Personality Wins

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My mate Ryan alerted me to an excellent article today. Although I’d never heard of Christopher Kimball or his magazine “Cook’s Illustrated” (I’m not much of a cook) I loved the story of his idiosyncratic personality, and the magazine’s anything-but-business-as-usual model, and its (going by mainstream publishing wisdom) unlikely success.

It’s a fascinating and entertaining read, but what really jumped out at me was this:

From the start, readers latched onto Kimball’s strange magazine with crablike tenacity. Today, roughly three-quarters of subscribers renew, a rate that’s the envy of publishing. In 2007, they signed up their one millionth subscriber, and over the years Kimball has supersized his idea into a franchise that includes 12 seasons of “America’s Test Kitchen,” the most-watched cooking show on public television; a second magazine, Cook’s Country (with its attendant show); reams of special issues and books; a battery of paid Web sites; a radio program; and even an online cooking school, and he has done it without discounting subscriptions or giving anything away or taking on a single advertiser [emphasis mine].

I’ve always believed that personality, intelligent opinion and honesty will always make a product more attractive and successful than focus groups, following the herd and conventional “wisdom”, and it’s lovely to see Mr. Kimball and Cook’s Illustrated prove this so clearly.

UX Australia, a Love Letter

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I only learned one thing at UX Australia this year.

No, that’s not a complaint. UX Australia 2011 was one of the conferences I’ve most enjoyed attending, ever. It’s just that I never really learn anything at a conference. Not that I’m all super smart and know it all already, it’s just that learning takes time. If it was your first time at a UX conference, what someone said in 45 minutes on stage may have been a revelation, and the half-day workshops I attended (especially Whitney Quesenbery’s storytelling workshop) introduced me to new and exciting concepts, but to really learn these things, I’ll need to do them, preferably with someone much smarter than me looking over my shoulder.

What I learned, or more accurately was reminded of, is the value of people.

Chats in Bars

The theme of people came up a lot this year.

At the after-party, I spent some time chatting with a young interaction designer from Germany named Susi. She was happy to meet someone who spoke German, and I was amazed she’d come so far for our little Aussie get-together. And she was taken aback by how nice everyone was. She thought there was a bit of an in-crowd, but everyone she got up the courage to speak to (and she knew no one when she arrived) was friendly, interested and welcoming. Her surprise surprised me at first.

On the way to a pub one night, I finally met the charming and funny Joe Sokohl. We discovered we had both lived in Hamburg Germany at the same time (not sure if Susi met him too, but his German’s pretty good) and shared some memories. We got on to how conferences work, and he mentioned how much he enjoyed coming over to Australia. My memory’s not nearly good enough to try and quote him directly, but he said he enjoyed our lack of rockstars; that there are plenty of great UX people in Australia, but that there’s little to none of the ego parading in-crowd mentality here.

The Cool Kids

Every conference has what Robert Hoekman Jr. called a “cool kids table” – that group of people who know each other from speaking at and attending conferences around the world. It’s unavoidable that when a group of people do something together that other people don’t do, that a bit of a clique develops, and we’ve got that in Australia too, of course. I’m more or less part of that group now too. Considering I feel I’m well and truly a part of this community, even though I’ve only been in this country three years, have only ever worked directly with one person in the UX community, and was accepted to speak at the first UX Australia although hardly anyone knew me and no one had ever heard me speak is proof enough that, in Australia, the “cool kids table” is mostly a concept in the heads of those who think they’re on the outside looking in. The cool kids don’t seem to know they are.

As Joe noted, Aussies tend to have their feet on the ground, and have a low tolerance for arrogance. I explained the “Tall Poppy Syndrome” to him: that Aussies tend to tear down anyone they see getting too far above the norm. But on second thought, I don’t think that’s what keeps our UX community grounded. We’re just lucky enough to have so many people who are genuinely friendly, don’t take themselves too seriously, and just want to make stuff that improves people’s lives and have a good time while they’re doing it.

That is worth a lot. Talk to most people about their jobs.

What Counts

Considering my recent Facebook cull, and compounded by reading “Big Deal” last weekend, I’ve obviously been thinking a lot about friends lately. And it may seem obvious, but that’s what really matters at conferences, and in anything we do: the people. It’s interesting to hear what people are working on and what an awesome process they followed to achieve the result, but the real value is inspiration, and that comes from the chats, usually in bars, where you find out why people really did what they did, what really turns them on and why they do what they do, in work and beyond. I can’t really say that I’m close with that many people in our community, but I’m surprised every time we get together by how many lovely people I’m lucky enough to call colleagues, and I’d really like to come to call more of them friends.

Sappy? Naive? Unprofessional? Well, this is a love letter.

I love you UX Australia.

Generally I’d try and summarise the great presos I saw at a conference, but that’s obviously not what was on my mind this time. Luckily, some smart people have done that for us:

Big Deal

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In May 2008, due to organiser confusion, I spoke with Leisa Reichelt at the first second next conference (flipping through my own blog reminded me that I missed next07). The conference was organised by Sinnerschrader, my employer at the time, and after meeting Leisa at reboot the year previous, I put in a good word for her and got her invited. The confusion was that I thought I’d agreed to soften the language barrier, and give Leisa whatever help she might need. The organiser thought I’d agreed to present with Leisa.

I’d never spoken at anything bigger than a group of mates at the pub, and would’ve described myself as someone with a “please shoot me now” level of stage fright. But by the time I found out what was expected, it was too late to back out. I threw some slides together, Leisa and I met at a café on the morning of our preso and mashed our slides into one deck, and off we went. Leisa was already an old hand, which helped me immensely, I had my “shoot me” moment, got past it, and by all accounts I didn’t embarrass myself. It felt like it was over in seconds, the audience laughed and nodded when they were meant to, and there were even a few people waiting to ask me questions when I left the stage.

Despite being “shoot me” nervous every single time, I’ve spoken at three more conferences since then and plan to do it again in the future. Why would I do this to myself?

To understand it better than I could ever explain it, read “Big Deal: On Being Famous to Almost No One” by Robert Hoekman Jr.

Robert was far more ambitious than myself and wrote numerous articles, five books (before this one) and ended up becoming a bit of a rock star in the web design & user experience world. He was flown around the world regularly to stay in top hotels, attend expensive parties and get up on a stage for an hour and talk about his work. And it destroyed his life.

“Big Deal” isn’t a book about web design, user experience design, or how to get a conference speaking gig. It’s a brutally honest account of Robert’s quest for what he calls “micro-fame”: to live an exciting life in exciting places, to win a seat at the cool kids’ table, to be adulated and validated by a bunch of intelligent strangers, and what achieving it all cost him in the end.

Sounds pretty glum, right? Luckily Robert’s a talented author, so it’s a pleasure to read – I flew through it in about six hours. Beyond that, at the cost of his marriage and friends, he discovered plenty of wisdom we’d all do well to keep in mind. Despite the rise and fall which is most of the story, it’s an optimistic book about keeping your eye on the things that make life liveable, and being mindful of why you’re doing what you do. I learned a lot, and am reconsidering my decisions and plans because of it.

Regardless of which industry you work in, if you define yourself by what you do, you should read “Big Deal” and learn from Robert’s mistakes. Should our paths ever cross at some conference, I look forward to buying Mr. Hoekman a beer to thank him for his honesty and courage.

Big Deal is available for Kindle or iBooks.

The Right Stylus

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Last year I wrote a few bits (here and here) about trying find and build just the right stylus for my iPad. No luck.

This March I was in Hong Kong and while waiting in a train station gadget shop for a friend buying some iSomething or another, I noticed a chunky, angular pen, with what looked like a rubber tip. Hallelujah! It turned out to be the AluPen from Just Mobile, and it’s hands down the best iPad Stylus I’ve ever used. Grippy, with a tip that is just hard and soft enough, it feels much like using a thick pencil.

If you draw on the iPad, or just get sick of smudging your finger across all that lovely glass, you must try this thing.

It’s Nothing Personal

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This morning I had 740 “friends” on Facebook. Now I have 352. Before you rush off to see if I’ve dissed you, please read on.

So I got the shears out this afternoon and drastically trimmed the friend tree. Here’s how I made my decisions. Looking at each person on my list of friends, I asked myself these questions:

  • Do I recognise this person’s name? If not, do I at least recognise their face? (I’m bad with names)
  • Have I had anything to do with this person in the real world in the last 5 years? If not, have I had any meaningful online interaction with this person in the last year?
  • Have I recently read anything that informed me, touched me or was somehow important to me written by this person?

If I couldn’t answer “yes” to all of these questions, I cut. Many of the people I unfriended (bizarre verb, eh?) fell into one of these categories:

  • People I had an interesting chat with at a conference years ago, but haven’t interacted with since.
  • Buddhists I had an interesting chat with or worked with at a meditation course years ago, but haven’t interacted with since.
  • People I had brief contact with somewhere else online, but never met.
  • People I used to work with and was never personally close to, with whom I’ve had no contact since the work relationship ended.
  • People I don’t or barely know, who friended me to see stuff (usually photos) I post on Facebook.
  • Someone I’ve never met at all and can’t remember how we became Facebook friends in the first place.

This all probably seems pretty cold. People’s feelings will surely be hurt. I’ve already received Facebook messages from people who’ve taken it personally. I’d apologise, but I reckon Facebook, and in a larger sense this clumsy new space we’re conducting our relationships in, are to blame.

The Facebook model of relationships, and the models of most, if not all, social networks are seriously flawed, for a number of reasons.

Just like “Friends” (without the sofas)

Apart from the broken insistence that everyone we have any kind of relationship with is a “friend”, Facebook in particular forces symmetrical relationships; that is, if we agree that we’re friends, you’re forced to see my stuff, and I must see yours as well. I speak at conferences, so you might be interested in my stuff, but there’s a good chance I don’t even know you. I’m a fan of your blog and am interested in your thoughts, but again, you understandably don’t have the slightest interest in me. I also post lots of photos on Facebook, especially from Buddhist events I’ve attended, so there are hundreds of Buddhists I’ve never met, many of whom don’t even speak my language, who want to see my pictures, but I don’t want to see their unreadable posts in Russian, Czech, Finnish, etc. But Facebook forces two-way sharing on us, and although they’ve given a slight nod to this problem, the interface they’ve given us to deal with it is clunky at best. Beyond a certain number of friends, we get an extremely high ratio of noise to signal, and miss the things we want to see as they drown in a deluge of irrelevance.

Things change

Other than all of that, real relationships change: people move, quit jobs, break up, drift apart. This happens naturally, and over time – I left Hamburg Germany 3 years ago, and naturally kept in touch with my close friends, but didn’t see the occasional acquaintances any more, simply because I wasn’t there. Nobody was snubbed, and nobody thought twice about it.

On Facebook, I’m always “there” and me and all 740 of my so called friends, no matter how emotionally or physically distant we are, are in each others’ faces every single day. In order to change this, I’m forced to make a a conscious decision and, if we translate the interface into natural language, say to them “I’m no longer your friend”. At least they don’t get a “Matt Balara just unfriended you” mail, but even without remembering when, how and where the hell we met, I can’t help but feel rude clicking a link that says “unfriend”. And considering how quickly I’ve received “refriend” requests (five within an hour), some people keep close track of this sort of thing and do indeed take it personally.

Balance

Very few natural relationships are in fact symmetrical. You might be a very open person who’ll tell anyone about your dog dying, your new job or the sexy lady you took home last night. The guy you just met in a bar may not want to hear it, and wouldn’t even dream of telling you what he had for dinner. An extremely asymmetrical relationship. It’s a real-world one though, so he’s got a pretty practical solution to his dilemma: he can get up and leave, and likely never see you again. Unless you got his name and can find him on Facebook.

In the real world, we all choose how much we share with who, and most of us get it more less right most of the time. There are unspoken cultural rules we absorb throughout our lives, and we shift gears smoothly and unconsciously as we change our social context: share less at work, more at the pub with old friends, even more at home with loved ones, and so on. On most social networks each of us is standing on a stage, yelling indiscriminately into a crowd of neighbours, current and ex lovers, colleagues, clients, acquaintances and complete strangers. And trying to target our messages at just the right group of people on Facebook is enough effort (not at all smooth or unconscious) that we rarely bother, and therefore rarely say anything that truly amounts to sharing.

Show me the money

This is not an accident. The last thing Facebook wants is for you to be able to quickly and easily manage what you see from, or say to, who – they earn their daily bread by providing other companies with a network that’ll quickly distribute their stuff far and wide – and their interface is quite smartly optimised for that, not for our ease of use or to reflect our actual relationships. I can’t blame them for that – Facebook is a company and exists to earn money – but it doesn’t mean that their interface doesn’t piss me off on a daily basis. I could argue with them for hours about whether or not pissing off users is a sensible long-term strategy, but that’s another story, and an argument I likely couldn’t win.

Alternatives?

Simply allowing asymmetrical relationships, i.e. I can see your stuff without you having to see mine, helps a lot. I love Twitter, for example. At the moment 1,304 people follow me, and I follow 444. I see what I want to see, and allow strangers to see what they want. If people I don’t know yet interact with me through an @MattBalara, I’ll often end up following them, and I’ve met people who’ve ended up being friends this way. Although the 140 character limit lends itself very well to link sharing, witty banter and light contact, it’s no replacement for the more in depth sharing and conversation that’s theoretically possible on something like Facebook.

Google+ looks like it goes a little way towards solving some of these problems, by emphasising context with Circles, and allowing asymmetrical relationships. I’ve got to admit I haven’t yet looked at it long enough to really get it, and I need another time intensive social network like I need a kick in the teeth, but after today’s big trimming, I’ll be having a much closer look, with a move away from Facebook in mind.

Now I know you

I now find it quite enjoyable to look through 352 names and know exactly who each of them is, where we met, and what we mean to each other. I’m surprised that I can remember that many people. We may not all be “friends” exactly, but I know they’re all people I want to keep in touch with, who mean something to me somehow, and who I look forward to hearing from.

To those who’re no longer in the list, please know that my intent wasn’t to insult you. I just couldn’t keep up, and had to draw the line somewhere.

It’s nothing personal. Which is the whole point really.