Object-Oriented UX

Issue № 431

Illustration by

Sue Lockwood

Object-Oriented UX

In June 2012, while working at CNN.com, I was tasked with designing the user experience of election night. The next five months of my life would be dedicated to that single night—but success to me had nothing to do with who won. I was concerned with findability, data visualization, a shape-shifting canvas, and how the hell mouse-over flyouts were going to work on an iPhone. For the first time in history, CNN.com was releasing a responsive experience. And, for the first time in history, I was going to design a responsive experience.

Speed as a Habit – First Round Review

This article is by Dave Girouard, CEO of personal finance startup Upstart, and former President of Google Enterprise Apps. He’s well known for building Google’s enterprise apps division into a $1B+ global business. Here he shares his tips for making speed fundamental to your company.

I’ve long believed that speed is the ultimate weapon in business. All else being equal, the fastest company in any market will win. Speed is a defining characteristic — if not the defining characteristic — of the leader in virtually every industry you look at.

Value Based Pricing 101: The Necessities and Your Pricing Strategy

Please note: This post is the third post in a five part series on the main pricing methodologies, highlighting the pros and cons of each. Check out the first post on cost plus pricing and second post on competitor based pricing.

We’re beginning every one of these posts with the same statement: “Pricing is the most important aspect of your business.” No other lever has a higher impact on improving profits. We elaborated on this assertion in a previous pricing strategy post, but realize that a 1% improvement in price optimization results in an average boost of 11.1% in profits. That’s no small change.

How to simplify complex decisions by cleaving the facts

We all face complex business decisions for which there is no one, correct answer, and yet a strong and occasionally permanent decision is required of us.

Sometimes the puzzle is created by fundamental uncertainty inherent in the decision. Examples: how a market will evolve, what competitors are investing in, whether new marketing campaigns will be successful, or how an important new hire will perform.

Crisp’s Blog » Making sense of MVP (Minimum Viable Product) – and why I prefer Earliest Testable/Usable/Lovable

A couple of years ago I drew this picture and started using it in various presentations about agile and lean development:

Since then the drawing has gone viral! Shows up all over the place, in articles and presentations, even in a book (Jeff Patton’s “User Story Mapping” – an excellent read by the way). Many tell me the drawing really captures the essence of iterative & incremental development, lean startup, MVP (minimum viable product), and what not. However, some misinterpret it, which is quite natural when you take a picture out of it’s original context. Some criticize it for oversimplifying things, which is true. The picture is a metaphor. It is not about actual car development, it is about product development in general, using a car as a metaphor.

You Don’t Need a Master Plan — You Just Need to Start

Startups are overdosing on ambition these days

Everything has to be a billion dollar idea that changes the world or it isn’t worth doing.

These days, even a billion doesn’t seem to be enough:

I’ve probably sat in on eight unicorn presentations [recently], and five of them use the world ‘trillion.’ Now I don’t think I had heard the word trillion in an investor presentation before that day.“

(more…)

Tobias van Schneider › Is the Ringelmann Effect Holding You Back?

In 1913, a guy named Max Ringelmann noticed something strange about humans. Ringelmann, a French agricultural engineer, took a rope and asked individual people to pull on it.

Then he asked those same people to pull on the rope with a group. He observed that when people pulled with a group, they put in less effort than when pulling on their own.

On 1:1s

Credit: Flickr / Ivan

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that 1:1s are one of the most important activities of being a manager. And yet we all know of managers who don’t do them, or do them so badly that they can hardly be called 1:1s at all. I’ve heard about managers who show up to the 1:1 and talk at their report until the time is over. I’m not sure if this is better or worse than no 1:1 at all. The worst manager I ever had, I dreaded our 1:1s so much that I used to get up an hour later on days when I would have to speak to him. My recollection of them was that there would be a terrible, awkward silence, which I would feel compelled to fill, but anything I said would be judged and used against me.

Status meetings are the scourge – Signal v. Noise

Jason Fried Founder & CEO at Basecamp. Co-author of Getting Real, Remote, and NYT Bestseller REWORK. http://basecamp.com Oct 31

Status meetings are the worst kinds of meetings. Eliminate them and you’ll actually know more, save a pile of money, and regain dozens of hours a month.

A status meeting — sometimes called a stand-up — is a meeting where a bunch of people get together in a room (or virtually via video chat) and speak one at a time. Someone gets the floor, they fill the group in on something that’s going on, then they cede the floor to someone else who does the same thing. One after another, around they go.

A Tale of 2 API Platforms – GGV Capital – Medium

Opening up an API is a big commitment, one that needs to be managed well over time in order to ensure a healthy and thriving ecosystem. If a company is still in the throes of developing a product strategy and business model, it’s worth waiting to offer a highly accessible, external API. It’s better to understand first where you’re going as a company, and then enable a massive network of partnerships to accelerate your product in that direction, with complementary experiences. If your company is thinking about offering a public API, this post is for your consideration. Let’s take a look at Twitter and Slack to illustrate the ways this can play out.

The NYT buying Wirecutter and Sweethome is so much more amazing than you think

I was happy to read that the New York Times bought Brian Lam’s Wirecutter and Sweethome sites for $30 million today.

Brian built incredibly useful sites that run on their own combo of trust and earnest nerdiness, offering up a killer utility to readers without asking for money or annoying everyone with advertisements. I use these sites at least once a month when I need to buy something—when I don’t have time or energy to spend an hour or two researching, and instead I just get whatever they say is the best product. I’ve never been disappointed in a purchase. Ever.

Kate Matsudaira: Leadership lessons for managers from a VP of Eng

Kate Matsudaira has been leading engineering teams for over a decade. She’s worked at major companies like Amazon, and great startups like Decide (acquired by Ebay) and Moz. Through these experiences, she’s accumulated a lot of knowledge on leading and motivating teams.

We recently interviewed Kate hoping to learn some of her secrets. We were not disappointed. She shared some awesome lessons for managers to learn both when they first transition to managing, and when they find themselves managing other managers.

Six Recipes for Software Managers

The engineering managers at Localytics have been working together for over a year, and through ups and downs, we’ve grown and learned a lot as a team. The goal of this post is to share some of the lessons we’ve learned with the community. Some of the content is aspirational but all of it is what we believe are best practices for leading software teams, presented to you in cookbook form. We hope these recipes provide value to fellow software leaders as well as a window into our engineering culture.

The KPI Org Chart

Or how to motivate Millennials, align your company behind your mission, and grow faster.

The best advice I ever read on hiring was “only hire for existing cash flows.” Naturally, I proceeded to ignore it for years. Instead I adopted the SV approach to “hire smart people and let them figure it out.”

Now that I’m consulting for some of these SV companies, I see firsthand what this anarchy looks like at scale. YMMV but I’ve found the high modernist approach to hiring in public companies looks like this:

How Fucked Up is Your Management?

J Nightingale Tech, Leadership, Photog, Food, Hippy, Dad. The unimaginable positive power of the global internet. CPO @Hubba. Board @creativecommons. Former Mr. @Firefox. 2 days ago7 min read

A Quiz, An Extremely Boring Manifesto, and a Free Drink Coupon

It’s taken me 15 years in this industry to figure out how to be any good at what I do. I don’t know how to write it all down yet, but I’m going to give a piece of it away to you in the next 5 minutes.

Ashleigh Axios: Four Leadership Tips from the White House

Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson.

Being a creative leader is usually nuanced — it can involve balancing business, user, and client needs, as well as managing a team and developing compelling creative solutions. It was especially so at the White House during my time serving as Creative Director. There the pressures were great, but there was no rule book or long line of examples for how the role could or should function in that environment.