Pek Pongpaet

What My Readers Click On

2010-09-10T14:05:16Z

I tend to share a lot of links and articles on Twitter and Facebook for my friends and followers. I’m always curious as to what types of content resonates with my readers. What I usually do is pipe all my shared content through bit.ly which is a URL shortening service that provides analytics. That’s good because if you want to see what your readers gravitate towards you can find out and give them more of what they want.

What I decided to do is to look at the click data for the last 3 weeks of my sharing and see what received the most clicks. Since I post the headlines with the link, a more catchier headline probably fared better on its own merit rather than the actual content.

Clicks   Article
102   Spectacular Photo Manipulations | Inspiration
70   How Entrepreneurs Have Changed – YourAM Blog
60   The REAL ‘Stuff White People Like’ « OkTrends
58   Why We Don’t Need More Women In Tech… Yet «
58   On the Edge – I am Jason Fried. I say amazing and thoughtfu…
56   9 Websites Stuck in the 1990’s / Flowtown (@flowtown)
55   MySQL Diehard vs. NoSQL Fanboi: The Animated Movie – ReadWr..
50   After $75,000, Money Can’t Buy Day-to-Day Happiness
47   What People Earn How We’re Making It Work | Parade.com

What I was surprised to see is that how many of the entrepreneurial and startup stuff got clicks. Although many of my readers are entrepreneurs, most are not. I also have about 2000 friends on Twitter and Facebook give or take so the click through rate is only about 2.5-5% for most popular stuff. Of course with the Twitter stream and Facebook updates, things get lost in the shuffle. They are very time sensitive and people may or may not see your posts. Another thing to consider is what times your readers are online.

A Recommendation Site for the ADD

2010-09-07T21:31:13Z

With the advent of Twitter where posts are 140 characters or less and Tumblr and Posterous where blog posts are getting shorter and shorter, it is no surprise that a site like ShoutWorthy exists. ShoutWorthy is another online reputation site that lets you recommend people and receive recommendations in 140 characters or less. It even integrates with Twitter or Facebook so you don’t have to sign up with another login and password.

LinkedIn is great for recommendations but because of privacy settings and the fact that you might not be connected to the person, it may not be possible to view those recommendations. My friend Sachin Agarwal once commented that the problem with LinkedIn recommendations was that after the first few recommendations, everything else was just noise. Having 20+ recommendations is great only from a numbers perspective but nobody was going to sit and read all 20 of them if they were 300 words or more.

ShoutWorthy does away with that Twitter style – everything is short and public. Here’s a screencap of a recommendation I made for my friend Paul Saini.

The setup is pretty much like Twitter in that you see feeds of recommendations by your friends. You also have your own ShoutWorthy page people can see recommendations you’ve given as well as ones you have received.

Thanks to Justin Reidy for introducing me to this site.

Designing For Non-Technies and Neophytes

2010-09-06T00:28:31Z

I have recently had the great fortune and pleasure of observing non-techies and neophytes use new software and it’s been an eye opening experience. Web designers who have been around software applications and the web for ten years develop certain assumptions about their users that may prove hazardous to their web app if their target users are supposed to be non technical or non web savvy users.

Here are some real life stories based on my first hand observations.

Story 1
I once had to perform a martial arts demonstration that was choreographed to music. I brought the music on my iPod. Prior to the demo, I gave my iPod to the sound technician and the MC. The iPod was set to the specific playlist and all they had to do was to hit Play when we bust out on stage. Apparently I had not counted on the fact that neither person had ever operated an iPod before and had no idea what to make of the click wheel. You could say that they must have been living under a rock for the last 10 years but I disagree. They weren’t stupid people either. One was an engineer and the other person was in the financial sector and had an MBA. Apple fanboys will argue me to death about the fact that Apple products are super easy to use. They might be once you learn how to use it but for a first timer with no instructions I think Apple devices can be quite cryptic.

Story 2
I observed a 10 year SaaS CEO and a software engineer use a particular website with much struggle and frustration. The software was supposed to be geared towards non-technical people but it was riddled with icons void of accompanying text descriptions. Neither of the users knew where anything was or what anything meant. The SaaS CEO who was used to Windows exclaimed that the software was full of Apple icons – confusing the use of icons for the Apple design sensibility.

I think these stories are indicative of a larger phenomenon. Designers who have been accustomed to the web and some of the UI affordances are making assumptions about certain user experiences.

Take for example this screenshot of Twitter for iPad. On the bottom left we see two icons. As a veteran web user and an interface designer, I immediately recognize that the two icons mean New Message/Compose and Settings.

However, I think that’s a pretty big leap for someone who’s not a web savvy user to assume that they know what those icons mean. I think UI designers can get too clever and do their audience a major disservice when they start making such assumptions about what icons their audience ought to recognize without further explanation.

There’s Always Room for More Social Networks

2010-09-04T05:22:21Z

Some people believe that there is room for only one viable social network at a time. First there was Friendster, then MySpace, and now Facebook. Well, maybe Facebook and Twitter. The fallacy of that argument is that these social networks are too broad. There will always be room for niche players. Even among the art/design community there are a few vibrant economies. DeviantArt has been around a long time and is not going away soon. Niche social networks have an appeal because the members can discuss and go into detailed discussions about their topic in a way that wouldn’t feel inappropriate at a more casual social network say like Facebook.

I’ve lately been a fan of Dribbble, an invite only social network for designers made by designers. The idea is you post small shots, using a tongue in cheek basketball analogy, of what you are working on. Other designers like and critique your work and offer advice on how to improve upon it. I found the community to be very helpful and friendly. But a site like this would have no appeal to the average consumer, a rocket scientist, or a musician.

A general social network like Facebook would not be appropriate place for uber web designers to geek out over every pixel. A social network like this also offers much more targeted advertising opportunities. The best Facebook ads could do for a while was to offer me American Apparel. For all the information Facebook had about me, they still couldn’t show me an ad that truly engaged me. Here’s where a niche social network does better. People who come to that site are already interested in a very specific subject. Products and services that cater to that group of people would do very well.

Obviously networks like Deviantart and Behance will never be the size of Facebook but they don’t have to be nor should they try to be. As long as you can get a critical mass of users, you have something.

On Perserverance

2010-09-04T04:52:46Z

At some point you will face a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. Whether this is a technical problem, a challenge at work, or a plateau in your training, everyone will come across this at some point in their life. I have been working on something for quite some time. I keep slowly plugging away at it, but lately, I’ve seem to hit a brick wall, and I feel like I’ve been equipped with only sticks and stones to take down this mountain of bricks despite my best efforts. At times like these, I tell myself to keep pushing but when there’s no hope in sight, it can be daunting. It’s so easy to throw up your hands and give up. The seduction of just letting it all go can be tempting.

Sometimes you just have to step back and take a look at how much you have accomplished. At times like these it’s good to have someone tell you that the end might just be around the corner. If you stop now, you’d never know how close you got. There is a Chinese saying, “Failure is the mother of success.” You can rarely succeed without first failing. Through failure we learn our lessons just as long as we are willing to pick ourselves up and keep moving.

I hit plateaus in my martial arts training all the time. When that happens, I try to surround myself with people who will push me and motivate me. I also try to change it up a bit and work on not only getting over the hump but also training on other stuff that may help me get over the plateau. Sometimes, you just need a break or get a fresh perspective.

I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.
- Steve Jobs 1995

How To Make an Award Winning iPhone App in 12 Hours

2010-09-04T04:49:44Z

This is the story of how two people who’ve never created a mobile application developed an iPhone app at the Day of Mobile Hackathon on March 6, 2010 in less than 12 hours and went on to win the Best iPhone App prize of $250 cash.

First off, what this blog post isn’t:

It’s not a get rich quick scheme. (Well, maybe it is, if it motivates you to crank out some apps with some new gained knowledge).
I’m also no trying to sell you anything. There’s not going to be some affiliate link or buy this e-book crap.
This is not a turnkey solution for a non-techie. If you can’t code, other than it being a good read, this article is not helpful to you. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for, move along.

If you are still reading this, awesome!

Day of Mobile is a one day developer conference focused on the mobile phone industry. Speakers range successful iPhone app developers who made gobs of money to a lawyer who talked about the legal issues that come up when creating these apps. At these types of conferences, it is not unusual to have a hackathon.

My friend Chad Paulson and I decided to partner up and compete in this hackathon. I’ve served as a judge at 2 hackathons including SocialDevCamp 2009 Chicago and Google Android Eco Challenge Hackathon in Chicago. Both hackathons turned out really well in terms of number of teams competing and apps that came out of it. Chad’s app actually won Best Overall at SocialDevCamp. He made out like a bandit. I was really pumped and inspired.

However neither of us had ever made a mobile app. I made a hello world iphone app that had a label that said hello world over a year ago. That’s about my level of experience with Objective-C. Since it was a one day hackathon, we really didn’t have much time. The conference started at 9AM on Saturday and code freeze was 2:30PM.

With that in mind we had to find a solution that would work for us. I had already done a tech evaluation of several mobile development platforms including Appcelerator Titanium, PhoneGap, Flash CS5, Mono, Rhodes and others for a client who was looking into mobile apps. These are development platforms that provide a layer of abstraction that allows one to develop a mobile app that would publish to one or more platform without having to learn said platform. In that research, I had concluded that the solution that would work for me and my team was Appcelerator Titanium because we were web developers who were comfortable with javascript and html. That’s what I ended up going with when we did this hackathon.

The mobile app that Chad and I decided to develop for the hackathon was a mobile version of my webapp, a social media monitoring tool. In keeping with the spirit of the hackathon, we decided not to start coding till Thursday (keeping development time under 24 hours). We realized later on that some of the other teams had been working on some of these apps for a week and had more people on it even. However, what we did do is install the necessary software before hand and started to figure out HOW to do the things we needed for our app. I also started designing the screens before hand so that we would hit the ground running the second we started coding.

If you think of it as an Iron Chef episode, we essentially figured out what we were going to make and had done all the prep work like chopping vegetables so that once the competition started, everybody just started doing stuff.

Friday March 5th, 10:00PM. Chad gets home from dinner with his girlfriend. We already had a skeleton project that was created when you create a new blank project in Titanium. We also already had Kitchen Sink installed. It’s a sample project provided by the Appcelerator guys that has all the sample code you would need to get started on anything except the most esoteric of projects – hence the name Kitchen Sink.

Since my web app already had a REST API that we could access, we just had to figure out how to make those calls and display them in the conventional mobile way, usually in a list. By 3:00AM, we had many of the screens showing dynamic data. By that time, I started to keep dozing off on my computer. I tried to push through but ended up going to bed around 3:30AM. Chad wanted to make more progress so he cranked at it till around 7:30AM. That was around the time I got up and I dragged my groggy self to the conference and started coding again.
When Chad got up at 10:30AM I had the final screen working.

At this point the app was basically working but it didn’t have all the bells and whistles of a usable mobile app (like back buttons between views, title bars, etc). Overall, at that point, I had put in say 7 hours of work and Chad about 9 hours. It’s a testament to the ease of use and power of Appcelerator Titanium.

We spent the remaining time till 2:30 tweaking and cleaning up the code and making sure it was a polished app that would demo really well. I also used some of that time to work on my slides for the demo presentation.

To be honest, I didn’t think we were going to win anything. After seeing all the demos from the various hackathon teams, we were very impressed. Each app was cool and compelling in its own right. I was very surprised when we ended up winning the Best iPhone App category. There were 11 teams with about 4 or more iPhone apps if I remember correctly. That was the end of the journey. By that, we were so tired that we just wanted to go home and pass out.

New Blog Design & Sneak Peek at iPad App

2010-09-04T02:35:45Z

I’ve been really tired of my blog design for a while now and it always seemed bloated with too many widgets that really slowed it down. When my hosting provider got compromised and my site was infected with malicious content, this gave me the perfect opportunity to update the site. I wanted a simple theme that looked well designed and clean. If you like the theme, here’s where I found it: WordPress Notepad Theme. I decided to bring the focus back to the actual content and get rid of all the other distractions.

As part of the design I decided to give people a sneak peek of my upcoming iPad app. Not only does it have a great design and looks great on the “desk” but it’s what I’ve been up to lately outside of work. Also it’s something that I’ve created and makes sense to feature as part of my identity.

Thoughts on iPad Killers

2010-08-16T04:27:35Z

It seems that every week there is some article on yet another iPad Killer. Whenever I hear this, two things happen: I groan, and I vomit a little in my mouth. I get that these articles capitalize on the popularity of the iPad, and other companies are jumping on the bandwagon also because of the popularity of the iPad. Companies just don’t get it.

The iPad is a beautiful device. I’ve had it for 6 months now and find that indeed it has a place between my mobile phone and my laptop. However it’s going to take much more than just a super awesome touch based tablet to take down the iPad.

The beauty of the iPad is that it’s much more than just the iPad. The iPad is really just a gateway to Apple’s money making machine. Through the iPad I have access to Apple’s immense library of music and movies through iTunes, Apple’s massive collection of apps in the App Store, and now Apple’s growing library of books in iBooks. It’s a whole ecosystem. If I went with another device, say a Windows tablet or Android tablet, currently I would need an account to buy music (Amazon mp3), a separate account to buy books (like Kobo etc), and another account to buy apps (Google). With Apple, it’s all tied to my iTunes account and it just works. They make it really easy and sweet to buy content. That is why the iPad is optimized for consumption and not for production. Any tablet device seriously thinking about toppling the iPad better have all these things. And this is not something easily done since it took even Apple over a decade to build all this up and build a brand and mindshare.

Another thing Apple has done better than any other device manufacturer is to embrace designers. This was a fortunate side effect from designers adopting the Adobe software + Apple hardware combo. This is why there are so many gorgeous apps in the Apple App Store. For example Microsoft has never been able to crack that egg. Even though the Microsoft stack has been adopted in the enterprise, they’ve never embraced designers until lately. Their attempt at that with the Microsoft Expression Engine is not likely to turn over any designers any time soon. Designers have been using the Adobe suite of graphic tools for over a decade. I myself have been using PhotoShop for over that long and don’t foresee switching anytime soon. I’m not the only one.

Why are designers important? For one thing – gorgeous apps. Consumers will buy well designed applications. You only need to look at the Apple App Store’s top sellers and compare it to the Droid Marketplace. The App Store’s top sellers list is filled with beautifully designed apps whereas the Marketplace list various game emulators. It’s pretty clear to me that the demographic of the Android platform is mostly developers, engineers and tech geeks. I think it reflects the culture of the two companies pretty well. Apple is about design and Google is mostly an engineering company. Google has been described as antidesign if anything. That’s fine but at the end of the day ugly apps just won’t sell.

All that aside, there’s really no way to tell who’s going to win in the long run. The Androis OS is quickly gaining marketshare and will continue to do so as more and more phone manufacturers and tablet manufacturers adopt it. Who’s to say that other companies might not be able to address the issues I’ve mentioned and eat into Apple’s marketshare.

How I Get Stuff Done

2010-08-08T02:12:30Z

I haven’t blogged in what feels like forever mostly because I’ve been really busy lately and also because I just didn’t know what to say or discuss. I’m generally known as the guy who gets stuff done or the guy who’s juggling a million projects and launching new products and websites. People often wonder how I can get stuff done. I thought this might be a good topic to share my thoughts.

If I had to boil it down to one thing, it is sacrifice. I simply give up a lot of things other people don’t want to sacrifice.

For one thing, I don’t go out much. I don’t socialize much anymore other than with people who can help me get stuff done or other like minded people who inspire me. I don’t go out boating on weekends or watching movies or go out for drinks. I just don’t have the time if I want to get things done.

I don’t spend a lot of time on Twitter and other social networks. I know that sounds hard to believe since I seem to tweet a lot. If you look carefully I really just share a lot, but I hardly engage. That’s because the sharing part hardly takes any time on my part. It’s very streamlined almost to the point of automation. That way I still have my hand in Twitter but really I’m just busy getting things done.

I delegate and have a team. No man’s an island. Also, no man can do everything by himself. There are only 24 hours in a day. With about 5-6 hours of sleep, 8-10 hours for a day job, there’s really only about 8 hours left to do your own thing. Spending time with my family is important so I take some time to do that everyday and you really don’t have a lot of time left. If you spend that time watching TV, socializing, playing video games and generally chilling out, you just don’t have that much time to spend on projects if that’s what you want to get done. So my secret is that I find people who compliment me in terms of skillset and partner with them or just down right hire them.

So that’s the other secret. I pay people to help me. I know so many people who want to do projects and have ideas, but they have this aversion to paying people. But those same people seem to have trouble getting things done. It’s been my experience that people generally don’t like to work for free. These same people couldn’t conceive of doing work for free, so how can they expect other people to work for them for free. It just doesn’t make sense.

I do business lunches. If you’ve never read the book “Never Eat Alone” by Keith Ferrazzi, you owe it to yourself to do so if you want to get more done in life. I hardly eat alone. Most week days, I try to schedule lunches with people I do business with or people I want to do business with. I try to strengthen relationships through these lunches and learn more about them and what they need.

Like most people, I commute to and from work. I usually read my Kindle or jot down ideas. Some of my best ideas have been conceived during these commutes. So always have a notebook on you for those occasions.

That said, I don’t think I am the most productive person out there. The most productive people I think know how to really optimize what they do and only focus on the stuff that really makes them successful. Thus they don’t have to work as hard. I’m still trying to figure that out.

Roundarch is looking for a few good men (and women)

2010-07-11T20:54:55Z

Roundarch is always looking for great people. We do some great work and some of our clients include: US Air Force, Northern Trust, Tesla Motors, Avis, Motorola and more. It’s an awesome place to work as I can personally attest to. We have a very casual environment even though we work very hard. Here are some open positions:

Senior Front-End Developer Chicago

eZ Publish Developer Chicago

SharePoint Developer Chicago

User Experience Designer New York

Visual Designer Chicago

User Experience Designer Chicago

Senior User Experience Designer Chicago

Lead Front-End Developer New York

Senior Java Developer Chicago

Functional Lead New York