I was doing some research for an article a few days ago and I came across some papers that were explaining different aspects of pay-per-action models and contextual advertising and things like this. And at one point it struck me how 
much math was in there. Formulas here and there and model X and Y explaining problem Z. Models for explaining how advertisers bid in an auction how publishers make the auction and so on and so forth.
Although I respect very much people who have the gift to see mathematical relationships in every aspect of life, I must say – come on people, take a brake, go pet the dog or something, look out the window. It doesn’t even matter what they were trying to prove in that article, the idea is that too many are forgetting that modern economics was built by guys like Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall. Smith was philosopher! If you need to turn to science for explaining at how people are bidding in an ad auction look at psychology first, not math. You are talking about people. Model their behaviour as much as you like that still won’t make you understand things completely.
My take is that among academia too many people are so busy of building “something new”, some “new model” that too easily people jump into making their own little mathematical model that no one understands because it’s new and it will get published. I don’t say these are not useful sometimes but economics and anything else that has to deal with humans is Powered by the People™. If you want to find out what effect a badly designed pop-up has on a sites users look at any talk show. Pop-ups are like that annoying guy that doesn’t let anybody else talk. Pop-ups are interruptions that don’t let you do what you came for. Wasn’t that easy? And I figured that out without building a mathematical model for it.
You’ve all heard the expression “Eat your own dog food”. If you haven’t, let me enlighten you. It basically means to use
your own products. If you are building the next best Twitter client, use it, don’t use TweetDeck. Same goes for any website out there. The idea is to get into the position of a user, not developer. But be careful! If you’re dog food is crappy but that’s the only dog food you know it’s still the best dog food in the world, for YOU alone.
In my experience as a web developer I usually notice most things that annoy me about a website I have to work on in the first 10 minutes. After 2 months of working on it I’ll know all the hacks that are there and will know how and where to click. That’s the main reasons developers make lousy testers.
My solution? Besides you own product, use similar ones whenever you have the chance then come back to your own and be amazed how stupid button X is positioned.
When you set up to build something, be it a new company, a great service, a product that the world can’t live without, one of the greatest barrier you hit is made from stereotypes. Let’s take luggage as an example. It took us so many years to put the tiny wheels on it yet people knew what the wheel was for many a year. And every year hosts of designers were thinking on how to make the next great bag and didn’t think about it. Why is that? Because a bag should look like this and this and that and doesn’t have wheels. So go wild boys and put flowers on those bag but no wheels. Luckily something snapped and they figured it out, after all.
But what if you took a guy that had never seen a bag yet knows what wheels are and you tell him to build some contraption for moving his belongings from point A to point B? Is he more likely to make a box with wheels on it than something that you have to brake your back to carry around? Probably.
Stereotypes kill ingenuity. Not because people are stupid, nor they lack creativity, it’s just hard to make a different sort of bag when you know what a bag should look like.
That’s why interdisciplinary approaches sometimes give incredible results. See Gary Vaynerchuck, who is a wine guy that started using the web tolls that were available in a way he thought it would work, and it did work! Look at Loren Feldman from 1938Media. Comes from outside the whole web geek culture, takes a different approach, which made sense to him, and nails it.
So next time when something you don’t know how to do comes your way, don’t run the other way, just do it the way it might seem natural to you and maybe you will do it differently then the rest and your way will be better.
Do you know those nice buses / trams that have the fancy automated gearbox for silky smooth acceleration? You know how good these actually are, when the driver puts his foot down and it doesn’t jerk, it just goes faster and faster, smoothly… until the same driver floors it, the brake pedal, that is. And than you get to know very intimately the person next to you. And than the foot moves again to the gas pedal and it’s so nice and smooth and you say to the person into you just crashed into how sorry you are for… everything and than bam, the driver slams the brakes and reaches for the hand brake to make a rally style turn and on and on.
I can see the social part of this, after all you get to know a lot of people better than you wished to, but I wonder, if they can make these buses accelerate silky smooth why don’t they do something about the braking?
That’s a good example of having the best equipment for providing a great service and ruining it, the service that is.
I wanted to give this post a philosophical spin but it kind of sucked, so Ctrl + A + Del and back again. No philosophical bull crap. One mention, though. You will see that all top five places are more or less related to nature. Although I’ve seen beautiful cities, about some I talk here, churches, buildings, these rarely impress me as much as a beautiful view. I like two things about traveling – the places and the people, with their habits (which includes food, mmmmm). Churches and other piles of brick, mortar and concrete – second best.
So, without farther ado, I give you my top five, as these are today, the 14th of Aril 2009
5) Istria, Croatia
There is something different about Istria, it’s different from the south of Croatia, Dalmatia (see nr 3), it just feels less wild. There are some beautiful places there, but more populated. I’ve see some of the most incredible cities, the likes of Rovinj. However, the one that really impressed me was a small city/village that looked like something from Dungeons & Dragons. All stone houses, off the bitten track and at 11 in the morning, on a weekday the most important thing one of the inhabitants had to do is wash the two stone steps in front of his house with a toothbrush, while a few of the other inhabitants were chilling at a nearby cafe. And of course, everybody was staring at you wondering what the hell you were looking for. When you see this, you know you’ve hit the jackpot. Unfortunately neither me nor Adrian can remember the name of the place. But anyway, beautiful seaside and with cities that look like Rovinj and with names like Pula, you can be sure it’s a good place to be. I surely enjoyed it.
4) Patscherkofel, Austria
The Alps are fantastic. If you live in Europe, you have no excuse not to go at least once and see them. In the winter they turn into this giant playground, where you can ski, snowboard, whatever, all day long. Patscherkofel is very close to Inssbruck. The winter Olympics of 1964 and 1976 were held here. You can take a damn bus from the center of the city and be and the ski lift in 20 minutes. Beat that Bucharest! Besides the incredible scenery and perfect slopes and great service and the fact that you can take the bus from the city and the great landlords we had and the good food and the great weather and so on, Patscherkofel gets a top 5 because it was my first contact with skiing outside Romania. For Miha and Gabi it was the first contact with ski. So top 5, definitively, top 1, not yet, read on.
3) Zadar and the Island of Pag, Croatia
Istria is one thing, Dalmatia is another. I don’t know what’s with the rednecks and the south but it seems wherever you go, when you go south you find more of them and Croatia is not an exception. It seems to me that people here are a tiny bit less friendly then in the north, but who gives a damn? This Croatian dudes say that the sunset over the Adriatic is the most beautiful in the world and they are ready to produce scientific facts proving that the atmospheric conditions are unique and bla bla bla… I don’t give a damn about their charts, but the sunset is beautiful, it’s more than that, it’s spectacular. The see is incredible too. It’s like a big, beautiful, clear, salty, warm, fish inhabited, calm lake. And the sun… the sun just burns everything and makes everything white, even the rocks. There are more rocks than plants there, but if you like it, it’s spectacular too. And Pag, a big island, is also spectacular. I thing that’s you can best describe it with these words: hot, rocky, windy, spectacular.
2) Omu – Bucegi, Romania
This picture was taken very early in the morning, don’t even know the year, very close to Omu. On the previous day Adrian and me climbed for the best part of the day to get there. It gets second best for the sheer feeling of a job well done I had then, for the beauty of the mountains and for all the beautiful things I saw while getting there. Adrian gets the credit for dragging my ass all the way to the top. I get bonus points for being stubborn. It gets second place because in my mind Omu’ symbolizes Bucegi, and these are the mountains I see most often and love.
1) Algonquin, Canada
Can I say spectacular? Yes I can and yes I have to! It has to be one of the most beautiful places I’ve seen so far. Me and the usual suspect, Adrian went for a short 3 day canoeing trip to Algonquin while we were visiting Frank and Denis in Canada, Toronto. This was last year, august 2008. The whole canoeing thing came to us, and especially to Adrian after we saw one of Ray Mears episodes, when he was building his own canoe and talking about the voyageur. And it was all happening, yes, you guest it, in Canada. After some Googling Adrian found these guys, Voyageur Quest and we booked a canoe trip with them. Must say, Adrian, being the hard core, lone wolf, experienced mountaineer her is and me being the usual cynical asshole we were a little skeptical about this whole organised trip. But was it worth! Oh boy! Never mind the organisation of things, which was very good, but the view…. Those who have never been in a canoe, do it! Right now! It’s not a boat, it doesn’t squeak, it just slides through the water, silently. It’s just something different from anything else. It’s not waking, it’s not riding a bike, it just is nice. And Algonquin is spectacular. You should see the sky at night. The nature is also different from what I’ve seen back home and in Europe so far, it has a different feel which I can’t really explain. Because of the whole canoeing experience, combined with the astonishing scenery and the sheer joy of the trip beating our most optimistic expectations, Algonquin gets the top spot, for now ;).
It was hard to sort through the places I’ve been and I must say, I cheated a little bit. Austria is very fresh in my memory as only recently I’ve been there. And when I had to choose between two places I chose the one for which I had pictures. There are places that I’ve seen before the miracle of digital photography hit the world. Up there, in the top 10 there are many places from my beloved country, like Sibiu, Sighisoara, many mountain picks. A big role in choosing the top 5 played the emotions associated with it. Maybe one of my recent ski trips to Sinaia was spectacular, but it was just a weekend getaway.
Hope you enjoyed this and let me know what are your favorite places and why. Don’t be shy!
Have you noticed how everything, these days is about getting data from as many places into one central location? Look at FriendFeed, look at uberVU, and the likes of Apture. Even Google Reader and other RSS readers do the same. Different methods, same idea. Get data from many places into one space, for you to happily engorge. I call this the Funnel Effect.
These are all agregators, but there are other examples out there. There are companies like smartHOTEL, that do something amazing, yet not that complicated. They spare hotels the hustle of crawling around 10 different websites belonging to 10 different tour operators and updating their prices everywhere. Instead, they use their system an voila! The idea is yet so simple the implementation so hard. And the benefits so great.
But if we keep stuffing more things in the funnel, won’t we get to the point when it will mutate into an waterfall?
There is probably a limit to the human capabilities, out there, that will force us to shape these tools into something we can digest. An by the way, isn’t user usability and good design an good example of how we must shape our tools to fit our abilities, be those mental or physical?
Prove me wrong, please.
