Company Interviews Archives - 6sigma

Google Job Interview Questions: My Experience and Why I Rejected the Offer

admin — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 06:03:50 +0000

This is the account of my interview experience with Google in 2006. This article discusses Google Job Interview Questions – my experience and why I rejected their offer. This is my story.

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Preamble: Google Job Interview

google contacted me about a position with the print team. i was well paid and was doing well at the company i was with at the time, but i agreed to interview with google anyway. the head of global print operations was under a lot of pressure due to the lawsuits, etc. yet, he needed headcount, especially they needed help with the actual print operation and the quality problems they were having at the time. the job was for a permanent position – why else would they go through a grueling 2 days of interviews for a contractor? but when i pressed him on salary and asked him to match and provide much more than what i was making and i anchored at an amount, he buckled and made it contractual instead. he waffled, so i said “no thanks”.

the people i met were nice, very bright, and focused on their work. several of them complained to me about their frustrations that “google was so big and stuck in its ways”. i thought that was interesting. i declined because of the iffy-ness of a contractual job (though the cash would be very good); the high cost of the bay area wasn’t appealing to me at the time; and, the future of the print effort seemed unsure to me – but the vision and promise of google print is very good. those were my reasons. now, back to the google interview below

The Google Job Interview

back in october 2005, i interviewed with google, for a position with google print. my interview was over 2 days, on 10/12/2005 and 10/13/2005. i didn’t do much to prepare for the interview, except read-up on all the google print controversy regarding the n lawsuits against google print. unlike most companies that fly their candidates out for an onsite interview, google’s policy was for me to pay for my flight, hotel, and food, but that they would reimburse me later. i thought that was lame and unprofessional; after all, they are the ones that contacted me for an interview and i never applied for a job with them. luckily, i was going to be in that area anyway for business, so i just scheduled my business trip for that week.

Google Interview Questions: Day 1, 4 interviews

in the lobby reception desk, i typed my name on this little widget and signed the dotted line. then, this little widget prints a self-adhesive name tag with my name, google, and my location. i gladly took that self-adhesive and put in on my shirt breast. then, i met with the hr people, both of whom were very nice. they were very, very late, but i had fun hanging out in the lobby of 1625 charleston road, building #44. in the lobby were 4 refrigerators full of odwalla drinks; i helped myself to a couple. on the wall was a large flat monitor that showed, in real time, the current google searches. this was really amusing. i remember the following searches:

web hosting reviews
size d bra
how to advertise
how to make a bomb
osama
italian mob + hbo
catholic anger
Find a Math Tutor

this was really cool. finally, the hr folks were ready and brought me into a room next to the korean and chinese speaking engineers. my first interviewer came in late and was really sweaty. he had just ridden his bike to work. he was sorry he was late. he was super nice and his questions were easy.

the next person was a little tougher; she had been with sun microsystems for several years and was in charge of their warehouse and distribution side. she asked some tough questions, was very open about her frustrations with google, but ended up very nice to me. she was very frustrated that the engineering received so much priority and attention, but operations and business didn’t. she was very open about what irritated her as an employee at google.

the next person came in had a background in library science and an mba from michigan. he was really nice too and asked fluffy questions. he wasn’t an engineer and i don’t think he knew what to ask me, so he asked me lame conversational-type questions. i don’t think it was a fit interview either; i think he was just clueless – not in a bad way, just that he just didn’t know what was going on. the next person i interviewed with was sharp; he was a stanford mba and had been in the print industry for a while. he wasn’t quantitative at all, but was nice. he asked me hypothetical questions about potential problems that they face in the print group. the problems were very interesting. there is true innovation going on at google, for sure.

that was it for day 1. there was no lunch, but i was free to raid the fully-stocked kitchen whenever i wanted to; i helped myself to a healthy dose of mountain dew and stopped by the cafeteria for a veggie sandwich. the atmosphere there is very cool and i felt energy and could visually see the innovation going on. very cool. that evening, i went to my hotel and did some work for the company i was with at the time.

Google Job Offer: day 2, 7 interviews

i did the whole self-adhesive, name tag thing again. got an odwalla (2 of them), then waited. eventually, the hr people came and got me. this day was much tougher than day 1. my first interview was with a former nasa scientist-turned googler. my interview with him was fun and interesting; he proposed several real case studies and problems that they face in the print team. my second interview was with another engineer; he asked me basic questions and one brain teaser. the brain teaser goes something like this, if i remember it right:

you are at a party with a friend and 10 people are present including you and the friend. your friend makes you a wager that for every person you find that has the same birthday as you, you get $1; for every person he finds that does not have the same birthday as you, he gets $2. would you accept the wager?

i had fun trying to solve this one. the answer has to do with the number of days in the year and the probability the person’s birthday falls on the same day as mine (without replacement). i eventually solved it, but it took time learning how to apply probability with no replacement. i tried using 10! (factorial), for some reason, but that was totally the wrong approach. we ended the interview; i didn’t feel as good about that one, because i struggled a little bit through that brain teaser.

my next interviewer asked a lot of algorithm questions. he made me write pseudo-code for a binary search; he had me uml a system; he made me explain cron, diff, the permission system in unix, and had me write a bunch sql queries. this guy was a scientist at epson, the printer company. he was sharp; quantitative but warm. i liked that interview. my next interview was with a nice lady who had been with google for a few years. she was cold, but not mean; observant, but not expressive. i felt that i answered her questions fine and our interview was done.

my next couple of interviews were with people that i had interviewed with the previous day, in day 1. those went fine and uneventful. but, by this time of day, i was getting really tired, physically and just tired of interviewing. alas, the last interviewer came, the head of global operations for the google print team. he was very nice, open, and direct. that interview went fine and he openly shared his strong interest in my background and said that i’d be a great addition to the team. he also shared how living in the bay area is so nice and seemed to be trying to sell the location and the company. i saw this as a good sign. our time ended; i left, but before i walked out the building, i managed to steal a few more of those odwalla drinks. i drove to the san jose airport, caught my flight, and went home.

Google Human Resources: Weeks Later

the hr guy called and gave me an offer! but, it wasn’t what i was expecting. i was excited for the google stock units (gsu) and the phat salary that would barely keep me alive with the bay area cost of living, but that’s not what i got. instead, google offered me a contractual position, with a very high hourly rate. of course, because it was contractual, there would be no benefits or google stock units. on the phone, on the spot, i declined the job offer. moving to the bay area wasn’t that appealing to me, especially if the job didn’t have google stock units and benefits. the cash was good, but my family needed more than that.

all in all, the experience was okay. there is certainly more hype about google than i believe it really merits. true, they hire sharp — really sharp people; i felt a lot of energy and could see the innovation happening there, but many of them seemed really unhappy. i can’t put my finger on it, but many employees i met really seemed unhappy and many mentioned the intense bureaucracy present at google — the people i interviewed with didn’t seem happy to me. they looked tired and grumpy. i didn’t get a feeling that google treats their people very well. i’m glad for my decision not to join google. but, i’ll always wish i had free reign on those odwalla drinks

Google Job Interview Update

yes, i recited that brain teaser from memory, so i’m sure i shared it incorrectly. the approach, though, is this: thinking now of probability without replacement,

(364/365) * (363/365) . . .

this is the approach to the problem. given this, would i take the wager? no; it’s a bad bet.

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World of Warcraft Game: The xFire Gaming System Interview with Ryan Kiskis

admin — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 06:03:49 +0000

Today we’re interviewing Ryan Kiskis, the director of Product Management at xFire, which is a gaming platform for popular games such as Metin, World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, and others.

you’re going to love this next disruptive company highlight. today, we’re speaking with Ryan Kiskis of Xfire. Xfire is the de facto standard of online gaming. we’re excited to have ryan on shmula today.

Be sure to read our other interviews in our leadership series.

update: this posting was ready during the week of april 17. but, as of april 24, a huge announcement was made that Xfire will be acquired by viacom for $102 million. congratulations to ryan and the Xfire team.

Tell us a little about yourself, ryan.

I’m currently Director of Product Management & Marketing at Xfire, though everyone at our company wears a lot of different hats. I’ve been with Xfire since about the time we launched the service at the start of 2004, and I’ve done vastly different jobs over that time frame. I’m primarily interested in next-generation web development, what’s currently being called Web 2.0, but I’d like to think we’re always pushing the envelope to the next thing. As a gamer myself, I’m lucky enough to be able to combine that interest with one of the most fun industries around, the videogame space. I came to Xfire immediately after graduating from Stanford’s MBA program, which itself came immediately after graduating from Princeton in aerospace engineering. I’m still shooting for that opportunity to fly in space one day.

What is the business problem or opportunity that xfire addresses?

You can break it down into 2 major aspects, one consumer oriented and one business oriented. The consumer piece of the problem is that the game industry was fundamentally focused on the game title itself as the link between people. Gamers went to play Counter-Strike online, and they generally played against random strangers on the internet. That can be fun, but in general it’s not nearly as satisfying as playing against friends that you’re going to chat with and hang out with over a longer period of time. To use a golf analogy – I like to play Stanford’s golf course, but if all my buddies are heading up to the Presidio, I’d much rather play with them up there.

The business aspect is that gamers are getting older (average age about 28-29 now), richer, and less reachable in traditional advertising channels. The average Xfire user uses our service for over 80 hours a month; I guarantee you they’re not watching TV for that long. They’re also becoming increasingly resistant to traditional marketing messages – you need to engage them, get them to interact with your product or service, not just see a brand message every few minutes. So it’s becoming an increasing challenge to reach gamers, especially for more traditional advertisers.

How does Xfire address the business problem? how is this approach disruptive?

Coming back to the game-centric attitude of the game industry – we basically tried to flip that on its head and refocus the experience on your friends and social network. Xfire is fundamentally about connecting you with your friends to play games, regardless of what specific game they happen to be playing. All of our features – one-click join, in-game chat, voice chat, rich-data profiles, everything – are designed to simplify and enhance a social gaming experience. I think our 4,000,000 users, as well as the success of other gaming social networks such as Xbox Live, have proved the validity of this model. In the PC space we’re still pretty unique in overall feature-set, and our independence from any individual publisher or platform holder has allowed us to innovate in what features we’re offering much faster than we would otherwise be able to.

On the advertising side, we’re offering our advertising partners more innovative, engaging campaigns to reach out to gamers. We’re able to combine a single, powerful ad placement in the client with online events that bring gamers together. Our gamers will be spending hours over the coming weeks – interacting with the games of our publisher partners, interacting with the Axe brand as they create their stories, and interacting with each other in collaboration on movies that will stretch into full-blown epics. We also have done skins of the Xfire client for partners, often associated with a community skin creation contest, as well as sponsored online gaming events with gaming professionals. We’re continully working on ways to combine our traditional advertising placements (web banner ads and our client placement) with these more innovative, engaging events, and we’ve had great success with them to date.

In terms of selection, price, and flexibility, how does Xfire compare to other companies in it’s space?

As I briefly touched on, we’re pretty unique in terms of feature-set for the PC gamer. No one else has our in-game chat technology or our automatic screenshot upload features. Other services provide individual features (voice chat, file downloads, etc), but with those services being their core businesses, they have to charge for them. Xfire is entirely free to our users, with features as robust as many of the comparable pay services. So if you’re a gamer, there’s really no reason to not have Xfire, and I think our growth rate indicates that’s true.

In the advertising space, we are obviously an alternative to traditional placements on the gaming media outlets (IGN, Gamespot, etc), as well as newer channels like in-game advertising or advergaming. However, we really have a sweet-spot in that gamers use our product for significant periods of time each day (unlike gaming media outlets), but they can also easily interact with these innovative marketing campaigns I described earlier (unlike in-game advertising – you can’t even click on an in-game banner, let alone interact). We actually have an interesting document up that we presented to the iMedia conference a few weeks ago, which is a great read for anyone interested in reaching gamers: http://www.xfire.com/cms/imedia.

Anything else you’d like to share?

At this point, I think I’ve covered everything you’d wanted to know and more If anyone’s got any questions or wants a demo, my Xfire username is Wyndairn.

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Startup Company Tackles Diabetic Retinopathy Treatment

admin — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 06:03:49 +0000

From time to time, shmula interviews companies that are disruptive-but-value-adding, either in their approach to business, their revenue model, or in their technology. to read about the companies featured on shmula, please go to the company interview page.

Be sure to read our other interviews in our leadership series.

It’s not often that one encounters innovation that also does the world some good. today on shmula, we’re speaking with Dr. Lloyd Hildebrand, co-founder and chief operating officer of Inoveon. Inoveon is a medical services company that detects, stages, and monitors diseases affecting the eye — diabetic retinopathy, macular edema, and glaucoma. Inoveon is a venture funded company and the list includes Eli Lilly, Centerpoint ventures, Massey Burch, Prolog, and Chisholm.

I have worked alongside Dr. Hildebrand and can attest to his superior knowledge in Opthalmology and Medical Informatics; what is most impressive, however, is his personal drive and passion to help prevent blindness through the use of technology, particularly Medical Informatics and Telemedicine. Shmula welcomes Dr. Hildebrand on today’s segment of disruptive companies.

Dr. Hildebrand, please provide a short bio on yourself

I’m a doc – entrepreneur first a general physician for about ten years and now am a ophthalmic plastic surgeon with an interest in leveraging IT solutions into clinical applications. Inoveon is an University spin-off company we founded in 1996. I still practice and operate.

What is the business problem or opportunity that Inoveon is addressing?

Diabetes is growing at epidemic proportions and isn’t showing any sign of slowing down (www.cdc.gov). Diabetes causes lots of complications in different organs including the eye. It is the leading cause of preventable blindness caused by diabetic retinopathy (DR). DR is treatable if detected early usually when it has no symptoms. If detected, laser surgery can prevent 90% of vision loss. The problem is that most people don’t get the recommended exam to have their eyes checked and so the disease progresses till it is too late to save the vision. About 1/3 of patients get the eye exam they should. These eye exams are not available where they get their diabetes care, so patients have to make an inconvenient and expensive trip for a special eye exam. We provide a digital imaging system that very accurately detects, stages and monitors the progression of DR in the diabetes office. Its like the blood sugar test for the eye disease.

How does Inoveon address the business problem? how is this approach disruptive?

Inoveon provides a system that images the inside of diabetic patient’s eyes to detect and stage the level of damage present. We do this in the diabetes care clinic (rather than the eye clinic). This is disruptive in that it replaces an expert exam by an eye care specialist with an accurate (more accurate actually), more accessible and less costly exam in the convenience of the clinic where diabetic patients receive most of their care. This increases compliance with the recommended yearly exams, identifies treatable disease earlier and at a lower cost.

In terms of selection, price, and flexibility, how does Inoveon compare to other companies in it’s space? — i.e., why should a client go with Inoveon rather than someone else or via another venue?

Inoveon differentiates itself by offering the highest quality diagnostic service available. This is important because it reduces overall cost of managing the condition by accurately identifying all the disease that can be treated (sensitive test) while making sure it sends only patients with advanced disease (high specificity) that need further treatment on for specialty care and evaluation. Lower accuracy systems are easier to operate, may cost less on a per test basis, but cost more because they don’t discriminate between mild and advanced disease stages.

Anything else you’d like to share?

If you have diabetes or know someone who does, remind them to have their eyes checked. You lose a lot when you lose your sight.

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MWI Helps Brands with SEO

admin — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 06:03:49 +0000

On today’s segment of disruptive companies, we’re speaking with Joshua Steimle, the founder and CEO of MWI. we’re going to learn about how a full-service marketing, branding, seo, and web development firm manages to stir things up and add value. welcome, josh.

Please provide a short bio on yourself

My name is Joshua Steimle, and I’m the founder of MWI, a Salt Lake City based firm specializing in brand management, web development, and search engine optimization, amongst other things. I’ve been running the firm for six years. We have clients of all shapes and sizes including garage technology ventures – Guy Kawasaki’s company, 3Com, Altiris, Brighton Ski Resort, Bank of American Fork, FranklinCovey, Johnson Mill Bed & Breakfast, and USDTV. My interests include technology in general, design, marketing, advertising, entrepreneurship, skateboarding, reading, writing, and art. I’ve got a masters of information systems management from Brigham Young University. I’ve got a blog at donloper.com if you want to know more.

What is the business problem or opportunity that MWI is addressing?

MWI provides services that help businesses that need to make more money or save money by increasing sales or cutting costs.

How does MWI address the business problem?

We do this by crafting customized solutions using cutting-edge web technologies as well as traditional marketing expertise. We can optimize a client’s website so they get more traffic and more sales, whether or not they actually sell anything online. We can also produce radio and TV commercials, magazine ads, billboards, direct mail, and manage the media buying thereof. We build websites with content management systems, do market research, design retail spaces, and create marketing and educational DVDs.

In terms of selection, price, and flexibility, how does MWI compare to other companies in it’s space? — i.e., who should a client go with MWI rather than someone else?

If you wanted to label us, you could call us a full-service advertising agency, but unlike most advertising agencies we have a strong background in web development and we like to think of ourselves as a bit more cutting-edge than most agencies that are run by older folk who do things the same way they were done in the 80’s and 90’s. We see ourselves as being more lean and results-oriented. We try to lock our clients into continuing to use us by providing services they can’t afford not to have, rather than through creatively worded service agreements or long-term retainers that are often a sinecure for the agency. We are definitely not an inexpensive firm, and our services and pricing aren’t a fit for everyone. We routinely refer clients to other firms if we feel they can get what they need for a lower cost somewhere else. But for companies that are looking to whoop up on their competitors and are serious about it (meaning they have a realistic budget) we believe we’re a great fit and better than many agencies in that we’ll get the job done right, we’ll get it done quickly, and compared to many agencies we’re quite cost-effective.

Anything else you’d like to share?

We work best with companies that come to us with objectives and then let us do our job. Some clients come to us and we find out that what they really want is a creative or technical team they can manage themselves. That’s not where we do our best work. We do our best when a client says “I’m entering such and such market and I need to have revenues to such and such point by such and such date” or “We need to recruit 200 students online for our university each year.” The clients give us objectives, and we work with them to create strategies and then we execute those strategies.

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Fired from Google: Interview with Mark Jen on Self-Esteem and Innovation

admin — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 06:03:49 +0000

we’re pleased to present our featured disruptive company today — plaxo. here to answer our questions is the infamous mark jen – yes, that mark jen – *the* mark jen that was fired from google for blogging (he was there only 2 weeks prior to his being fired). his being fired for blogging popularized him into superstardom. the shmula team is thankful to mark for taking the time to share with the readers of shmula how disruptive plaxo really is and how that distruptiveness adds value to its users.

Be sure to read our other interviews in our leadership series.

Tell us a little about yourself, mark.

I am a Product Manager at Plaxo. Before joining Plaxo I was an Associate Product Manager at Google for a short time before I was fired for blogging. I learned some very important lessons and now speak at various conferences about the interplay between blogging and business. I previously worked as a Program Manager at Microsoft and a Software Engineer at IBM. I continue to run a blog that covers both his personal and professional life called Plaxoed!

What is the business problem or opportunity that plaxo addresses (no pun intended)?

Plaxo is a universal address book. We solve two main problems: first, we have a network that enables people to connect and share their contact information automatically; second, we synchronize contacts, calendar entries, tasks, and notes between multiple computers and different applications. We currently support sync between Outlook, Outlook Express, Yahoo!, Mac OS X Address Book, Mozilla Thunderbird, and AOL Instant Messenger.

How does plaxo address the business problem? how is this approach disruptive?

Plaxo uses a network effect to dramatically simplify the mundane task of keeping your address book up-to-date. All yourcontacts who are on Plaxo can be updated automatically when they change their contact info. Plaxo also makes sure users have their data wherever and whenever they need it; we sync to different clients and also provide online web access for users on the go. Finally, Plaxo exposes a public API to let 3rd party developers create applications for users on top of the Plaxo data store.

In terms of selection, price, and flexibility, how does plaxo compare to other companies in it’s space? — i.e., who should a client go with plaxo rather than someone else or via another venue?

The price for basic service: free! With over 10 million users and growing, Plaxo is the de facto leader in the online address book space.

Anything else you’d like to share?

To learn more about Plaxo, check out our blog. No stodgy corp-speak we promise

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Word of Mouth: Interview with Samuel Clemens of Bzzagent

admin — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 06:03:48 +0000

Today, we’re speaking with Samuel Clemens, the director of network optimization at bzzagent. bzzagent has created a systematic, effecient, and effective way to leverage the most effective form of adverstising: word-of-mouth. sam answers a few questions and shares more about what bzzagent does and how it disruptively but positively contributes and how it is different from the traditional advertising model. thanks, sam, for spending time with us today.

Be sure to read our other interviews in our leadership series.

Please provide a short bio on yourself

Work experience in reverse chrono: BzzAgent, Greylock, Amazon, Elance, Booz-Allen Hamilton. Education: Yale for Applied Math, Harvard for MBA. In a nutshell, I’m an analytical product guy, all of my gigs have been about building something techish.

What is the business problem or market opportunity that bzzagent is addressing?

Traditional advertising today is broken. This is from the perspective of the advertisers, the consumer product companies. Consumers use tivo and satellite radio to filter out ads in the more traditional mediums, or are simply becoming more jaded. Also, if you ask professional advertisers at media agencies, the holy grail of marketing has always been word-of-mouth. The problem is how to generate word-of-mouth in a systematic way (staging street spectacles is not systematic).

How does bzzagent address the business problem?

Bzzagent solution: Marketers (either product companies or their ad agencies) tell us who they are targeting and give us samples of the new product. We send those samples to the slice of our user agent base that matches the target demographic. Our deal with the agents is that if they like the product and talk about it, they need to tell us in a report so we can pass the feedback to the advertiser. They also need to say that they got the product from us (we get a lot of new agents this way). The agent gets a cool new product to try, the advertiser gets measurable word-of-mouth distribution, and everyone’s happy.

How does a bzzagent campaign help your clients? measureable differences that you could share?

Go view our many case studies. But, here are some notable examples:

Java.com

Objectives

Diminish the barriers to trial and adoption by placing java.com in the hands of new consumers
Identify an effective media that can drive awareness to the next generation about Java technology at a grassroots level
Determine the circumstances where people use java.com and discover which factors drive word of mouth about java.com

Strategic Approach

Engaged 1,100 Agents in a 12 week Campaign
Agents were between 18 and 29 years old
Each Agent received two java.com ringtone cards, a java.com mouse pad and an official java.com BzzGuide

Results

Increased Engagement
- Agents in this campaign were more engaged and responded more positively than those who participated in the previous java.com campaign
Gained Valuable Consumer/Market Insights
- Agents informed us that they found the java.com user experience to be more about browsing than downloading and purchasing
- Agents who returned to java.com to browse for new site content (looking for new ringtones, applications, games to demo, etc.) proved to be highly evangelistic
Generated Reach
- Reached an estimated 33,745 individuals
- Drove Awareness to the Next Generation
- Since Agents had a better understanding of java, the technology seemed to be a deciding factor when purchasing devices that run or are built upon java technology

Dunkin’ Donuts

Objectives

Educate consumers about Latte Lite at a grassroots level to generate awareness, trial and evangelism
Diminish the barriers to trial and adoption by placing the product in the hands of new consumers
Gain insight into the consumers’ opinions and experiences with Latte Lite, and how people talk about the product

Strategic Approach

Dunkin’ Donuts engaged 3,000 Agents in a 12 week Campaign
Targeted Agents in New York, Detroit, Boston and Cleveland
Each Agent received six Be My Guest cards for a complimentary Latte Lite and the official Latte Lite BzzGuide

Results

Generated Reach and Trial
- Reached 111,272 individuals
- 96% of Agents noted that at least one person with whom they conversed had tried a Latte Lite
Gained Valuable Customer/Market Insights
- Consumers who were outside of Dunkin’ Donuts’ original health conscious’ target market enjoyed the Latte Lite
Lifted Sales
- Category sales increased by 26% in test markets while control markets experienced an 8% increase
- After the first eight weeks of the campaign, overall sales in the test markets were 5% higher than sales in control markets
- An increase of nearly 0.5% in test market gross sales from the product launch

What is the future of bzzagent?

Future: It’s a media model, just like TV or radio or anything else. Advertisers call up and say we want to market our new style of jeans to women age 24-29 in Boston with 1 dog and who drink coffee on Wednesdays. We tell them we have 11,000 such folks, but we’re sending them a new face cream product next week, so how about booking 5k in May?

Aside from word-of-mouth, what would bzzagent look like for blogs? is there work in this category?

Bzzing blogs. Sure, don’t see why you couldn’t do a campaign for a blog. In theory at least, word of mouth is one of the most effective means of marketing any type of consumer product. In practice, blogs are themselves naturally word-of-mouth animals, so they probably don’t need us.

Thanks for spending time with shmula.com, Sam!

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Interview with Josh Coates on Mozy and Innovation

admin — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 06:03:03 +0000

Disclaimer: i am not affiliated in any way with mozy, berkeley data systems inc., or josh coates. josh and i met several weeks ago over a plate of exceptional and affordable mexican food at mama chu’s restaurant in provo, utah. i’d describe him a young male, with incredible mental horsepower, unmatched entrepreneural drive, and a nice three’s-company-sized afro. i am a personal user of mozy, but i am not employed by or affiliated with mozy in any way. cheers!

Be sure to read our other interviews in our leadership series.

Please provide a short bio on yourself

Here’s the short version: I started out at UC Berkeley and spent most of my time in graduate research groups working on large scale parallel systems. I spent some time at Microsoft Research in San Francisco, and also worked in the engineering department at Inktomi. Next I founded Scale8, which was a large venture backed storage service provider which handled storage and bandwidth for MSN (music and photos), Viacom (MTV and VH1) and Fujitsu. The technology was great, but we had a lot of challenges on the business and management side. In 2003 we closed shop and sold our intellectual property to Intel. I moved on to work at the Internet Archive for about a year where my primary job was to build out their new petabyte data center in San Francisco. I learned more about glycol cooling and 3-phase power than I really wanted to know — but it was a great experience working with Brewster Kahle and the archive. They are doing important and amazing work there. In 2004 I moved to Utah and started Berkeley Data Systems.

What is the business problem or opportunity that mozy is addressing?

It’s pretty straight forward: disk failure, hardware thefts, accidents, disasters – they all happen. Everyone needs a backup strategy. The problem is that backup can be expensive, and a big hassle. It seems like the obvious solution is an automated remote backup system. It’s always been amazing to me that no one has solved this problem. Sure, remote backup solutions have been around for years, but they are amazingly expensive and the software quality is lacking. The trick is this: can you make it free and keep it simple, yet powerful enough to handle the ‘hard part’ of automated remote backup? Developing excellent software is always a challenge, but on the back end, how do you safely store millions of users’ data? If you do the simple math, you come up with petabytes, and that’s when things get interesting.

Cool. that sounds like arrington’s description of companies he’d like to profile, but don’t currently exist. zawodny also describes a need for this kind of service. Scoble talks about the need for data storage here also. it seems like everybody is hoping for technology like you’ve described. does this technology exist now and…in mozy? how does mozy address this opportunity?

Yes & Yes. We just decided to develop the highest quality remote backup software in the world, and then give it away for free.

How much is it again?

FREE!

How does mozy make money?

Two ways: a weekly sponsored newsletter (which, since we’re in beta, we are self-sponsoring them) and the second way is through premium accounts. A premium Mozy account gets you more storage, and is exceptionally inexpensive. Of course, the reason our economics are so dramatically different from traditional remote backup companies is because of our technology. We’ve developed something we call “Distributed Reed-Solomon encoding” or DRS for short. It’s about 8 orders of magnitude (that’s not 8x, that’s 8 orders of magnitude, which is 100 million times) more reliable than traditional RAID5.

This level of reliability is critical if you are storing data on thousands of disks. But what’s really innovative about it is that we can manage the system with just a small dedicated team rather than a huge administrative staff. We’re also just now wrapping up the development of another breakthrough — but I’ll save that for another time. All of these innovations are really just a lot of hard math and statistical analysis — but it’s pretty incredible what it can do when applied.

Josh, there’s some hype about online storage companies. one of the more popular ones is amazon’s S3. please explain to our audience the difference between mozy and the online storage companies, most notably amazon’s S3?

Let me make one thing clear: remote backup is not the same thing as an online hard drive. There are plenty of online hard drive services on the web — they are relatively easy to implement and they have marginal value. Don’t get me wrong, I think the “internet storage” concept is fine if you want to manually upload a set of static files that you want to access on the road or to share your mp3s with friends. But it’s not like it’s going to save your can when you leave your laptop in a taxi in Boston, when your house burns down, or when you are trying to actually run a business. It’s just a different problem we’re trying to solve for people.

Berkeley Data Systems is focused on free, secure, automatic remote backup. That’s a narrow, but critical focus and I think that’s the most important difference. As far as S3 goes, I think Amazon’s announcement has caused a lot of grief and anxiety for some of the folks in the online hard drive space. S3 is a great concept, and I think it’ll do great and with an 800lb gorilla like Amazon behind it, it’ll really change online storage. Kudos to Amazon – but fundamentally, it’s just another online hard drive with an aggressive pricing model, and doesn’t have a lot to do with solving the hard problem of remote backup. I think for now, we’ll keep focused and let the online hard drive crowd fight it out amongst themselves.

The difference is that remote backup is automated, encrypted, and incremental. And frankly, it’s very hard to get all the features right: encryption, locked files, block-level incrementals, automation, error detection, single instance storage, and simplifying a complex problem into a simple user interface. You see a zillion little online storage companies, but very few innovative remote backup startups, because it’s really hard to make major breakthroughs in this area. It’s been a lot of fun to finally break some of these barriers with Mozy.

In arrington’s post in january, he lumped mozy with the other online storage companies. your answer to my previous question shows that his characterization of mozy is incorrect. moreover, — the comparison grid that was part of that review — didn’t look to me like he or his assistant really looked at mozy. we, at shmula, went ahead and investigated mozy’s feature set. below is what we found:

arrington has done other profiles on storage companies and seems to really like Omnidrive and has done not one, but two posts on it. incidentally, the founder of omnidrive is also his cohost on TalkCrunch. i wonder how a side-by-side comparison of Omnidrive versus Mozy would look like? arrington did say he’d like to feature mozy again. i’d bet the ($1.34/week) i make on adsense revenue that mozy would come out on top.disclaimer:i don’t know jack about omnidrive and have not used their service. in fact, i had never heard of them or been to their website until this week. in truth, i don’t know which is better — omnidrive or mozy — and, it wouldn’t be a fair comparison: one is an online hard drive, the other is remote backup. there’s a difference.

On to a really important question — mt. dew or mt. Kilimanjaro?

We’ve recently conducted extensive double blind taste tests here at Mozy, and it turns out that caffeine free mountain dew actually tastes more like it has caffeine in it than the regular mountain dew. Go figure.

Can you share with us rough numbers of current free subscribers or % growth over the life of mozy?

I’ll play coy on the user/growth numbers (it’s LOTS and FAST) but I will tell you that we have over 40 million encrypted files on our servers, and by the time you read this, it’ll likely be a few million more than that.

Anything else you’d like to share? future plans you’d like to share about mozy?

Argh. I have to restrain myself here – we’ve got some very, very cool stuff coming out Real Soon Now – we’re in a constant state of improvement and innovation. But in the meantime, go download the Mozy client and wrap your data in the warm blanket of free, automatic, secure goodness.

Anything else you’d like to share?

If you are reading this, and you don’t have a remote automated backup solution, then get one. If you win the “hard drive crash” lottery (unfortunately the odds are surprisingly good) then it will really mess your day up. You don’t have to pay $20 per month, or buy an external drive or perform the nightly CD burning ritual heck, you don’t even have to floss your teeth if you don’t want to. It’s simple – if you are running Windows XP, then give Mozy a try. If you don’t mind one newsletter a week emailed to you, then it’s free, otherwise it’s really inexpensive ($1.67 per month). If you’re running linux, just run a cron job of rsync, gzip and mcrypt piped over ssh to your friends server over their DSL line. (Yes, we plan on a linux client eventually but in the meantime..) If you are running a Mac then wait a few months for the Mac version of Mozy to come out. Anyway, just play it safe — there isn’t a good reason not too. Data loss is now optional.

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Interview with Mary Poppendieck and Role of Lean Leadership

admin — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 06:02:58 +0000

Mary Poppendieck was gracious enough to agree to an interview. She brought the concept of Lean to Agile and is a thought leader in the Agile/Lean for Software space. She is the co-author of Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit for Software Development Managers (Paperback) and Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash (Paperback).

Be sure to read our other interviews in our leadership series.

My plan is to collect a series of questions from my readers. A subset of these Mary will graciously answer and I’ll post the entire Q&A here on shmula. I will stop accepting question on August 25, 2006 and I will post the interview on August 28, 2006 [1. Read More Leadership Interviews].

Here are Mary Poppendieck’s other responses to readers’ questions:

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Before Pinterest, there was Kaboodle: Interview with Brian Hansen

admin — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 06:02:54 +0000

From time to time, shmula interviews companies that are disruptive and value-adding, either in their approach to business, their business model, or in their technology. At bottom, these companies are doing something completely different and novel and are customer focused. To read about the companies featured on shmula, please go to the company interview page.

Be sure to read our other interviews in our leadership series.

Today on Shmula, we’re pleased to be speaking with Brian Hansen, Vice President of Product at Kaboodle. Kaboodle is one of Guy Kawasaki’s portfolio companies — that is, Kaboodle is a portfolio company of Garage Technology Ventures.

Brian, please share with us a little about your background.

I’ve been in consumer web roles for the past decade. Before Kaboodle I was Director of Product Management at MyFamily.com, COO at Infopia, and the first employee at FlipDog.com (acquired by Monster.com) where I was VP over Business Development and Product Management. Before that (when I was young) I was a Strategy Consultant at Accenture and an early employee at Onyx Software. Educationally, my MBA is from Tuck (Dartmouth) and I have a B.A. in Japanese from BYU.

What is the business problem or opportunity Kaboodle was built to solve and how does Kaboodle solve the problem?

The problem is that although it’s very common to visit several different sites (often dozens) when shopping for something, there has not been a great way to easily capture, share, and get input on the various options you consider during the process. Kaboodle solves this problem with a simple Add to Kaboodle javascript bookmarklet you click on any web page containing something you want to add to your list.

Kaboodle’s proprietary extraction technology creates a summary of that page including a picture, description, highlights (including pricing information) and a title link and puts it on a Kaboodle page. That resulting page containing all of the things on your shopping list is easy to share with friends and family to gather input. They can add comments and additional items to the same page; so collaboration is very simple no more cutting and pasting into separate emails for several people and trying to consolidate all the input that comes back.

Additionally, Kaboodle pages are public by default, so it’s also easy to reuse the work of other Kaboodlers and copy items they’ve already found across the web onto your own pages as a way to jumpstart your shopping research. We see social shopping as really the next phase in online shopping as people personalize their overall shopping experience and move from a feature and price comparison to really finding the products that fit their taste and style.

Anecdotally, 80% of the shopping activity is search and 20% is the actual purchasing — this data, I believe, mostly describes offline shopping. Do you think this data is a close approximation for online shopping behavior as well? Please elaborate and perhaps share with us a little about what the online shopper is like — demographics and the general ethnography of the online shopper.

For some online purchases, like an iTunes gift card, the process is very simple. But most online purchases have some element of personal taste or variation (like fashion, home dÃ©cor, Halloween costumes, accessories, etc.) so you want to visit several sites with different offerings and pick and choose your favorites before deciding. In those types of shopping decisions, I think your 80/20 rule is pretty accurate.

A recent eMarketer report suggests that one of the big reasons consumers shop online is because prices are, on the whole, lower and there’s a wider selection. It sounds like Kaboodle was designed to help make the “selection” part easier for the customer. In that same eMarketer report, we learn that the online eCommerce space is a very large market and is growing at a healthy rate. Given this data, tell us, how does Kaboodle make money?

Kaboodle makes money through both lead generation and soon brand advertising. We currently show CPC links from Google AdSense and Shopping.com and CPA links from eBay.

With the recently-announced (in June 2006) partnership with eBay, please help us understand how that partnership helps Kaboodle, eBay, and the customer?

The MyCollectibles partnership is really about creating a place for passionate collectors who are shopping, collecting and showcasing anything they collect from coins to art pieces to pez dispensers. The collectors can connect with other collectors, discover new products and shop for them on eBay. Kaboodle benefits as it allows consumers to discover Kaboodle through eBay. eBay benefits through stronger collectibles interest and increased transactions as collectors browse collections posted by others and find items they’d like to purchase for their own collection and they typically turn to eBay to make those purchases. The customers (collectors in this case) are helped by having a free place where they can showcase their collections, connect with other collectors, and get ideas for additional items they might want to acquire next as they expand their collection. They also get entertainment value from simply browsing what other people have collected.

What are some of the best ways you’ve seen people use Kaboodle?

First, Kaboodle is the best completely open wish list available. Whether it’s your Christmas wish list, a wedding registry, your child’s birthday wish list, a baby registry, or a list of supplies you might want for your classroom if you’re a teacher, Kaboodle allows you to add items from anywhere on the web and then easily share that list with friends, family, and anyone else. Anyone viewing your wish list can reserve items so that everyone can see what’s already being purchased and what’s still needed the purchases might happen by clicking through the links on the wish list or by running down the street to your local department store; but all the coordination is managed right on the Kaboodle wish list.

Second, Kaboodle is the best way to build your personal shopping network of people with similar taste and interests who are always finding great products.

And of course Kaboodle is also ideal for managing your own personal shopping and trip planning especially group travel where several people might be helping decide on lodging, activities, where to eat, etc.

To a stay-at-home mother of 5 kids in her 30’s, how would you explain Kaboodle to her and why should she use it?

Since your question randomly happens to exactly describe my wife, I’ll just use her own words: Kaboodle saves a lot of time. Here are a few examples: It’s great to be able to put everything on a single page and then share it with grandparents who want to know what to buy for the kids’ birthdays (or for moms of the kids’ friends who are asking about birthday present possibilities). It also makes it easy to manage holiday shopping (we have private Kaboodle pages my wife and I use to keep track of what we’ve bought for the kids, notes on expected shipping arrival dates, etc. so we’re both always coordinated as we opportunistically buy things from the lists while keeping all the information hidden from the kids we copy items from the Kaboodle wish lists our kids have made as the starting point). And when we’re shopping for furniture or things for the house, it’s a great way for us both to get on the same page and narrow down the styles and specific pieces we like the pictures make it easy to quickly sit together, look at a single page, and prioritize and eliminate items.

This space seems crowded with players: ThisNext, StyleHive, Yahoo! Shoposphere, Wists, MyPickList, GiftTagging, Plum — how is Kaboodle different from the other players in this category?

The most obvious way Kaboodle differs is our powerful extraction technology. With a simple click of the Add to Kaboodle button, our engine does a lot of work behind the scenes to grab the right picture, summary, pricing information, etc. rather than requiring the user to select and annotate everything they want to capture. The second big differentiation is our discovery engine that automatically allows users to find other Kaboodle content that’s highly relevant to their current shopping search. Finally, our robust collaboration capabilities that allow multiple individuals to add items to the same page, allow for private pages with a select group of invitees, allow an option for voting on items on the page when making group decisions, and of course all the coordination logic in our wish lists for reserving gifts, seeing whether or not gifts from your own list have been reserved, etc.

Speaking of technology and software, I’d love to learn a little more about the ins-and-outs of technology at Kaboodle: there are a myriad of features in the social shopping space that one could have and, I’m sure, Kaboodle receives numerous and daily feature request from its users, in addition to features that come from your analysis of the competitive marketplace — how do you prioritize between all the possible features? Also, without sharing your secret sauce, can you share a little about the technologies behind Kaboodle — languages used, server clusters, databases, a plan for scalability?

We have a fantastic and very passionate user base who are great about sharing feature ideas with us. Since this is a new space and all of us are pioneers at this stage, real user input is extremely important. With respect to the underlying technology, we’ve built our own proprietary technology using the typical set of open source tools (java, linux, MySQL, etc.) Our engineering team has extensive experience developing highly scalable systems in their past environments; so that’s definitely a strength at Kaboodle.

Regarding brand awareness, when I do a Google search on “Kaboodle”, Kaboodle.com is returned, but so is Kaboodle.org, the open source LAN tool and Kaboodle the Linux Media Player for KDE. Have you seen namespace confusion and does it impact the Kaboodle brand?

So far, we haven’t seen any name confusion impact. We think the Kaboodle brand is very fitting since the literal meaning of caboodle is a collection of things. And recently David Placek (CEO of Lexicon Branding) mentioned Kaboodle as both a fun and a memorable name. That sentiment has been echoed by our users. We hope to be the most prominent Kaboodle and the one people think of when they think of shopping.

What can we expect next from Kaboodle?

We will continue to innovate. We are just at the beginning of redefining the shopping experience on the web. We want to facilitate better discovery, easier filters and more fun ways of making your world mobile.

Anything else you’d like to share?

Pete, thanks for talking to us. We hope your readers give Kaboodle a try this holiday season!

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Lean for Software: Interview with Mary Poppendieck

admin — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 06:02:13 +0000

Mary and Tom Poppendieck, the author of Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit for Software Development Managers (Paperback), which won the Software Development Productivity Award in 2004 and, the sequel Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash (Paperback) were recently interviewed on the history of Lean, or the Toyota Production System, and how the software world is now using Lean to develop software. Below is the transcript of that interview

Be sure to read our other interviews in our leadership series.

Here are Mary Poppendieck’s other responses to readers’ questions [1. Read More Leadership Interviews]:

Mary & Tom, can you please introduce yourselves and tell us what your currently working on.

Mary: My name is Mary Poppendieck and I’m working on the concept of Lean Software Development. I was a programmer for many years and then I went into management, into product development and got out of software development for a while, and then I came back in again after I left the company that I was working with. I was involved as a Project Manager and that’s the first time I ever ran into this idea of “waterfall”. I said to myself: “How can this possibly work?” Then I discovered it actually didn’t work, so I decided to figure out how to apply the concept of Lean, which I’d worked with when I was in manufacturing, to software development.

Tom: I’m a physicist. I’ve been a professor, a high-school teacher; I’ve worked in industry – working on navigation systems for commercial airplanes. I’ve been in small and large, and I’ve spent the last part of my careeer as a software consultant and encountered many of these ideas as they were being introduced in the last decade. Currently we’re working together to spread the ideas of Lean, as they establish a context for Agile software development

Where does Lean come from?

Mary: Lean comes from the Toyota Production System which was invented at Toyota for automotive manufacturing in the late 1940s, 1950s, 1960s. We didn’t actually discover how it was working in the US until perhaps the early 1980s, when the idea of “Just-In-Time” manufacturing started competing against other US products, so we started seeing Toyota and other Japanese cars taking market share away. In my industry, which was 3M, we were making video cassettes and all of a sudden we found that Japanese competitors were selling video cassettes for a third of what we could selling for, and less than we could make them for. We were trying to figure out what caused that. It turns out that this concept of Just-In-Time manufacturing was strongly behind what was going on, and later the concept became known as Lean manufacturing.

What is Lean software development?

Mary: We’ll talk about Lean in general. The Lean history starts over here in manufacturing. Here the first thing Lean was known as was “the Toyota Production System” (it was the way Toyota learned how to manufacture cars). That became known as Just-In-Time and that how it was known when it came to the US and Europe. Then, in 1990 a book was published “The Machine that Changed the World” – the Story of Lean Production. That’s where the word Lean production came from. They’re all basically the same thing. They’re a way of thinking about manufacturing that allows you to do rapid manufacturing with very low inventory and high variability. Then, if we come down this path there’s something in logistics (warehousing, moving materials between companies) called supply chain management (SCM). SCM is the way that you use Lean in the logistics area. And if we come over here there’s a whole other area which I’ll call Product Development, which is very different than manufacturing and logistics. We now apply Lean thinking principles (not the practices, but the principles) from manufacturing and logistics into Product Development. When you apply Lean into Product Development you get a different way of looking at it. And I believe that software development is a subset of, is like, it’s part of Product Development. When you apply Lean to software development you take the general principles of Toyota production system or Lean and you apply them into the Product Development environment but you don’t use the exact practices that you would use in manufacturing. You have to go back to the first principles of what you’re trying to accomplish and move those into software development.

What are the main principles behind Lean?

Mary: The main principles behind Lean were articulated by Taiichi Ohno, the person at Toyota who invented the Toyota Production System. The first principle would be the idea of Flow (or Low Inventory, or Just-in-Time). The second one is what I would have to call “expose problems” or “no workarounds”. The idea is that you have flow and you have low inventory: it’s like you have a boat on the water and your boat is sailing above these big rocks, which are problems. This is your inventory level here. If you lower your inventory level, at some point you’re going to run into a rock rock and your boat is going to come down and bump into this rock. If you don’t get rid of these rocks when you lower your inventory you’re going to bump into rocks, and crash and burn. The first thing you’re doing is lower your inventory to expose those problems so that you can get rid of them. If you don’t expose problems and stop and fix your problems, then lowering your inventory is just going to crash your boat. You have to do two things: you have flow but you also have no tolerance for abnormality. You just don’t allow defects into your system; you don’t allow things to go wrong. When something wrong happens you stop, you figure out what is causing it, you fix it rather than continuing on and just ignoring it or working around it. These are the two basic principles.

What does “inventory” mean in software development?

Mary: In software development inventory is anything that you’ve started and you haven’t gotten done. It’s “partially done” work. In manufacturing if you start making something and it is in-process, it’s not sold, it is inventory. In development it’s the same thing. If you started developing something and it’s not done, it is inventory. What you’re trying to do Lean software development is the least amount of “partially done” work as possible. You want to go from understanding what you’re supposed to do to having it done and deployed and in somebody’s hands as rapidly as possible.

Tom: “Done” means coded, tested, documented, integrated, “Done”, so there’s no more work to do. It is one of the main reasons why Lean approach gives you a more reliable delivery, a more trustworthy delivery. So that instead of finishing activities like requirements, which doesn’t tell you much about how far you are along overall, each piece of work that you do is completely done.

What are some of the other principles of Lean?

Mary: The way I apply Lean into software development, I have seven principles that are the foundation of the way to look at it Lean in software development. The first principle is to eliminate waste. The second is to amplify learning. The third is to delay commitment. The forth is to deliver fast. The fifth is to build integrity into the product. You can’t test it in later; you have to build it with integrity in the first place. The sixth is to engage the intelligence of the people who are doing the work. The last is to optimize the whole system, not just part of it.

What is “waste” in software development?

Mary: Waste is anything that the customers do not value. If you’re doing something and in the end the customers don’t think it is important for them, then it is waste. There are lots of ways to look at waste. One is: partially done work is waste. Just like in manufacturing, inventory is waste; in software development partially done work is waste. Also, extra features you don’t need right now is waste; stuff that causes delays is waste; things that get in the way of a rapid flow of product are waste. Because customers, when they have a problem they want the problem solved now, and stuff that delays that is waste.

What does this look like practice?

Mary: We start by asking people to draw a Value Stream Map. You start with a customer problem-need request, and you go to where that request is filled. So, you put on “customer glasses”, and now I want to watch what happens to that problem until it is back and the customer problem is solved. You draw a map or a timeline of everything that happens from the time the customer request comes in the organization until the customer has their problem solved. You lay out the activities there and how much of the time are you really adding customer value and how much of the time is just sitting there contending with other work that has to happen.

So, one of the things you do to eliminate waste is to say “From customer request to customer delivery, what is my cycle time? How fast do I do that, reliably and repeatably (not: every so often I can do it this fast). What are the steps and how much of that time am I really adding value?” You do that and you find out that, for instance, you develop these requirements… Oh, first of all, it takes forever to approve it, because some how or other you don’t think approving is important, and then you develop this set of requirements, and after a while you discover that you have to change them. So, you go back, you loop back, you’ve done a lot of work that’s isn’t even needed because it gets changed, and then you actually code it.

Well, when you have requirements churn, meaning you’ve done some requirements work and then it needs to be changed, that means you’ve written your requirements too soon. If you don’t wait until it’s time to write those requirements (that’s what I mean by “delayed commitment”) that’s when you’re going to have a lot of changes in requirements. On the other hand say you get to testing and you find errors – oh my goodness! Now you have to go back and code-and-fix, and code-and-fix. If you have that cycle in your value stream you’re testing too late. The idea is to move the detailed requirements closer to the coding, the testing closer to the coding, and do it in smaller chunks.

What it looks like in practice is an iterative cycle that’s 2 to 4 weeks long in which, just before the cycle begins, I take the top priority things that I want and I blow them out into detailed requirements. I write the test first, because the test really helps me understand the requirements, and then I code so that I pass those tests. I make sure that I’m documented, and done and ready to deploy. That means I’ve integrated it into the code base, on a constant basis; if something goes wrong I stop and I fix it, I don’t build up a bunch of defects.

I actually don’t have a defect list, it’s much better to fix the defects, not that you don’t have a couple of those that you decide to ignore, but generally speaking you don’t even have to have a defect list: you need to have a practice that says”When I find something that’s wrong I fix it.” It’s either wrong or it’s right and I don’t have to say “I’m going to have things that I can fix later”. So you write the test, you write the code to pass the test, you integrate every single hour or two into the code base; when something goes wrong you stop. Now this requires automated testing. It also requires a lot of discipline.

When it’s done I have already tested and integrated it. Yes, I do a validation stage but I shouldn’t be finding errors in the validation state. I should generally pass my validation stage and then I can deploy it. Probably automatically, and with something that makes the customers feel safe. This is very much like maintenance programming where maintenance gets the error, and if it’s a serious error in 24 hours they have that thing fixed and patched and back in production. This is what I mean by a rapid cycle.

What does it look like when you have a large team, let’s say 30 developers?

Mary: When you have 30 developers you have three teams and not one, or maybe even four teams. Or maybe you’ve tried to create a divisible architecture so that your architecture allows individual pieces of smaller teams to work on that. Then that’s coordinated by a few people from those teams.

Tom: But even if you’ve broken it down into three teams they all work on the same code based so they’ll continue integrating and synchronising with each other. If it’s a distributed environment you still have one code based one repository. People that live near the repository get faster builds, the ones that are remote get slower builds.
What impact do delays that are outside the development group have and what can you do about that?

Mary: I’d like to stop and say that the development organisation should not be an independent thing. The development organisation is trying to make something that’s bigger than the development organisation. If you’re just developing software you’re actually just developing something that’s probably pretty useless. If the software is not embedded in a business process or in a product it is really not very useful. The first thing to think about is: the development team is part of a bigger team, one that is trying to change a business process or that’s trying to put a product on the market. You need to look at the development team as a piece of that whole team that’s trying to deliver value to the customer. There has to be somebody that is looking over the entire process and making sure that all the different organizations are working together to create that fast value stream. But I admit that every time we find value streams with big pauses and big delays in it, guess what: it’s almost always true that you’re crossing organizational boundaries at that point. Nobody seems to own moving the process forward across the organizational boundaries. So, you need to have an environment in which those organizational boundaries have somebody owning it, making sure there’s coordination across the whole thing you’re trying to do; the whole product or the whole business process, not just the development part. Otherwise you can develop forever and not actually have something that’s an overall business success.

Tom: The bottom line here is that there’s no such thing as technical success; there’s only success – and success means that the business benefit, that ROI that justified this, is realized success – this means that this product sells on the market. Technical success is irrelevant. It might make individual people feel good, but if it doesn’t succeed in the market, in delivering ROI, it’s a failure.

Mary: So one of the things I’m looking for when I say “optimize the whole”, is a team that looks at the whole picture and not just the development portion of it; and a leader that leads the team across the entire value stream, not just the piece of it that’s “development.”

You mentioned one of the principles as “engage intelligence of the workers”. How did you do that? How does that look like?

Mary: It means first of all, understanding that the people that are doing the work are the people most capable of figuring it out how to do it best. So if you have a process, it is not designed by some organisation that you might call ” Process Police,” that figures out how things should be done. You have the people that are doing the work figure out what is the best process to do the work. You don’t pretend that management is the people with most intelligence to figure out how things should be happen.

You create what I would call a visual work space so that when somebody shows up for work in the morning he can look around, see what needs to be done, figure it out and make it happen. Some of the mechanisms to do that is, if you have a team working together and at the beginning of the iteration they decide together what they can do over that iteration, then they take cards and post it on the walls and when they walk in they say “Ok I’m going to do this story,” etc. They can see what is done, they is not done, they meet daily to figure out how they are going to solve the problem and at the end of the two week iteration they have it done. Nobody is tracking each task and telling the team how to do every individual thing; instead the team is being chartered to figure out how to make things happen themselves and how to make things best. When I was a manger we were trained that the most important thing is to make sure the people who are doing the work are the ones that know it best; if you think that you can make decisions for them: guess what, you’ll make more mistakes than they will. You need to structure the work so that it can be done well by the people doing the work and so that they can figure out how to do the best thing. That’s what I mean by engage the intelligence of the workers. The team should be doing the project control, they should be deciding what tasks should be done next; you shouldn’t be having somebody telling them what to do.

Tom: The opposite of that is conformance to somebody else’s plan, to somebody else’s process. It isn’t that there isn’t a process, but the process is owned and evolved and continuously improved by the people using the process, rather than having a process imposed.

This sounds a lot like Scrum. What’s the difference?

Mary: Scrum is a fine example of a Lean environment. Scrum is a set of practices; this is how you do things. Lean would be the principles behind those practices. Lean is the general principles that encourage you to use something like Scrum. Lean would basically say: “You can decide in any given environment how that principle should be applied.” So what it means to have delayed commitment? In one organization it might be different than in another. With delayed commitment, for instance: don’t make decisions until they have to be made. In some Scrums you have a fixed two week window, in some organizations, maybe you really can delay commitment until a week before. Maybe if you’re doing embedded software you have to synchronize how you do things with the hardware team. And so exactly how you do things will depend upon the context in the environment, but the underlying principles apply, and if you apply the principles you will get that Scrum it’s definitely a Lean process, for example. But there are other processes that also could qualify. For example a lot of “open source” development could be conceived as quite Lean, but doesn’t actually conform to a lot of the other principles. There are many example of how Lean can be applied and Scrum is a really good one.

Tom: The difference between Scrum or XP and Lean is that Lean looks over the whole value chain and allows you to understand some of the impact that organisational boundaries have on your efforts, when there are boundaries between testing organizations and deployment organizations, requirement organizations and so forth, and things get handed off from one group to another. There are delays, there’s information lost, there’s lack of feedback, and all these things are exposed when you start with the value stream. They’re not really visible when you measure only a little piece of the process, which software development methodologies alone tend to do.

What popular ideas and processes are directly in conflict with Lean and what is your position on those?

Mary: One of the popular processes that is not exactly in conflict but comes from a different industrial paradigm would be CMM. CMM has this concept of breaking things down into little tiny pieces and measuring every single little tiny piece. That comes from the good old scientific management days, it’s a Taylorist concept where you break things down into little pieces and you optimize every piece rather than the whole. Instead of having hundreds of detail measurements, Lean would focus on a few key high-level measurements, like cycle time. For instance, from the time I get a request to the time I deliver it, if I can rapidly and repeatedly do it in a two week window or a known time frame, I have to have all of the disciplines that CMM wants me to have in place, in order to do that. But I wouldn’t necessarily be measuring every single one; I would know that my overall measurement shows me that I’ve got my process in control.

In manufacturing a mature organization is one that has a fast repeatable cycle time, and the definition of maturity is rapid repeatable cycle time; that covers all the other disciplines that have to be in place. I define maturity as repeatable, short cycle time. Is not that a Lean organization is not capable of receiving CMM certification because most certainly probably would be and because you can’t go fast repeatedly without having the disciplines in place. Instead of dividing things in detailed things and making sure that every individual piece is done, you look at one overall measurement and that drives all of the other things to be in place. I think CMM comes from mass-production paradigm of dividing things into little pieces, whereas Lean comes from the paradigm of having a more overall look at the whole measurement instead of the detailed pieces.

Tom: Cost accounting is aligned with CMM: measure the cost of each little part and add it up. Throughput accounting measures “how much money did you make from your activity?” That’s Lean

What about Rational Unified Process? How does that fit in?

Tom: The rational unified process, like CMM, has a very significant amount of wisdom, that is distilled, systematized and organized. The value of it can be very large as an aid to an organization in learning techniques, as checklists. But the way that is adopted is unfortunately very often a bureaucratic and compliance-driven, rather than a “Lets get the parts of the wisdom , that are applicable to our current context.” It can be very valuable but it is packaged in a way that is difficult to find the parts you need, unless you are an expert. And if you are an expert, you don’t need it anymore.

Mary: There’s a concept that RUP people say: that you configure up and you can only use the pieces of it that are applicable to your area. In practice that does not happen. People don’t do parts of RUP, they do every part of RUP and although that is not necessarily the way it was meant to be, it is definitely the way it is oftentimes implemented. So, you can’t downscope and take the good parts. It seems you have to take everything whether it is truly applicable or not. Once you do that you’re adding a whole lot of waste into your process, stuff that is not really necessary. There’s no focus on “what of this can we not do,” because it’s waste. The same is true with CMM. “What of these pieces do we not need, because we are already there in those places?” or “We don’t need that piece for this context.” It’s sort of like you have to do every little bit and let’s look at the overall thing to see which pieces are going to give us the best result. Which of these pieces is just plain waste, just stuff that doesn’t have value from a customer’s point of view?

Tom: Unified Process is also based on a set of principles which are not totally dissimilar to the Lean principles. But the principles are suppressed and ignored and the focus is on the practices, and the artefacts, and the documents and the processes. If the adoption of the RUP would focus on the RUP principles, as we advocate focusing on the Lean Principles, the likihood of success, leveraging the intelligence of the people rather than encouraging their conformance, is far more likely to be successful. It is not RUP vs. Lean vs. Scrum vs. XP, it is the mindset of the individuals and of the organization that matters; which is why we focus on the principles and how it applies in individual contexts rather than on individual practices or artifacts or anything else.

What is “delayed commitments”, one of the principles you mentioned?

Mary: The idea of delayed commitments is not to decide until you have the most information that you possibly can have. Then you make decisions based on that. It’s the idea that (not that you procrastinate and never make decisions) but that you schedule decisions for when you have the most information. For example, pilots are trained that when they have to make a taught choice, they should decide when they have to decide, and not to decide until then because that’s when they have the most information. The military paradigm: when you’re threatened decide when you need to respond and don’t respond ahead of that, wait until that time because then you have the most information. But don’t wait any longer than that. So, it is the idea of scheduling decisions until the last moment when they need to be made, and not making them before that, because then you have the most information.

For example, let’s take user interface. When do you really need to design a user interface? Oftentimes it drives the whole design, but in fact you don’t really need it until you’re about to do your first alpha test. Before that you can be designing the business layer and you can actually put testing in below the user interface and you can be designing all of the other business logic; you can get that done with any kind of interface and in fact you ca drive testing with a automated interface, and then just before you go to alpha testing you decide what you want for your user interface. Then you take it off and at that point in time you figure it out. But up until that point in time you don’t need that. And there are many pieces of decision in software development, where there’s this idea that we have to design the whole thing before we get started. But the fundamental Lean principle in product development is that we should not make any design decisions until we absolutely have to. We really do not want to have decided anything until we need to; and so at the point it time of the decision we should still have 3 options. Still have a couple of middleware options, or still have not decided how we’re going to do the user interface. You wait until you know the most possible information before you make decisions. So, the idea of having a complete detailed spec at the beginning is the exact opposite of the Lean commitment.

Tom: At the beginning is the time of maximum ignorance about what you really need. It is hardly the time to make your key commitments. Most of the cost is incurred when you make the first commitments. If you can delay that, you can do a much better job.

Mary: You want irreversible decisions, decisions which you can’t change, to be made as late as you possibly can. Otherwise, if you make them early you’re going to lock in the decision, because you’re going to build stuff on it, and you didn’t need to make it yet. And if you wait, you leave options open so that you can chose later exactly what you need to do. That’s just basically a good design heuristic.

Another principle you mentioned is “deliver fast”. Shouldn’t we be slow and more careful?

Mary: Well, I don’t believe, and there’s a lot of evidence to show, that being careful, having high quality, is most certainly is not related to how slow or fast you are. If you take a look at companies that are really good, they also tend to be really fast. Take a look at how fast Dell can deliver a computer. You can’t do that if you’re sloppy. Take a look at how fast Fedex can deliver a package. Only companies that really have their act together and are disciplined technically can be fast.

In Lean the whole idea is that you can have variability with speed and quality. You can’t go fast without having everything together. PatientKeeper, which is Jeff Sutherland’s company, delivers 45 cycles to its competitor’s one cycle. Now, they can’t deliver, they die if they have defect-ridden code. They have to have good stuff. If they don’t have a slick, workable installation process they couldn’t do it. They can take one code base, they don’t have a lot of branches, ant therefore they have mandatory updates for all kinds of their customers, who are hospitals. If they didn’t have software that their hospital trusted, and allowed them to have continuous upgrades, they could not get away with it. So if you’re going to be fast and rapidly respond, you’ll have to be very trustworthy. Just like the maintenance department. Let’s say you have a critical error and your system crashes. Your maintenance programmers go in there, find out the problem, they figure out the fix, they test it and they put it in the patch and you let them do it all the time. That’s because they’re fast and they’re also trustworthy. If you think about software, why is other software any different than fixing up a critical error? You should have all of the same processes in place that a good maintenance department has so that when something goes wrong you can detect it, you can fix it, you can put it in the patch and you can do it where the entire organization has confidence in your capability to do that. Real true speed is actually something that has to come with extremely high quality. So, I really contest the concept that you’ve got to go slow and be excruciatingly careful. What gives you confidence is excellent testing procedures, is automated testing, is stuff that’s disjoint from each other so that as you add features you don’t add complexity. It’s simple code and very disciplined procedures but not go slow. In fact is have your automation there, so that you can go fast. Then you can have higher quality than “let’s be slow and careful”.

This sounds nice but is it realistic in large organizations with a lot of boundaries between departments?

Mary: We get people saying a lot: “I can’t do that in my company”. It is very true that the organizational boundaries are where this falls apart so we’ll give a class in Lean and people come back and say “I can do it until I run into testing, but the testing department does not want to have anything to do with it” or the people in requirements, or our customers don’t want to think about things differently. As you get up to boundaries you really have some problems.

But organizations that are in a deeply competitive environment tend to figure this out pretty fast. Because, if you get a single competitor out there that can do this, they can probably knock your socks off real fast. So, for instance, PatientKeeper puts out 45 cycles to its competitors’ one, and all of a sudden your competitor can flood the market with really good, high quality, constant improvements and you can’t – you’re in trouble. What we find is that the organizations that figure out how to do this are the ones that have threatening competition and they have to be able to do something that is really new, novel, different and highly competitive. If you don’t have a lot of competition and you can keep going the way that you’re going and you don’t have to think about how your organization is structured, you might actually not be able to do Lean in your organization. But when you got into competitive companies where you have got to be creative and you have to figure out how to hit the market better than your competitors, this becomes a very nice competitive advantage. And, the companies that we see using this are the companies actually forced to think really hard about how they can have some leverage their competitors can’t have.

Tom: We’re seeing both very large and very small companies using these ideas. This kind of thinking is largely responsible for the success of Dell, Wal-Mart and other small companies like that.

What do you do when you can’t get Lean into your organization? What’s one approach?

Mary: If you run up against an organizational boundary that you can’t do, then Lean is not coming into that company at a high-enough level. Very often it is said that you really have to have Lean as a corporate philosophy, that’s in the blood of the whole management structure, otherwise it tends to have problems. So, you really have to think about this as being a fairly high-level corporate philosophy or culture, before it can actually work across the various organizational boundaries you might run into. Not all companies want to switch their culture that way.

On the other hand, there are a lot of Lean initiatives happening in our world these days, in other areas, not software. You’ll find it in operations, in retail operations, in warehouses, in manufacturing and in business processes – Lean has become an initiative that various companies have. One day that finds its way into the software development environment, and when it does at least you have a management structure that is beginning to understand what Lean means. And if you translate it correctly into software development, you probably can get some serious management support for Lean initiatives, also in software.

How do you do Lean under contract?

Mary: Ah, well that’s really a problem. All of the Agile techniques run into trouble when the organizational boundary that you’re crossing is into another company. Because, when two companies start working together they tend to need to have a contract between them. And the contract usually has to spell out exactly what were doing, and exactly how much it is going to cost; most contracts then create a game between the companies, where you have predefinition of everything, and you have to check it all off later. If you have a contract like that it is very difficult to have a Lean environment, or any kind of Agile environment.

But there are now some contracts that are being formulated that recognize that Agile gives you better results. For example, Norway has a PS2000 contract, it was written by the Norwegian computer society, and it is a standard contract for a large public service, public IT contracts, and it is specifically written to encourage Lean, or Agile, software development. It defines how the parties are going to interact together with the assumption that the parties are going to figure out on an outgoing basis what it is that they really want to do. And it creates a contracting environment that allows people to “inspect and adapt” as time goes on, and have feedback in the entire development process. But most contracts don’t do that, and a contract that doesn’t allow feedback, change, that requires everything to be predefined is going to make it very difficult to do any kind of Agile process at all.

For more on Lean for Software, please visit this interview I had with Mary in August 2006. The source for the content above can be found here.

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Nanda Gauri: Interview with Inventory of Clocky

admin — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 06:02:08 +0000

From time to time, shmula interviews companies that are disruptive [1. Read More Leadership Interviews], simple, and yet elegantly meets an unarticulated but dire customer need. Today, we are speaking with Gauri Nanda, the inventor of Clocky and founder of nandahome.com.

Be sure to read our other interviews in our leadership series.

Nanda, Tell us about yourself.

I have been designing products for a few years now, since I was a student at the MIT Media Lab researching the intersection of design and technology. Because of all the interest surrounding him, Clocky gave me the drive to start a company. Since graduating, I founded Nanda as a place to find things that are missing from our lives and create them. Our ideas come from ordinary questions like ‘Why does my alarm do such a terrible job of getting me up?’ and ‘Why can’t I find a bag that makes it easy to carry my heavy laptop around?’ Then, from these ordinary questions, we set out to create extraordinary products. Things that are at once both simple and exceptional.

What is Clocky?

Clocky is, quite simply, the most obvious way I could think to get out of bed. He is an alarm clock that runs away when you don’t get out of bed on time. He will jump from your night-stand and run around the run in random directions. Because you don’t know where he’ll end up, you have to get out of bed, and find him to silence his alarm. In this ‘hide-and-seek’ game, you wake up in the process!

What is the Alarm Clock Problem?

When I was a student, I would hit the snooze bar repeatedly, never realizing how late it was getting. I had friends who told me that they would put the alarm clock on the other side of the room, but because they knew where it was, they would just sleep walk to it, turn it off and go right back to bed. As a designer, it was obvious that the alarm clock needed to be improved, both in functionality and in personality. In addition to doing the job of an alarm clock better, Clocky is also an attempt to imbue alarm clocks with living qualities so that it is ultimately more fun to use.

Did you study people sleeping? Can you share a little about the ethnographic steps to observing people sleeping and waking up — what insights did you gain? How did those insights evolve into your solution, Clocky?

During the development time, we received countless emails from people who needed a better solution than their current alarm clock was providing. Over and over, I heard the same story of people repeatedly hitting the snooze button and never reaching a wakeful state. During the design process, we tested the product out with potential customers and made changes to the program as well as the interface (including buttons and backlight) to ensure better usability. It was very important to me to maintain a minumum of user interface controls so that anyone could use the clock almost immediately.

Past the concept phase, tell us about the product development process and the iterations Clocky went through to finally arrive at the current version. For example, the Clocky prototype was much bigger than the current version — what led to that design decision?

The original prototype took me a couple of weeks. It was put together with the materials I had at my disposal while I was a student at the MIT Media Lab, and turned out to be little more than a pair of Lego wheels and motors and a shag covering to hold it together. At this time, I wasn’t optimizing Clocky for size and efficiency, but rather just creating a proof-of-concept for a class project. In order to get Clocky ready for commercial sale, I worked with a team of engineers and manufacturers on the design for about a year. We went through about 3 design iterations on the external casing. We didn’t want Clocky to take up too much room on a night-stand so we reduced the size considerably. We also wanted Clocky to be much lighter, since it was to withstand a drop to floor everyday. Through a lot of engineering and testing, we identified the parts of the clock that would endure the most shock when Clocky jumps off of a night-stand. We designed those parts so that the force would be directed away from them.

Material sourcing and manufacturing — can you share about your experience in that arena.

The original prototype I put together quite quickly using limited materials I had at my disposal. The shag was used to emphasize Clocky as something with living quality. In a manufacturing context, materials are chosen that are durable and easy to work with. I decided to retain the living quality of Clocky by arranging the buttons and the LCD screen in such a way to describe a face. We compared and contrasted various strong and shock absorbing materials. For example, for Clockies wheels, we needed a material that would bounce back and not wear too much over time because the body should not hit the ground when he falls. We tested out several different customers for this purpose.

How long has Clocky been in the market now? Clocky has a (funny/cool) factor to it. Do people really like using it? Do people laugh or curse at it when they wake up? Tell us about that.

Clocky was launched right around the holidays. If had quite a lot of good feedback: “Just talked to my daughter – She was thrilled with her first morning with Clocky! She said it woke her up smiling and then she was giggling as she chased it around her room and downright laughing by the time she turned it off! By then she was wide awake and ready for her 8AM Bioengineering Class!” “My daughter is presently at Dartmouth. She’s the master of the snooze alarm. When home, she can go for hours with the alarm going off, hitting the snooze button, and probably not waking up at all. When I saw the info about Clocky on line, I immediately ordered one to be shipped to her at college. It’s been a week after Clocky’s arrival, and already I have success to report. For example, she got up today in time to go to a job interview, which went well. She reported having to find Clocky behind the refrigerator. It Works!” Certainly, a lot of people may purchase Clocky because they think he’s funny or just out of curiosity. I think it’s great if people just get a good laugh out of Clocky. I hope that Clocky enables a new way of thinking about the things we use every-day. The buzz surrounding the product may be attributed to the fact that Clocky attempts to humanize technology and make it more personable, a concept which I believe could be applied to many products that we use on a daily basis so that they become more usable.

Why is there a Snooze Button? Can I program it to travel to where my Gym Clothes are, so that when I finally find it and turn it off, I have no excuse but to work out because I’m where my clothes are at?

Well I sort of felt (and a lot of people agreed), that a person should have some time to get up, and have a chance to turn off the alarm before Clocky runs away. So we allow for one snooze. If the person using Clocky is alert as soon a they hear the alarm, the may opt to disable to snooze button. We found that Clocky does not need to employ sensor technology to do his job. He may bump into objects on the floor or hit a wall, but because he is programmed to change directions a few times, he will usually get ‘unstuck.’ We have a couple more versions of Clocky in R&D. Future versions of the clock will employ more sophisticated technology to achieve some exciting features we have planned. We envision an entire Clocky product line.

Where can people buy Clocky?

Clocky is currently only available for purchase online at nandahome.com. We will be announcing select retail availability soon.

What is next for Clocky? What other projects are you currently working on? What problems are trying to solve through innovative product development?

We have a line of ‘Lapsacs’ out now, which are bags with laptops in mind. The idea was to reinvent the common black laptop case into something more stylish and more comfortable for carrying around a heavy computer. Much like Clocky, the Lapsacs came out of what I observed to be a common need. We have other products in R&D which I can’t disclose yet!

Thanks very much Gauri!

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Humane Interface Ask Aza Raskin Anything!

admin — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 06:01:38 +0000

In a previous post on Ethnography, I invited Aza Raskin, founder of Humanized, a consultancy that aims to help companies design more humane products — from consumer packaged goods to software interfaces — and, son of Jef Raskin, the inventor of the Macintosh and author of The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems — to possibly answer reader’s questions about design, visual management, ethnography, genchi genbutsu, man-machine interactions, or anything related. He accepted!

Students of the Toyota Production System will quickly see the very close parallels between humane design and the way Toyota approaches their treatment of people, work environments, and business.

A little more about Aza:

Aza brings over six years of interface design and consulting experience to Humanized. He gave his first talk on interface design at his local San Francisco chapter of SIGCHI at the age of 13, got hooked, and has been speaking ever since. By the age of 17, he was talking and consulting internationally; by age 19, he was coauthoring a physics textbook because he was too young to buy alcohol; and at age 21, he started drinking alcohol and co-founded Humanized. Aza has also done Dark Matter research at both Tokyo University and the University of Chicago, from where he graduated with honors in math and physics. For recreation, he does Judo, speaks Japanese, and invents in his lab. He also enjoys playing the French Horn, which has taken him all over the world as a soloist. Be warned: Aza is an incorrigible punster, so please do not incorrige.

Here’s What You Do

If you have a question for Aza, please submit them in the comment section of this post. I will keep comments open until ~midnight of June 30, 2007. Aza will take some time to answer those questions, and then I will begin posting his responses during the week of July 9, 2007.

Humane Interface Philosophy

1. It’s not your fault.

The main thing you have to remember”and please remember this, because it could be vital to your sanity”is that any problems you have with an interface are not your fault. If you have trouble using your microwave, it’s not because you’re “not good with technology”, it’s because the people in charge of designing the interface for that microwave didn’t do their job right. User interface design is incredibly hard, and carries with it a great deal of responsibility; this is something that’s taken quite seriously when it comes life-critical systems such as flight control software. But in today’s consumer culture, what should be blamed on bad interface design is instead blamed on the “incompetence” of users. Just remember that it’s not your fault.

2. Simple things should stay simple.

Some tasks”for instance, teaching a child arithmetic”are intrinsically pretty complicated. But some aren’t. Setting the time on a wristwatch, for instance, shouldn’t be that hard; on old analog wristwatches, it basically involved pulling out a knob, twisting it until the watch showed the correct time, and pushing the knob back in again. But on newer digital wristwatches”ones that claim to be more powerful and feature-loaded than their analog counterparts”it involves pressing a series of buttons in a hard-to-remember, often unforgiving order. Most people dread setting the time on their digital watches, and for good reason.

It’s right and proper for complicated tasks to take time and expertise to accomplish. But something that is fundamentally simple”like changing the time on a wristwatch”should stay simple.

3. Fewer choices mean fewer worries.

People love having choices, because having choices means having freedom. Well, we don’t think this is necessarily a good thing when it comes to usability. We believe that when someone wants to do something on their computer, they want to spend their time doing it, not deciding how to do it. For instance, Microsoft Windows provides you with at least three different ways to launch applications and services on your computer: desktop icons, a quick-launch bar, and a Start Menu. Each one of these mechanisms is useful in one or two situations but horrible in others, and each has completely different instructions for operation. Microsoft even gives you a wealth of choices to configure them the way you want, which makes the situation that much more complex.

When we can, we try to avoid burdening our users with choices like this: we’d rather just take the time to make one simple mechanism that the user can use for all their purposes. Because the less burdened a user’s mind is with irrelevant decisions, the more clear their mind is to accomplish what they need to get done.

4. Your data is sacred.

It’s that simple, really. When one ensures that a machine can’t lose a user’s work, interfaces become a lot simpler; no more dialog boxes asking questions like “Are you sure you want to delete that entry?”; no more remembering to click a “Save” button like it’s a nervous twitch. You never need to regret any action you take, because any action you take can instantly be undone. Not to mention your complete lack of terror when you’re in the middle of working on your computer and the power goes out.

5. Your train of thought is sacred.

You can only really think about one thing at a time. If you’re thinking about paying your taxes, you can’t be thinking about your vacation in Tahiti. Indeed, thinking about that vacation in Tahiti will actively prevent you from thinking about your taxes. That’s why when you want to get something done, you want to get everything out of your head except the task at hand.

Quite simply, you need to preserve your train of thought. And that means that the interface you’re using can’t derail it. No talking paper clips bothering you from the sidelines, no fiddling with windows to find your work, no distractions.

6. Good interfaces create good habits.

When you’re first learning how to use even the best of interfaces, preserving your train of thought can be hard because so much of your mind is focused on how to use the interface, rather than on what you need to do. But as you become more proficient at using a good interface, it eventually becomes second nature”it becomes a habit, like walking or breathing. You don’t need to think about what sequence of motions you need to perform an action because it’s like your hands have memorized them as a single continuous gesture, saving you the trouble of having to think about them.

Bad interfaces, on the other hand, prevent habits from forming”but they can also make you form bad habits. Have you ever closed a window and hit “Do Not Save”, only to realize a split second too late that it was exactly what you didn’t want to do? That’s a bad habit from a bad interface.

Good interfaces make forming good habits really easy, and they make forming bad habits nearly impossible.

7. Modes cause misery.

There exists a mortal enemy to your habits and your train of thought: it’s called a mode. If an interface has modes, then the same gesture that you’ve habituated performs completely different actions depending on which mode the system is in. For instance, take your Caps Lock key; have you ever accidentally pressed it unknowingly, only to find that everything you type LOOKS LIKE THIS?

When that happens, all that habituation you’ve built up about how to type on a keyboard gets subverted: it’s like your computer has suddenly turned into a completely different interface with a different set of behaviors. And that derails your train of thought, because you’re suddenly confused about why your habits aren’t producing what you expect them to.

When you think about it, almost everything that frustrates us about interfaces is due to a mode. That’s why good interfaces have as few as possible.

8. It’s easy to learn.

Good interfaces aren’t just effortless to use once you know them”they’re also easy to learn to use. This doesn’t necessarily mean that someone should be able to use it without any instruction, though”it just means that knowing how to use any feature of the interface involves learning and retaining as little information as possible. Keep it simple, and keep it consistent.

Other articles in the “Ask Aza Raskin” Series:

More articles on Genchi Genbutsu and Ethnography?

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Aza Raskin on Feature Bloat & Clutter

admin — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 06:01:36 +0000

In today’s post, Aza Raskin responds to a reader’s question regarding Featuritis, Feature Bloat, and Clutter.

Be sure to read our other interviews in our leadership series.

One of the problems I observe frequently is that web sites with otherwise intelligent product managers and designers seem to have a cumulative UI habit tending toward clutter, user confusion and stress. In other words, each great new feature added to a site requires its own breathing room and consumes space; so other elements are rearranged and shrunken down to make room for the new tenant on the page or, in an even worse accommodation, a new tab or completely separate offshoot is created in the site navigation structure to accommodate the new feature. It seems to me that a much smarter approach would be to acknowledge the value of simplicity and focus and decide that something must be removed when a new something is added (kind of like some moms who tell their children each Christmas that they need to give away some of their toys to make room for the new ones) ” but how do you build a culture of continual reduction and focus rather than continual expansion and bloat in building an ever-evolving web UI?

There is a constant tension between making a website that is simple; a website that does a few things, and does them well; versus making a website that attempts to pander to the long tail of all things that Internet surfers want to do. The later is somewhat untenable and the former ignores user’s needs. As is always the case, the game is in finding the right balance.

I agree with you that it is good to perform spring cleaning on your website. Otherwise, you end up with a conglomerate of cruft: A modern city built on top of the remains of an medieval city, built on top of the remains of a Roman city.

There is another way of looking at the problem. Instead of just adding a new feature, you can attempt to figure out a unifying mechanism by which your new feature and older features can be unified. For instance, when working on designing the Humanized Reader, we spent a lot of time working on how to unify the archive feature and the filtering feature. Eventually, we came up with the solution by extending the “scroll down means go back in time” metaphor to actually load new content in the first case, and through a form of structured search in the second.

I call it the “find the hammer that makes the most features look like nails” approach.

How do you create a culture of continual reduction? That’s perhaps even harder. Besides having small teams as I mention above, I might recommend having everyone on the team do at least a week of front-line customer support and user testing. We do this at Humanized. Being in the trenches; dealing and working with customers; really reshapes the way you think about the effect of cluttered and kludgy interfaces.

Other articles in the “Ask Aza Raskin” Series:

Aza Raskin discusses the infinite scroll approach to Google search results.
Aza Raskin shares his thoughts on Feature Bloat (aka, Featuritis)
Aza Raskin describes the concept of Quasimodal Design.
Aza Raskin explains the role of Poka Yoke in the User Experience

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Aza Raskin on Quasimodal Design & The ATM

admin — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 06:01:36 +0000

In today’s post, Aza Raskin responds to a reader’s question regarding the interface of Automated Teller Machines (ATM) and a quasimodal and more humane approach to design.

Be sure to read our other interviews in our leadership series.

Aza, the following picture was taken by a friend. It is an ATM at an airport. I know the image is difficult to see, but would love your thoughts on the interface of this ATM machine.

Below is Aza’s response to this reader:

Here’s how the machines like the one in the picture normally work:

(1) Feed your card into the machine. The ATM eats the card, quarter-inch by quarter-inch.
(2) Now that the card has been read, you enter your PIN.
(3) Select how much money you want to withdraw.
(4) Take your cash.
(5) The ATM spits out your card and you take it. If you don’t take it, the machine beeps incessantly.

Despite the beeping, I have forgotten my card in such machines. The problem stems from a mode: the credit card is either in your possession, or being read by the ATM. As is almost always the case when a direct solution to a mode is required, the solution is to use a quasimode. The user should perform a kinesthetically active action while the card is being read by the machine. Such actions can be unwieldy and impractical (like pressing a foot pedal) or they can be simple and effective (like holding onto the card).

Citibank ATMs do this well — they ask you to dip or swipe your card. This forces you to be touching the card during the entire time in which the the card is being read. With the quasimodal solution, you won’t ever forget your card (unless you are foolish enough to set the card down).

Other articles in the “Ask Aza Raskin” Series:

Aza Raskin discusses the infinite scroll approach to Google search results.
Aza Raskin shares his thoughts on Feature Bloat (aka, Featuritis)
Aza Raskin describes the concept of Quasimodal Design.
Aza Raskin explains the role of Poka Yoke in the User Experience

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The post Aza Raskin on Quasimodal Design & The ATM appeared first on 6sigma.

Aza Raskin on Software Poka Yoke and Humane Interfaces

admin — Fri, 28 Feb 2025 06:01:36 +0000

In today’s post, Aza Raskin explicates on the Poka-Yoke and how it can be effectively applied to user interfaces.

Be sure to read our other interviews in our leadership series.

We lean fans spend a lot of time explaining how great Toyota is. And great they are. See what I mean? We can’t help ourselves. Anyhow, I am interested in your thoughts related to the way Toyota deals with interfaces, etc. I personally have two Toyota vehicles in my driveway and love them. But I was recently in my brother in laws new Camry and noticed they made some rather big changes to the way things looked and felt inside. I dare say things looked a little un-Toyota-like.

A simple and effective concept from Toyota is Poka-Yoke, or mistake-proofing. Products and Interfaces are context-sensitive ” that is, products and interface features have a particular purpose , but I’m curious if you can share any generic context-agnostic approaches to mistake-proofing, or Poka-Yoke? Principles of Poka-Yoke you can apply to anything; to any product or interface?

An interface is humane if it is responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties. We make mistakes. No matter how hard we try to concentrate and prevent errors, errors will happen when our concentration wanes or when we are forced to do something that is beyond our cognitive abilities like multi-tasking: the act of consciously thinking about two things at once — and, with the use of Queueing Theory & Little’s Law, we learn that multi-tasking leads to lower productivity.

Poka-Yoke is an excellent method of making a process more efficient and humane by being considerate of human frailties: we won’t always be thinking about which way a part fits in, so design the part in a antisymmetric way so that it can only be installed correctly.

Shigeo Shingo wrote “Defects arise because errors are made; the two have a cause-and-effect relationship…yet errors will not turn into defects if feedback and action take place at the error stage”. In other words, users make mistakes, but those mistakes are detrimental only if they aren’t corrected immediately. One context-agnostic principle of humane interface design is summed up in the mantra “Never Use a Warning When You Mean Undo”. If you make a mistake, no big deal. Just undo it.

For example, a common Poka-Yoke style method is to cover an important switch so that it cannot be bumped accidentally. But, what happens if you use that switch all the time? You’ll either leave the cover open or flick-the-cover-open-and-flip-the-switch as a single gesture. In the computer world, we often have the advantage over the real-world in being able to undo. So that even though you just ran the smash-the-car-into-the-wall safety test while the technician was inside, you can just go back to the way it was before.

If Poka-Yoke was practiced more in interface design our lives on the computer would be a lot less stressful.

Other articles in the “Ask Aza Raskin” Series:

Aza Raskin discusses the infinite scroll approach to Google search results.
Aza Raskin shares his thoughts on Feature Bloat (aka, Featuritis)
Aza Raskin describes the concept of Quasimodal Design.
Aza Raskin explains the role of Poka Yoke in the User Experience

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