1. Music pages need a prominent and centered Music Player. For all the fail of Myspace the one thing they got right is that a band’s page is about its music. The first thing front and center needs to be a Music Player. Instead we get a half-assed music player option which either has to sit quietly in the bottom left hand corner below the fold, or on the Boxes page (if you make Boxes page the default), but then your page looks fairly stupid, because the rest of the good content (Wall) is elsewhere. So - a very quick and dramatic improvement would be to place the Music Player box right at the top of the Wall tab, so that visitors can hear the music and read the news and talk with the band at the same time.
2. A Page’s administrators need a way to get a solid news stream from the page including all comments, likes, and etc. Without this feature it is difficult to communicate with fans. I run a page for my photography on facebook, but I find there is no good way to get all the comments. Instead I have to notice that someone commented, then find the photoset and look at the photoset’s comments to find the actual comment. There is no good way to know that someone’s written on the page’s wall either, unless you have the wall display in Page + Fans mode, and physically check back. A page can only be an effective tool if it enables the administrators to communicate with the people, but without a feed it’s nearly useless.
3. RSS. Come on facebook, it’s 2009! What is the excuse for not having an RSS feed for the page? What’s more, several places on the site have very carefully hidden RSS links (such as Notes), but they don’t even bother putting in the proper HTML LINK element to get it to show up in the browser’s url bar. Get with the program, please.

I don’t doubt that facebook’s engineers are busy cooking up the next redesign and improvement, but I think that if facebook wants Pages to be a successful tool for businesses, bands, and other commercial-ish entities that are starting to make facebook their home, then that area should be their next target for a redesign and rethink.

I got rid of my zoom lens and use typically a 35mm or a 50mm lens on my camera. Looking through one focal length all the time really trains your eye to see that box around everything you look at. Not only does it help you to spot good shots, but it also makes you less conspicuous if you don’t have a gigantic lens glued to your face at all times. I often frame something in my mind before I even bring the camera to my eye. This is just not very easy to do with a zoom lens, but if you know your favorite focal length by heart, you can do much of the thinking ahead of time, so you don’t miss the moment. Even better is to get a rangefinder camera, or maybe just a standalone viewfinder that you can look through.

2. Manual focus can be faster

Autofocus has several disadvantages. First, many cameras, including my Pentax K20D will not fire the shot in AF mode unless the AF has locked. This means you may miss the decisive moment. The second disadvantage of AF is that when it misses, it misses big. So instead of focusing on your subject you might focus on the background, completely ruining the shot. With manual focus you might the focus a little bit, but the shot may be plenty useable, just soft. Especially when shooting at small apertures like f8 and up, and with wider lenses, MF becomes quite useable, especially if you take advantage of hyperfocal focusing. Third, AF is a bit noisy, and often nearly useless in dim light.

3. Meter ahead of time

When an interesting scenario presents itself, you don’t want to miss it because your camera settings are wrong. Sure on gray days with low contrast scenes your camera’s meter might get the exposure right. But if you find yourself in a complex lighting scenario, I find it’s better to prepare ahead of time by setting your camera to manual exposure and figuring out the right exposure as the light changes. For this, it’s best to take a test shot and look at the histogram and make sure nothing is over or underexposed, or just use your eyes if you don’t have a histogram. You can use the camera’s suggested metering as a starting point and adjust from there. Keep your eyes on the light around you and make sure that when it changes you have updated your camera settings in preparation for the next shot. And don’t forget to adjust the ISO appropriate to the light around you - typically 100-200 for bright days, 400 for overcast conditions, 800 and 1600 for indoor lighting. For a fun bonus, learn the sunny f16 rule and try using your eyes as a meter.

Shameless plug: check out my photography on flickr.

To land your dream job, you need to target your employer. Pretend to work for them and do something that proves you’re the person for the job. Show them your thought process by keeping a blog and being active in online communities. Show them your work by participating in projects and displaying them to the world.

At the same time, employers need to start getting more creative to find the talent they seek. Posting your job requests on monster with the same dry templated “5 years of experience with these 15 things” speak isn’t going to get you very far.

Why did I go to interview at CohesiveFT? It was their craigslist post that got me interested. They were quick to spot emerging trends (three years ago that was Ruby on Rails, and using Macs as dev machines), and used creative language that showed me that they were thoughtful and had personality. They stood out from a sea of dry and robotic postings produced by HR departments listing unrealistic requirements while sorely lacking a clue. And why did they hire me? I was an early adopter, I wanted to use exactly the technologies and platforms they found exciting, I had a blog where I shared my thoughts, and I had a project that demonstrated my skills in a way a standard resume could not.

Here’s the thing - it’s still early days for personal branding. Most of your peers are mass-blasting companies on Monster with the same resume template. Most of them don’t have much of an Internet presence beyond Facebook and LinkedIn. There is still a ton of room to stand out and get employers to notice you.

How to get a competitive advantage over your peers and land your job 2.0:

• Know what job you want and tailor make a website/resume/portfolio for it.
• Participate online - blog, tweet, etc.
• Get your name all over the interweb - would your employer rather hire/interview someone they know nothing about, or someone they can get to know in advance by googling?
• If you don’t know about SEO, ask a friend or use a blog platform like Wordpress which does much of the work for you. This will help you get in the top ranks on Google for your name.
• Update your site regularly to get more Google juice.
• Look for job opportunities in unlikely places, where fewer people are looking (facebook, twitter, linkedin, craigslist, niche job boards like jobs.37signals.com). Forget about Monster and the other big job sites.
• Follow the companies you want to work for - their blogs, their tweets, their employees etc. Start conversations with them.
• Create things that are of interest to your future employer. Pretend you work for them and execute a project that would make them envy your work.

Such has been the story with me and Comcast. I get one disconnection, I shrug it off. I get another at 1am, and I take it as a sign to go to bed early, but today I had several disconnects during the day, while I was working, when I needed my connection to do work. At this point I was already filled with emotions built up from having terrible service over the last three days. So when I tweeted about it, I was already in a very negative mindset. Luckily, Comcast is one of the few companies that actually has very competent twitter support that can actually solve problems.

Nonetheless, how much better would it be if Comcast paid attention to the data that they already have. They know how many times my modem disconnected in the last week. If it happens once, send me an email telling me it was a minor hiccup. If it happens twice, have customer support notified right away. Don’t wait for my complaint! Email me, tell me you know the source of the problem, and when it will be fixed. How much cheaper will it be than dealing with crabby negative customers like me after 3 days of bad service?

This post takes me back to the saga I had with bluehost, who for several months would not admit that the box I was being hosted on was being oversold so badly that the database was down on a regular basis. Don’t let it get to that point. Be proactive in your customer support and your customers will love you.

By examining the types of companies and technologies claimed to be “cloud computing” (by themselves, or others), and then showing that what they are providing has been around for many years and already has its own label, we can hopefully narrow down what exactly is the important bit about cloud computing.

So…what cloud computing is NOT…

• Gmail, google docs, salesforce.com, and etc. These things are simply web-based services, or SaaS, or even PaaS if you want to get fancy. This type of technology has been around and evolving at least for a decade. It may be getting popular and significant now, but it doesn’t warrant a new jargon term.
• Running your software distributed among many computers. This is called grid computing, parallel computing, and so on. It’s been around in one form or another for decades, and again, does not warrant a new jargon term.
• From the WSJ article: “In it’s broadest sense, cloud computing describes [...] Information is stored and processed on computers somewhere else — “in the clouds” — and brought back to your screen.”. No, that’s called the Internet. See also client/server, server side processing, thin clients, take your pick.
• “A company’s backroom mass of servers and switches is cloudlike.” - No, that’s a datacenter. There’s nothing significantly more cloudlike about it today than there was ten years ago.
• Just a marketing term. Cloud computing is a significant change in how businesses acquire and pay for computing resources.

See more: Storing your stuff online is not cloud computing, What is Cloud Computing?

Shameless plug: Elastic Server will have you running in the cloud in minutes.

• 30 second spots interrupt you right as you’re watching a show so your annoyance factor is high.
• With a 2 minute spot, the advertiser has to work to capture your attention. This is a key aspect. One recent commercial I saw was a 2 minute short film about Honda racing. The film was actually relatively interesting to watch and a lot more palatable and engaging than a 30 second spot involving jingles and a radio announcer voice.
• The 2 minute spot will give advertisers more creativity to deliver content that is actually interesting to users, rather than resorting to traditional 30 second spot limitations of drilling messages into your brain.
• I am more likely to associate a positive experience with a brand if they’ve earned my respect. By showing me an interesting clip and then leaving me at peace to watch my show, the brand wins.

I found one blog that claims an 88% response rate in favor of the 2 minute ads. They also talk about how it would be potentially hard for advertisers to come up with good content, making a point that a 2 minute long commercial about Wal-Mart may be hard to swallow. This is a Good Thing. Advertisers should work for our attention. If they can’t muster up an interesting 2 minute clip, then they don’t deserve our attention.

The age of push marketing is coming to a rapid close as our primary content delivery method shifts to the Internet and on-demand technologies. We’re not going to sit there and wait for our shows to come on, we’re just going to click a button and watch what we want, when we want.

But we need to make ads just as pullable as we do our content. If I’m gonna have to watch a 2 minute ad, why shouldn’t I choose which ad I want to see? If I’m presented with 2 or 3 choices I might click on an 2 minute long ad about rock climbing because I’m really into that, or a funny short advertising The Office, but I’m not really into shopping at Wal-Mart so I’m going to ignore that one whether they like it or not. With pull advertising, the publishers also get my attention data, because I chose to watch their ad over several others. They get data about how they’re doing demographically, and they get data about how they stack up against competitors.

Hulu would also get an interesting idea about advertising demographics and determine ad popularity. Eventually they could use this data to figure out which ads people would like based on ads they’ve watched in the past and attention data from the rest of the community. This could usher in a new age of advertising where crappy uninteresting ads float to the bottom and out of sight, creating a competition for quality of ads by the publishers.

When the ad content gets interesting, user attention is captured, users aren’t annoyed by bad and irrelevant ads, everybody wins.

1. Fitts’s law. When I click to open a new tab, I previously had immediate visual feedback that this had occurred. Now I have to look past two additional rows of screen real estate (the shortcut bar, and the url bar) to spot the change. I have already had a few times where I command-clicked a link to open in a tab and had a bit of trouble spotting that the tab had actually opened. Not only does it affect the distance my gaze has to travel, but also my mouse, when going from page content to clicking between tabs I now have to pass two additional rows.
2. Inconsistency. Up to the release of Safari 4, all Mac applications had a uniform title bar. The top line of the window was reserved as a place to display the window title. Now the top line is taken up by tabs, making this application behave differently than every other. Not only is this visually inconsistent, but if you click the corner of a tab you can end up dragging the tab instead of the window. You can also (with admittedly small probability) land on the close tab icon when trying to drag the window, which will not enable you to drag at all. While both of these events have small target areas, and thus low probability of being hit, the fact that it’s possible makes it a worse choice for usability.

Why did they do it? I am guessing that eliminating the standard title bar and using that real estate for tabs enables us to gain about 25 pixels more vertical space for actual page content. But I don’t think 25 pixels of content is a fair tradeoff for the usability problems introduced by the change.

Update: Restore your sanity:

defaults write com.apple.Safari DebugSafari4TabBarIsOnTop -bool NO

The book presents lots of interesting evidence for this, and even throws out a number - you need 10,000 hours of practice at something to achieve expert level. Gladwell says getting started young and having access to the environment they needed to spend those ten thousand hours perfecting their art helped Bill Gates, Mozart, and the Beatles to become great.

The other key notion in the book is that you have to be just good enough. For example, to win a Nobel prize, statistically you need an IQ of about 130. But it turns out that having an IQ of 150 or 200 does not increase your chances of getting the Nobel prize. In other words, there is a particular threshold above which you are good enough to get a Nobel prize. The rest is up to how hard you work, the hours you put in to practice and get great at what you do.

Not all of us can be Nobel prize winners, but most of us are probably good enough in our areas of specialty to have a chance at greatness. So the only thing standing in our way is practice. There’s my inspirational thought for the day…time to go practice :-)

No previous modeling experience is necessary, and shooting will take place on saturdays and sundays in Chicago and Evanston, at locations of your choosing, as long as they’re easy to get to by public transportation. Please contact me at yan AT pritzker DOT ws with your two identities (it’s ok if you need time to think about them) and your availability over the next two months if interested. You will receive a CD with the full resolution photos for printing or publishing on the web. Thanks!

Update: Please see the scheduling page for my availability.

It’s pretty universally agreed that the iPhone is well designed. What makes it so? The rounded corners and shiny glass? The special effects in the OS? It’s too easy to think that once you’ve seen an example of great design, you can reproduce it. I’m not trying to pick on Microsoft, but the Zune and Windows Vista are failed attempts by engineers to reverse-engineer great design.

Some photographers take great pictures without ever formally learning the Rule of Thirds. Most people take boring or even offensively crappy pictures. Some programmers without formal training have an intuitive grasp of algorithmic complexity and code patterns. Most of them reinvent the wheel daily and write terrible code. In design, there are also people with a great eye and an intuitive sense of the principles of good design. But, like in these other disciplines, they’re very few and far between. Chances are you’re not one of these rare talents, even in your field of specialty. You probably had to learn the rules and practice your skills, like everyone else. It follows then, not having learned the rules of design or practiced them, that you’re not a good designer.

Come to terms with this now, so that no one else gets hurt by your bad design decisions.

Do you know English pretty well? If it’s your native language, you may consider yourself a master. If someone shows you a sentence, you can probably spot grammar mistakes from a mile away. But could you explain the tenses or morphology of the English language to a foreigner? More than likely, you don’t know the technical information about what makes English ‘tick’. In the same way that you don’t know the principles that were put to use to make a great product like the iPhone.

It is too easy to confuse the ability to spot something with the ability to create it, or even explain why it is the way it is. Design, like most other disciplines comes with a set of rules, patterns, and principles. These theories have been developed over time, from experience of other designers solving many problems. Some of these theories are very intuitive. Others are very counterintuitive, like the Paradox of Choice (which is not perhaps per se a design principle, but should inform your design decisions). Most of them require a lot of practice to internalize.

Understand this now: if you did not spend time studying the theory of design, analyzing case studies of past design problems and solutions, and practicing to the point of design becoming second nature to you, you will have a wrong intuition about how things should be designed. You may really honestly think you have an amazing eye, and that you’ve seen enough examples to do it right yourself, or you may simply think design doesn’t affect product sales or customer satisfaction. You are wrong. The sooner you get this, the sooner you can hire the right person for the job, and produce excellent products.

If you don’t really understand grids, you’ll probably create things that are poorly aligned and create confusion in the minds of your consumers. If you don’t know what ligatures, kerning, and letting are, your business cards will look unprofessional, and you won’t realize it (hint: Microsoft Word won’t do it for you). If you don’t know the first thing about color relationships, you’re likely to create combinations that hurt someone’s eyes, or create the wrong emotions for the product you’re selling. If you don’t know about the basics of interaction design, you will design products that are frustrating to use.

You are a not a designer. A designer is someone with training and experience in design. You may convince yourself otherwise, but your customers will not be fooled.

For more on this topic, or if you need a book to convince your boss about hiring a designer, The Inmates are Running The Asylum, is a must read for any engineering manager interested in producing excellent products.

P.S. This is obviously written toward the engineering-slanted audience that reads my blog. If I’ve offended you, good. It’s time to wake up and realize most engineers are terrible designers. Not because they’re stupid or incompetent, but because design is a discipline like any other, and if you don’t expect an English major to write your code, then you shouldn’t expect an engineer to create your design.

As engineers we’re accustomed to scanning hundreds of pages of docs and learning new technologies quickly. Design isn’t something you can learn this way, and it’s a big blow to an engineer’s ego to realize that he has come up against something he can’t learn overnight without tons of dedicated practice. If you read the book I mentioned above, it makes some good points about why the very thing that makes you a good engineer makes you a bad designer.

Hire a designer, and listen to this person very carefully. They know how to make users happy. You don’t. The worst part is if I asked you to solve problems in theoretical physics, most of you would realize right away you don’t have a clue, but nearly everyone thinks they have a clue when it comes to design. If they did, we wouldn’t have so many terribly designed products.

Update: some people thought this post was patronizing. I’ve updated the title to make something clear: I’m not a designer either. I’m just someone who is around them enough to understand that what they do is equally important and complicated as what I do. I’ve taken the time to educate myself as much as reasonable in design, in order to manage design projects and communicate effectively. I have educated myself well enough to know that I don’t know enough.