I thought for a second and smiled.  Then I said the word you just said in your head when you saw the picture.  I said it in exactly the same way while bobbing my head.  ”Nice!”  Needless to say, I bought it.

Then my wife used the product in the dish washer.  She took a dish out, frowned and looked back at the product.  She was unhappy, tilted her head in annoyance and said, “Nice.”

Is this a good product name or an awful one?  At Marketo, we have a feature called a “Smart List”.  If it wasn’t smart, people would have been pissed.  You can’t set the bar high and then fail to meet expectations.  You can’t call the product Nice if it’s actually lame.  I’d prefer they called it Walgreen’s Detergent.  I wouldn’t be fooled then.  Or (god forbid), they make the product better.  Then it actually would be Nice.  I would buy it and enjoy it.

Think of the names you encounter in products.  How do they manage your expectations?  Is it “Nice!” or “Nice.”?

It’s less work to have the beard at first, but trimming it can be a pain.  Plus, I hate how I can see my hair going away.  With a shaved head, it’s all gone, so I don’t think of the hair that is especially missing.  The beard gives some interesting definition to my face, but also itches.

Blink
(From the book by Malcolm Gladwell) Your subconscious is better at interviewing than you  are. It can tell, within a few seconds if someone is good or bad.  When you shake someone’s hand, spend the next 30 seconds really examining how you FEEL about the candidate. Remember or jot down your first impressions.

Imagine
Imagine the conversation you are having isn’t an interview.  Imagine you are having a meeting and trying to figure out the solution to some problem.  Forget what they are saying, focus on how the interaction is.  Can you imagine yourself working through a problem together in a good way.

Don’t ask stupid questions
Never ask something like “Tell me about yourself.”  Think about the specific values you want to know if they have.  For example, I believe product managers should be really good at research, so I ask, “How did you prepare for today’s interviews?”  I am looking to see how thorough they were.  Sometimes people didn’t have time to research so I say, “Fine, if you had 3 weeks to prepare, tell me all of the things you would do to prepare for a job you really wanted.”  I am just looking for the “value” of research.  Ask a question that gets to the heart of what you want.

Sell Sell Sell
Make the person WANT to work with you.  Explain why the company vision/mission/culture is great.  Explain why you matter.  Great people are hard to recruit.  The interview process is a two-way street.   Don’t be arrogant and think this is some sort of hazing ritual.  Great candidates are your goal, not people desperate for any job they can find.  Having a little “different” in your interview style will go a long way.

Have a rating system
It’s a good thing to normalize your rating of candidates.  We use the following:

• 0 = No way, Jose.  The candidate is a loser.
• 1 = Meh.  Maybe you could be talked into it.
• 2 = Yes.  A thumbs up rating.
• 3 = Holy Cow!  We gotta hire this person NOW!

You are allowed 1 decimal for precision, so a 1.8 is someone who is pretty good…you just need a nudge to push you over the edge.  When you meet your peers and evaluate candidates, use the system to keep everyone ranking in the same way.  Plus it’s fun.

Happy Interviewing!

PowerPoint
I almost always use PowerPoint, however I hardly ever use bullets and text.  Usually, it’s a single high res photo and one or two words.  Some people say, “What if they wanted a take-home version?”  My answer is simple: Then make something else to take home.  It is not effective to give a presentation using materials meant to be taken home.

The tools in PowerPoint are very powerful.  You can use animations, transitions, fonts and images to create stunning, interesting looks.  They are there to support your speaking and help the audience to visualize your ideas.  They are not meant to help the speaker by writing down every idea the speaker wants to cover.

Stories
There is no substitute.  It makes no sense to tell people facts.  You have to tell them stories. People resonate with a good story.  They keep it in a special place in their brain.  Let’s say you wanted to convey that people should be honest and ethical.  Tell a story about someone who was/wasn’t and the consequences. Information is not memorable, stories are.  See “Made to Stick” for details.

I do an additional thing, which could be termed “tangents” or “side-stories”.  Let’s say you are talking about some subject like the cooling technology in a laptop.  In the middle of your talk, stop and tell a quick story about how Enrico Fermi used giant buckets of water to potentially put out a nuclear fire when he was experimenting under the stadium at the University of Chicago. Semi-related stories are great, especially if they are funny.

Relax, they don’t know you are nervous
I get very nervous before every single speaking engagement. My stomach is rumbling and I think all kinds of terrible thoughts like, “Will I choke?” or “What if they hate me?” or “Did I think this through?”  I know from experience that this nervousness is usually not visible to the audience.  The important thing is to focus on what you are saying and not your inner dialog.  Never talk to yourself in your head.  Focus on the moment and let your brain work in a relaxed mode.  Sometimes people get nervous and then start saying (in their head) to stop talking to themselves and RELAX.  Obviously, this can result in a death spiral.  I use a technique of listening to my breathing.  I clear my mind and listen to my breath.  It calms me down.

Passion
If you don’t care about what you are talking about, people won’t care about your presentation. If you have to present on something you are bored with, you have to still put passion into it.  Find something that excites you.  Find an angle.  It may be very hard, but if you seriously can’t get excited about any single thing in your talk, you should cancel it.

Passion allows people to better empathize with your point of view.  When you seem engaged and excited about the topic, then people will feel the same way.  A speaker is an emotional beacon.  The audience draws the energy (or lackthereof) of the speaker. Bottom line: Be passionate and you will reap the rewards.

Make eye contact, but not too much
Generally, I try not to make too much eye contact.  It freaks me out.  I will notice them staring at me and it will distract me.  I like to look at the crowd like it’s a sea of fish.  I don’t pick anyone out, but rather look at the “crowd” as a single organism. However, once in a while, I will linger on a single person and see if they are nodding or falling asleep or showing some form of emotion.  These are spot checks to see if things are going well.  You should know your own comfort level for this aspect.  I have heard some people claim that it calms them down to look at one person.

Intangibles
I don’t know the secret sauce that makes me good at this.  I don’t know when I started to be good, although I feel like I have improved over the years.  It’s like asking how someone became funny or how someone became a leader?  It’s a multitude of factors that are hard to pin down.

What other tips have you heard?  This is really just a partial list.

Then, in the middle of 2nd grade, I moved to an upper-middle class neighborhood called New City.  (Not a very creative name, I know).  The day I arrived, I noticed the school looked very different.  Everything was clean and nice and spacious.  The kids were dressed very differently as well.  Much nicer than me.

It was mid-year for most students, but for me it was the first day.  The teacher looked at me and asked me to solve the problem on the board.  I stood up and said, “15 take-away 6 is 9.”  The teacher laughed, then the other kids laughed.  She said, “Oh dear, we don’t say ‘take-away’, we say ‘minus’.”  The other kids laughed at me again.  I sat down.  (pause here for about 5 seconds before reading on)

I remember the moment as if it was yesterday.  I remember how angry I felt.  I knew the damn answer, Who cares how I said it?!  Why did they laugh?  The rules had changed.  I wasn’t tall anymore, I was gangly and weirdly big.  My athletic prowess was mostly ignored.  My smarts didn’t count in this new world where saying it the “right way” mattered more.  I wasn’t popular because my clothes were old and didn’t fit right.  I was a loser.

No!  (This was the moment) I am still a leader.  I just don’t have followers.  I wasn’t going to play by their rules.  I was going to play by my rules.  I wasn’t going to care if I had friends or not.  I wasn’t going to care how I looked.  I wasn’t going to care if they knew I was smart.  I knew who I was and I was going to stay true to me.

The rest of my education followed this pattern.  I did well on tests, but I never did my homework.  Why should I?  No one convinced me its value until much later in life, when it was too late.  I had few, if any, friends.  I wore headgear (crazy braces thing on your head) for the entire 6th grade school year.  I knew I wanted my teeth fixed, and this was the fastest way, so screw them if they didn’t like it.

I was good at sports, but wasn’t a jock.  I was good at painting and sculpture, but didn’t hang out with the artist (emo) crowd.  I read alot, but I didn’t hang out with the “smart kids”.  I was an oddball with clothes that didn’t fit.  I was a misfit.  But I never lost my spirit.  I kept that inside, locked in my heart.  No one could take that away from me.

My spirit is fierce and original and cares about things being done right.  That spirit is what makes me a leader and allows me to speak from the heart.  I am lucky to have found a job that taps into that potential.  I would have hated to go through life and never have used that spirit.  I think I am very lucky.

Do you know the moment that defined your character?  I bet if you think about it really hard, it will reveal itself to you.

I have no idea how to play drums.  However, drums are just as subtle and different as the other items.  A good drummer can feel a kit and notice all kinds of details that I would miss.   In case I didn’t mention, I bought a drum kit for my kids over the holidays.  It was hell.  It was almost as bad as buying a car.  There  are electronic drum kits and acoustic kits in all shapes and sizes and colors and options and brands and wood styles.

Eventually, I saw one on craigslist and a friend who says he knows drums went to see it and bought it.  It looked OK to me, but I feel like I should have kept looking.  It was an alright deal, but not spectacular.  It’s a Gretsch Catalina kit made of mahogany. You wouldn’t believe (or maybe you would) how I have buyers remorse because Maple is better than mahogany.  The good news is that the kids like it.

Putting a drum kit in a house is a risky proposition.  The main reason is that it’s incredibly loud.  I had to make some rules like:

1. No playing if someone in the room doesn’t have high-end ear plugs.
2. Play gentle.
3. Don’t play too early in the morning or late at night.

Literally, we are worried that the neighbors will complain about the noise.  I put a thick blanket in the bass drum to muffle the sound.  I am considering getting drum silencer pads.  It is noisier than anything we imagined.  We plan on putting curtains and other sound muffling accouterments in the room.

Right now, it seems like it’s a pretty bad investment.  Although there is one very bright side that makes it all worth while.  The kids love the drums.  They are playing them every day.  My older boy (guitar) is starting to jam with the middle kid in a way they never have before.  They are making up songs.  We now have a room they could invite over other kids from School of Rock and practice.

In the end, this is exactly why I got the kit.  I want the kids to grow up with music around them.  We have invested alot in lessons and instruments and noise reduction technologies.  But really, I think the investment is in the kids themselves.  The goal is not to become a rock star, but rather to have music as a part of their life.  I think it enriches one in a way that you can’t get in any other way.

The UX is clearly complex, but in the end, it “feels” just right.

Warning 1: I didn’t like it much.
Warning 2: I don’t like prototyping tools in general. (Axure, JustinMind)

Here is the story of my first 30 minutes.

Logging in
Why do I have to give you my email address AND a username?  Can’t I just give you my email address?  Why do you need both.  It’s just a pain in the ass.  And even having a password, can’t I just login with GMail or Twitter or some other OpenID provider? Jeff Atwood says you should and he is pretty smart.  After I got over my annoyance, I was logged in.

The User Interface
This is built in Flex/Flash.  Seems like an anachronism at this point, doesn’t it?  Who thinks Flash has a long term viability on the web?  Adobe doesn’t seem to.  Seems like HTML5 is the better choice.

Looking directly at the UI, I was struck by how there was no big logo anywhere.  I could have been looking at anything.  There was a tiny icon on the top left, but I had to search for it.  This is a branding fail.  An app needs to have a presence.  It needs to be recognizable from 10 feet.

Trying to Use it
Arrghhhh.  This was frustrating.  It looks like PowerPoint with absolutely positioning, but really didn’t have an interaction design model anything like it.  For instance, you drag on a Canvas and it creates this thing to move around. See below

Notice how you can’t drag the item from the body of the item like most systems.  You have to grab that middle + and drag from that.  This became highly annoying.

I started to get confused by the different panel types and other things I could drag on.  It seemed like there were fewer interaction components than I typically needed.

Slowly Getting the Gist
After a little while I could understand what they were going for. It didn’t make me like prototyping tools any better, but I remembered what I experienced with Axure and JustinMind.  There are clearly a ton of details in here and you wouldn’t be able to get value out of it until you got the hang of it.  I was able to make something with a grid and tabs after a little while.

Right Clicking
I am a right-clicker by nature.  I want to right-click on something and manipulate it.  I don’t want to go to some property sheet and click buttons that are far away from the object I care about.  I think, more than anything else, this bugged me the most.

I couldn’t tell how to create reusable objects, although I assume you can. I could see how there were different views, but it wasn’t simple of lovable.  Generally, I wanted to stop using it after 30 minutes.

Seeing your handy work
I wanted to see what this thing looked like, so I clicked File-Export.  It gave me a warning of some kind and I clicked OK. It brought me to a page with XML on it.  I was confused, so I clicked back.  All of my work was gone. Are you kidding me?  How could the system not save my work?  How could export not use a different window or tab?

Save-as-you-go is the best way to handle a web application.  Stop asking me to save, just do it for me.  This is the modern web!  That experience was brutal.  Losing your work is about the worst thing that can happen in an online prototyping tool.

Summary
Prototyping takes too long and has too little value.  This tool is an online version of desktop software like Axure.  It’s complicated and limited just like the other competitors.  It’s not lovable like Balsamiq and not ubiquitous like PowerPoint.  In my judgement, the UX of this product is pretty poor and it is destined to be a bit player in a small market.

I really wanted to like the software.  I went in with a positive attitude.  I apologize to anyone offended by my critique.  I encourage anyone/everyone to use it and see for themselves.

The start menu disappeared.  All these tiles showed up and none of them seem to work.  I couldn’t find anything I was looking for.  It’s buggy.  REALLY buggy.  I just don’t see the benefit of the new Metro tiles thing.  Maybe if it was a touch screen, but with a trackpad it was awkward at best.

I saw someone running Ubuntu on their desktop.  It had this cool flexy window thing when you dragged windows around.  It was cool!  That’s what I want.  I want fancy effects.  I don’t need a new lame tiles thing.  I almost installed Ubuntu after seeing it!

Windows 8 doesn’t seem to improve anything.  Let’s see how it fits in with other releases.  My reaction to each Windows release:

1. Windows 3.1 – Better than DOS!
2. Win 95 – Nice!
3. Win 98 – Excellent!
4. Win NT 4 – Fine, for servers.
5. Win ME – WTF?!
6. Win 2000 – Multi-threaded!  Awesome!
7. Win XP – Perfect!
8. Win Vista – Slow, junky, buggy.
9. Win 7 – Yay! Back on track!
10. Win 8 preview – Ouch!

I’ve beta tested every single one of these operating systems.  I would consider myself an expert in Microsoft operating systems.  This latest technical preview is pretty lame.  I calls it likes I sees it.

Now, I just need to decide if I uninstall back to 7 or try to live with it until the next technical preview.  Something tells me I will re-install Windows 7.

The concert was amazing.  It’s just Jake with some dry ice smoke in the background and some lighting.  No chair, no singing, just Jake and the Uke.  One might think it would be boring, but it was anything but.  We were mesmerized.  I took a little video of Jake doing Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing.  Click image below.

He also did Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah, George Harrison’s While My Guitar Gently Weeps and Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody.  Plus he had a bunch of songs he wrote, all with no words, just uke.  They were great.  I especially liked Five Dollars Unleaded, although the tune is extremely reminiscent of another song, but I can’t place it.  As it was playing, I made up lyrics like “I..have lots of gas, lots of gas, lots of gas.”

Afterwards, Jake signed our Ukulele and posted for a picture with Ethan (above).  Great guy, great concert, totally out of the ordinary.  Highly recommended viewing.  Also, for Christmas, consider an inexpensive Uke, it’s a great present.