1. It’s still not possible to easily tell if your message was received, read or even opened.  Just like email you will never know if the important proposal made it.
2. Information overload.  The problem is finding what’s important. New things move to the top regardless of how important they are. Compare this to how you organize papers on your desk, important things move to the top.
3. If you say something stupid you can’t take it back. Just like email once it’s out there you’re done. Even if the other person hasn’t seen it yet. They will now play it back in it’s full glory.
4. Privacy. You can’t send something and keep the recipient from forwarding it on.
5. Transfer of large files or collections. You can still attach things but if you want to share 50 wedding photos or a large home movie Wave won’t help you much.  It’s a communication pipe but files are secondary citizens.
6. Bonus #6. Spam.  You’ll can still get it and you’ll still be expected to flag it.  So there will be false positives. An extensive social network reputation doesn’t help.  A lack of a social network doesn’t keep you from sending 1000’s of messages.  It’s still early so there is little spam but this will change if this catches on.

Often times we don’t use these icons verbetam but they provide a valuable design language and starting point that offers some level of predictability and consistency across apps.

Get them over at http://www.glyphish.com/

Before:

Example image from drupal 7 content list

Key points with this screen:

• The title areas don’t tell you what you’re supposed to do on this screen. In fact there are at least three competing title areas. “Content” as a title, “Content” as a tab, “Add new content” as a secondary title and two group boxes that cover filtering and updating. The actual title of the screen doesn’t reflect the modal nature of dialog. You’re actually adding content to something else and it’s not clear what that is.
• The information is presented in the wrong reading order.  The content table should be first.  You first have to read the list to see what you’re dealing with before you decide to either filter it or update it.
• An empty list is a dead-end. It tells you there is no content but doesn’t direct you on how or where you should go to create some.
• The X in the upper doesn’t make it clear what it would close. The tab? The dialog? A simple cancel button or a standard cancel button or a close button in the upper right would be more obvious.

After

Key points

• Title should say what you’re doing.
• Filters should sit above column headers whenever possible. No additional button action should be needed and multiple filters can be applied at the same time.
• It should be easy to reset the filters and hide them. Hidden should be the default.  The filters should give you a clue as to the number of items in each filter bucket:  Articles (3)  Posts (120). This makes it easier to select the right filters.
• If the table is empty it should be easy to get to a content creation page.
• Buttons along the bottom of a dialog provide clear ways to exit or complete the task.
• Things that don’t map to the core task should be hidden.  In the original mockup there were options to update the status of content from published to unpublished. This type of functionality belongs in a management section, not when you’re “adding content.” It should be removed or hidden in a similar way that filters can be hidden.

A typical scenario is between someone with an idea and someone who’s in the position to help fullfil that idea. This can be a VC with money, a contractor with skills or a business partner. The person with the idea begins the conversation…

“I need your help, but before I can even tell you how you can help, I need you to sign something.”

What a conversation killer. When you put it that way, it sounds rediculous but that’s exactly what these conversations are about.

1. I don’t know you.
2. I don’t know your idea.
3. I don’t know your background or company.
4. I don’t even know if I can help you.
5. What is the upside for me to sign an agreement?

Let’s tell some more truths.

1. Few people read their NDA’s closely. It takes time.  This is time that is spent looking at papers rather then discussing your idea and how to execute it. What would you rather spend time doing?
2. It’s not clear to me how enforceable NDA’s are if they are violated.  It’s practically impossible to tell how information leaks out and who is responsible. If information leaks out will you really spend thousands of dollars in legal fees?  If you’re a startup the answer is always no.  The only time NDA’s get more serious is when they are with a larger publicly traded company.
3. In most cases the NDA does exactly the opposite of what actually needs to be done.  If you need help the best way to get help is to put the word out. You’ll find the best people and the best answers to problems.

At best the NDA says that both people signing agree not to be assholes.  Of course you shouldn’t need a piece of paper to tell you that, after all you’re the one asking for help.

Ideas are worthless

Imagine you’re a brilliant entrepreneur, a savvy business women or a brilliant negotiator.  No matter how good your idea, the idea itself is worthless. Zero. Nada.  There are two things that matter with ideas:

1. Execution
2. Advantage

As I just said ideas are worthless, litteraly a dime a dozzen. Execution, is the way you implement the vision of the idea. No one is going to execute the idea the same way that you would execute it. It may be your drive, your passion, your tenacity. Whatever it is, no one else has it.  You have to be more passionate about your idea then anyone else.

The other thing that matters is your advantage. This may be your connections, your education, your life experiences, your expertise. Whatever you bring to the table that gives you the lead over your competition.

If you can execute your idea and you have an advantage you can tell your idea to people all day long and it doesn’t matter.  If other people don’t have the same passion and advantage as you they will never be able to bring the idea to completion that way that you would.

It’s been done.

Your idea, however brilliant has already been done. It’s been done by someone else, in some other country, in some related field, in some other time, to some similar product, using a derivitive technology. For all the NDA’s that I’ve signed I have never once seen an idea that is totally new.

Ideas are by nature evolutionary and build upon past ideas.  No matter how good your ideas may be it’s already been done. It’s has already been disclosed. A simple google search of your idea will show that there are tons of people doing what you’re trying to do.  What hasn’t been disclosed is how you’re going to execute your idea.

Ideas are a People Business

VC’s talk about intelectual property or the secret sauce for your idea. In most cases it’s not the patents sitting in a drawer. It’s people who have a vision to execute and a tactical advantage to make an idea successful.  If you’re asking for help you need the right people and to get them you need to have a lot of conversations.  The more NDA’s you sign the less total conversations you can have.  Among other reasons this is one of the reasons you won’t find VC’s signing NDA’s.

Someone is building your idea right now. What are you waiting for?

An NDA?

The problem is that controlling this experience requires secrecy. It means that within Apple there are people who know the secret and people who do not.  The secrecy creates dividing lines between groups. The groups that are not ‘in the know’ then go off and create their own secrets.  This is what has happened at Apple and it’s getting out of control.

Everyone gets paranoid about saying too much and in turn says too little. This secrecy has created a particularly deep divide in the iPhone part of Apple’s business. The cloak and dagger secrecy behind the ways that Apple runs the app store have made me question if the secrecy is ‘worth it.’

I appreciate the show and the magic that goes on to make it happen. That said a clearer line needs to be drawn between what’s good for hardware sales and what’s good for the rest of the business.

In re-designing the site I knew I wanted a content system. We evaluated Joomla, Drupal, WordPress and custom solutions.  Joomla and Drupal looked promising. Wordpress was a good blog system but not designed for larger site structures. We started implementing a Joomla site and were perhaps a week into the process when we decided to change paths and go with Drupal.

The Joomla front-end experience is easier to get started with but makes it difficult to setup and interact with content quickly. The Joomla system had a lot of out of the box features but it required too many steps to do simple things.

The Drupal user experience was by contrast amazingly stark. After downloading Drupal I couldn’t figure out how you could possibly build a site using it.  It later became clear that the real value of Drupal was with it’s module system.

Critical flaw: Make sure things work out of the box. Batteries should be included.

While Drupal is truly a powerful system this is easy to overlook. The default install that you get from Drupal.org has nothing included. It’s like getting a car engine without the seats.

Dries: Oh, you want seats in your car? There’s a module for that.

There are more complete solutions and downloads available from providers like Acquia but this is not obvious. The modules are the most critical part of Drupal and if you’re not familiar with modules it’s not clear what modules you need.  They have many names that are also not obvious: CCK, Views, ImageCache, AdvancedHelp, Devel, Mollom, TaxonomyMenu.

Too much flexibility can cause problems.

Everything in Drupal is customizable. Not only can you customize your content but the system also makes it very easy to customize the admin structure, menus and commands however you want. It’s so easy to customize the administrative interface that it’s easy to get into a state where nothing works.

The admin interface should be designed to be quick and efficient for creating and editing content.  Some amount of customization is great but the system as it stands is overly abstract making it easy to get into trouble.

Be good at certain things. Don’t try to be good at everything.

When evaluating Drupal it seemed that it has support for blogs, forums, discussions, groups and pretty much everything else. It was only later that we decided that even though Drupal could do these things it couldn’t do them well.  For instance Drupal has a blog module but it’s so much harder to use then WordPress that there’s really no reason to fight Drupal to do what you want, it’s easier to integrate WordPress. Same story for PHPBB and the Drupal Advanced Forum module.  As a content system Drupal should make it easier to integrate these external products. Instead they try to re-invent these components and it doesn’t work.  Drupal is a good content system but it’s not a good blog and it’s not a great forum.

More then anything I wish Drupal would be a better cross product citizen for other PHP projects.  For example: Gallery, PHPBB, WordPress, ZenCart, etc. Plugging in other stuff that’s not part of Drupal should be encouraged.  The attitude that it has to be Drupal for everything is simply not practical.

Views and CCK

Views and CCK allow you to create all sorts of queries onto your content and allow you to customize the fields of content that you collect. It’s basically like creating your own database columns for your content.  The problem is that you can’t just take someone elses database you have to build them yourself. If I want to setup a bunch of content and views to create a little client database I have to start from scratch. It would be so much easier to take a good solution as a starting point and customize it to specific needs.

There should be a number of popular and useful views that should be included. I shouldn’t have to create my own “random post of the day” or “most popular articles” these should be canned views.

Modules and Blocks

A module encompasses a portion of functionality. It’s actually not ‘modular’ in that sense of the word. It’s more like a plug-in that extends the functionality. A block is a component that gets shown on a page.

The block model assumes that you have one core site template and that blocks are either shown or hidden on each page. As your site grows you have to have rather complex rules for when certain blocks are shown and when they are hidden. The UI to customize this show/hide functionality is rather broken. Rather then having page tempaltes with visual drag-drop interfaces for multiple pages you have to manually specify all your blocks and pages within one block template page.

I wish I could define a site structure then drag/drop content and widgets to each page in the site structure.

Terminology

With any content system there’s a certain amount of learning that has to happen. For some reason content systems don’t use terminology that is used when designing a website. They use their own abstract terms: Page, Story, Book.  If you take these terms literally you may expect that stories compose a book and a page is one page of a longer story. This isn’t how it works.

Drupal uses the term “Menu” for everything. Even if certain things are tabs, other things are trees and still others are actually menus.

Making things practical, not just possible.

Drupal has the ability to do a lot of things but in many cases these things are possible, not practical. Solutions for certain tasks are not ‘turn-key’ they involve a lot of customization and configuration. As a simple example I wanted to create a special “clients only” section on my site. Reading the docs and forums there were at least 10 different approahes for how to solve this problem. Some solutions suggested advanced permission modules, others suggested Organic Groups, still others suggested a CCK/Views approach. This seems like such a basic security scenario that there should be a simple solution to make this work (there was not).

I’m sure this problem has been solved many times over using Drupal however there is no current way for people to share these “solution recipes” in a way that I can download them and have things just work.

Long term experience

I think Drupal’s user experience has a lot of potential and I’m encouraged by the efforts I’ve read about for the Druapl 7 release.  Focus on the user experience is really the thing that’s going to make this not just a powerful system but a practical one.  I’m looking forward to it.

The arguments for Linux on the consumer desktop were not working:

• The main argument of Linux was that it’s a free alternative, however most people get PC’s with an OS pre-installed. From this perspective ‘free’ doesn’t matter because it’s built into the price.
• The second argument of Linux is ‘it’s open source.’ This argument carries some weight with businesses but a typical consumer doesn’t understand or care about open source.
• The third argument is speed. Not a bad argument but when most people only care about web-browsing and email the bottleneck is usually the dial-up connection, not the x86.
• Beyond that the argument isn’t very compelling. Linux provides the same abilities to launch basic apps, configure settings and has the same or often times worse compatibility issues with drivers.

Over the last five years we’ve seen a shift in mobile applications.  For about 30 years people thought of mobile phones as an extension of traditional phones. They would make calls and that was the primary use. Over the last 10 years we’ve added features like voice mail, texting and even basic web browsing. It wasn’t until just the last 4-5 years that the next wave of mobile has taken off.

Mobile today

Mobile phones today are dominated by three classes of devices, 16 button, 60 button keyboard and new touch devices. There are about 1Billion 16 button phones, 50-100 million keyboard phones and about 20-40 million touchscreen phones. I’m mostly talking about this last category of emerging phones though some principals apply to both keyboard phones and 16 button phones.

The key difference between the phones of yesterday and the phones of today are a combined set of capabilities and technologies that fundamentally change the user experience. These include:

• Always connected – email/web/etc
• Adaptive input screen (control every pixel)
• Geo-location
• Touch/Gesture interface
• Accelerometer
• Apps you can download

A lot of these technologies existed either in isolation or in awkward implementations. Together they allow for a much richer application experience. This has become a platform that is fun, exciting and profitable for application developers.

Design for existing behaviors

When designing an application it’s key to keep scenarios in mind. A scenario is the basic story of how a person may use the application. The important thing when thinking about scenarios is that actions tend to stay the same but the way you complete those actions changes.  Behavioral changes are difficult and rare. It’s much easier to design tools that encourage and support existing behaviors. Similarly it’s much easier for end-users to adopt your application or tool into their existing behaviors rather then changing established patterns.

Designing for Mobile

When designing for mobile remember that people are out in the real world. Your application needs to be a good alternative to the desktop/laptop. The factors for this type of design should include:

• Input methods – make it easy and minimal to get information into the device.
• Form Factor – Design for a smaller screen size and make it easy to read and get information back out of the device.
• Location – Take location into account
• Efficiency – A mobile application should be quick and efficient

From the end-user perspective the iPhone adds a number of features:

1. Cut, copy, paste
2. Photo/text message (MMS)
3. Landscape use of email, notes and other applications
4. System wide search
5. Voice recording

Among a long list of many other new features.  These make the iPhone a much more powerful device and narrow the gap between what was traditionally seen as a laptop function and what was considered possible for a phone.  Most of these features were changes to the core built-in tools and could only have been done by Apple.  I suspect the timing of the summer release will be such as to poison the well for the much anticipated Palm Pre device.

The three things that users want and are still missing were:

• Flash support
  Was omitted probably for as much political as technical reasons.  Apple likes new developers coming to the platform and wants unique native applications, not Flash ports.  I expect they will hold off on this as long as they possibly can.
• Background applications
  Were omitted for performance reasons.  While I may not like it I agree with the trade-off.  If background applications were allowed Facebook, Twitter, ESPN and everything else would try to run in the background killing the battery.  A server based push model while not as flexible is a good way to address this pain point.
• Video Recording
  A core function seen in many lower end phones. It’s possible the new API’s will allow developers to do this but given everything else Apple did add I was surprised this was not done.

Developer Features

Much of the recent success of the platform has been in large part to developer written applications and the App Store. Apple announced that over 800,000 downloads of the SDK. Wow!  Apple has taken the original iPhone that wasn’t a platform at all and over the last year has turned it into a mobile computer.

We’ve been designing and developing applications for the iPhone since it was released and while the iPhone is a very powerful platform there were a number of rough spots that Apple has been fixed with this new release.

• More complete set of API’s.
  The original release of the iPhone SDK was limited in that a lot of the API’s were not documented or makred as off limits. With this new release Apple promises 1000 new API’s hopefully opening up more flexibility in what applications are allowed to do and the types of tools that can be built.
• Easier wireless networking.
  This new functionality allows users to play/chat/interact and otherwise communicate with other local users. This opens up a number of possibilities for social games, information exchange, syncronization and interactions.
• Built-in maps.
  Google has allowed their map component to be used in other applications. It’s still not entirely clear how this will work but this adds a nice component that was previously unavailable.
• Push Notifications.
  Many applications need the ability to alert you to new things, events, alarms, messages, etc.  Push notifications provides a solution for this but unfortunately it won’t work for some types of notifications.  You can’t build a “Where is my child application.” or “tell me when I’m near so and so.” you can however build many other applications that were previously not possible.
• Interaction with hardware.
  This is a big one. Expect to see custom iPhone apps for many of the speaker systems and audio docks Bose, Griffin, Altec, etc. Expect to see custom iPhone apps for BMW, Volkswagon and Audi to allow you to control various car features from your phone or Ipod Touch.  This will lock in the iPhone to a lot of new hardware devices (good for Apple, bad for other competing devices.)
• Interaction with the music library
  This will allow applications to play music from your own music library. So you can pick a playlist in a game and listen to your own music without having to exit out and go start your iPod.
• UpSell and Subscriptions
  This is a big one for developers. The business of application building has some problems in it’s current form. Any established software company knows you need the ability to upsell.  The ability to upsell and sell subscriptions allows developers to build deeper and richer applications, create new content and new features that can be sold.  This enabled a whole new breed of applications that could previously not have been done.  Apple still seems to be missing the ability for developers to charge for software upgrades (upgrade from version 1 to version 2 for just $0.99) but hopefully this is will be possible.

What we’re personally most excited about:

1. Wireless networking – We have a game that we would like to enable with Wireless Networking. We’re also thinking about a business card exchange program that could do the same.
2. Hardware Support – We have a fitness application that could take advantage of hardware support
3. We have a music application in development that we would like to be able to play your own library

Bring your iPhone and join us for a beer. We hope you can make it.

Additional details, directions and free tickets while they last are here:
http://bostoniphonedevs.eventbrite.com/

- Greg