Simplicity Rules

If you don’t read frequently updated websites using a feed reader, you really should. I assume most of you are probably reading this outside of adamduvander.com, but if not, go learn how to get automatic updates from a feed without having to visit the site. Nothing will simplify your online life more.

I’ve used a number of feed readers over the last five years, starting with Bloglines and moving on to NewsGator recently giving in to Google Reader. I don’t think any of them have the perfect interface. Until today, I didn’t think I could describe what that would be.

A feed reader should look like email. At least, I wish I could use my feed reader in the same way I use email. I keep my inbox clean, I filter out the stuff I don’t ever want to see (spam) and I save non-urgent messages for later.

In a feed reader, I want to be able to glance at the latest content and tell the reader one of the following:

• Delete it
• Read now
• Read later
• Never read anything like this

Many readers are able to get close to this, but they have a problem with the last one. Too much noise in the signal can keep a lot of us from adding more feeds. There needs to be a simple way to mark the type of content you don’t want.

As an example, there is a blog I read that has great content, but also has a daily feature that I never enjoy. I would love to get the feed from that blog without that daily feature. I’m a geek, so I could create a Yahoo! Pipe to do what I want, but I shouldn’t have to.

The filtering technology should be within the reader. Wherever possible, it should be automatic, the same way my email program learns what I consider spam.

For many people, the email analogy will fall flat. Your email might be overflowing. You might be overwhelmed at the thought of another inbox. In that case, you appreciate the problem of information overload. The answer shouldn’t be less information overall, but instead smart processing so that we only see the part that matters.

Most of my time these days is being focused on something I haven’t talked about publicly yet. I’d been waiting to finish the site for the project. With that done, I’m ready to spill it: I’m writing a book!

The book’s focus is creating web maps and location-based applications. I’ll be covering several mapping APIs in a cookbook style that will allow even non-programmers to be able to embed interactive maps into their web pages.

I’m excited to have the opportunity and thrilled to be published by No Starch Press, who do the Wicked Cool series, among other great technical books.

Looking back, this topic makes a lot of sense for me. For years I worked with location data at BestPlaces. In 2004 I started my Portland hotspot finder. I had to roll my own geocoder, because this was nearly a year before Google Maps was released.

When I started writing for Webmonkey again, I wrote up tutorials on mapping APIs. I covered WhereCamp Portland. I wrote up other location-based services and libraries. So, bringing my experience to a book seems natural.

There’s a lot of hard work ahead, but I’ve found the writer’s groove and am well on my way. If you’d like to follow my progress, I’m writing at the book’s blog.

It’s been nearly three years that a little group called Portland Web Innovators has been meeting. At the end of 2007 I highlighted a few meetings, but 2008 was such a great year, I felt it deserved a full chronicle.

Check out my 2008 Web Innovators year in review to see what this group I co-founded has been up to.

How do you decide what features to include in a new product? The simple answer is to reduce to only the essentials. That’s a lot of what I write about here, so there are many methods, such as the 60 second deadline.

Portland-based site Shizzow has a set of rules that it uses to determine whether a new feature will be added. I had a chance to sit down for a Webmonkey Q&A with one of the founders, who shared the list with me.

1. Simplicity
2. Community
3. Trust

If a new feature does not match all of those criteria, it doesn’t get added. This has helped a small team, all with other fulltime jobs, create a cool site with a feature-set that’s “just enough.”

Yes, I’m delighted that simplicity is one of their core requirements, but the balance of the list is what really makes it work. Rather than adding something to Shizzow just because it’s cool, the team needs to apply the feature to their ground rules.

A simple list like Shizzow’s can help you make good choices, avoid feature creep, and create a better, simpler product.

[Photo by Duncan Cumming]

It’s late in the evening and you’ve been working so hard you forgot to eat dinner. By now you’re tired and really don’t feel like cooking. Is your favorite restaurant open? If you’re naive, you check out their website, but you probably already know that’s a useless endeavor.

Except in rare circumstances, restaurants don’t have much of an offline-online connection. If they did, you’d be able to see the menu, learn about wait times, and maybe even get your order in before going down in person.

There has yet to be much to force restaurants to innovate online. One brick and mortar industry that had no choice but to change is the bookstore.

In 2009, Amazon will celebrate its fifteenth year and in that time it has changed the habits of many a book shopper. You can browse just about any book ever, look inside many, search inside some, and then buy it for 30% less than if you drove on down to your local store. It’s incredibly convenient.

Of course, you can’t physically turn the pages or feel the weight of the book. And you can’t have it now. There are many things a real bookstore has going for it, which is why I often go.

Recently I was searching for a few specific titles and wanted to share a tiny way that my hometown store, Powell’s, is embracing the offline-online connection.

When viewing a book listing, such as this one for Designing the Obvious, a table shows which locations I can find the book in stock. I could go down to their technical bookstore, one of my favorite places to go anyway, and grab one of the two copies of that book.

Powell’s has an online presence that allows me to be an offline customer.

When I wasn’t able to find a particular book at Powell’s, I grabbed my iPhone and was happy to see that Borders has a similar system. It doesn’t tell me the number of books in each location, but does list whether or not it is there. Or, well, whether it is “likely” there, phrasing that doesn’t inspire much confidence. At least I knew which Borders to head to and I did find the book there.

The physical bookstores that stick around are going to embrace this offline-online connection. It will become easy to shop both online and in person. And hopefully it won’t just the big guys that will do it, but the small bookstore that really is around the corner.

Similar concepts will expand to other areas. It may take awhile for restaurants to get there, but eventually they’ll have to. And finally, after a long work day, you’ll be able to reserve yourself a table, order an appetizer, and walk down the street to your online eatery.

If you want to make a simple website, or have a simple product, you need to become well-versed in letting the good in and keeping the bad out. You can’t do everything and you can’t have every feature someone could possibly want.

You are a curator, and Jason Fried has a great talk (15 minute video) about what a curator does:

“Think of yourself as a curator. You want to be a curator. You have to decide what comes in and what goes out. Curator’s job is to say no. Curator takes an entire universe of options to decide whether or not something makes it into a museum.”

The hard part, I think, is how to decide what is essential and what is not. When I need help with that, I turn to a couple of the concepts from Designing the Obvious:

• The Unnecessary Test
• 60 Second Deadlines

How do you decide what belongs in your museum?

There’s a hidden radio concept design that’s been making the rounds. My friend Nathan sent it my way and said it reminded him of the unopenable mint container.

The radio’s volume is controlled by pulling up the lid, showing more speaker. It is tuned by twisting the entire lid. Once you know this, it’s wonderfully simple. Do you think it would be obvious to the first time user? Does that matter?

Starting yesterday my daily routine with DuVinci has changed drastically. During (an extremely busy) July I phased out the work for BestPlaces that I have been doing in some capacity since 2001. It’s time for me to focus on something new.

I want to help others create on the Web. There are designers with great skills who want to learn to program. And there are bright business owners who can’t execute on their ideas. I believe anyone can learn to program. I’m looking forward to proving that.

Right now you can see my first steps at Webmonkey. I’ve written for the site since 2000, but now I’m joining as a contributor on the Monkeybites blog and writing about a tutorial per week.

The move from BestPlaces is tough. I believe in the aim of the site and the people behind it. In fact, I’ll be helping them out a bit here and there.

I’m excited about my next steps and look forward to hearing your ideas. Many thanks to those who’ve already given me such wonderful advice. I hope to receive more of it soon.

Sticky note pic by striatic

I hate doing the same stuff over and over. Since I’m a technical guy, I often create ways to make myself more efficient. Outside of work, this looks fairly mundane: stuff like buying only one type of sock, so I never have to search for a pair.

Michael Lopp writes about the geek phenomenon of being efficient in Saving Seconds. It begins as a rant against the mouse, but really gets somewhere when he writes about creating a new email message:

“There are two types of people. The ones who waited for me to say Go to compose a new mail and the ones who read ‘compose a new mail message’ and pressed the three keys that are necessary, from anywhere in the OS, to fire up a new compose window.”

I think Web people bring this desire to be efficient into our work, mostly for the better. Finding and eliminating repetition is an excellent way to streamline your product. Why make a user click twice if once will do? (Lopp might also say, why make a user click at all?)

Of course, everything in moderation. One can certainly be overcome when constantly striving to be most efficient:

Paying attention to productivity is a slippery slope. The system efficiency addiction associated with saving time can become so compelling that your process begins to control more of your time than your product.

Sound familiar to anyone?

There were some great comments on the unopenable mint container post. I wanted to share a few of them.

Most people agreed that once someone learns the trick, the container is simple. Brent Logan downplayed the effort needed to learn how to use the mint tin, then came up with some great additional reasons why the time spent learning is worth it:

I’d say opening this mint container IS simple, because once you know how to do it (and it can be documented in just two simple pictures), you can open it:

• one handed
• without looking
• with ease

Justin Thiele liked the mint tin, but wouldn’t call it simple:

What if Microsoft Word decided on a new way to copy text? No more Command C (Ctrl C for you PCs). Instead copy would be F1. F1 is simpler, only requires pressing one button, no keyboard dexterity required, and much easier to say to somebody. But now the process of remembering that Microsoft Word uses F1 and every other program uses Command C, becomes more involved. If other programs begin to take these same liberties then complexity abounds.

It sounds like Justin is worried about consistency, which I think plays a large part in simplicity. Certainly being consistent within a context (such as your own website) is important. But there’s also consistency between contexts, such as your website and my website. If you underline links and I underline everything except links, one of us will probably be confusing people. And if there are enough people making changes like this, we may all begin to confuse people.