Timely, along with WIP, were the winners of BNZ Startup Alley at Webstock ’13. Timely will be visiting Kiwi Landing Pad soon as part of their prize. In the leadup to their visit, we caught up with Ryan Baker from Timely and with Catherine Robinson, Kiwi Landing Pad’s San Francisco Director.
Catherine Robinson
Webstock: What’s the one big thing Kiwi start-ups wanting to operate in the USA should know, but don’t?
Catherine: The USA market is a 100 times bigger than New Zealand, and 100 times more competitive. This is great for “sharpening your saw”, but be prepared to adapt, change the way you conduct and operate your business.
Webstock: What are some of the main reasons Kiwi start-ups haven’t succeeded in the US market?
Catherine: Firstly there are already a number of successful Kiwi companies, like Litmos and Aptimize for example but we want to see a lot more of them. In my experience there are several key issues that can affect kiwi companies:
Don’t try to “boil the ocean”. Choose a single vertical and concentrate there. This is a foreign concept to many NZ companies because we’re from a much smaller market, we tend to generalize our approach
Speed to market. We create great innovative products in NZ, but markets and demand change rapidly and this has left many companies scrambling to adapt to the changes. Worst case it means missed opportunities for success
Cost. Starting a company to be global from day one used to be prohibitively expensive for most early stage companies. In the last five years this has quickly changed, and the cost to enter market can be dramatically lower
Webstock: For Kiwis freshly arriving in SF, Silicon Valley, the hub of the web… what should they expect in the way of culture shock?
Catherine: Silicon Valley is vast and there is no big “Welcome to Silicon Valley” sign. It’s 1500 sq miles of tech campuses, strip malls, housing estates, business parks and cities that merge together.
San Francisco is about 70 kms from Santa Clara – one of the cities inside Silicon Valley. Prepare to spend a lot of time traveling and have plenty of buffer time built in. Being late is not a good start to a meeting here.
Technology plays a significant role in the Bay Area. If you are lost or need help there is an app for that.
Contrary to popular belief-there is good coffee in San Francisco!!
Webstock: A year or so down the track how’s Kiwi Landing Pad going? How would you sum up the year and what are you looking forward to in the future?
Catherine: KLP is a long term play – the vision is to provide a landing point for an increasing number of Kiwi businesses wanting to expand into the US and in doing so reduce their risk and the time it takes to set up an office and accelerate their business development plans through our knowledge, networks and community.
In the last few months we’ve seen a significant increase in the number of companies wanting to establish residence at KLP, a reflection of a growing awareness and more companies thinking globally.
Timely founders with the winning cheque at BNZ Startup Alley
Webstock: What are your expectations around a visit to SF and the Kiwi Landing Pad?
Ryan: Our expectation is that it’s going to be frickin’ awesome! For both Andrew and I this will be our first visit to San Francisco. Although, one of the cool things about being part of the cloud ecosystem is that we’re already working with a few SF based companies – so there’ll be familiar faces for us to meet with right from day one.
The Kiwi Landing pad will be fantastic to use as a home base. We’re hoping to corner all of the residents there and hear their war stories of getting traction in the US.
Webstock: The US is a huge market. Is it a realistic target for you? If so, does that scare you? Excite you?
Ryan: Yes, the US is a huge market, with lots of potential customers for our product. But inevitably that also means more competition as well. The US is already our largest source of customers for Timely – but currently our conversion rate sucks on US accounts – so there’s something that we’re not doing right and it’s great timing for us to get over there and figure it out. It’s exciting for sure!
Webstock: Are you expecting anything in the way of a culture shock, going from Dunedin to SF?
Ryan: I’ve been to other parts of the US before – so not expecting general culture shock. But in terms of Silicon Valley culture – yes, I’d say the maturity and size of the startup/tech space over there is going to be pretty different to what I’m used to!
Webstock: A couple of months on from BNZ Start-Up Alley at Webstock, how are things progressing? And in what ways has winning the competition helped you?
Ryan: The timing of winning Webstock was awesome. We are using the prize money on advertising and this is already starting to bring in new customers. We’ve also had increased interest from investors, which was always part of our plans once we had the demand for the product proven. The geek-cred has been cool too – and we’ve met a bunch of other start-ups that we didn’t know before who we’ve kept in touch with.
Webstock is the second best thing I’ve ever won in my life (in the 80’s I won an Omnibot, that will never be beaten).
Webstock: Where to from here for Timely?
Ryan: We are still growing at a really healthy rate – so the challenge will be to keep doing what is working well and to manage that growth. We will be hiring over the next few months – and building a team of ridiculously awesome people will be a big focus for us.
In this interview, we asked Mark Piper, co-founder of the mighty Kiwicon and, uhh, hacker, to interview the urbane and erudite Jason Scott.
Mark: Let’s save people a visit to Wikipedia. Give it to us straight. Who is Jason Scott?
Jason: I’m many things to many people, but these days I’m mostly living the high life as an Idea. The Idea is simple: computer history is important, and online data generated by people has weight and meaning. I run a number of projects, including the TEXTFILES.COM family of sites, a number of documentaries both in production and finished (BBS, GET LAMP, with ARCADE, 6502, and TAPE on the horizon), and working full time as an archivist for the Internet Archive.
Mark: Let’s chat about your job. To me, it looks like one of the coolest jobs in the world. Reading awesome stuff, playing old games, meeting the people who literarily changed the world, browsing GeoCities and a seemingly unlimited supply of hard drive space. Is it really is cool as it looks? What’s the biggest challenge it brings for you?
Jason: It is humbling and amazing to spend every single waking moment doing something I want to do. Yes, it really is as cool as it looks, assuming that doing unbelievably involved classification, investigation, and compilation of data is what sends your motorboat humming. For me, the fact that I help people around the world get access to so much culture and help give hope that possibly-lost history can be found again, is about as good as it gets. It’s kind of amazing to live un-ironically well for a change.
My inbox, however, looks like something that crashed the Yellow Submarine movie into Wargames.
Mark: New Zealand isn’t just a hop and a skip away for you. In fact, it’s a long fucking distance to travel. What do you hope to achieve the most from this visit?
Jason: I had the opportunity to visit New Zealand last year, and I celebrated it by landing there and being sick as a dog for the whole time. I also saw a single city, and my hosts were kind enough to guide my dizzy carcass, like some sort of meandering videogame character, through the streets of Auckland. What I saw was great, so the opportunity to travel and see more of New Zealand is a welcome chance to get it right the second time.
I’m not bothered by the distance – the destination is great! However, the last time I came by, I spent the return flight awake watching movie after movie, and 9 feature films later, I got off the plane stumbling like the creatures from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. So call that a lesson learned.
Mark: You once said : “The computer industry is 50 years of over promise and under deliver”. Is that changing yet?
Jason: We have a LONG way to go before THAT changes – with endless new people signing on every day, promising them that their phones will turn tears into gold or will rescue orphans from burning buildings is still quite profitable, and with a few notable exceptions, it’s considered the way computers are marketed.
Normally, that’s not a big deal, but when the promises drift into longevity, access, and shutdown times, then my amusement turns to anger.
Mark: One of the things that shines through out the subjects of your work, is an in-depth understanding of the technology stacks some of your interviewees used. They knew how it worked and what the limitations were (and how to push them). There seems to be an increasing number of people that believe such in-depth stack knowledge is becoming a lost art. What are your thoughts? Are we understanding the technology less?
Jason: I think that there’s still access to much of the deep knowledge of how things work but as we spread the reach wider for who can use computers, the motivations of these folks to learn the really hard developer-level stuff just isn’t there. If this handheld computer that makes phone calls does more processing while showing you a map than a building’s worth of home computers did in the 1980s, your first thought might not be “I can’t wait to get into the device layer” and is likely more to be “Oh come on, that road’s been closed for weeks.”
I definitely think there’s a trend towards there being virtue in being unaware of the undercarriage of technology, and that means a lot of people are in the same position they are for their energy or their food – something goes wrong, anything at all, and we’re just completely frozen, with no solution coming forward and nothing to do but wait for the lights to come back on or for the vegetables to stop having whatever took them off the shelves in the first place. It can’t be great to be that disconnected from what keeps you alive and healthy.
Mark: As a sysop growing up, one of the things that was really clear to me at the time was the importance of staying local. Whether it was phone verification for new users or a social BBQ to talk tech over, BBS’s were largely a local community thing. Are such local communities getting lost now days with all the fan dangled new web tech? If so, can it be saved?
Jason: When things started to really move over to the internet, we definitely lost that feeling of locality and geography. Since websites were few and far between in the world, there might be one big online forum or one large news site that everyone around the world posted on at the same time. But over the years, we’re starting to see that locality come back, be it in the manner of mobile apps, attaching geography to social media, or even how people can set up something like a subreddit that services just their college or smaller town. It’s all cyclical, I guess, and things are looking up again.
Mark: You and the team at Archive Team, mirrored Geocities. An impressive undertaking in anyones book. I get lost in there randomly browsing the old neighborhoods from time to time. During the archive process you must have seen some classic stuff. Could you share a favourite you stumbled on during that mirroring work?
Jason: To be honest, what really made me happiest was not individual webpages (although I did find lots of interesting ones), but using this mass of webpages to look for similar items and then group them all together. For example, I really liked tracking down Under Construction GIFs, those animated promises of future work on a website, and putting them all on one large web page. Same for Netscape logos and mail icons. When you do this sweep across the entire collection like that, you start to see trends, artistry, and a perspective unheard of a mere 10 years earlier. To be able to go “now show me what people thought was a good way to promote their browser” or “how many different ways can you say ‘click here to mail me'” is pretty amazing.
Estelle: What is your background? What first got you interested in web development?
Chris: I was a computer nerd as a kid and that just rolled forward. I was into programming and art in high school. Then computer science and design in college. I would have loved to get a web design job right out of college but I didn’t have the chops. So I went into graphic design and the printing business for a few years. All the while I was building websites on the side. Some for fun. Some for bands I was in. Some personal sites. Some freelance. An opportunity for a web job came up, and with that sideboard of work, I was able to get it.
Estelle: What do you consider yourself? A designer? Front End Engineer?
Chris: That’s always tough to answer. That’s why I like joke titles. I was “Lead Hucklebucker” at Wufoo. Certainly Front End Engineer is a big part of it. I also do design but I’m self conscious about it.
Estelle: What are you most passionate about when it comes to front end engineering?
Chris: Decision-making is a big one for me. I really like talking through problems and making choices. Of course that could apply to any job but it’s particularly fun in front end because the days are like an endless series of little logic puzzles to solve.
What text makes the most sense here? What should happen if they click here? How does this grid behave at this size? Does this look button-y enough? Is this error message helpful enough? How could we have prevented that error in the first place?
I consider all those things front-end problems.
Things like “should this be a <div class="subtitle"> or does an <hgroup> with an <h2> make the most sense?” are front end engineering problems to be solved as well, but are less interesting to me lately.
Estelle: It sounds like you’re passionate about good user experience design. How important do you think it is for Front End Engineers to also be skilled in UX?
Chris: Fairly important. UX is everyone’s job. If you just mindlessly replicate designs I don’t think you get to be an “engineer”.
Estelle: What projects are you working on now?
Chris: I’m actively trying to keep it simple these days. The big new thing is CodePen, a social front-end playground, if you will. You can build things out of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript then share them, test them, get help on them, whatever. It’s all about education and inspiration around front end.
I also podcast at ShopTalk (you’ve been on before!) and of course keep up CSS-Tricks, my long time blog and community site around all things web.
Estelle: For people considering entering our profession, what would you recommend them?
Chris: My general philosophy is “Just build websites.” What you need to know becomes clear when you build.
If you absolutely have no idea where to start, I think I’d suggest “Handcrafted CSS” by Dan Cederholm (the book) and read through it and follow the project.
Then pick a project of your own. Build a personal site. Find a business you can build a website for. Anything.
And just do it. You’ll have roadblocks. But now, you’ll have a motivation to do the research and learning you need to do to defeat the roadblock.
(Repeat 1,000 Times)
Estelle: What is your biggest obstacle in your career as a FEE, and what are you doing to overcome it?
Chris: There is fear and there is over-confidence. Sometimes it’s hard to know the difference.
For example, every since I started web design I sized all type on every site I’ve ever worked on in pixels. I’d read stuff about the downfalls of that and alternatives and yadda yadda and dismiss it all.
I’ve been building websites for a while now, I do it this way, it works fine.
That kind of confidence is sometimes super useful. This works for me so I’m not going to worry about it and focus my attention elsewhere.
But at some point I had to admit it was either 1) being fearful of admitting that what I’ve been doing all this time was wrong or 2) overconfidence that my was best without truly considering other options.
So I give sizing all fonts with ems on a project a proper try and it’s better. There are some clear benefits.
That kind of thing can be a constant obstacle. Your own mind can be awfully stubborn.
Estelle: Where do you think our profession is going? What do you think we’ll be focusing on in 3 years?
Chris: Three years is a great time frame to think about it because it’s both close and incredibly far away at the same time. Just one year ago there were a LOT more discussions around IE 6/7. I feel like that’s pretty much over now. There was an attitude like “Oh this HTML5 stuff is neat or whatever, 2030 will be sweet!” Now a year later we’re using a lot of it on live sites. Time passing is a part of it but the rate of change is going faster too.
I think layout is going to be a different ballgame in three years. Flexbox will be starting to be used in primetime in about a year and will totally oust floats-for-layout in two years.
Web components will be a big deal I think. Web apps will be created in a much more modular structure. It will be funny to think of CSS as this huge looming monster over websites like it is now. Instead it will be contained to smaller parts.
Education will catch up a bit, so young people entering the field will have actual web experience. Tools will get better. It’s a bright future. If you’re already involved in the web right now, you picked a good place to be.
Thanks to both Chris and Estelle for the interview!
In the first of our interviews with Webstock ’13 speakers, we talked with Clay Johnson. Clay has an impressive CV that touches on many aspects of 21st century life — our relationship to technology, our consumption of information and the way these relate to power and politics. He’s also giving what promises to be a unique and, yes, important workshop: How To Take Over Your Town.
Webstock: I want to focus on the workshop you’re giving at Webstock – ‘How to take over your town’. It’s an intriguing title!
So, firstly, what’s been your journey to get here. You’ve been involved in politics with the Howard Dean presidential campaign and with Blue State Digital. You’ve worked with the Sunlight Foundation on making government more transparent. And you’ve written a book, ‘The Information Diet’ about the (pretty poor) information we consume and how to improve that. How has all that lead to you wanting to take over the town?
Clay: I don’t want to take over the town. I want us to take over our towns. Or rather to take our towns from charged up political climates into friendly, innovative communities. All politics is famously local. Power, too, is local.
Our media environment, though, makes us pay attention to large, sexy, national or global issues — issues that we largely can’t do anything about. Here — I’ll ask you three questions. No Googling allowed:
1. Who is the president of the United States of America?
2. How has the child poverty rate in your city/town/community changed in the last year?
3. Which one of the outcomes of the above two questions are you most likely to have an impact on?
Now some may say “That’s not fair! It’s very important to know who the president is!” and they’re right. These aren’t mutually exclusive. But what if I replaced the first question with “Name a Kardashian?”
We — the technology community — have to start paying attention to our communities. Two billion dollars just got spent in the United States presidential election, largely raised from concerned americans who wanted to participate in the election in some way. Thousands of people knocked on doors, made phone calls, and asked for votes. Can you imagine what would happen if that effort and participation went into improving public schools, or heck, street sweeping?
Webstock: The workshop description includes the following line, “The future of government isn’t in the code of law, it’s in the code of software.” What do you mean by that?
Clay: Right now the establishment profession of power is the lawyer. They write the laws, make the rules, determine who follows the rules and how best they get followed. But as technology is famously eating the world, isn’t the developer on the rise? After all, the software developers at Facebook are, through software, creating governing law on our interactions — they’re creating rules in the system about how we can communicate.
I think it’s time to start thinking about this critically. And I think it’s time for developers to start thinking “Perhaps I can make a big difference by making some changes in the way my community works!”
Developers have a skill like no other profession: they can rewire society without having to wait on government to change.
Webstock: Who should attend this workshop and what will they learn?
Clay: The developer who wants to learn how to organize people. Above all else, what I’m going to teach you isn’t a political skill, it’s a critical skill about how to move people. Hopefully, you’ll take this skill — combine it with what you already know how to do, and make amazing things happen for your community. But heck, if you just want to use the skills I teach you to learn how to leverage the ideas from US Political Campaigns in your business — that’s fine too.
That’s going to be the first half of my workshop. The second half of my workshop is going to be about having a healthy information diet so that you can stay focused on making great things happen for you. By the end of my workshop, you’re going to have a system for dealing with incoming crap, and you’re going to leave Webstock with more time. Anybody who wants more time on their hands should come to my workshop.
Also, Nat Torkington. And the lesson that he will learn is that he should have given my book a five star rating on goodreads. He will learn that lesson “the hard way.”
Webstock: Changing tack a little, one of your blog posts that I loved was ‘How to focus’ And I even went so far as to try the Pomodoro Technique mentioned there. How has the “focusing” gone for you? We all know it’s one thing to write or think about focusing better, it’s another to actually put things into practice over a sustained period of time.
Clay: I must confess. Focusing has gotten a lot harder for me since my wife and I brought our son Felix into the world in July. I still need to child-proof my How to Focus technique.
But honestly, I still use that technique a lot. It’s intended to be sort of a recovery program: when you find yourself lost in a rut of things that are asking for your attention, having the focus technique available is the thing that gets you out of that rut and back on track. It works every time.
Webstock: What the one single thing you’d recommend to someone wanting to improve their information diet?
Clay: Write 500 Words, every day, before 8AM. Make it the first thing you do every morning. That way, you’re starting your day as a producer, rather than a consumer. And your whole day will revolve around you making things rather than reacting to things.
Webstock: And finally, what are you most looking forward to at Webstock?
Clay: I’ve heard so much about Webstock that I can’t even begin to anticipate what I’m looking forward to the most.
Webstock: Thanks so much so Clay! We’re looking forward to having you here in February.
Jennifer Brook is a resident of tree houses, a maker of limoncello, a cobbler of shoes, and one heckuva interaction designer. Jennifer is a lead user experience designer for Method. Prior to joining Method, Jennifer was interaction designer at The New York Times, where she designed the newspaper’s iPad and iPhone apps as well as several of the company’s web products. She’s teaching a Webstock workshop on rapid prototyping for the iPhone and iPad.
“Tapworthy” author Josh Clark sat down with Jennifer to talk about her path to touchscreen design, what it’s like to square off with Steve Jobs, the techniques newfangled designers can learn from old-fashioned books, and what she has in store for Webstock.
Josh: Like a lot of folks who come to digital design, your path wasn’t exactly a straight line. Where did you start in your career?
Jennifer: For the seven years after college, I focused on making books: letterpress printing, hand-binding, the whole nine yards. I got into making limited-edition letterpress artist books that have been collected by rare book libraries, museums, private collectors. And it was through bookmaking, which I see as a kind of interaction design practice, that I stumbled into what I’m doing now.
Books as interaction design, I like it! Here’s this ancient, centuries-old process of printing words and ideas, and now you’re someone who’s at the cutting edge of digital design. A lot of people would look at those worlds as being completely at odds.
I don’t see them as being at odds. There are a lot of similarities between bookmaking and digital interaction design. As a bookmaker, the way I approach my work is through this lens of an interplay between form and content. I typically start out with content, work through sketchbooks, and then start prototyping book forms. Before production, I have anywhere from 10-20 prototypes before a book would go into production.
The fundamental process of making a book: write, sketch, prototype, is almost identical to the process that I follow now.
Could you speak a bit more about how books are interactive?
Sure, well, a book is merely an inanimate object until someone opens it. Access to the content can’t happen until that first interaction happens. It’s all about hands and touch. Touch interfaces, ease of use, readability, portability, people have been working on these problems for hundreds of years through the form of the book.
It’s a highly evolved piece of technology that took centuries to get to a point where you don’t have to consciously think about the fact that it’s a complex piece of interaction design.
So as a bookmaker, I was interested in exploring these ideas, deconstructing the interaction, and exploring book forms where more interaction was necessary to unlock certain content. In all of the artist books that I’ve made, there is text that can’t be read unless someone does something in addition to just opening the book.
When I would make books, I would find myself watching people use my book prototypes to try to figure out ways to make them easier to use, or consider affordances to cue people that there was something more going on. I loved thinking about the intimacy of the form as a kind of play that would invite a deeper relationship between the content and the person.
Why did you make the jump to digital?
Learning about the history and the technology of the book was the gateway drug into wanting to be a part of something that was technologically relevant. Through making and researching books, I became interested in the idea of being at the edge of something, like when all of these different technologies—paper making, book binding, and printing—were at the edge and converging. This is what pushed me into switching the atmosphere of my practice from art and craft into design.
It was when I was living in a tree house, without an Internet connection, and for a period of time without electricity, when I started reading Fast Company and getting excited about what was happening online.
Okay, back up, we can’t let this pass. You lived in a tree house?
The tree house is a structure on a friend’s property in North Carolina. When I left my very first job, I retreated to said tree house for several months. Then I went and worked for some friends of mine who are weavers in Italy for several months for the winter. When I came back in the Spring, the friend and I decided we wanted to make the tree house bigger. So I drafted plans for an additional part and we hired a carpenter. For about four months, I worked on building the second part of this tree house, which I then lived in for several years after.
You’re drawn to the making of physical things.
I’m a builder.
Of books, of tree houses, and also of shoes, right?
Oh gosh, shoes, yes! As I started getting more and more involved in bookmaking and my work began to be collected, I would see my books go into special collection libraries, put behind glass boxes in exhibitions, and stowed away deep inside buildings, never to be handled again. I also observed that, because the books were perceived to be so precious, people were afraid to touch them. This was antithetical to why I wanted to make books. The possibility for a piece of artwork to be handled was, coming from an art school background where everything hangs on walls, the part I fell in love with.
Making shoes is a way to take the tools, materials, and processes I know and understand as a bookmaker, and using them in service of making a utilitarian object.
So you start off making art books in a tree house in North Carolina, and shortly after you find yourself working at New York Times Digital. How’d that happen?
In coming out as an interaction designer, I recognized that living in a tree house in the middle of North Carolina was like falling in love with marine biology while living in Kansas. My whole life became about getting to water as quickly as possible. New York, in this way, is my ocean.
And so I moved out of the tree house, found a mentor and just kind of put my head down on pursuing this one thing. When I finally moved to New York for the job at the Times, I was mentally prepared for it. And absolutely excited.
One of the things you’ll talk about at Webstock is how publishers are adapting to the post-PC (and post-print) era. They’re moving from the intimacy of the print era to the intimacy of the touchscreen. Are publishers in a way better suited than other industries to make this transition?
There’s definitely a fantasy that publishers have about what the iPad could be, and while many of their fantasies are about revenue, they have other possibilities in mind as well. I think some of their fantasies are around that connection that people have with the brand and how that could potentially extend to devices like the iPad or iPhone.
A real strength of analog technologies like magazines and newspapers is the opportunity to turn off and focus, and go more deeply into something. I believe there’s a need and a desire for human beings to have “off time.” There’s an opportunity there for digital designers to explore and solve these kinds of problems.
I’m interested in an idea that Mark Weiser coined and started writing about in the ’90s: the idea of “calm technology.” The central idea behind calm technology is that it should move into the periphery and away from being the center of our attention. Our smart phones and connected devices are still very much at the center of our attention, but I hope that over the next few years, this will start to change.
I’m personally interested in finding ways to allow technology to move to the periphery. It’s something I thought about when I went out to Cupertino to work on the first New York Times iPad prototype at Apple. I wasn’t thinking, “can this replicate the newspaper?” but rather, “can this app provide a kind of mental space for someone wanting to delve into long-form content?”
Do you think of the iPad differently from the iPhone in that respect?
Definitely. I don’t open my iPad up in line to check my email and see what’s new on Twitter. The iPad is usually not far from my bed or somewhere under the couch, and something I pick up here and there, not too frequently, but every couple of days. I personally think of it more as a domestic device, but that’s not to say that there aren’t these huge opportunities for the iPad in education, health care, and enterprise.
But if you look at the way Apple marketed the first iPad, it was through these giant advertisements of people laying on their couch with the iPad on their lap. And that was the marketing campaign for an entire year. That says a lot about how they were thinking about how the iPad would be used. That it’s exploding in all these other areas and that it is making it’s way into the workplace is a bit of a surprise. I definitely didn’t observe that when interviewing people the summer after the iPad came out.
When you went to Cupertino, it was two or three weeks before the iPad announcement. Your team was invited by Apple to hustle to build the New York Times iPad app to present onstage with Steve Jobs at the keynote announcement. You had the chance to interact a few times with Steve as he was vetting the app and giving you feedback. What did you learn from those experiences?
My colleagues and I had a rare and, in hindsight, amazing opportunity to meet and interact with Steve Jobs. We had one meeting in particular with him in the very beginning where we were invited to ask him questions about the iPad. One of the stories he told us was this: when the Industrial Revolution was first beginning, businesses and homes had one motor to run everything. As the technology matured and became cheaper, motors became ubiquitous. So now everything has a motor. There are hundreds of motors in our homes. He then made the connection between what happened with the ubiquity of motors, and what he predicted was going to happen with computers, where screens and sensors will pervade every corner of our lives, that every room in the house would have an iPad.
The most impressive part about meeting him was seeing how involved he was with everything to do with the launch. Our first full demo and critique was in front of him.
Yikes, I bet that was terrifying.
Yeah, we were a little bruised after that experience.
What is his manner in critique?
It’s unforgiving. I mean it’s everything you read about him. He didn’t mince words. He was brutally honest but invited that same kind of honesty in return. If we didn’t like something about the iPad we were told we could tell him. So it was a two-way street.
You got to critique Steve while he critiqued you. Speaking of critique and app-building, you’re doing a full-day workshop at Webstock. What will people get from the day?
It’s about quickly building app prototypes. One of the things people will get is a kind of religious zeal about looking at their designs on a device and as quickly as possible.
For the last fifteen years, web designers have been designing in the same context and with the same tools that their work will be seen and used. So, when you have a mouse in your hand, you’re thinking very clearly about mouse-click interactions. You’re designing using the same tools that the people using your designs will ultimately use. But when you’re designing on the desktop for a touch device, you’re not in the same frame of mind when your making decisions.
When designing for touch, we have to get our work on the device as soon as possible, and at every stage of the process. This kind of rigor will evolve our thinking about what’s possible and also poke holes early in some of the flawed thinking we might have because we’ve been designing on a desktop for a desktop.
Does that mean we have to use different tools, too, when we conceive and design apps?
The tools that we have available to us are not perfect. So there’s still a bit of fiction and storytelling we have to weave into our prototypes. And I don’t have definitive answers, but I do have some ideas.
I started teaching a class called “Designing for Touch” at Parsons New School for Design this past Fall. I was particularly impressed by one student who filmed all of the gestures available in his team’s game, and juxtaposed them with a keynote prototype of the game actions. He did this using very simple tools we all have access to.
So it wasn’t so much a pure on-device prototype but it was this proposal he put together that helped us all visualize and think about whether or not the gestures made sense and were intuitive.
It’s going to be the same deal in the workshop, right? You’re not just going to talk about this stuff. You’re going to put people to work.
I’m a taskmaster when it comes to workshops.
Concept videos are becoming more important in the prototyping process to help demonstrate gesture interactions. The smart folks at BERG are great examples of this. Do I have it right that you’ll be doing some video work in the workshop?
Yes, we will be making some tiny films as part of the workshop, what I like to call interaction sketches. One really incredible thing about using technologies like Keynote is you can very quickly make little videos that you can put on a device to get a sense of possible interactions.
There are a lot of parallels between film as a form and interaction design as a form. You have to think about time, movement. And there’s an emotion you can capture in a film that you can’t necessarily capture in an on-device prototype. So in the class I’ve been teaching, we did our touch prototypes first and then the students made a video about their product. It was fascinating to observe how much more clear and coherent their ideas came through in the video than in the on-device prototype.
Making and showing a video can convince people. It’s a believable medium. You can make an idea look very evolved in a video even if it’s held together by chewing gum and paperclips.
