Will Any Agency Hire This Man?

He is 38, and unemployed. He dropped out of college.
He has been a cook, a salesman, a diplomatist and a farmer.
He knows nothing about marketing and had never written any copy.
He professes to be interested in advertising as a career (at the age of 38!) and is ready to go to work for $5,000 a year.

I doubt if any American agency will hire him.

However, a London agency did hire him. Three years later he became the most famous copywriter in the world, and in due course built the tenth biggest agency in the world.

The moral: it sometimes pays an agency to be imaginative and unorthodox in hiring.

He was, of course, talking about himself. It reminds me of how revolutions of industries rarely, if ever, comes from the inside. It happens when people from the outside create products with a new completely new view, not bound or affected by those already in existence.

Via @tor.

Via Asymco.

It looks like the kind of application where you would add fake content over and over again, just to experience the joy of interacting with it. Now that’s what I would call a great user experience.

It’s never too late to create a new product in an well-established category, you just have to do it much better.

Even though it looks great, I haven’t tried it yet. Many people have, and they say it’s as good as it looks, but I have to give it a spin before I can deem it a success or not.

Clear is built by Realmac Software, Milen and Impending. It has been sent to Apple and should be out very soon.

When Steve Jobs talked about he’s ‘cracked it’, he’s talking about connectivity – so we’ve had that in the market already for 12 months, it’s nothing new, it was new for them because they didn’t play in the space. It’s old news as far as the traditional players are concerned and we have broadened that with things like voice control and touch control; the remote control for these TVs has a touch pad.

Hmm. Phones did exist before the iPhone, no? That could connect to the internet? And that had apps on them? You could call, send messages and listen to music. Yes, I think that was possible.

Samsung, and many companies like it, just doesn’t get Apple. If my mind serves me correctly, Microsoft and Nokia showed this exact type of ignorance back when rumors about an Apple-phone started to float around. And they even did so after Apple had their unveiling. How did that end again?

In the end, just as Indiana Jones could never turn down the opportunity to search for the Holy Grail, I could no less turn down the chance to work for myself on something I truly love, no matter how safe the alternative might be. When I’m old and dying, I plan to look back on my life and say “wow, that was an adventure,” not “wow, I sure felt safe.”

A good and interesting read about how GitHub got started. What really stuck with me though, is that last sentence in the excerpt above. When I’m old and dying, I plan to look back on my life and say “wow, that was an adventure,” not “wow, I sure felt safe.”. Hell yes, I definitively plan on doing the same.

Via @aral.

It’s no mistake that this is very much the sort of thing that is most valued within the most effective software teams in Silicon Valley. Let’s call it “the designer who codes.” This is the sort of person can build exactly what he knows people need, with an aesthetic that compliments its use, with no back-and-forth.

Silicon Valley start-up Quora does it this way to great effect. They take the process simplicity to the next level. Every person on lead designer Rebekah Cox’s team is also an engineer. The design doesn’t happen in Photoshop. It happens in the text editor, in code.

Great article about the new breed of designers, that doesn’t just live in Photoshop all day, but can, and do, design just as much directly in code. For interface design, it’s just nothing that can match it. Facebook, and especially Quora, are excellent at this. The experience is stellar.

The article also tell’s a fun little story about Steve Jobs and the first calculator on a mac.

Today that stops. It’s a new year, with new possibilities and with the wonderful opportunity of “resetting”. I’ve spent all December designing, developing and editing it, so I hope you’ll enjoy what you see and read.

I’ve also changed the format of my blog. It will still include articles like before, but I’ll also be posting links to all kinds of different content, with my opinion or comment below. The new blog setup is inspired by Daring Fireball.

I’d really appreciate to hear your thoughts, be it good or bad. Feel free to add a comment below or message me on twitter. Thank you!

A lot of people think Netflix is better than it is, is what I would always say. Because they get a movie recommend to them, they like the movie, and they have a great experience with the movie, and they transfer that love back to the site. And if you can create a service like that, it’s golden. Because all you really do is to get out of the way.

Think about the invoicing application when you see much money you’ve earned, or Google Analytics when your site goes viral. Great, positive content often equals a great user experience. As software designers, we should be more aware of that, and try to highlight the positive content in our apps that make people happy.

In all this work, and all the usage, and all the trials, and all the tweaks, I’ve spotted a pattern. Things that look good at the end of the day often don’t look good the next morning.

The end of the day has a way of convincing you what you’ve done is good. The next morning has a way of telling the you truth.

Definitively. I also often look at a design every day after one another, and the more days I open it and still like it, the bigger the chance I’m on to something good.

For a very long time, I’ve had the following sentence in the bottom of my dekstop wallpaper; “Steve Jobs changed the world. What have you done?”. Each and every time I sit down next to my iMac to work, I read it and it reminds me of the quality he stands for and the work he’s done. It inspires me and motivates me to keeping creating the best possible things I can.

Steve Jobs in December 1982, at his home in California. Photo by Diana Walker.

I’ve always, in a strange way, thought I would meet Steve Jobs. But it wouldn’t happend before I had done something substantial in life, worthy of Steve’s time. It would be a day when what I had created was of the utmost quality, and had made an impact on the world. It would have met Steve’s standards. He would know who I was, and we would have a conversation, not fan-to-icon, but man-to-icon.

It might sound strange, and it most likely never would have happened, but I’ve still worked towards it and in some weird way looked forward to it. It’s been some kind of a life goal. And knowing that there isn’t even the slightest possibility to meet and chat with the greatest visionary the world has seen in modern time? That saddens me very, very much.

It’s a selfish reason to be sad for, but a reason none-the-less, and only one of many.

Thank you, Steven P. Jobs. For the impact you’ve had on me, and for the impact you’ve had, and will have for many coming years, on the world.

Yale Fox, a DJ from Toronto, has for the past few years been researching the effect music has on people, especially how it affects human behavior in nightclubs. His findings are very interesting and show how easily we can be guided into doing something, or rather buying something. All on a subconsciously level of course. Some of his findings include:

• Experienced DJ’s balance big hits, which makes people dance, with slower songs, which makes people go to the bar buying drinks instead of dancing.
• House music generates more cocktails and vodka sales.
• Rock music generates more beer sales.

Another thing that was particularly interesting, is if we’ve had a great time going clubbing and dancing, we tend to subconsciously give the credit for the successfully night to the liquor brand we drank. So the next time we go to the store to buy liquor, we buy that particular brand in search for creating that same good feeling and evening.

No wonder brands spend so much money associating themselves with different events, people and settings. Also, the reason clubbing is enjoyed so much by many people, is because when dancing with a group of friends, the brain produces a higher level of Oxytocin, which increases the level of trust you have towards the people around you and reduces fear and anxiety.

If you’re interested in some more tidbits, you’ll find them over at Teehan+Lax, which was just given a visit by Yale.

Image from VancityAllie.

I just started using two new Mac apps; 1) Fantastical by Flexibits and 2) iA Writer by Information Architects. They were both released in May, something which may tell us a thing or two about the future of the OS X platform. More developers and more awesome software.

1. Fantastical

Fantastical is a calendar app which works by using plain English. It shines from beginning to end. I thought it was so good when I first got it, that I came up with things I could add to my calendar, just for the sake of being able to use the application more. It really shows that the creators spent hours and hours tweaking it to craft the perfect experience.

My feature requests for Fantastical:

• The ability to edit events.

Buy Fantastical from the Mac App Store

2. iA Writer

iA Writer is a writing app with laser focus like no other. It doesn’t have preferences or options, just extreme focus on the task at hand; writing. iA Writer has a feature called FocusMode, which I absolutely love. It lets you focus on the one sentence at hand – everything else becomes secondary. Combine this with a full-screen mode and gorgeous typography, and you got yourself one heck of a writing app. I now use iA Writer for writing all my blogposts.

My feature requests for iA Writer:

• Auto-save so that you never have to think about it.
• Auto-fill the name of the document with the first header text you create.
• Remember which screen-size I used and where on the screen the app was last time it was in use. Similar to how the Finder works.

Buy iA Writer from the Mac App Store

Have you tried any of them? Would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

It was the morning of January 9th, 2007. Steve Jobs took the stage at San Francisco’s Moscone Center to change the mobile industry forever. With a brilliant presentation, the Apple Chief introduced the very first iPhone.

The following day, around 24 hours after the 2-hour-long presentation, RIM (makers of the BlackBerry smartphones) executives invited the whole company to an all-hands meeting to talk about the newly-announced iPhone.

A former employee said they then concluded that it was impossible to create what Apple said they had created. RIM refused to believe the iPhone could do everything they said it could, without having terrible battery life.  They also allegedly thought several features was impossible to create. Microsoft, Nokia, Motorola and Palm is said to have had similar reactions.

Enter the release on June 29th, when RIM disassembled an iPhone for the first time, and found that they had been completely wrong. They found that the iPhone was almost one big battery, with a tiny logic board strapped to it, and that it worked exactly as Apple had said it would.

RIM only then started to work on a iPhone competitor, The BlackBerry Storm. Failing to believing the first time, they had however given Apple an even bigger head start.

Such an interesting story, and it shows how big of a leap the iPhone really was. No wonder we had such bad phones when this kind of attitude and ignorance was all over the place.

Via SlashGear via Electronista via Shacknews.

So I feel kinda bad for not having written anything on my blog in 2011. Things have been crazy busy with new projects taking lots of time, as well as a new full-time job. That is however no good excuse. Everybody is busy, and it’s really just a matter of prioritizing correctly and taking the time to do it. That’s what I’m going to do now.

There’s a couple of new things:

1. The design has been updated. It has been crafted for the single purpose of giving you the best possible reading experience.
2. Comments are now activated and will be active on all future posts. I’d love to hear your thoughts, questions and critique.
3. The blog will become more topic-focused as time goes on. I won’t write about things that doesn’t belong here. I haven’t picked any particular topics yet, but I’ll definitively create some guidelines for myself in a couple of weeks.

I hope you’ll follow along and hopefully find what I write interesting.

Image from cambodia4kidsorg.

The urinals in the toilets on the Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, has what looks like a small fly inside of them. When you look closer however, it’s actually the outline of a fly, etched into the porcelain itself. The staff at the airport did research afterwards found that urinals with the fake flies reduced spillage by 80%! When a man sees a fly, he automatically aims at it. Genius.

Via Thomas Krampl Via Dickson Fong Via Xianhang Zhang and lots of googling.

They have to be doing something right to achieve that kind of quality. The interview embedded below is a fascinating look at how Pixar works and how the company is organized. It’s full of good stuff from start to finish.

The interview was done in March earlier this year, at Innovation 2010 by The Economist. Martin Giles interviewed Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar.

Via Ryan Singer via Scott Berkun.

When I was designing the temporary beta signup page for Timely App, I wanted to highlight the word “time tracking” strongly, because it instantly explained the whole application. I had already used up a couple of other visual effects such as bold and a light yellow background, so I went with an underline, which really made the text pop.

Lesson learned though: Never ever use an underline to highlight a text or sentence if it’s not a link, because everyone will think it is and try to click it. Look at the heatmap below to get a feeling of what I mean:

First of all, you should follow me on twitter.

I find subconsciously human behavior extremely interesting. It doesn’t matter what we do knowingly, it’s those milliseconds where our brain is making hundred of choices that affects what we do. All of our smaller actions, like clicking a link or not, is done utterly subconsciously. We just do it, but there’s always a reason behind it. There’s obviously different reasons, and often more than one, for us doing something (like the visuals), but for this article, I’ll talk about the text, specifically the difference between using a statement and command.

I’ve read several interesting articles over the last year about how certain smaller changes have affected clickthrough rates with huge results. I’d love to give them all credit and link back to them, but I could only remember and find two:

What I find interesting in both articles isn’t which exact phrase worked better than the other, but the fact that a command did so much better than a statement.

Do we humans, subconsciously, like to be told what to do, instead of having to manually take a choice of doing something? Is there a much bigger chance that we’ll do something if we being directly told to do it, instead of having to create an action from a statement (or a fact)? And the stronger the command, does the chance of doing it grow as well?

When we’re presented with a statement, we process a fact and may choose to read the fact and move on, or to execute the possible action a statement can give us. For example, as Dustin uses in his article: “I’m on twitter.”. The primary here is that he’s on twitter. The secondary is that we may follow him on twitter.

When we’re presented with a command however, we process an action and choose to execute on that action or not. Again, in Dustin’s article: “You should follow me on twitter.”. The fact has now changed from the primary, to the secondary, and the command has become the primary.

So it would seem that the brain subconsciously responds much easier to a command, where it only has to go through one process (the action), compared to a statement where it has to go through two processes (the fact and the action). The data shows that in both Jason’s and Dustin’s cases, changing from a statement to a command more than doubled the action they wanted people to do.

And that is the exact reason I use commands, instead of statements, when I really want people to do something. Obviously you can’t use commands everywhere, but on important things, like encouraging things to signup for something, subscribe to something, or follow/like something, a command will probably work much better than a statement.

I’m still very much interested in wether a much stronger command will create better results, and if there’s a limit to how strong a command can be. I’ll definitely try different A/B tests around this topic in the coming future and report back on my findings.

Image from Wikipedia, created by Patrick J. Lynch.

Let me say that one more time. Sold 2.8% of the market, gets 39% of the profits. And this includes all phones worldwide, not just smartphones. Apple sold 17 million handsets during the first half of 2010. Nokia, LG and Samsung, combined, sold 400 million. Their profits, again, combined, are lower than Apple’s.

Look at the graph below to get a better picture at how this is split up:

Via The Mac Observer.

Unless you’re a fortune-teller, long-term business planning is a fantasy. There are just too many factors that are out of your hands: market conditions, competitors, customers, the economy, etc. Writing a plan makes you feel in control of things you can’t actually control.

Why don’t we just call plans what they really are: guesses. Start referring to your business plans as business guesses, your financial plans as financial guesses, and your strategic plans as strategic guesses. Now you can stop worrying about them as much. They just aren’t worth the stress.

So true. Excerpt from the excellent book Rework, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson from 37signals, makers of Basecamp and Highrise among other applications. You should read it.