Werd I/O

Samuel Hulick writes that he's breaking up with Slack:

Which is to say, I thought you were providing some relief from the torrential influx of messages, alerts, and notifications I was receiving on a daily basis. “Me + Slack = Fewer distractions and more productivity,” I thought at the time. I have to say, though, that I’ve since found it to be the opposite.

Like, WAY the opposite.

I love Slack. It's a handy, lightweight way to reach people you work with, wherever you are. But I also find myself closing it from time to time, and turning off my notifications throughout my workday. I'm not sure this kind of notification management is something everybody does, and people have, on occasion, been mad at me for not seeing a notification in real time.

Simultaneously, some companies are rethinking open plan offices. As Stowe Boyd wrote last year:

Recent research in Denmark shows a correlation with sickness: the larger the open space is in an office, the more people will take sick leave. Compared to traditional single occupant offices, those in open offices with more than 6 occupants had more than double — 62% — the normal days of sick leave.

That's partially because open plan offices are germ vectors, but this isn't the only reason:

A growing body of research is gradually cementing the idea that open offices can also make it harder to get work done. By overstimulating us, they can make us more stressed and more distracted -- and therefore less productive.

By hyper-connecting everyone via platforms like Slack, we're constructing a giant open-plan office that is almost impossible to escape.

Not only do constant notifications decrease productivity and stress us out, but if you have ownership over your problem or product, you're more creative when you work alone.

That's not to say that we shouldn't be connected. But the onus is on us to manage our connections - and it has to be acceptable to switch them off on our own terms. A number of countries have examined banning after-work emails, but this doesn't cover the interruptions while you're at work.

The excitement of ubiquitous connectivity - we all have smartphones now! and they're amazing! - is wearing off. With it, we need to examine design trends like calm technology, and learn to be proactive about controlling our information environment, rather than reactive to ever beep and information blast that comes in. (No matter how addictive they might be.)

We all want to be more effective, creative and efficient at work. It's time we took another look at designing the best environment to do it in.

Working with Erin Jo Richey changed the way I think about building software.

There's a kind of software development I like to call checklist development. That's where you just draw up a long list of features you want your software to have. This could be based on your own intuition, or it could be because you have a collection of stakeholders who have all told you that they want certain things.

The end result is a kind of shopping list of software features. You might take that list and have someone else develop it, or you might develop it yourself. Either way, it's the single worst way to build a software product.

Throw out the shopping list.

I already knew that checklist development was a harmful antipattern. You need to have the right features, built in the right way, to solve real needs.

What Erin has brought to Known is an intellectual rigor in finding those needs. It doesn't matter if you've been working in software development for thirty years. Building based on your assumptions is not the same as determining unmet needs through a scientific, data-driven process.

The first week Known existed as a company, we had countless phone calls and conversations with the kinds of people we thought we might want to build it for. We just shut up and let them talk, and Erin created a framework for distilling that information into actionable insights. (She also open sourced the scripts she used.)

From there, we created simple prototypes of product iterations that built on those insights, and tested them again. Those prototypes didn't need to be software, and in fact they were worse if they were; the lower the fidelity, the more people projected their own assumptions onto them, and the more we learned.

We've run design thinking workshops at universities to glean real insights from students, faculty and staff; we've spoken to a huge number of people about specific markets like podcasting and chatbots; we've covertly created lots of different kinds of prototypes in order to learn and iterate.

My instinct is often to intuit and try to be a kind of software artist; all the while, Erin has rigorously questioned our assumptions and found ways to test them. Of course, being a startup cofounder, she does a lot more, too. But I think this approach to design is unique in open source projects, and still fairly rare in software overall.

Design is a science.

In the two years we've worked together, I've often thought that "user experience design" is the wrong term. For the layperson, it implies visual design, and the craft of building a beautiful user interface (even if design is, in truth, a much larger and richer field). In fact, user experience design is about applying scientific user research to the product idea itself, and then continuing to use research to iterate that product in order to make sure it's meeting their needs in a satisfying way.

A lot of developers think of design as a superficial layer that you add at the end. Instead, if you're serious about making something that people can actually use, it should be the thing that comes first. And second. And third. Scientific design should be part of every stage of development. Development becomes one part actual engineering, one part investigative journalism, and one part data science.

My first question used to be: "what can we build?" Now it's: "who can we talk to?"

I came from the huddle-down-and-just-build-something school of development. It took me a little while to come around. But these days, I wouldn't do it any other way, and that's all down to Erin.

We approach projects differently.

This different approach means that, when we work with external clients, we like to make sure we understand the core needs first. A checklist of feature specifications can be a negative signal (unless you've already done your own empathy-based needs-finding). We like to hear about goals and real people.

The good news is that Erin can help you find those needs, and tease out those user stories, through the techniques she's developed. Then, she can create a low-fidelity paper prototype - usually wireframes - to get feedback. From there, higher-fidelity prototypes can be created and tested, bringing you closer to a final product that actually meets a need - and therefore is more likely to succeed.

That's how we do our projects at Known, both for ourselves and other people. We find it allows us to build better online communities. I'm never going back to building in a vacuum - and neither should you.

(What if you don't need Known? That's okay too. Legend has it, she also does her own freelance user experience consulting.)

Real talk: Known should list Matter as a cofounder.

Erin and I brought Known, Inc to Matter's third class in May, 2014. Over the next 19 weeks, we honed the fundamental story of our business, learning new techniques to validate assumptions and determine concrete needs along the way. They gave us $50,000 and a new way of thinking about startups.

Matter is a values-based accelerator that funds "ventures that have the potential to make society more informed, connected, and empowered". It's the only accelerator that I would have considered bringing Known to, and I think its mission makes it unique in Silicon Valley.

It funds ventures, not projects. That means you have to be driven - as I am - to create businesses based on these values. It's not good enough to build an interesting software platform; it has to be something that will attract investment or be able to grow through real revenue.

If that's what you have, Matter doesn't end at Demo Day. This last Friday, Corey Ford and I took a walking meeting around South Park. This isn't something that happens every few months: he and the Matter team have been there for us when we've needed help and advice every single time. When we began, I couldn't imagine the support we'd still be receiving almost two years later. (When we joined, Matter was a two-person startup in itself; Corey and Lara Ortiz-Luis have now grown into a much larger team.)

What's not immediately obvious when you read about Matter is the community. I've picked up the phone and called founders who went through the program years ago, and they've been happy to share their time and expertise with me, no questions asked. I could ask a question right now and four founders would give me advice before I've finished my coffee. More importantly: I consider them all friends, and the community persists even for the founders who have exited or closed their companies.

Here's another reflection on why Matter is different: half of Matter Three and Matter Five's CEOs were women. Two thirds of Matter Four's CEOs were women. Two thirds of the Matter team itself are women. I haven't seen that mentioned anywhere, but given the current Silicon Valley climate, that is certainly worth highlighting.

The partners are also awesome. We've enjoyed a close relationship with PRX and KQED in particular. Since we joined the community, Google News Lab, the Associated Press, Belo, Tribune Publishing, CNHI and McClatchy have all joined - and the Knight Foundation, one of the most important forces in American journalism, is a founding partner. They've joined because they see media changing, and they want to be a part of the future. These aren't small opportunities.

I wasn't asked to write this post. If I'm effusive, it's because I'm grateful. As a values-based entrepreneur - I've dedicated most of my career to building open platforms for media and education - I appreciate that Matter even exists. This is a firm that counts Wael Ghonim among its portfolio founders. It's not just an accelerator, and while that $50K seed might be a carrot, it's the least of its value.

So I'm writing this post because of that. I know lots of people who follow me are working on mission-driven ventures. You might be looking for partners, but need to find the right kind of community to protect the value of what you're building. All I'm saying is: Matter Six is open for applications, and it's worth your time.