Yesterday marked the launch of a simple, one-page announcement site for Build 2013 that Minky helped design and build in approximately a week. The concept relied on faking masks in the browser to reveal parts of an underlying image as the user scrolled. With weak browser support for masks, the task proved to be particularly tricky to implement responsively across the target browser stack because of known sub-pixel rendering issues using percentages in Webkit browsers (let’s save that for another day). All in all, despite the apparent simplicity of the design, it turned out to be terrifying to pull off.

What you might not have guessed, though, is that most of my fear was grounded not in my ability to actually implement the design successfully, rather my ability to implement it while hitting the invisible but omnipresent bar of perfection — the eternally moving target characterized by an elusive set of front-end development best practices and techniques — we set for ourselves as web designers.

So, let’s talk about perfection.

Peerfection

Frank Chimero recently tweeted —

My favorite feature of the Web is View Source.

Indeed, I couldn’t agree more. But there’s a downside captured by another tweet by a friend, Susan Robertson —

As I’m doing this responsive design I worry I’m doing it wrong and anyone who looks at the source will laugh – this stuff is hard.

For front-end web developers, the sentiment captured by her tweet and the typically resulting sensation of uneasiness should be a familiar one. The one very unique aspect of front-end web development as compared to the rest of software development is that the code you write is literally one right-click away from anyone who wants to see it (and let’s face it, that’s the first thing we do to each other’s sites).

While we take much pride in the craft of our professions, it causes a level of anxiety similar to what many of us feel on stage while hundreds of pairs of eyes are staring at us. Susan Cain in her book, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking —

One theory, based on the writings of the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, holds that when our ancestors lived on the savannah, being watched intently meant only one thing: a wild animal was stalking us. And when we think we’re about to be eaten, do we stand tall and hold forth confidently? No. We run.

The thought of peers viewing our source causes our reptilian brain to voice a tiny question that inevitably turns into a shrieking echo by the time we approach the finish line —

Will my code hit the bar of perfection?

Dustin Curtis’ piece captures our innate, often bordering insane, tendency to seek the best, i.e. the perfect. We’ve all felt that way about something or someone at one point or the other in our lives. To me (I write this right after my recent two week eastern European vacation), perfection is like that first bite of Sachertorte served to you in a café perched on a cliff with a breathtaking view of Wolfgangsee. But, I know that not everyone shares my view. Certainly not my wife. She’d much prefer some Apple Strudel. And, to even approach perfection it’d need to be served with some vanilla ice cream and a Melange. Really, if you were to press her, she’d admit that the final ingredients would also involve a soft, freshly laundered blanket and a Weimaraner to cuddle with.

We’ve made peace at some level with the notion that our tastes are subjective, a topic that I’ve written about both here and here in the past. Tastes differ from person to person. And we acknowledge that when it comes to tastes, it isn’t a matter of absolute wrong or right, rather of what’s right for me. Seemingly conflicting tastes can thus co-exist in a world where even as we mock each others’ tastes, often tastelessly, we strive to accept, as Jakob Von Uexküll infamously dubbed it, each others’ umwelts.

But when the conversation turns to anything that could be remotely be considered through an objective lens, or more accurately, as having the possibility of one right answer — beauty, logic, mathematics, politics, religion, music, and literally everything in the world including our beloved front-end web development practices actually fits this bill — all bets are off, we say. As irony would have it, for anything you that you think may be judged only subjectively, there are usually at least two people who believe the opposite: that objective reasoning may be applied to that context to reap the only right, i.e. perfect, answer. And all of a sudden, we’re not talking about tastes or sophisticated choices anymore, but facts — cold, hard, statistical, empirically reproducible laws of nature — and we’re ready to battle it out with theorems, axioms, rules, laws, and best practices.

But could it be that even the facts we embrace and the sciences we worship often need to be measured, much like taste, in relatives rather than absolutes? Could it be that our facts, in the right light, much like our tastes, are imperfect?

Let’s Russell Some Feathers

Back in the early 1900′s, there was a mathematician by the name of Bertrand Russell best known for having discovered a mathematical paradox. Russell’s Paradox is best explained by an excerpt from Fermat’s Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World’s Greatest Mathematical Problem by Simon Singh:

Russell’s paradox is often explained using the tale of the meticulous librarian. One day, while wandering between the shelves, the librarian discovers a collection of catalogues. There are separate catalogues for novels, reference, poetry, and so on. The librarian notices that some of the catalogues list themselves, while others do not.

In order to simplify the system the librarian makes two more catalogues, one of which lists all the catalogues which do list themselves and, more interestingly, one which lists all the catalogues which do not list themselves. Upon completing the task the librarian has a problem: should the catalogue which lists all the catalogues which do not list themselves, be listed in itself? If it is listed, then by definition, it should not be listed. However, if it is not listed, then by definition it should be listed. The librarian is in a no-win situation.

Russell’s paradox lay the groundwork for publication of Kurt Gödel’s Theorems of Undecidability in 1931. Gödel’s theorems proved without doubt that Mathematics as it existed then (and today) could never be logically perfect. Until then (and even in many circles today) Mathematics was heralded as the only logically consistent science there was — the only surety, or as it were, “perfection”, in a world full of subjective flip-flopping. But Gödel’s theorems pretty much butchered that sacred cow.

The fact that mathematics has massive holes at an axiomatic level is hardly astonishing, though. After all, the history of not just maths, but all sciences is rampant with examples of error, gaps, contradictions, and embarrassing gaffes. Pluto recently losing its planetary status, the recent financial crisis exposing the fragility of the rational model of economics, the use of lobotomies to cure psychological illnesses, the absence of the zero in mathematics for centuries, doctors prescribing low-fat/high-carb diets to diabetic baby boomers, the hypothesis that prevailed for centuries that the earth was flat: each generation provides ripe material to the standup comedy amateur night that is our collective scientific stage.

This is not to say that all things in the universe are arbitrary, that there are no truisms, or that everything that is right today will actually be proven wrong in the future. Rather, it is our ability to identify truisms accurately that we must question constantly, not just for topics entirely unfamiliar to us like mathematical axioms, but for the very topics that are most familiar to us.

Indeed, and we know this deep down, our fallibility is most tested and exposed when we’re in our comfort zones.

History Repeats Itself

There are a tremendous number of patterns and practices that we employ today as web designers and developers that we collectively saw as absolutely wrong a few years ago and will likely see as wrong at some point in the near future. Or, as several characters repeated in Battlestar Galactica, “All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again.”

Take the phenomenon in the golden age of Flash where “immersive experiences” took over the browser viewport and presented users with “highly interactive” (but generally unintuitive) experiences where straightforward ones were really best suited for the job. Ask anyone who “did Flash” in the early 2000′s and they’ll tell you that we’re back in those days, but this time with HTML5. An issue I took with the introduction of the redundant <article> and <section> tags a few years ago, a torch first carried by our very own defender of that which is sensible, Jeremy Keith, is another case in point that brings back memories of cyclical contradictions in the ongoing standardization processes. The flip-flopping around the use of vendor prefixes to utilize proprietary browser features, many of which were/are not only non-normative but far from being introduced for standardization, is another outrageous case in point and repetition of history. The “works best in Chrome” phenomenon, the comeback of the formerly frowned upon practice of using divs for marking up our grids, the cyclical CSS architecture debate, … — “All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again.” Heck, even the social issues in our industry continue to play like a broken record.

I suspect Russell, Gödel, and our favorite Galactica characters would all agree on one thing if they were in our industry: front-end web development and aspirations of code perfection are fundamentally incompatible. While it takes hundreds of years for Mathematics, unarguably the most logical field in the world even if not perfect, to change at a fundamental level, the Web counts in months, even days at times. And when it comes to the profession of a web developer, perfection of the craft itself is so much of a moving target that bending over backwards to write the most elegant code to solve a problem or trying to keep up with the latest best practices, while addictive the same way competing in triathlons is addictive, can ultimately be sabotaging, both to the user experience and to the morale of the developer.

But good luck convincing our brains of that, right? My hand is literally twitching to type a rebuttal at this very instant about how a laser focus on perfection of the craft doesn’t take away from delivering the best user experience, rather it enables it. But that post has already been written a few thousand times over, so to my dear amygdala, I say: Relax!

Even if the wisdom of Nobel prize winning mathematicians and badass Cylon enigmas don’t do much to convince us, we should be able to find some solitude in the infinite wisdom of one of our own, Trent Walton:

I think there’s some value in realizing that most of the world doesn’t give two shits about what we do during the day…it reminds me not to take things too seriously and also not to worry about what anyone else thinks.

Touché, my amigo. Maybe we’ll never convince ourselves to stop looking for the princess in the castle. Maybe what we really need to work on is realizing that there is no castle.

I'm interested in building a product and I've registered Minky to help me do that. Honestly, that's all I've got right now.

Really, I want to talk about Microsoft today. Leaving a company after 5 years is a big deal. We spend more time at work than we do with family and friends. Leaving without saying a word just feels wrong.

So, here goes.

If you've read anything I've written in the past couple of years (or have recently attended one of my talks), you probably already know that I'm somewhat obsessed with topics related to the brain. I tend to spend a lot of my free time reading about error analysis, cognitive psychology, behavioral economics, neuroscience, and the likes. I've even shared a reading list to that end with you in the past.

There was one particular study I came across a few years ago in a book by Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong, that changed how I think at a foundational level. The study, known as the Sally-Anne Test, remains one of the most cited — and in the context of autism, still fairly controversial — developmental psychology studies in existence.

The Sally-Anne test is administered to children between the ages of three and four. It involves staging a simple puppet show involving two characters, Sally and Anne. Sally places a marble in a basket, closes its lid and leaves the room. Shortly thereafter, the very naughty Anne, enters the scene, flips open the lid of the basket, pulls out the marble and places it in a box sitting in the corner. Now, the child who has witnessed all of this, is asked a simple question —

When Sally returns, where will she look for the marble?

Almost every child in this age group exclaims with confidence, "In the box!" This answer is baffling to adults for the obvious reason: there's no way Sally could have known that the marble was mischievously displaced by Anne because Sally wasn't around to witness that. But the children don't care about this detail. To them, reality and their minds' representations of reality are one and the same. Sally thinks the marble is in the box because, well, it is in the box.

The children provide an incorrect answer because they have yet to develop what is known as the representational theory of mind, what is considered a key differentiating feature of human beings as compared to most other mammals. Theory of mind is what bestows upon us the knowledge that our mind's version of reality isn't true reality, but an interpretation of reality. Furthermore, it gives us the knowledge that everybody has their own mind and thus, their own reality.

But what, pray, does this have to do with my departure from Microsoft? It's a good question and one I will answer with another question —

What is the most important thing I am taking away from Microsoft?

Turns out that that's the $64,000 question you have to answer for yourself when you spend approximately 10,000 hours of your life working at a company.

10,000 hours. Wow.

I came to Microsoft because I was (and still am) interested in designing and building software products. I joined the company fresh out of a two-year stint as a Program Manager at Amazon, the brunt of which was spent surviving an epic death march towards the launch of Amazon's 35th product category: Instant Video (back then known as Unbox). It's easier to recount what went well on that project because there wasn't much. Upon shipping the first version over a year behind schedule — a schedule that was my responsibility, but mostly out of my control, I might add — over 90% of the team quit not just the Unbox team, but the company. I was one such statistic as well.

Now, if you were to ask me to list the causes for the failure that was the initial product, the response would have been at the tip of my tongue. I'd have immediately furnished you with an exhaustive list: weak product vision, collective lack of engineering and design experience, lack of process, competing political agendas, lack of leadership, too many cross-functional dependencies, and so on. Simply put, I'd have painted you a picture of what we fondly refer to in the industry as a clusterfuck.

Speaking of, one of my first projects at Microsoft was A Website Named Desire. A colleague of mine, Erik Saltwell, and I came up with this idea for a poster that illustrates what goes into getting a web application off the ground. It was based on some fantastic research Erik had done for the now discontinued Expression Web. We hired XPlane to help us realize our vision: one that took hundreds of painstaking hours of illustration and creative reviews.

Our goal was to illustrate the typical software product development cycle in practice — non-linear, highly chaotic, angst ridden, tear-jerking — in stark contrast to the apparently neat, linear, and highly theoretical ones typically presented in software project management literature. Actually, if you follow the project manager in the poster (hint: she's the one with a little progress indicator next to her head and a look of perpetual resignation on her face), you will see the theoretical linearity of the process hidden in the chaos.

A Website Named Desire turned out to be a hit campaign. We printed and distributed over 10,000 posters, and I like to think it was a hit because most people who saw it instantly related to the picture of dysfunction it painted. But as good as the poster was at illustrating the "how" and the "what", it barely scratched the surface of "why". Why is the act of building software — and more importantly, life itself — often such a clusterfuck?

Pretty much everything we need to know about the root causes of, not just software project failures but most failures in life, can be traced back to the Sally-Anne test. As we get older we develop and refine our theory of mind allowing us to understand and deconstruct extremely complicated situations. And with a little help from our friends like mirror neurons, we are literally able to feel what others feel. Even when we are convinced about something, we acknowledge that the conviction may not be a fact. Nothing illustrates this aspect of our existence better than the adage, "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"

But this doesn't stop us from having very strong convictions. And our ability to be fully convinced about something while acknowledging our own fallibility at judging anything is an elegant imperfection that suspends us in a confusing duality — we know that we can't know anything with 100% certainty, except certain things are 100% certain to us. It is a duality that escapes our consciousness most of the time because our sanity depends on it.

It is why we know that murder is always wrong. Or that Microsoft is evil while Google isn't. Or that banning same-sex marriages is the will of the Almighty. Or that JavaScript programmers aren't real programmers. Or that the right to bear arms is at the root of violent crimes. Or that ______ is smart/good/wise/credible/trustworthy and ______ isn't. Or that racism or sexism don't exist. Or that Instagram made a deal with the devil. Or that some of us are born into a lower caste than others. Or that Apple is perfect.

Our list of views is endless, and what's more is that for every view we hold, there's someone who holds an opposing view with the same level of conviction. And collectively, our views cancel out and we fail the Sally-Anne test much like our toddler selves: a hypothesis that may as well be a binding law of physics at this point thanks to the work of folks like Dan Ariely and many before him.

So where does this leave us? Actually, where does this leave me in relation to my most important takeaway from 10,000 hours spent at Microsoft? OK, I'll spit it out now.

Certainly, I learned a tremendous amount about how (and how not to) design, build, ship, and market software products. If my Work page is any indication, I acquired a boatload of new skills and got to practice honing others. But I got much of that at Amazon, too, and it's something one would expect from most decent jobs. What was different is that — through the sheer act of finding a voice at a controversial company like Microsoft with millions of customers, fans, and critics — I stumbled upon the most important aspect of building products: people. And not in that awfully tired way repeated by folks who talk about how "it's all about the people" but never really practice it. I realized it in the kind of way that I can only compare to the final scene of the Matrix where Neo sees the agents as strings of code.

This is not to say that I can fly around the Matrix and bend will. Rather, it's that I can see and understand things that escaped me years ago when I was at Amazon. I was convinced of the causes that led to the failures of Unbox. But in hindsight, they were merely symptoms of other, more elusive root causes. Now, if my old self were here, he'd say, "Of course they were symptoms. The real problem has always been the people." But he'd say it in that awfully tired "people are the source of the problem because they are evil or stupid or both" way.

I now exist in a context where most things can be explained without the use of adjectives like evil and stupid. And with some creativity and knowledge of human behavior, I believe most crises can be averted long before they amount to train wrecks. I even give talks about this. Simplistic black or white (evil and stupid) explanations are tempting and the forté of, as Daniel Kahneman dubs it, System 1 mode of thinking: the automatic brain. But as Einstein put it, "Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler." Even the simplest analysis of human behavior maps to some shade of gray, not black or white, and requires the critical thinking offered by System 2. And, in no small part due to the opportunities I received at Microsoft, I learned to see and paint with grays. In a Sixth Sense like twist of fate, I learned the "Why?" of A Website Named Desire.

The best part of it all is that I also came face-to-face with and embraced a reality most people aren't fortunate enough to truly discover in their lifetimes: my mind's version of reality will never equal true reality. And no amount of knowledge or experience will likely ever make it so.

10,000 hours well spent, if you ask me.

I emigrated to the United States as an adult at the age of 20. I moved from a small town near Bombay to, of all places in the world, Indiana, to pursue a degree in Computer Science at Purdue University. At the time of this writing, I've been living in the US for 12 years.

If you've met me and didn't already know this about me, you're probably very surprised right now. Why? Because I don't fit the stereotype at all. I barely even have the accent. People are generally shocked when they find out I grew up in India. Most people think I was born and raised in the US, and when I tell them I wasn't, they guess that I'm from Canada. Incidentally, my wife is Canadian, and I have a strong suspicion that my mirror neurons are too smart for their own good. But I digress.

"So… err… why and how did you lose your accent?"

Ah, if only I could earn a dime each time I am asked that. I have a standard response. It's a little crass, but it was certainly true at the time.

"To get laid. I wanted to date different ethnicities but most women I encountered seemed be turned off by the Indian accent."

It's true. And consequently, I taught myself to speak like an American over the span of a year or so. Not only did it enable the love life I'd romanticized, but it dramatically improved my quality of life in areas that I hadn't remotely anticipated.

Purdue University is located in the small town of West Lafayette, IN. It's literally in the middle of nowhere and is surrounded by corn fields and farming communities. Gary (the city that gave us Michael Jackson) and the international students attending Purdue made up most of the minority non-Caucasian population in a 100 mile radius. The area was far from stereotypical "White America", but it was certainly no melting pot of ethnicities. And while most people were tolerant of cultural differences, you didn't stand a chance at getting the red carpet when you sounded like Apu. If you had aspirations of being treated like an American, your only choice was to be more American.

While most immigrants are mortified by this, I was mostly fine with it given my natural chameleon tendencies and curious nature. Over time, I embraced numerous "superficial" changes — knowledge of local pop culture, non-verbal signaling tactics, fashion, diet, the company I kept, etc. — and reaped the countless benefits that resulted from these changes. I didn't know it then because I hadn't read the research that I've read in recent years, but I was learning, in the words of Daniel Kahneman, the most important lesson about being a human being: we can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman — the Economics Nobel laureate who is credited to have literally flipped how we think about our own rationality; a torch now brilliantly carried by folks like Dan Ariely — turns mythologized musings about humanity into facts. Take the question, for instance: If someone attractive walks up on stage to give a talk, do you take their points more seriously? Our intuition suggests the answer is "yes", at least as it applies to other people. After all, you and I don't judge a book by its cover, right?

As it turns out, and thanks to the work of Kahneman and others, the answer is, in fact, an emphatic, but more importantly, a scientifically binding "yes". The phenomenon is well-documented in the form a cognitive bias known as the Halo Effect. And I hate to break it to you, you and I fall prey to it as well. If you are convinced you don't, it's only because you're designed to tell yourself that story thanks to the wonder that is your left hemisphere. But now we're slowly veering into the realm of neuroscience, so let's reel ourselves back in.

The point is this: humans suffer from hundreds of biases that cause us to discriminate against each other not only based on race and gender, but also socio-economic status, smell, height, accent, political affiliation, attire, and countless other attributes. And our conscious minds are designed to hide our biases from us; hyper-awareness of many of these biases would defeat the very reasons they evolved. Once you consider this alongside the undeniable reality that some of us are born less fortunate than others, it becomes difficult to argue that racism or sexism or ageism don't exist or that "you are to blame for all that is shitty in your life" without driving even a red squirrel to call you a "bonerfart". After all, the evidence to the contrary is so accessible. Here's my reading list to get you started.

With that said, I do fear that our propensity to publicly hang the bigots often stems from a romanticization of the utopian dream of a true meritocracy: the idea that somewhere in the distant future is a world in which rewards are directly proportional to true talent and contribution. While that's an intoxicating dream, it is nothing more and nothing less than just a dream, and from a scientific perspective, a dream that is most likely unachievable. I fully acknowledge that many among us are fueled by lofty, seemingly unachievable goals. I used to be, too.

But as of late, thanks to another fantastic book by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi titled Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, I've come to believe that the true secret to happiness lies in setting challenging, yet achievable goals like the ones Sara and PPK advocate.

The ultimate goal, after all, is finding a happy medium.

For those of you who weren't watching, Silver is a NYT statistician and author of Five Thirty Eight who gave Obama around 90% odds for winning a second term. He even bet Joe Scarborough $1000 (a bet that Joe ridiculed but didn't take). Gawker has a good summary.

Now we know that not only was Silver right, but his model nailed the results in all 50 states rendering him an overnight sensation. Silver is (half of) America's knight in silver (OK, I apologize) armor leading the charge against those evil political pundits who use nothing more than their awfully fallible gut feelings to make predictions. The verdict is in and the pitchforks are out. "Down with gut feelings! Long live logic! Long live the maths!"

There's only one problem with this new mantra: it's plain wrong.

I suspect a majority, say 90%, of the folks chanting this mantra haven't the slightest clue about how Silver's model works. Fortunately, there's a human-readable explanation of his methodology here (note: this one is for Senate forecasts which inherits much of its methodology from that for Presidential forecasts) as well as an informative piece on predictive models by Silver himself.

You don't have to go too far into either of these pieces to quickly realize that his model relies heavily on voter polls. In other words, Silver's model performs a statistical analysis on voters' presidential candidate preferences which — at least each side believes this about the other — are almost always based on gut feelings.

In my view, Silver's model isn't anti-gut. Quite to the contrary, it's very pro-gut. And if you've taken my repeated advice to read Gigerenzer's writings, you know that this is well worth celebrating.

Signaling is something we associate with animals. The quintessential example of signaling is that of the peacock that spreads its tail feathers to score a mate. The phenomenon serves as an evolutionary communication channel for the purposes of reproduction. Traditionally evolutionary biologists have believed that the peacock tail signal is a costly one: among other things, by maintaining a large, beautiful tail of feathers, the peacock proves to potential mates that he can survive in the wild in spite of this inconvenient appendage. There remains some controversy around the cost of this particular signal, but I digress.

The most interesting and arguably, powerful, type of signal is the dishonest signal. Take green frogs, for instance, that signal territorial defense by croaking in a certain way. As a study has found, green frogs often lower the acoustic frequency of their calls to exaggerate their own size. This bluff, of course, is designed to intimidate potential predators and competitors.

A successful dishonest signal involves a certain level of anonymity on the part of the sender. It’s imperative for the green frog’s true size to be concealed for his dishonest signal to work as intended. The ability of the green frog to mimic an authentic sounding lower frequency call is key as well. Finally, the dishonesty must leverage the state of the specific environment.

In the case of humans, it’s worth clarifying the concept of a dishonest signal. It’s tempting to associate dishonesty with lying, but that’s generally far from the case. The dishonesty we’re talking about here is in relation to the perceived image of the individual. A white lie can often be a classic example of a dishonest human signal. Your friend gets a haircut. You think it looks awful. But you compliment her because there are more social benefits associated with the delivering a compliment in that situation. Dishonest signaling is thus an extremely important part of being a social being and serves a very important purpose among human beings.

Since they serve as one of the primary signaling channels of our day, it’s key for social networks to facilitate dishonest signaling between humans.

From this perspective, Facebook is at a severe disadvantage. Facebook requires that you craft an intricate online persona of yourself complete with demographic information, pictures, relationship status, political and religious affiliations, educational qualifications, and so on. Not only that, but Facebook broadcasts literally everything you do to everyone. And you are expected to snap to this image you’ve created. When you stray from it — that is, when you broadcast a perceived dishonest signal or one that is alien to your persona — the bluff is generally called in the form of dissenting comments and behaviors. In the long run, it means less, or worse, as we saw with MySpace, less meaningful engagement.

Twitter is better. You can remain relatively anonymous on Twitter, even completely anonymous (but it generally comes at the cost of certain popularity goals). The high fidelity of the signal, i.e. written language, often requires cleverness on the part of broadcasters but for the most part, Twitter is an effective networking channel in that it facilitates a healthy amount of dishonest signaling. Apart from the enforced character limit, it comes pretty close to signaling in real life.

Instagram is almost a perfect channel. You can remain as anonymous as you please and unless you’ve set your account to private, you can be followed by (and follow) anyone. The signals broadcasted on Instagram are images which, as the saying goes, speak a thousand words. In other words, the signals are left up to the interpretation of the receivers. And, the channel itself does very little broadcasting of what you do, which means that others’ perceptions of you are mostly based on your own signals rather than ones created on your behalf.

Where is all this coming from? Over the past few months I’ve been trying to explain an emerging pattern in my social networking practices. Certain pictures receive hundreds of likes and lead to over a hundred comments on Instagram, but the very same pictures receive only a handful of likes and scolding comments on Facebook. Often a picture that seems to bring a tremendous amount of joy to my followers on Instagram can (and has) led to an argument on Facebook. The key seems to lie in the ability of each of these networks to facilitate dishonest signaling. While one (Instagram) promotes it, the other (Facebook) seems to encourage behavior that attempts to squash anything that could be a dishonest signal.

The problem: When a channel overly polices dishonest signaling, the channel itself becomes dishonest. I wonder if this is why more and more people seem to be talking about Facebook as a venue for being fake, and consider Facebooking to be not as much fun anymore.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m still investing in Facebook.

This week marked the real launch of the new Microsoft.com home page. And as someone who has been involved on and off with the project from the moment it was conceived, I thought I'd tell you the story, albeit extensively abridged, behind the new Microsoft.com.

Grab a seat.

Serendipity

"Will you meet with my team and talk to them about modern web design and development?" asked my wife, Pita, as she walked through our front door one evening. "This an important year for Microsoft. Our home page needs to be a leader on the Web on every front."

My wife recently took over as Director of Program Management for the Microsoft.com team. Her team is the middle prong in the trident that produces any web site under the Microsoft.com domain. An engineering team implements the actual solutions that are designed by a group of marketers and designers; among other things, Pita's team oversees the proper execution of the projects. Pita wanted me to meet with the all the teams involved to share some lessons on modern web development: something I generally do exclusively at industry conferences.

"It's not my job!", I protested. She responded, "You're my husband, Nishant." That was that.

So, I prepared and delivered an hour long presentation wherein I outlined the tenets — progressive enhancement, responsiveness, and adaptiveness among others — of modern web sites as best as one could in an hour long presentation. I initially delivered the presentation to a part of the marketing organization run by Raju Malhotra. Incidentally, with Windows 8 and a whole new array of devices on the horizon, Raju's team had been discussing a better cross-device strategy for Microsoft.com. In hindsight, I can't help but smile at the serendipitous timing of all these conversations. Excited by the solution I proposed, he insisted I deliver it to his boss' entire team. So I did.

It's this next presentation where everything started to fall in place. In fact, the presentation itself turned into an animated discussion about whether it was possible, or even sensible, for Microsoft.com to go modern.

The Psychology of Loss

For those of you who don't know Dan Ariely, he's a Behavioral Economist with a penchant for scientifically pinning down the myriad irrational ways of human beings. In his brilliant book, Predictably Irrational, Ariely explains a cognitive bias called loss aversion:

Our aversion to loss is a strong emotion, one that sometimes causes us to make bad decisions. Do you wonder why we often refuse to sell some of our cherished clutter, and if somebody offers to buy it, we attach an exorbitant price tag to it?"

Indeed, research has shown that our brain feels more pleasure merely by the promise of avoiding losses than when it actually acquires gains.

At the time of this writing, Microsoft.com is ranked as the 30th most visited site in the world ahead of Apple, Pinterest, Tumblr, Adobe, BBC, Flickr, Craigslist, and many others. In the time you've been reading this article, thousands of users visited nearly one hundred localized versions of Microsoft.com on thousands of different devices driven by countless expectations. And as you would expect, the Microsoft.com team has spent over a decade instrumenting and fine tuning the home page in sophisticated ways to meet the complex matrix of needs of these users.

This is hardly unique to Microsoft. Other top 100 sites like Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, Wikipedia, Twitter, and Amazon all cope with the same challenge. And whether it's Google's obsessiveness in testing for the right shade of blue, or Amazon's heavy reliance on A/B testing — one that I myself utilized when I worked on Instant Video and Kindle — it all serves the same goal: meeting user needs. And as McNamara's Fallacy has proven, data often leads even the most well-intentioned awry.

It's easy to browse the Web and mock Web pages that suck. And, whether it's the web page of a software giant or a mom-and-pop shop, behind what may seem like obvious design gaffes ultimately lies a nuanced set of decisions fortified by the fear of losing everything: brand loyalty, established user patterns, and ultimately, revenue. Ironically, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," is the adage that's often at the root of the problem. What looks broken to you and me about Facebook's UI or Amazon's seemingly never-ending product pages, are more often than not, "by design".

For the Microsoft.com team to take a calculated risk and pour their understanding of their users into a cleaner, smarter, and modern page, the change had to start with the the source of the, and in my opinion every, problem: People.

People Keep on Learning

"There was this moment when Trent was standing up at the front of the room showing us an early concept, and someone asked if we could allow the menu to support four levels of hierarchy. Without pause, we heard Trent yell, 'No! Just… NO!' He had a grin on his face. It was one of those 'No, but I still like you' no's'. I knew in that moment that this was going to go well," said Michael Ruggiero, the development manager for the home page, to me over pizza a couple of weeks ago. Michael entrusted much of the integration and optimization work to a very talented developer on his team, Tyson Matanich, who worked closely with the crew from Paravel to build the site you see today.

In my early discussions with the team, I'd outlined a model that involved bringing in some outside talent and integrating them carefully into the Microsoft team. Building mobile first web sites is a bleeding edge topic, and unless you're living on that edge, it's best to defer to the expertise of someone who is. I recommended Trent, Dave, and Reagan, the Austin boys behind my favorite design shop, Paravel, Inc. Having collaborated with the three amigos on several very successful and visible projects — Lost World's Fairs, 10K Apart, and most recently, the Build conference site — I was certain that they had the right skill set to complement that of the Microsoft team, but more importantly, the right attitudes.

The software industry takes pride in the technical interview. But what started with the noble intention of hiring the best people has turned into an often reductionist game of hiring those who excel on a singular axis: answering mostly ridiculous technical questions and brainteasers in the moment. The most regrettable casualty of these hiring practices is typically the emotional intelligence of the candidate. Simply put, their personality. This is ironic not only because the ability to write magnificent code or masterfully organize pixels often plays a very tertiary role in the process of innovation, but because it is ultimately balanced people coming together to solve a problem that leads to the kind of emotional experiences that make for hit software products today. My friend and hero, Bill Buxton, a decorated Microsoft designer, provides what I consider to be the best recipe for hiring such people.

Fortunately, Benson Chan, Raju's newly appointed Product Manager for Microsoft.com — in other words, the guy with the butt on the line for the user experience — got this better than most people. Benson and I grabbed lunch after I presented to his team, and he understood well that the key to success for this project was to create and empower a small team of the people who were I-shaped: the kind of people who were willing to try new things, challenge the status quo, balance theories with reality, learn from and support each other, and were willing to embrace our friends from Austin.

Not to mention, a group that was willing to reach into their gut to design the right experience.

Designing from the Gut

The power of intuition was brought into the limelight in 2005 thanks to Malcolm Gladwell's national bestseller, Blink. What most people don't know is that Gladwell drew heavily from the research of a German psychologist, Gerd Gigerenzer, who's been publishing research and writing books on the topic since the 90's.

In Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, Gigerenzer introduces us to a notion he dubs evolved capacities: complex capabilities given to us by nature, like sight or memory that we’ve evolved to unconsciously perform complex tasks, like the ability to track a moving object. As it turns out, humans are pretty bad at, say, predicting the trajectory of a ball. So, in order to actually catch a ball, we use certain evolved capacities in tandem with a rule of thumb called the gaze heuristic: fix your gaze on the ball, start running, and adjust your running speed so that the angle of the gaze remains constant.

If there is one thing Gigerenzer's research confirms without the slightest doubt, it's that our gut is truly intelligent. In fact, it is the primary mode of intelligence required in solving a gamut of problems — driving a car, catching a ball, predicting stock prices, making decisions on the battlefield, and countless others. My contribution to the list: Design.

Designing from the gut is a radical concept. It is generally met with a tremendous amount of friction in most software circles that tend to rely heavily on "logic and data" for all decisions. This is not to say that there isn't a place for telemetry or usability studies in the act of designing software. It's simply a question of when and where.

"In rethinking the user experience, we didn’t want to simply offer up X number of programmable slots. We got together as a team to discuss how to best create an experience to tell our product stories, meet the needs of our customers, and how we wanted to have a beautiful experience across any device. We drew learnings from analytics and previous A/B testing, but at the end of the day it was strategy by gut, tweaking by data." said Benson to me when we met in the RedWest campus of Microsoft a few days ago in reference to the impressive hero graphic that spans the top of the page. It's easy to understate the significance of his statement in the absence of context. But consider that the new hero graphic is a huge departure from the information architecture of the last few versions of the site. The image below speaks a thousand words that amount to: go with your gut.

The Microsoft.com team had the ability and freedom to make gut calls like this one, and this brings to the foreground the final and most important ingredient of this project that I can fit into the attention span of a Web reader.

Leaders Are Made, Not Born

"My favorite part of this project? Leadership. This project, more than any other I've been a part of, had leadership. Not management, but leadership," reflected Greg Bader, the Program Manager on Pita's team responsible for driving the execution and launch of the Microsoft.com home page project. Curiously, when I probed him about whom he considered the leader of this project, he said, "Well, Benson was a rockstar Product Manager. But we couldn't have done any of this without Tyson, who is the best developer I've ever worked with. But, Trent and crew brought such feeling and expertise to the project. I suppose none of this would have ever happened if Pita hadn't pushed for it and provided us air cover in the first place. I guess… everyone on the project was a leader."

This sentiment was echoed in my other informal conversations as well. "It wasn't about us vs. them. We were all in it together. It was very Gestalt," said Michael Ruggiero. "Never once did I feel that my own management was telling me what to do. My entire management chain just trusted us to go make the right calls," said Benson.

The most common cause of failure in most large organizations is micromanagement, not just by appointed leadership, but by everyone involved. And in terms of risk factors, this project exhibited far too many that could have led to a culture of micromanagement: a distributed team, a tight timeline, limited budget, complicated requirements, lofty goals, and not to mention, strangers from Austin taking the lead on design.

In the words of Peter Drucker, the man who is often credited to have invented management, "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things." I repeatedly found examples of Drucker's wisdom whenever I stopped to peek into the progress of the Microsoft.com project.

And the payout for this management philosophy was significant.

The Proof is in the Pudding

The new Microsoft.com home page is designed with a multi-device future in mind. And if you didn't already catch this, the page is, as Ethan Marcotte coined the term, Responsive. The Responsive movement rose from the proliferation of smartphones and tablets initially driven by Apple; ironically, even Apple.com is not responsive yet.

It's easy to dismiss this project by saying, "It's just a page. Big deal." That would miss the point entirely. It would also be entirely inaccurate. The Microsoft.com team built tools, guidelines, and processes to help localize everything from responsive images to responsive content into approximately 100 different markets. They built instrumentation to track the behaviors of their users on multiple axes. They built a device lab to test the page on a multitude of devices. They adapted their CMS to allow Content Strategists to program content on the site.

As the Microsoft.com case study on Paravel's site illustrates, the team built a bleeding edge site in the real world.

This project is innovation in its best form: the kind that has the courage to take bold yet calculated risks. And it represents the start of a movement, the type that has the power to ripple not only through a large organization, but the world. Shortly after the site previewed a couple of months ago, Luke Wroblewski, one of the leading experts on mobile first development and the author of an excellent book by the same title, tweeted —

Now when someone asks: "But are any big companies using responsive Web design?' You can answer: "Yes. Microsoft."

— Luke Wroblewski (@lukew) June 29, 2012

The Moral of the Story

We tend to attribute singular causes to successful software projects: the developer was awesome, the designer was a rockstar, Basecamp made our project successful, management gave us all the freedom in the world, Steve Jobs, and the list goes on. We like our stories to have neat conclusions. It's just human.

But reality is much more nuanced and complex as the Microsoft.com story illustrates. Even as I wrote this post, I wondered to myself, "Was there one thing above others that made this project successful?" Was it that each member of this project team was humble? Or that there were clear accountabilities and roles across the board? Or that the timeline was just tight enough to force decisions? Or that the team members themselves had a certain level of experience in the industry? Maybe it was the undying trust that the leaders of the various teams placed in their employees?

The more I thought about it, the more reasons I came up with, and the tougher it became to weigh one higher than the other.

So, in the end, I can't give you one reason this project succeeded. I am compelled, however, to list all twenty-five —

Abe Thomas, Benson Chan, Bidur Adhikari, Chris Johnson, Claire Jennings, Dan Ma, Duane Clare, Greg Bader, Jeff Case, Joe Chung, Joseph Ho, Kalpita Kothary, Kavitha Mullapudi, Kimberly Wolk, Liliana Aguila, Michael Ruggiero, Mike Brewer, Mike Wu, Raju Malhotra, Rick Holzli, Sha Zhou, Steve McGinnis, Steve Whitford, Steve Yin, Tyson Matanich.

To be fair, he tends to bring it upon himself. He frequently breaks one of our house rules: You steal it, you wear it. Having said that, I’d be lying if I said I don’t get overly excited whenever I find him snuggled next to a pair of stolen underwear. And it seems that Yoshi’s followers feel the same. The pictures featuring him in underwear — particularly, women’s underwear — are among his most appreciated pictures.

But, not everybody likes a dog in panties. In fact, I’ve come across some folks who get downright offended by these pictures. Among the various complaints, there’s one I find particularly interesting —

“You’re humiliating the dog. Through this act, you are putting yourself above him. It’s about the most offensive thing you can do to him.”

Yes, someone’s actually said that to me. In person. Five minutes after they met me for the first time (ignore that somehow I snuck a picture of my dog in panties into the conversation within 5 minutes of meeting someone). I decided to egg him on a little —

“But, I am above him. And cats, chickens, cows, lamb, goats, fish, and all sorts of other creatures. Heck, I eat half of them, so he should just be happy I don’t eat him.”

He seemed a little take aback by my response. I continued —

“I figure that I already put myself above Yoshi and his friends on a daily basis as a carnivore, so I may as well have some fun with it.”

He obviously missed that I was just being hyperbolic to make a point. A fellow meat-eater, I could tell he wanted to refute it. As I’ve written in the past in a related post, the typical rebuttal that meat-eaters often use is the sustenance argument: it’s OK to kill animals for sustenance, but it’s not right to humiliate them for comedic relief. It’s about as weak as an argument could get. Most of us don’t go out and kill our own game for survival. In fact, we don’t really eat meat for survival anymore. Most of us eat meat for pleasure. It’s a personal preference fulfilled by the industrial agricultural revolution which, for the most part, through its no-bullshit, “efficient” and resultantly despicably cruel practices eliminate any doubt about our place in the food chain, i.e. at the top.

But we don’t really think about this, and therein lies the rub.

It turns out that we can easily fool ourselves into believing that our moral fabric is far superior than it actually is. All that is needed is some distance between us and the true crime. Studies show that stealing a credit card number is much less difficult from a moral perspective than stealing cash from someone’s wallet. And the more levels of indirection there are between actual cash and representative monetary objects, e.g. tokens, debit and credit cards, coupons, credit swaps, mortgages, derivatives, etc., the easier it is for us to steal and believe we haven’t stolen.

My underwear-stealing Weimaraner Yoshi seems to reap the benefits of this self-deception as well. He continues to steal underwear from the laundry basket in spite of the steal, wear, repent cycle.

Or maybe he just likes wearing women’s underwear.

Indeed, construction on this church commenced in 1882, and Gaudí planned for its construction to continue well after his death in 1926. At this time, the estimated completion date is 2026, Gaudí’s death centennial.

Why on earth would a designer plan for one of his projects to be completed after his death especially if he knew that it was to be the most significant work of his career, and possibly of any architect’s career? Seems like an insane move.

But you know what they say about the line between insanity and genius. And Gaudí was no basket case.

Gaudí, a devout Catholic, envisioned the most intimate of prayer destinations for his fellow Catholics. And he figured the best way to capture this intimacy was to execute one of the bravest maneuvers in design: allow others to complete his design. Indeed, his blueprints left guidelines for architects from future generations on how to complete different parts of the church.

Contrary to popular belief, the genius of Gaudí wasn’t his nature-inspired architecture. It was his vision of laying a framework that allowed for future generations to play a key role in the outcome of the Sagrada Família. And the result is a breathtaking structure that is as much the peoples as it is Gaudí’s. Magnificent, intimate, and in a class of its own, even if controversial.

Twitter, in so many ways, is the Sagrada Família of the tech world. The best of Twitter — mentions, retweets, hashtags, to name a few – came from its users or third-party applications. And Twitter’s unique genius was that they embraced these innovations, in turn making Twitter something bigger than what it ever set out to be. But that era seems to have just ended.

Folks like Gruber, Arment, and Brooks have summed up pretty much all there is to be said. There’s one point I read somewhere that I disagree with, though: that 99% of twitter users won’t be able to tell the difference. Sure, they won’t be able to tell the difference today. But what about tomorrow?

Twitter’s move is akin to ending construction too prematurely on Sagrada Família. If that had happened, the Sagrada Família would have become just another church. And, I suppose that’s not a bad thing.

But it’s certainly not what it could have been.

As Gerd Gigerenzer writes in his book, Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of the Unconscious, the speed-accuracy trade-off applies only to novices. All bets are off if you’re experienced. In fact, focusing consciously and “taking your time” will actually hurt your performance if you’re someone with much experience in the field at hand.

How can we account for this apparent paradox? Expert skills are executed by unconscious parts of our brains, and conscious thinking about the sequence of behaviors interferes and becomes detrimental to performance. Setting a time limit is one method to make thinking difficult; providing a distracting task is another.

24

I recently invited the intensely talented Paravel trio to help me design a site to help sell out Microsoft’s Build conference. Our timeframe was roughly 10 days to deliver the markup. I pitched the project to Trent and team on July 23rd, 2012. We kicked the project off the next day, the 24th, with an end date of August 2nd to hand the markup off to our back-end developers.

This meant that to stay on schedule, we’d have 24 hours to sign off on the basic design: a wireframe and close-to-final copy for the site. Yes, that’s 24 hours.

As the only member of the design team who was also a Microsoft employee with the most knowledge about Build, we decided that I would take the first stab. Reagan and Trent stood by ready to rebound the design as soon as it landed on their side of the net.

I’ll spare you the details because the image below speaks a thousand words. On the left was what I delivered to the Paravel crew (around 6pm on the 24th). On the right is the result of Reagan & Trent applying their magic, all within 24 hours. Now, compare it with the site we launched on August 8th.

Love at first site

On the Build project, most of our decisions were guided by spontaneous gut feelings because that’s all our schedule allowed. But as luck (and some good ol’ psychology) would have it, that didn’t seem to prove detrimental to the quality of the site. In fact, quite to the contrary, it seemed to drastically improve its overall quality, and as Trent writes in his post, even the decisions we made along the way. Food for thought? I think so.

Not to mention, the event sold out in a record 53 minutes.

As you would expect, a few of her siblings were very upset about the divorce but not for reasons you may imagine. Back then, the family of a divorcee typically became the talk of the town. Their character, culture, and integrity were brought into question, and their social graph changed for the worse. What made matters worse in my mum’s case is that she was divorcing a man from a particularly affluent family.

Her siblings were upset that she would do this to them. That she would subject the family to such an ordeal.

If memory serves me well — and knowing what we know about flashbulb memories, I have a nagging suspicion that it doesn’t — this was the first real paradox I had to cope with in my life. I was about 7 years old, and I remember tormenting over why my mother’s family, who is supposed to love her unconditionally, would not support her decision. I was angry, and that anger fueled a better part of my adolescence.

Anger is interesting because it is always accompanied by self-deception. We direct anger at people because they are doing something wrong; implicitly, we’re acting on an assumption that we’d never have or would commit the same crime. And maybe that’s true for a particular situation, e.g. I would never abandon my own sibling for social or monetary gains, but even that’s unknowable.

Regardless, what’s certain is that even as we direct our anger towards others failings, we do so blind to our own vast collection of flaws. Clearly, we must rank our own flaws as lesser evils, for if that weren’t the case, we’d be more careful about criticizing others.

The fact is that we’re all liars, but we’ve always known this deep down, and the topic has consumed many a philosopher’s life. But the notion of deception took an interesting turn in the last couple of weeks with the release of Dan Ariely’s latest book, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone—Especially Ourselves. Ariely not only confirms much of what we’ve known intuititively (or through related readings), but sheds light on the nuances of deceiving others and ourselves. Not only does he share some of the most fascinating behavioral studies I’ve ever read, but he also pins down a fundamental truth about deception:

In a nutshell, the central thesis is that our behavior is driven by two opposing motivations. On one hand, we want to view ourselves as honest, honorable people. We want to be able to look at ourselves in the mirror and feel good about ourselves (psychologists call this ego motivation). On the other hand, we want to benefit from cheating and get as much money as possible (this is the standard financial motivation). Clearly these two motivations are in conflict. How can we secure the benefits of cheating and at the same time still view ourselves as honest, wonderful people? This is where our amazing cognitive flexibility comes into play.

Read it. Trust me, it’s more fun spotting dishonesty, both in others and ourselves, than it is to pretend like it’s something else, or worse, that it doesn’t exist in places it most certainly does.