commentary

It’s not an experience

It’s not an experience:

Alto.com is a wonderful pharmacy that offers same day delivery. I have nothing but great things to say about them.

But they’re following a pattern I’m seeing far too often these days. They’re trying to track everything, and asking people to attribute "experience" to things that are mere, routine happenings.

They ask me to rate my "experience". Thing is, I didn’t have an experience. The delivery person just left the package by the mailbox and I grabbed it when I got home. And what does it mean to even rate a delivery like this? It showed up, it was correct… Is that a 5-star experience? Would it only be worth 3 stars if the package was lying on the ground instead of propped up against the wall? There isn’t enough there there to even establish a value.

If you’re going to ask anything, a more apt question might be "Did the correct prescription show up on time?" Then I can answer yes or no. But rate the experience? And every time I get a prescription, it’s the same question about the experience.

I know what they’re getting at, and I’m probably belaboring the point, but I’m seeing this everywhere and I can’t help but think it’s generating data that’s incompatible with the actual situation. Being asked to rate minutia with a 10-point scale, and ascribe depth of an experience to something that’s effectively flat and one dimensional, is overshooting the goal.

[I don’t think Jason is belaboring the point. I started writing about this from a slightly different perspective — namely, that all these companies want to have a “relationship” with me — whatever that word means when you’re not talking about individuals. What I usually want is a transaction. You sell something or a service, I pay. I don’t mind a customer service check, but it needs to be thoughtfully considered and implemented.]

Source: Jason Fried

Jony Ive on Life After Apple

Jony Ive on Life After Apple – WSJ:

One surprising thing about Ive’s approach is that conversation, rather than sketches, is how he often begins a project. Thinking—and then speaking about that thinking—is the raw material he works with. “Language is so powerful,” Ive says. “If [I say] I’m going to design a chair, think how dangerous that is. Because you’ve just said chair, you’ve just said no to a thousand ideas.

“This is where it gets exciting,” he says. “You have an idea—which is unproven and isn’t resolved, since a resolved idea is a product—and the only tangible thing about the idea are the problems. When someone says it’s not possible, and all you are being shown is why it’s not possible, you have to think and behave in a different way. [You have to say], from a place of courage, I believe it is possible. 

“I love making things that are profoundly useful,” he adds. “I’m a very practical craftsperson.”

[I apologize for the paywall… but this particular bit registers so tightly with me. Thinking and discussing are so important to my design of anything. And not just the “saying no” part by using certain words and making choices. But the malleable, mutable nature of ideas as words is profound.]

More Bosses Are Spying on Quiet Quitters. It Could Backfire.

More Bosses Are Spying on Quiet Quitters. It Could Backfire. – WSJ:

In some ways, what’s going on here is that companies are conducting a gigantic research experiment on their employees without necessarily being equipped to understand the data their worker-surveillance systems produce. Only about one in three medium-to-large companies has an analytics and data science team capable of parsing the kind of data these systems spit out, says Mr. Kropp of Gartner.

However employees feel about increased monitoring of how they do their work, they may not have much choice about it, as more companies make working from home contingent on employee acceptance of monitoring. One Prodoscore client that recently shifted to remote work specified that employees who wanted to work from home had to use Prodoscore, says Mr. Powell. In the first month, 80% of the company’s employees, or 3,200 of them, opted in, he adds.

[Sure, sure. Hold a gun to people’s head and surprise! They accept the monitoring. If you’re an employer and your staff is (supposedly) quiet quitting… maybe you should try and understand the lack of motivation by… wait for it… talking to them? C’mon. We can do better than surveil everyone.]

Welcome to the new Verge

Welcome to the new Verge:

When you embark on a project to totally reboot a giant site that makes a bunch of money, you inevitably get asked questions about conversion metrics and KPIs and other extremely boring vocabulary words. People will pop out of dark corners trying to start interminable conversations about “side doors,” and you will have to run away from them, screaming.

But there’s only one real goal here: The Verge should be fun to read, every time you open it. If we get that right, everything else will fall into place.

[All I can say for now is “Nice!”]

CnC Episode 3: Being perfect is unobtainium

3: Being perfect is unobtainium

There’s a difference between the useless “be perfect” and the journey to always improve. Reaching for perfection contains greatness. Being perfect is, atmo, unobtanium. Clips from Michael Brauer, Grammy award winning mix engineer and Julian Lage, a brilliant guitar player. We start to discuss how change can be hard.

21. Prototyping to learn

21. Prototyping to learn:

There are a lots of decision-making steps along the product-development path. Those of us in the software industry who were influenced by Kent Beck et al talk about “spiking.” It means trying to build just enough of something to expose the unknowns that we would have missed otherwise. It’s not unusual to spike two different approaches to the same problem to see the difference in their characteristics.

[snip]

These examples only scratch the surface. The big idea is to think of prototyping not as a single costly effort to build and verify a single guess, but as a way to learn, to uncover what we don’t know — to find the best way forward for the unanswered question at hand.

[Public prototyping also takes place… like with Constraints and Creativity. I did some prototyping privately, but there’s so much more to learn about the choices that sometimes it makes sense to do them publicly.]

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The Arc of the Moral Universe Is Long, But It Bends Toward Justice

The Arc of the Moral Universe Is Long, But It Bends Toward Justice:

Quote Investigator: Theodore Parker was a Unitarian minister and prominent American Transcendentalist born in 1810 who called for the abolition of slavery. In 1853 a collection of “Ten Sermons of Religion” by Parker was published and the third sermon titled “Of Justice and the Conscience” included figurative language about the arc of the moral universe:

Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Jefferson trembled when he thought of slavery and remembered that God is just. Ere long all America will tremble.

The words of Parker’s sermon above foreshadowed the Civil War fought in the 1860s. The passage was reprinted in later collections of Parker’s works. A similar statement using the same metaphor was printed in a book called “Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry” with a copyright date of 1871 and publication date of 1905. The author was not identified:

We cannot understand the moral Universe. The arc is a long one, and our eyes reach but a little way; we cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; but we can divine it by conscience, and we surely know that it bends toward justice. Justice will not fail, though wickedness appears strong, and has on its side the armies and thrones of power, the riches and the glory of the world, and though poor men crouch down in despair. Justice will not fail and perish out from the world of men, nor will what is really wrong and contrary to God’s real law of justice continually endure.

[Buoying my spirits…]

Source: Daring Fireball

A hundred things I learned writing my first technical book “Data-Oriented Programming” | Yehonathan Sharvit

A hundred things I learned writing my first technical book “Data-Oriented Programming” | Yehonathan Sharvit:

Usually readers stop reading after reading the middle of the book. If you want them to read the second half of your book, you need to find a way to hook them.
A possible way to hook your readers is to tell a story.
Inspiration is not linear. It’s OK to stop writing for a couple of hours.
Motivation is not linear. It’s OK to stop writing for a couple of weeks.

[Solid list. Excellent stuff]