery schedule. I will over-simplify and over-generalize it here:

The Scenario

Let’s say you’re building a product which requires a feature that a snapshot can be exported to a PNG file. This is typically what would happen:

• Product Owner: “As a user, I want to export snapshot to PNG, so that I can email it as an attachment to the Finance Department”
• Story is added to Product Backlog, prioritized during the Sprint Grooming and estimated in the Sprint Planning
• Developer Dinesh starts working on it, he adds the Export to PNG feature, it is demo’d at the end of the Sprint and everyone is happy

The feature and product iteration is shipped, customers start using it, the product team goes back to juggling new features and bugs. Priorities and sprint teams change. Somewhere down the line, another requirement comes up:

• Product Owner: “As a user, I want to export snapshot to PDF, so that I can archive it in the Document Management system” (Don’t ask why the two systems can’t work with the same format).
• Story is added, prioritized and estimated. This time though, Dinesh isn’t around (he’s either on vacation, promoted, no longer in the company or simply more focused on another aspect of the product)
• Developer Gilfoyle starts working on this feature. From this point on, 3 things can happen:
  • Rearchitecture: An experienced developer or architect recognizes the potential of code reuse/refactor/rearchitecture between the two implementations. A common interface emerges, common functionality is moved up and specific functionality is moved to concrete classes. Note that:
    • Code is refactored
    • Some previously existing code is even thrown away
  • Technical Debt is accrued: Gilfoyle has limited time to implement the new feature; on the UI side the “Export to…” menu selections show up users would expect, but the internal implementation is disjoint. The code is not clean (but does the job), the Export functionality is not unified into a single interface and there is code duplication.
    •  In some of the stakeholders’ minds, code has been “reused” from the previous implementation, but in reality it has been copy-pasted (imitation being the best form of flattery towards Dinesh)
    • The team and PO might even recognize the Technical Debt and add it to the backlog, to be dealt with in the future at a lower priority (although that tends to lead towards a Bottomless Backlog)

In both cases, layers emerge in software over time as features are added and the product evolves. However, the first case has architectural layers and the second exhibits feature layers: In extreme cases, you might even be able to infer the Product Backlog by looking at the order in which features were added.

The Analysis

Some thoughts:

• “The Technical Debt Trap“: Doc Norton explained it very well at CraftConf 2016 (video link): (a) Most of what we have come to call “Technical Debt” is actually code cruft, and (b) “clean, testable code is a pre-requisite to being able to pay back Technical Debt”.
• Show me the $: While a Product Owner may have limited influence over where budget is spent, a Product Manager may be in a better position to limit the long term negative effects of decisions made within the scope of individual sprints
• One size does not fit all: Complex products or long development cycles, must be overseen by an experienced Architect or Development Lead, who advises the PO, PM and other decision makers
• Stakeholders pay for the product, not the code: For stakeholders coming from a more traditional software engineering background, it may seem like throwing away (or refactoring) code is a questionable decision, because money was spent on producing it. This thinking must be erased by clarifying the benefits of a more robust and maintainable design.

The Solution (Maybe)

In summary: Features, as seen by the business, are not always the same as features, as seen by the developers. I’m tending to think the solution might be to maintain two backlogs: a business-oriented Product Backlog, and an architecture-oriented Technical Backlog. The latter would go into the details of how the business needs will be met at a technical level, driven by the objectives of overall cohesiveness, maintainability and constant reduction of Technical Debt. Here’s how I imagine it:

Note that the technical effort to achieve a given amount of business features, is more than what it would be if the team worked off of a single backlog. This is simply because the Technical Backlog takes into account the additional effort of refactoring/rewriting, which is normally not covered in the typical Product Backlog.

I’m curious about what you think, please leave a comment below or get in touch on Twitter: @survivalcrziest.

(PS: Here’s a tip: VCS-based Software Analysis by Adam Tornhill)

Update: Prioritization of Items in the Technical Backlog

Based on some of the readers’ feedback, I would like to clarify how I intend the system to be used:

1. The top of the Technical Backlog is prioritized / groomed based on (a) “Technical Value” and (b) budget and schedule constraints (“effort”).
2. •  Technical Value here is defined as the value delivered by the technical solution towards meeting the needs of the [prioritized] Product Backlog.
3. Items may be to the Technical Backlog not just based on the insertion of new features in the Product Backlog, but also based on technical reviews / retrospectives where it is identified that an architectural change is required (e.g. for purposes of maintainability or compliance).
4. The items pushed to the bottom of the Technical Backlog thus represent Technical Debt.

 

Innovation is not a Linear Phenomenon: The Faraday FF Zero 1 Example

Innovation ‘R’ Us

Every company is trying to “innovate” these days… no matter how large or small. Some of the bigger ones are virtually pleading with their multinational workforce through challenges, awards and incentives to come up with the magic pill that will help the company sail through stormy waters (As Alf Rehn summarized it [1], “in April we innovate, in May we fire people”) .

The smaller ones… well, there are companies based entirely on nothing else but “an innovative solution” to do something you could already do before (but this time in a Javascript framework). Looking at it from the Lean Startup perspective, I find it a bit weak when a whole business is based on the USP of “innovative”. Your solution could be based on quality attributes [2] that make it faster, scalable, interoperable, customizable, streamlined, or really 100 other ways that could maximize value… the means to achieve these better be innovative, because that’s the very least your customer expects from you!

Have you ever heard a Formula 1 driver call himself fast? Or a firefighter call him/herself brave? Or a surgeon boast about how precise she is? No, because these are attributes that are inherently expected of them. If they weren’t fast or brave or precise, they wouldn’t last very long in their line of work. Similarly, today all technology companies are expected to be innovative in order to survive. You know who boosts their own ego publicly? Pop stars:

Whenever a company or product proclaims itself to be "innovative", this is what it basically sounds like pic.twitter.com/lyNpyC1vOt

— Kartik Sachdev (@survivalcrziest) March 1, 2016

 

Innovation is… Not Where You Think it is

Now, about Faraday. Earlier this year at CES I picked up this leaflet from the Faraday FF Zero 1 booth. Since then, I have thought often of the part marked in red below:

“SVP of R&D … spotted a drawing of a racecar on a designer’s desk and thought …”

BOOM. Innovation happened. Did the designer have a mandate to come up with a supercar? No. Was the SVP in an in offsite innovation workshop, brainstorming with other employees? No. Was there an innovation competition or challenge going on in the company, with an award at the end of it? Probably not. This is possibly the best example that innovation does not happen in an institutionalized manner. When successful innovation happens, it comes from the most unexpected places, more often than not driven by synergy, and it opens up a non-linear value proposition:

Original image credit: [3]

 

An Indicator of Innovation

These days some people are solving more problems with a Raspberry Pi over a weekend, than during a whole week of work in front of a corporate laptop. What can leaders do to harness this immense creative potential? I think the answer is to build an organization conducive to innovation, geared up to quickly change course when an innovation potential appears on the horizon, and… basically get out of the way. Easier said than done, you say… there are risks, budgets, stakeholders, possibly even (shudder) committees… no way this is going to work.

Which brings me to the final point: how deeply is trust rooted in the company’s culture? In Faraday’s example, the SVP trusted that something produced by one of his designers was potentially a big deal. It did not come up through a chain of committees and approvals. It happened through synergy. And while structure can stifle synergy, trust can help it thrive.

I therefore argue that the amount of trust in a company is a solid indicator of innovation potential. How much employees trust the leadership’s direction, how much coworkers trust each other (even across borders and timezones) and how much the leadership believes in the people they hired: these factors determine how likely synergistic events will be recognized, and nurtured into products or solutions that are called “innovative” by customers and competition, not just by the companies themselves.

---

[1] Alf Rehn, “How to Save Innovation From Itself”. Craft Conf 2016 talk.

[2] George Fairbanks, “Just Enough Software Architecture: A Risk-Driven Approach”. InfoQ interview and excerpt.

[3] MintViz.

CES 2016: From the Fringes

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas is the premier trade show for tech product previews and release announcements, going as far back as the VCR in 1970 to Driverless Cars in 2013*. This year the CES featured about 3800 exhibitors, spanning 2.47 million sq. ft. spread out over 3 locations** visited by 170,000 media and industry professionals — and I was privileged to count myself amongst them. Featuring keynote addresses from Intel, Netflix, IBM, Samsung, nVidia, Volkswagen and other big names, a lot has been written, presented and shared on mainstream as well as social media about the 4 day event. This chart sums it up the hype pretty well:

Source: BuzzRadar, CTA

I decided to share some of my views from the fringes, rather than the trenches — there is no point in rinsing and repeating what is already out there, nor do I have any delusions about the value of my personal opinion about tech that enables your car to count how many oranges are left in your fridge (yes, it was demoed, with voice control).

The Oculus Rift demo was by far the hardest to get into — there was a line, a line to get in the line, and a third holding area. Eventually I made it on the last day, and it took me about 20 min to recover from the simulator sickness caused by piloting EVE Valkyrie’s spacecraft from a living room chair. I still felt there were rough edges and the HTC Vive was by far a more refined, immersive and truly flawless experience. The new Sony PlayStation 4 VR was quite impressive as well: I could lean out of a moving car and look behind me, and the granularity of control was so good I could rotate knobs on the car stereo. OSVR.org based devices were quite popular too, and some others that caught my eye were Virtuix Omni active VR platform, AntVR’s Holodeck concept and ICAROS‘ EUR 10,000 gym equipment that lets you fly around in a virtual world powered by your own body. Certainly beats playing first person shooters wearing VR googles on a treadmill, or riding a virtual horse on a exercycle.

There were tons of clones (mostly based on Gear VR) and drones. Augmented Reality seems to be gaining ground, but despite solutions like the Sony SmartEyeglass and Daqri Smart Helmet, VR seems to be more popular of the two. It’s worth noting that virtually every VR or AR demo was running on Unity3D content, including those at NASA and IEEE’s booths.

I also tried my hand at racing simulators of various scales: from small VR setups, to actual cars mounted on motion platforms, to a massive 4×4 grid of 55″ OLEDs in front of a force feedback seat rig. There were several interesting display technologies on show: 3D without glasses, transparent (scaling up to entire walls), curved and Samsung’s modular, edge-blending display tech straight out of a sci-fi movie. Avegant’s Glyph might turn the display industry on it’s head, though, much like the way it’s worn.

 

On the automotive side, voice, gesture and intent based user interfaces seem to be gaining ground. Also making an appearance were adaptive user interfaces and improvements in sensor fusion, self-learning and self-driving techniques. There were tons of wearables, 3D printing and home automation booths. The two core themes seemed to be a maturing of the ecosystem (just about everything built on top of something else, not too many technologies solving problems from scratch) and apps for doing things that don’t need apps, like locking your front door. You’d think we would stop there, but no:

On the social innovation side, I found GrandPad, Casio’s 2.5D printing and the Genworth R70i Aging Experience very thoughtful. Besides these, I liked Mixfader‘s idea of an MVP slider for mobile DJs: after all, the crossfader is the main thing that requires precise tactile control, everything else can be relegated to the screen. Also impressive was Sony’s line of 409,600 ISO see-completely-in-the-dark cameras. And this is now a thing:

You’d also probably be able to find a lot of beautiful photos of Las Vegas on the Internet, so let me leave you with this video of a not-so-common Las Vegas activity that I squeezed in on the last day, courtesy of DreamRacing.com (very fringe-y because I picked a Nissan over a Ferrari). Thanks for reading!

* Apple, Google and Microsoft have their own tech events and despite the Xbox (2001) and Android devices (2010) being unveiled at CES, these companies tend to keep their product announcements exclusive to their own events. So no Hololens at CES.

** „Tech East (Las Vegas Convention Center), Tech West (Sands/Expo at the Venetian,  The Palazzo, Wynn and Encore) and Tech South (Aria and Vdara)

Recent Popular Posts

Hi there!

In case you missed them, below is the list of my recent top blog posts. I hope you will find some of them useful, thought-provoking, or just plain amusing. I look forward to your thoughts and comments.

• Prezi’s 7 Year Itch?
• My report on the Amuse UX Conference in Budapest
• Short post about Evangelizing Lean Product Development
• Scrum, Kanban, Scrumban or Just Ban Scrum? (and Part 2)
• A lighthearted take on Management Personas
• My takeaways from Craft Conference, Budapest Day 2 and Day 3
• This is a Revolution, not a Recession
• Why Driverless Cars?
• My first Prezi: India as Seen from Hungary

You might also be interested in these older posts:

• My summary of Flight Simulators for the Serious Hobbyist
• Such UI, Much Refactoring
• User Stories vs “The User’s Story”
• “I just have to…” Project Management, which was republished by PMHut

Prezi’s 7 Year Itch?

This has been a really hard post for me to write, because some of the brilliant engineers and designers at Prezi are my professional acquaintances and/or good friends. And that’s the very reason I’m writing it – real friends tell it like it is. I’ve been putting this off since I first started using Prezi almost a year ago. But now that I have experienced it in free, Edu and Pro flavors, and created some pretty complex ones, the initial tiny niggles now seemed to have, let’s say, zoomed in (pun intended). So Prezi people: please consider this well-intended motivation.

Prezi was founded in 2009, and I imagine at that time it must have felt something like Wolfenstein 3D: technologically ground-breaking and in some circles, controversial (you may recall Microsoft tried to acquire id Software). Powerpoint needed to be killed, because it enforced linear thinking – and Prezi was the answer. Yet, 6 years later, linear thinking is still popular:

Hey @prezi do you have data on how many @CraftConf 2015 speakers used Prezi? Noticed shudderingly high no. of classic Powerpoints #CraftConf

— Kartik Sachdev (@survivalcrziest) April 25, 2015

With 60 mn users (and 160 mn -/+ 18% Prezis created, depending on which part of their website you refer to), obviously they’ve got something right. Right enough that they are able to sustain an international presence on a single product. That rarely happens at this scale, and I suppose it is something to be admired.

The Platform

The in-browser experience is brilliant. Works well and virtually eliminates the entry barrier.  I tried using the desktop variant, Prezi for Mac, once. Just once. I found that it in terms of usability, it didn’t offer any major advantages over the website. But the real problem was that it kept false-flagging sync conflicts between the “local” and “cloud” versions. Eventually I decided the fake stress wasn’t worth it and switched back to the browser.

You may not have this dilemma if you would like to use the free power of Linux to share your ideas – Prezi doesn’t support it. (To be fair, they more than make up for this by actively promoting the tech and open source community in Budapest, by regularly organizing/hosting events, meetups and conferences).

There is an iPad version that “enables users to pan, and pinch to zoom in or out of their media” (That’s perfect, because that’s pretty much what an iPad is good for, anyway).

What I really wish for is the ability to resize the slide view pane on the left, so I can identify and jump to specific slides. And multi-select, especially for reordering (use the Force of the Shift Key). I would also like to mark some sections so I can focus on certain areas for preparation. Or even skip straight to one depending on how the conversation is flowing.

I mentioned stress earlier. You can quite easily recreate it by using 2-finger zoom gesture on a Mac. It’s not very precise and often ends up being a lot more than you’d expect. I once had to spend hours fixing my slides when a select-move-zoom operation didn’t go as planned. I learnt the hard way to stick to the zoom buttons and not use gestures.

And finally, it all runs on Flash. Yes, even now.

Features

The undo/redo feature also has a bit of a mind of its own. For simple operations it usually works fine, but when you’re in the flow and make a mistake, it often does the thing you’d least expect. Infinite undo/redo shouldn’t be that hard to implement either, considering everything is an object with attributes, anyway. What would be really nice, though, is some kind of checkpoints — major versions that you can roll back to, branch out of, or share with someone (e.g. numbered drafts). Because, 2015.

The guides when moving stuff around are hard to see. Too often they blend into the background, especially e.g. if the background has a grid. Get those ants marching again!

I also miss the ability to add notes, although what I would really expect is a more modern way of representing “prompts”, in a way that would be intuitive for presenters.

Warning: Brutal Honesty Ahead

Try this test, Prezi folks: create a new Prezi, single slide only, and export it to PDF.

• Number of pages expected: 1
• Number of pages found: 2.  The first page is always duplicated during export, regardless of number of slides.
• Test result: FAIL.

Really, nobody noticed this in all these years?

Or that the image borders provided by the Aviary plugin are too thick and can’t be adjusted? (I trust you when you say my “private”, potentially proprietary/copyrighted images are truly private, even though there seems to be no obvious ToS or protection mechanism).

I’ve had Aviary and PDF export error out on me on a couple of occasions. I can live with that. But must you call them IO_ERRORs? That sounds more like the server ran out of disk space or something. And to non-programmers like my Dad, it probably looks like “ten errors” misspelt.

Nice to have: compressed PDF, with lowered quality. Try printing a 60 MB PDF some time, or re-uploading it — when just a link would have sufficed.

For that matter, why limit social sharing options to only to Facebook? How about Twitter, LinkedIn and dare I say, SlideShare integration as well? (PS: Do people really share presentations on Facebook? How about a good old “Email this” shortcut?)

There is tremendous potential to use Prezi as a content generation tool if it allowed exporting to video, or directly to YouTube (and/or Vimeo). Think tutorials, troubleshooting guides, walkthroughs and just plain not having to talk over and over again — present it, record it, share it. Other people seem to have the same idea, too.

And if only there was a way to present to the second screen, so in a presenter view (or just Edit mode) I can see what’s coming next and how I’m doing with my timing.

Use Your Imagination

Animated GIFs are still the quickest way of demonstrating processes in action, for example. Importing Google Spreadsheets and converting them into graphs within the editor. Powerful timelines like TimeGlider. Simple maps like OpenHeatMap. Leveraging the zooming and object hierarchy features to build a MindMap mode (which may even serve as a foundation for the final Prezi). And why limit the zooming and rotating to 2 dimensions only? I would love to make a Prezi with 6 slides, each represented on a face of a cube which can be rotated in 3D space. After all, the future of storytelling is going to be virtual and immersive.

(Here’s an idea: API and plugins).

Prezi is great, but that’s no reason to not be even greater.

(Or just release the Kraken: make it open source, let us fork it and watch how people use the platform to build even more clever ideas for telling their stories).

 

 

 

Amuse UX Conference, Budapest

Last week, I had the privilege of being part of a group attending the first edition of AmuseConf on behalf of our company. Amuse is “an international conference for anyone interested in how to design and develop successful products that users love”. It’s organized by the same good folks that bring us the outstanding CraftConf year after year, sponsored primarily by Prezi and UStream (and SAP in case of Amuse). They did a near-perfect job, with only minor glitches with the seating and catering on the first day. Considering that the Big Data oriented CrunchConf was also literally next door, the event was practically flawless. Fast, uninterrupted WiFi and no food options for vegetarians/vegans remained a hallmark this organizing team (even though Tom Illmensee, event MC is himself vegetarian 😉 ).

(BTW, if you’re wondering why so many tech conferences are being hosted in Budapest, the event’s WiFi password should give you a hint):

510 attendees from 32 countries (as far away as Australia) made Amuse a roaring success, as did its impressive lineup of Speakers. 27% of the speakers were women, which is great for a tech conference — I hope next year we have even more!

Below is a summary of the talks I found the most relevant to my work. But by no means does that mean you should skip the other talks… depending on where you are and what you’re doing, you might be interested in some of the eclectic topics covered such as:

• Designing web interfaces for children by Trine Falbe
• Conducting research outside “sample of convenience” by Bill Selman from Mozilla Foundation
• Design Thinking by Tobias Haug of SAP (my favorite quote: “Innovation = Execution x Creativity”)
• How to get your dream UX job by Andrew Doherty of Google (worth checking out just for his mad presentation skills)
• The Ethical Designer by Cennydd Bowles
• Storytelling in a multidevice landscape by Anna Dahlstrom

Design Equilibrium

By Jonathan Lupo

Jonathan opened the conference with a very engaging talk drawing parallels between businesses and ecosystems: a “balanced exchange of value between Actors, Enterprise and Brand”. He gave practical examples citing the application of Lynn Shostack’s work on Service Blueprinting to a transformation in the healthcare industry. I strongly encourage viewing his inspiring talk on YouTube.

His core suggestion is a separation of Product Design from Service Design. The latter “fills in whitespaces between points of [rich] engagement provided by products”, helping to restore balance to the overall experience, and hence the business ecosystem. This is the real intangible value of services, as opposed to products.

He also proposed the concept of an “Engagement Model”: a framework to contextualize all the data a business collects.

UX: Design as a Science

By Joel Marsh, author of the UX Crash Course

Joel’s key message was that “Scientific UX Design is reproducible”: essentially drawing on the principles of the Lean Startup and applying them to the UX domain. His presentation was one of the most popular and engaging ones, and his quotes and examples garnered a lot tons of positive feedback. One thing that struck me was his exposition on the two types of creativity: Creative expression and creative problem solving. He noted that an over-applicability of creative expression can make you feel good as a designer, but result in an over-designed and bloated product:

Another talk I would highly recommend watching when it comes out on UStream.tv.

Making Dog Food a Part of Your Balanced Diet

By Toby Sterrett

Toby used his work at Simple Bank to highlight the pros and cons of “eating your own dogfood”. The initial employees used the app themselves, and one of the downsides was that the missed revelation that users of such a smooth app had to deal with a paper form-based process to close their account, which took up to 20 days.

Another inspiring talk that you should definitely check out, full of quotes of wisdom like:

• “Delight is design’s superpower”
• A past discussion on Leadership strategy: “Build a shared vision, get the **** out of the way”
• “UX is not about throwing technology at a problem, but throwing people at a problem”

On the other hand, Simple A/B tested as many as 16 variations of their login page (for more examples, check out UserOnboard.com).

Live posters being created by @remarker_eu

How We Built Hotjar and Onboarded 50k Users in a Year

By Dr. David Darmanin

David used practical examples from Hotjar to support his model of “Drivers, Barriers and Hooks” when dealing with site visitors. He also put a quirky twist on some timeless wisdom:

MVP is the smallest possible product you need for your customers to tell you that it sucks #ux #lean #amuseconf

— Kartik Sachdev (@survivalcrziest) October 29, 2015

Hire people smarter than you. It's intimidating but you'll learn something & in the end they'll make you look good #ux #amuseconf

— Kartik Sachdev (@survivalcrziest) October 29, 2015

The two most amazing insights for me were:

• Hotjar captures every single customer interaction on a Trello board, and uses that feedback to prioritize their features.
  • They also make their roadmap public, which demonstrates their commitment and at the same time reduces enquiries about feature requests
• They use the income from their paid customers to fund the creative freedom to build features for their free customers

The Invisible Interface: Designing the Screenless Experience

By Avi Itzkovich

Avi, founder of UXSalon, opened with a discourse on recent editions of Microsoft Productivity Future Vision. From there he led the discussion on towards a future without bigger and wider screens (which wouldn’t require “superhuman arm strength”):

• “The most profound technologies are the ones that become invisible” 
  • Like automatically opening sliding doors
• “Voice UI is the future”
• “Gesture control is here to stay, but not on screens”

The Best Interface is No Interface

By Golden Krishna

Golden surmised that we are all “chipping away at digital chores”, and we don’t have to be “slaves to screens”. He has laid the foundations of the #NoUI movement with his book: “The Best Interface is No Interface”. His excellent talk (slides here) was supported by book reading and real examples. Also, don’t forget to check out his accompanying toolkit on “how to create elegant solutions with no screens”.

For further inspiration to join the movement,  take a look at his Producthunt collection of “interfaces that require little or no time with screens”.

Magical UX and the Internet of Things

By Josh Clark

Josh opened with an announcement of his book release: “Designing for Touch”. His presentation was literally magical, complete with a wand, to the point that he managed to tie in together excerpts from preceding talks and put the whole conference in perspective. I found a similar slidedeck from one of his previous talks here, and I highly recommend taking a look at it while we wait for the official conference videos to come up on Ustream.tv. It was a treasure trove of out-of-the box examples like:

•  Augmented REality Sandtable (ARES), which literally turns dirt into a high-tech, military-grade user interface… using not much more than a Kinect and projector
• Grab Magic, which brings superpowers to data transfer
• Propeller Health, which connects Asthma inhalers to phones for health monitoring

Josh’s key message was “interaction at the point of inspiration”: that we should think of “the whole world is an interface, just like it has always been”. He proposed “thereables” instead of wearables: bits of smart technology in the physical space where we would expect to interact with them, not something we burden ourselves by carrying or wearing all day long. To this end, he suggested that “the smartphone is Magic Wand 1.0 for everyone” and we should start thinking of it as just more than a screen.

Regarding user interfaces, he had 3 bits of advice that I found remarkable:

• “Technology should amplify our humanity”
• “We shouldn’t educate users on how technology works, unless we really *have* to”
• “Honor intention, don’t assume it”

Josh ended with a call to action:

We have bigger problems to solve. @bigmediumjosh #amuseconf #ux #innovation

— Kartik Sachdev (@survivalcrziest) October 30, 2015

Like this one.

 

 

 

 

 

Evangelizing Lean Product Development

I’ve written and tweeted before about how influential I think Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup has been for me. While we wait for Eric’s next book, The Startup Way, which is more focused on bringing lean thinking to big companies (and by the way is being researched in a very interesting way — read about it on KickStarter), the timing was right for me to assimilate my thoughts and share them with a group of colleagues.

While I’m still waiting for the feedback to pour in for my 3-part course, I’m very happy to have had the opportunity to share with others that “Lean” is not just some black art practiced in car manufacturing plants, and “Entrepreneurship” can take root even in large, established organizations. Now, more than ever, we are all living (and trying to thrive) in “conditions of extreme uncertainty”.

I hope I have been able to get across some of the thinking behind the concepts covered in Eric’s book: the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop, the Minimum Viable Product, Innovation Accounting, Vanity Metrics, practical techniques like Cohort Analysis & Five Whys and finally the most relevant: The Innovation Sandbox.

I also threw in a bit of George Fairbanks’ Just Enough Software Architecture, which addresses “engineering risk”, as opposed to “project management risk”. And of course, lessons learned from my enlightening weekend at Lean Startup Machine a couple of years ago.

The coming days will tell if the course was useful and comprehensible enough for others to practically apply some of the principles to their projects. I hope that over time we can build a community of like-minded lean practitioners within the organization, acting as enablers of sustainable innovation. #WasteNot.

The Global Bullshit Crisis of 2015

For the first time in recorded history, the total amount of bullshit being produced on planet Earth every year has exceeded the amount of human shit produced annually.

Leaders around the world are rising up to the unprecedented challenge. “This will not be tolerated any more,” said the leader of a leading Muslim League. “It has come to r misr attention that Bullshit now needs freedom and democracy,” a prominent American leader added. Meanwhile Russia has announced a zero-tolerance policy towards Bullshit: “Any shit will be shot out of the sky. We can’t afford to wait any more to confirm if it is Bullshit or not.”

China, on the other hand, has taken a rather controversial stand by declaring that they will produce even more Bullshit cheaper and faster than anyone else. India went two steps ahead: demanding that Britain should pay reparations to India for all the Bullshit. The UK’s response was to put all Indians on the Bullshit Watch List. A scandal ensued when a leading tabloid revealed that 65% of Hindustanis in the UK are in fact from other -stans. “Bullshit!” was the response from the leaders from these other -stans.

African leaders condemned the event strongly: “Whenever the world discovers something new, it leads to decades of strife in Africa. We are still paying the price for being the cradle of all Human Bullshit.” Soon after, Japanse scientists shocked the world with their discovery that radioactive Bullshit has medicinal properties.

Meanwhile, all of Europe has united against Bullshit. “We must preserve our own Bullshit and not let it get diluted by Bullshit from outside,” said a spokesperson. Canada and Mexico were the only countries to not react. Allegedly when the Bullshit hit them, they were surprised to learn that “North America” is not the same as “America”. Australia reacted strongly by deporting a prominent Hollywood actor’s dogs and New Zeland declared that they need a new flag to deal with all this Bullshit.

The same actor then announced his new blockbuster about Bullshit, expected to complete production in 2017. Bollywood promised to copy the script, add songs and release a Hindi version by 2019. Kollywood vowed to copy the Hindi version and release it in less than 6 months. This chain reaction went on until Rajnikanth announced that he had already made a 3D version of the movie in 1972.

The rest of the entertainment industry was not far behind. The video game industry responded with tons of Bullshit Simulator apps and TV channels were flooded with inspiring shows like “Bullshit Idol”. The music industry announced that Bullshit Dance Music (BDM) tracks could be downloaded for free, in return for credit card details that would be “hacked” only a year later.

Owing to all this frenzied activity, the two leading news making agencies of the world decided to form a consortium aptly named the Bullshit Universal Reporting Platform (BURP). According to their official press release: “In this connected and informed world, our viewers don’t accept plain old Bullshit anymore. Fortunately, we have the backing of such large global corporations that we can afford to create our own Bullshit.”

Silicon Valley has taken up the digital baton to solve the problem from a tech standpoint, and failing that, make tons of money consulting about it. Oogle was the first: “People are searching for so much Bullshit these days, we had to split our company into two to keep up with the demand,” they claimed. Fakebook followed with a public beta of the new Bullshit Multiplier feature. “Throw any Bullshit at it, and it will display similar Bullshit that you might have otherwise missed out on in real life,” reads their updated website. Picosoft and Zamaon almost simultaneously announced their new OneShit feature. “Why should you be limited to your own Bullshit? We want to take Bullshit into the cloud, so you can access any Bullshit, anywhere, on any device.”

Halfapple, however, was ahead of everyone else as usual with their ground-breaking product offering: iShit. No one really understands what it does yet, but there is speculation that for its price, it can probably solve California’s drought problem.

The car industry was quick to recognize the potential of all this surplus Bullshit as well. “Our best researchers are working on it. By 2020 we expect to mass produce cars that run on pure Bullshit,” and industry spokesperson said.

The impact of this event has far reaching consequences for the human race as a whole. Space Agencies around the world are launching probes to other planets to find the origin of Bullshit. Studies have shown that the weight of all this Bullshit is slowing down the rotation of the Earth, and as a result we may soon lose the Moon. “Good riddance,” said the Director of the leading Space Agency. “We didn’t find water on it anyway.”

UFO researchers as well have chipped in from the fringes: “Not since 1947 have we witnessed so many confirmed sightings of Bullshit around the world.” Countries where these sightings have occurred in recent months have been quick to cash in on the tourism opportunity, complete with guided package tours in 12 languages.