That’s why it was with much fanfare that I directed my wife to a project that was near completion. Not only was it understandable – it was a piece of functionality that I had watched her use repeatedly with other apps. “Aha!” I thought, “What a perfect opportunity for her to see how brilliant her husband’s work is!” She clicked over, tried to start, and declared:

THIS IS A MESS.

Embarrassed, I lamely exclaimed that the design problems that she was seeing weren’t my fault. “It’s the client,” I said, “they’re making me do it that way!” I tried to point out a few of the geegaws that required some clever solution but it was already too late. A few sympathy clicks later (the developer’s version of pity sex) and she was back to the old application.

It’s true this design has been dictated from the top. And, while pretty in Photoshop, the mockups were created with no thought in how things would function. All the rounded corners, drop shadows, gradients, poor contrast text, and unlabeled form fields were useless as soon as interaction was required.

It would be easy to take my check, never include this work in Vox Pop’s portfolio, and point the finger at the client. But to do so would be to accept that I was powerless in the process – something that is never the case. This was my failure. I now accept that:

• I failed to articulate what items were wrong
• When I did communicate I did not use an convincing enough arguments
• I did not adequately demonstrate better alternatives
• I “checked out” of the process when the clients reiterated that the design should be implemented exactly as they had wished, with no deviations

The last point is probably the most insidious. It was a blank check waiting to be cashed if the project failed.

“Wow, this thing kind of blows.”
“Not my fault. They wanted it that way.”

The problem becomes what I can do at this late stage. Realizing my hands aren’t tied was the first step. Now I’m wringing my hands as how best to proceed.

It seems that the longer I put off writing a book update the more they just keep accumulating. However, the books currently “on deck” for Vox Pop are (from left to right):

• Adobe AIR Programming Unleashed by Stacy Tyler Young, Michael Givens, and Dimitrios Gianninas – while I was initially very excited for this book subsequent thumbing through shows that its mostly written for Flex developers. Its a very one-sided approach and most unlike…
• Adobe AIR 1.5 Cookbook by David Trucker, Marco Casario, Koen De Weggheleire, and Rich Tretola – all solutions are demonstrated for both ajax/Flex which makes this a great reference for DOM developers looking to use AIR. It also serves as something of a Rosetta stone for javascript aficionados looking to cross that bridge to the other (Flex) side.
• Never Make the First Offer (except when you should), Wisdom from a Master Dealmaker by Donald Dell with John Boswell – self-congratulatory, pompous, self-serving; and that’s just the first chapter. Full review below.
• Past Due, The End of Easy Money and the Renewal of the American Economy by Peter S. Goodman – I can’t remember where I heard the review; might have been NPR, maybe the Colbert Report. Regardless, this couldn’t be more timely or more relevant for those attempting to build new business free of speculation, questionable value, or hyperbole.
• Singularity Sky by Charles Stross – been on a minor Charlie kick lately although this one wasn’t the red-hot intellectual poker that some of his other paperbacks have been. Full review below.
• Ariel by Steven R. Boyett – written in 1983 this post-apocalyptic story conjures similarities to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road; that is, if Jack was traveling with a talking unicorn and a sword named Fred. Full review below.
• Information Dashboard Design, The Effective Visual Communication of Data by Stephen Few – Within the first few pages this book has shown me why pie charts suck (always), dashboards are minefields waiting to happen, and a vast majority of companies really, really stink at this. But where others smell offal I smell an opportunity.
• Don’t Make Me Think, A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability by Steve Krug – the classic designer tome, now in its second edition. I left a gaping void in my bookshelf’s soul for not having this earlier.

Full reviews of those that I’ve finished below:

=”Never Make the First Offer” – Entertaining, But Not Enlightening=
Donald Dell, when you strip away the celebrity clients and connections to power, is a salesman. It is no surprise, then, that he spends more time in this book selling Donald Dell to the reader then he does a particular technique or practice. To be fair, reading about Jimmy Conner’s hissy fits or Michael Jordan’s compulsive gambling is entertaining reading. But those looking for negotiation insight would be better served by genre classics like “Getting to Yes” or the more academic “Essentials of Negotiation”.

=”Singularity Sky” – Two Stories Converged in a Wood…=
Singularity Sky has two big ideas at play. The first is the practical ramifications of the singularity on a culture not that far removed from our own. The second is a believable approach to time travel as applied to interplanetary warfare. Unfortunately, the mind-blowing connotations produced by the first are overshadowed by the melodrama of the second. Charles Stross has always packed more ideas per chapter than most science fiction writers articulate in the entire book. That is usually a good thing. Here, however, the two sides were less peanut butter and chocolate than they were peanut butter and pickles; potential compelling narratives on their own but unsatisfying when munged together.

=”Ariel” – Don’t Overthink It=
In this reprinting the author spends time in the afterward describing what it was like creating his first novel. Even without him explicitly saying so it wouldn’t be that hard to guess that was the case. The choice to have characters bounce between geographical locations is odd. The sequence of “boss battles” proceeds strangely. There are maddening inconsistencies in the “changed” physical universe. Even the main antagonist is left underdeveloped; if there was no time for fearsome detail then the story would have been better served by a shadow of the reader’s own imagination. However, the story of loosing one’s innocence is poignant. It is understandable why this book is such a favorite among teenagers: the story of a samurai-sword wielding familiar of a unicorn isn’t as removed from their experience as we might think.

What have you been reading lately?

While the suitor in Ominture’s case is surprising the end result is not. Omniture, an analytics company, is a best-in-class behemoth who’s founder had admitted they had outgrown their Orem, UT roots. At last year’s BYU entrepreneurship day Josh James bemoaned the lack of skilled, local executives with experience on par with the challenges they faced. He described how they had to take their recruiting strategy elsewhere to find the talent.

However, Josh is emphatically enamored with Utah. It’s why he refused to move his company – despite the growing pains. It’s also why he made Silicon Slopes effort a personal crusade. For all its faults Silicon Slopes wasn’t about finding media angles to highlight Omniture (at least not completely). It was about recruiting other titans of tech industry to the area.

And now the big have been swallowed by the bigger. It raises a number of interesting questions. Adobe is a San Jose based company employing more than 7,000 people globally. What possible value could they see in keeping Omniture’s pro-Utah pet project ? There will be a number of well-compensated employees coming out of this. Will they have their founder’s same allegiance to the region? Or will they return to wherever they were recruited from to start their own firms? And will the Utah campus slowly dissipate, as Novell’s has over the course of the past decade and a half, when the corporate offices (and decision makers and focus) are a plane flight away?

Then there is the big merging with big to get bigger. On Monday Twelve Horses and a Boston based digital based marketing firm merged (operating under a much more benign yet admittedly SEO friendly ‘One to One Interactive’ moniker). Twelve Horses was a great company well beyond a quirky name. It had a fantastic story. It had a winning crew based in Reno, NV. It also had great leadership growing something special in Salt Lake City. All involved seemed devoted to nurturing a rich ecosystem of community events. I even went so far as to call Steve Spencer, head of the Salt Lake office, an area “patron“.

The people inside remain the same. However, the commitment to the area will wane. It’ll be nothing malicious or intentional. There simply will be little point. With the merger Twelve Horses has ascended into the rarefied air of ‘global company’ (think the mile high club; all the glamor but none of the procreation between the spreadsheets). With clients in Asia and Europe comes the impracticality of managing smaller, local accounts – why spend hours responding to an RFQ in the low five figures when the same time spent can now net seven plus? Why laboriously build relationships at home for every lead when you’re now able to cherry pick from the best assignments anywhere in the country? Why hob-knob with the area freelancers, bloggers, and technorati of dubious merit when the ROI, relative to now available opportunities, is guaranteed to be low?

As they were aggressively attracting the top Utah talent I had hoped that they could serve as a new type of company for others to follow. I wanted them to demonstrate just how an organization can look beyond its own immediate self-interest and actively cultivate complex cultures of mutual collaboration. I thought that, perhaps, their savvy use of social media could be a model for transparency and openness to rally a region’s tech community around.

I realize now how ridiculous it is to have pinned such expectation to them. They did not ask for it and it was unreasonable to have sought it from them. By any conventional measure – deal flow, client prestige, iPhones per developer – they are successes. The deal will bring new press-release worthy opportunities, far-flung challenges, and larger contracts. Twelve Horses’ merger and Omniture’s buyout illustrate exactly what each group is: a business; nothing less and, to my disappointment, nothing more.

In theory, coworking spaces, like Salt Lake City’s Betaloft, provide a tremendous service. They allow freelance writers, programmers, and creatives to collaborate in an ad-hoc, professional environment. However, the reality is less than perfect for a majority of its intended audience.

Cities in the western United States, like Salt Lake, are extremely car-centric. Where people live may be considerable distance from where a coworking center may be. There likely isn’t adequate public transportation between. Also, like many peers, I’m increasingly “client squatting”; that is, the jobs are too big or too technically complex to be handled remotely. Finally, when not at a clients I’m in my home office. After several years my man cave home office is optimized to my own predilections. It makes very little sense buying a membership to schlepp my stuff somewhere else when I’ve got all my creature comforts productivity tools readily available at the bottom of the stairs.

There is, however, one enormous advantage that an external space could serve. Even a virtual, distributed organization, like Vox Pop, needs a place for physical mail to be sent. My current solution is problematic. First, its multiple addresses: a PO Address for standard mail and my home address for package delivery (much to my chagrin). Second, the initial thrill of getting mail was quickly eclipsed by the tedious routine of driving to the post office to see if anything was there and discovering there wasn’t. The third issue is the perception of a PO box; despite progress toward redefining what a successful business may be many still hold PO boxes as a sign of un-professionalism or instability.

Regus is a nationwide business that offers a number of virtual office solutions across the country. What I’d love to see at my local coworking space is an emulation of the services provided by Regus. In particular, their mailbox solution is extremely attractive. For a monthly fee anybody can have:

• an address at a very professional looking location (Times Square, Capital Hill, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, etc.)
• somebody to sign for packages
• notification when new mail is there
• mail collection that is forwarded to address of your choosing (or held for pickup)

There are other places, like the UPS Store (formerly Mail Boxes Etc.), that offers something similar. However, the fit with coworking spaces would seem to make this a natural, low cost way of adding an additional revenue stream. I’m not interested (or have time) to cowork for the number of afternoons to justify a monthly membership. But paying a monthly fee to take advantage of Betaloft’s lovely downtown address is attractive. More importantly, the money saved from avoiding wasted post office trips would easily pay for itself.

What am I missing?