Robin's Interesting Thoughts

“Invention fights specialisation at every turn. Human nature and human progress are polymathic at root. And life itself is various — you need many skills to be able to live it.”

-Robert Twigger, Master of Many Trades

 

“The systems that best exemplify direct manipulation all give the qualitative feeling that one is directly engaged with control of the objects — not with the programs, not with the computer, but with the semantic objects of our goals and intentions.”

-Hutchins, Hollan, and Norman, “Direct Manipulation Interfaces” (1985)

Apple and others have demonstrated that one of the best ways to be successful over the long term is to focus on the customer: to prioritize customer needs over all else. (I’ve also called such efforts a focus on quality.) But achieving that requires, by definition, focusing less on other things, including the success of the business itself. For example, you might decide to simplify an existing feature instead of adding a new feature that will attract new customers and new revenue.

That is the paradox: If you really care about succeeding in business, the best way to actually get there is to stop caring so much about succeeding in business (so you can focus instead on the customer needs). The more you want it, the harder it is to achieve it! It becomes a sort of mind trick of fooling yourself into wanting something else, in order to actually get the thing you really wanted.

Prioritizing customer needs, of course, is not sufficient to succeed in business — many other pieces must also fall into place. But I think this basic paradox helps to explain why it has been so rare for other technology companies to imitate Apple’s long-term success.

“Every great creative performance […] has been in some measure a bringing of order out of chaos. It brings about a new relatedness, connects things that did not previously seem connected, sketches a more embracing framework, moves toward larger and more inclusive understandings.”

-John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society

“It may be that the creative individual could not tolerate such a wild profusion of ideas and experiences if he did not have profound confidence in his capacity to bring some new kind of order out of this chaos.”

-John W. Gardner, Self-Renewal: The Individual and the Innovative Society

“To be fully free to create, we must first find the courage and willingness to let go:

• Let go of the strategies that have worked for us in the past…
• Let go of our biases, the foundation of our illusions…
• Let go of our grievances, the root source of our victimhood…
• Let go of our so-often-denied fear of being found unlovable.

You will find that it is not a one-shot deal, this letting go. You must do it again and again and again. It’s kind of like breathing. You can’t breathe just once. Try it: Breathe just once. You’ll pass out.

If you stop letting go, your creative spirit will pass out.

Now when I say let go, I do not mean reject. Because when you let go of something, it will still be there for you when you need it. But because you have stopped clinging, you will have freed yourself up to tap into other possibilities — possibilities that can help you deal with this world of accelerating change.”

-Gordon MacKenzie, Orbiting the Giant Hairball

“Being infinite, the whole of reality is too much for the conscious human mind to grasp. The best any one of us can do is to take the biggest slice of Infinite Reality that we can hold — intellectually, spiritually and emotionally — and make that slice our personal sense of what is real. But no matter how broad it is, any human perception of reality can be no more than a tiny sliver of Infinite Reality.”

-Gordon MacKenzie, Orbiting the Giant Hairball

John Gruber, “Apple Watch: Initial Thoughts and Observations“:

The most intriguing and notable thing about Apple Watch’s design, to me, is the dedicated communication button below the digital crown. […] Apple is notorious for minimizing the number of hardware buttons on its devices… The only explanation is that Apple believes that the communication features triggered by that button are vitally important to how we’ll use the device.

I had that same thought when viewing the Apple Watch unveiling and noticing the unusual dedicated button: Apple must consider those communication features vitally important.

It took me a little while to get used to the idea, but it now seems quite natural to virtually tap loved ones on the wrist and send them little drawings and heartbeats. Perhaps in five years we’ll be wondering how we ever got by without that capability.

“Breaking down a complex thing into understandable chunks is essential for understanding, perhaps the essence of understanding.”

-Bret Victor, Learnable Programming

 

I use the term information architecture a lot but have found that its meaning is often unclear. The reason I chose that word is simply that I haven’t found or coined a better one yet. To try to describe what I want it to mean, I started by listing close synonyms and related words:

• Conceptual Structure
• Taxonomy
• Object Model
• Model
• Framework
• Classification
• Categorization
• Hierarchy
• Typology
• Decomposition
• Characterization
• Understanding

In the physical world, most objects are distinguished by physical independence. A pencil, a desk, and a chair are self-contained objects — we can use them and talk about them independently from each other. They also relate to each other — a desk is a helpful aid for using a pencil. But we are not confused about the identity of the pieces (pencil and desk). In other words, the “object model” is concretely in front of us.

We create an analogous world in our minds that consists of concepts and theories. Here, our determination of independent pieces is far more subjective. For example, writing and drawing are usually considered separate concepts, but is calligraphy a form of writing, or is it drawing? Or both? Or is it something else entirely? We are free to create whatever concepts are useful to us as we interact with the world and think about what is happening.

When I say information architecture, I’m referring to an instance of this conceptual world. What are the definitions of each component part, and how do they fit together?

In software design, the component parts are things we call “features”, “pages”, “commands”, etc. The designer’s choices about the definitions of these components are as subjective as the concepts in our minds — but they must be understandable by millions of people who use the software! Though most people rarely talk about it or think about it, the information architecture influences everything about the way we learn and interact with a tool.

And just as we can create new concepts like “democracy” with far-reaching effects, we can create new software concepts like “windows”, “hyperlinks”, and “text messages” which transform the way technologies are used.