Mapping ideas to software
We are trying to give more an more “mappings” of problems and ideas to the software applications and services we are creating. Two recent examples:
Matteo Bicocchi’s (“pupunzi”) mappping of neeeds of site improvements to Patapage:
9 ways to improve your site but you don’t know how to
My mapping of different work management needs with Teamwork:
Stories of work management
Your software is what people’s usage makes of it.
Back from Better Software 2010: impressions and what I learned
At http://www.bettersoftware.it/ I have learned something real which can help me working – and shipping. I got inspiration for new ideas.
Here I give some quick impressions and links.
The organizers: a word of praise to the organizers, Develer (http://develer.com). I lived the event as speaker, student and (satirical) “journalist”. In all three roles, I appreciated their efficiency, practical sense and also sense of humor, bearing my postings as “Fake Simone Zinanni”.
Twitter coverage: Maybe in USA conferences this is just normal, but I was amazed by the real time reactions which we got during the speeches through reading tweets: #bsw2010. It was great fun. Also proving a good wireless coverage for 300 PCs – kudos to Develer.
Cirillo’s talk: what has been impressive of his talk is the sense of concreteness. Of interpreting methodology as something minimal, that has to have a deep impact. And the ease with which he can connect habits to problems, never leaving any space for rhetoric.
Actually just before the conference I had studied the “Pomodoro technique”: to learn more about Cirillo see this beautiful site here:
http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/
Alberto Mucignat: I really liked his talk: “Social design: progettare applicazioni che funzionano”
http://www.bettersoftware.it/conference/talks/social-design-progettare-applicazioni-che-funziona
because (given the strict time limits) he has tried to give us “new product / web site creators” some tools to analyze the flow of social interaction of our sites with visitors and communities. I will try to apply his schemes to our (5!) new products and web sites coming out in 2010. Waiting for the slides!
Alberto Falossi: Alberto made a neat and compact talk about crowd funding – see his kapipalist manifesto. After that I asked him a couple of questions, which for time reasons I couldn’t ask during the class. I reproduce one here:
“Alberto, why did you build a service which serves all kinds of crowd funding, and not one specific for a certain activity (like one for musicians…). Posting your question on a specialized crowd funding site isn’t it more likely that you will get funded?”
His answer (freely re-interpreted – Alberto correct me if I reporting you wrongly): “You should not delude yourself that you will get funded because a casual visitor funds projects of certain category. Searching for funders is an effort that has to be done entirely by you, building a community. The crowd funding service has just to ease the transactions.”
Second question: “You hinted that your idea is not to get a % on the money, as other crowd funding sites do. Where then will you get paid?”
Alberto: “My service is free. I have not decided definitively, but I am thinking of pro versions of the service, instead of taking a %”.
Peldi: I missed Peldi’s talk, only because mine was at the same time. My friends from Open Lab that were there told me that it was great. We had already contacted Balsamiq people for a plugin for Patapage (here). I actually met him afterward at a coffee break through Silvia, who was hunting interviews for Devineu and has “trapped” the fellow.
He is a great fellow, and gave us some interesting advice on our products even in a 2 minutes encounter. Silvia will soon interview him for devineu.eu.
My talk: “Una home page memorabile” – actually “Get visitors to read and remember your home page” . I am an inexperienced talker. I had 35 minutes for my talk, and that could cover only half of what I wanted to say – so that is what happened: I hope I made the point that copy-writing is neither a secondary nor a trivial skill for any web startup, but I had to skim through the example applications – sorry. You can find the examples presented in detail here:
Part 2: http://pietro.open-lab.com/2009/10/19/get-visitors-to-read-and-remember-your-home-page-applications/
Thanks to all – see you there next year.
Developers in Europe web site is online
The “Developers in Europe” site is online here:
This is a site where European startups can learn from other startups and innovating software houses. Read the mission here:
http://devineu.eu/mission.page
You can even interview yourself here. We used also Patapage for the site development.
P.S. Among the gadgets, there is the Seth Godin – inspired “Tame your lizard brain” app:
Some books helpful for product development and marketing
In the last three years it has frequently happened that by reading a book and getting in depth knowledge about some of the diverse activities needed in software product development and marketing, we found out that we were doing something wrong, or were about to. Sometimes simple changes in policy have quickly lead to direct increases in sales – so its not “just theory”.
These are among the books that have most influenced us:
Some of the beloved / informative or both are not currently in Open Lab, because some of us is reading one or is hiding it at home, among which:
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Our software house is not formally a startup, though product development has changed so much in the last 12 months that we are proceeding as a startup. There are many nice books from the past in our libraries, whose content is always valid.
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Also a section for the IT guys:
And there is more:
The blurring distinction between graphic design and software development
Since we released the beta versions of Patapage and BugsVoice, I keep receiving enquiries about the graphic design of these applications and their web sites. People ask me “who designed the graphics?”.
Actually, the answer is everyone in Open Lab, and specifically no one. I always found a bit simplistic the idea that the “developer” creates applications by programming, and when the app is working and almost done, he/she asks a designer to create some graphics for it. In this line of reasoning there is a family resemblance with the idea “I first create an application and then market it.”, which I find deeply wrong – but this is another topic. If you are developing web applications aimed at wide markets, design and application development integrate one another at every development step. And this is how we create and design applications in Open Lab.
Like when we have to create a logo, the internal designers, who are also developers, propose candidates in a meeting to which the entire software house takes part; not only design and application integration are considered, but also marketing must be taken into consideration when evaluating design solutions.
Interface design and graphic design are different concepts, but are also related: a usable interface must be pleasant, not confusing, and both skills must be used to get a good result. Today’s users expect applications to be pleasant; and a well designed and pleasant application will more easily elicit a “collaborative” attitude from users in the first steps of evaluation, and even afterwards, if the design is consistent throughout the application. Consider also “wow” effects that designers can create.
The gaming software industry has understood the crucial role of designers long ago. And the boundary between gaming techniques and usability for “serious” software can be crossed proficiently – we did this with good results in our Teamwork software. A great introduction to this theme is Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Functional Software by Amy Jo Kim. In order to use such techniques, good design is essential.
People that have designers take part in development, will notice that they can learn a lot from development, even when they get back to more design-specific tasks. And vice-versa, even more, holds for developers. Usability is often supplying the right metaphor: algorithmic experience often won’t help in such tasks, but the culture of a good designer can.
If you are doing web development, can you draw a strict line between what is done in your CSS for usability and what for esthetic considerations? And with say jQuery JavaScript selectors, their usage is for behavior, layout, design? There is no clear distinction; and you may see this as a problem, but also as an opportunity for interdisciplinary work.
This also evidences that it is a bad idea to use just external occasional collaborations for graphic design; you should find a way to have a consistent and continuous flow of design ideas in your software house. A similar conclusion is reached by Joel Spolski in this podcast: “Joel explains why he no longer believes in outsourcing design.”
So among the hats one startup should include in its first team, there is indeed development and marketing, but also graphic and usability design.
Similar considerations to the one above are valid also in the rest of the industry, not only in software; I was recently in Milan in the Triennale expo about Deepdesign (see a review here), and what they are doing brings together design, industrial prototyping, integration with mass production, and hence the distinction between design and product engineering is blurred.
Another, similar development: with Patapage in Open Lab we are working continuously crossing the boundary between page design and data / contents mashupping, creating a tool that makes the distinction between designing a site and inserting / updating / community contributing its “contents” problematic.
And the answer to“who designed the graphics?” is… the entire Open Lab team.
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