Great advice on making your creation match your vision

Here’s one of the best descriptions of the practical side of creating something with teams. It starts at 31:00, where Charlie Rose is asking Quentin Tarantino what Terry Gilliam told him before Reservoir Dogs on how to get the vision in your head on the screen.

http://www.charlierose.com/view/content/12704

Here’s a loose transcript of his answer:

As a director, you don’t have to do that. Your job is to hire talented people who can do that. You hire a cinematagrapher who can get the quality shot…you hire a talented costume designer to get the color you need….YOUR job is explaining your vision, articulating to them what you want on the screen.

This advice can be applied to any collaborative exercise. But it all starts with a vision. 

The wonder of smartphones

We almost take it for granted how smartphones have changed our lives in how we communicate and get our media.

Yesterday, I tuned into NPR election news not on the radio but via the TuneIn app, streaming it into my home speakers for all to hear. After which, I did a free video conference call via Google Hangout with the grandparents overseas, where our twins stared and interacting with them as if they were next door. 

And all for free, without commercial interruptions, and decent sound/video quality.

It’s something we take for granted, but once in a while, it’s good to realize how fast personal computing has come to enable such feats. It’s a reminder that the greatest innovations are ones in which you can’t imagine a world without them. 

My next (i)phone

My current phone is an iPhone 3GS, a once great phone, now a mere shadow of its past glory. It has lost its lustre in more ways than one. The volume controller is broken, the screen feels small and dated, the back of the phone looks like a scarred gym wall, complete with graffiti, gashes and scratches all over. And yet, it’s still with me as I await the next big thing in the Apple universe. I’m intrigued by Android phones, but waiting to see if I can be wowed enough by the hardware to forgo my not-so-minor issues with iOS. The OS on the iPhone 3GS feels like mud compared to the fluid Android on Samsung Galaxy III, which my wife has.

So, here are a few things I’m hoping for in my next phone, not just the next iPhone, as compared to my current phone:

  • More battery life // with more apps, especially media-heavy ones taking up more juice, this is a must and a dead battery is a dead phone. 
  • Speed // both in terms of app snappiness and data, my addiction craves it.
  • Bigger screen or better resolution, preferably both // bigger is better, but not too big you see. 
  • Fits my palm without having to fumble for things // it can be the best phone, but if I can’t do most things with one hand, it’s a deal breaker. 
  • Better sound // my iphone has all my audio, and playing it wherever is essential.
  • More durable and solid // with new toddlers around and gravity, it’s gonna take a beating.
  • Supports my favorite apps // goes without saying
  • NFC // NFC is the future, and if I’m going to keep this phone for at least 2 years, it better keep up.
  • Lighter phone // helps with pocket fatigue.
  • Better camera // because I don’t need to carry another point and shoot device, and my current phone’s photos feel like they were take with a poorly imagined instagram filter.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love my iPhone 3GS, but it’s time to move on and put this baby in a car docking station where it belongs.

To be continued on September 12…

We struggle with the right words to describe the design process at Apple, but it is very much about designing and prototyping and making. When you separate those, I think the final result suffers. If something is going to be better, it is new, and if it’s new you are confronting problems and challenges you don’t have references for. To solve and address those requires a remarkable focus. There’s a sense of being inquisitive and optimistic, and you don’t see those in combination very often.
Jonathan Ive 

Minimum viable product vs maximum hubris

One of the biggest mistakes I see startups make is not overreaching, but hubris, specifically overconfidence. By that I mean building something now that they believe will be the foundation for what they dream their product will be. They want to be the next big thing, and start to build the foundation for that longer term goal. But if you look at the great consumer companies today (craigslist, google, facebook, twitter, mint, dropbox), they all look very different from how they started. They started by solving a specific problem, and doing a few things very well. This is not so much a minimum viable product approach as it is a product with maximum utility.

A minimum viable product implies you have a grand vision for where the product will be. That’s hubris — not always a bad thing, but very rare and often not helpful if you’re trying to build something immediately useful. Just like having a business plan is often useless, you can’t predict what you can’t control. Instead of building the minimum viable product, think about solving problems, specifically a few you’ve personally experienced that you think you can solve. Whether it’s a big or small problem is not that important, solving it is and making it enjoyable/efficient/fun (depending on your goal) is what matters. 

Ideally, your product should solve at least 3 problems to be relevant and popular — if you’re solving more than 3 problems, you’re probably doing too much — any less you’re probably a browser extension. The problem must be real, yet probably never clearly articulated by anyone. So you have to identify and articulate what people are feeling but not saying — strike that, your product (not you) has to articulate that most clearly, but your product’s words/user experience will have to set the right expectations.

Take Instagram for example. There were and continue to be tons of photo sharing apps out there, but what made Instagram stand apart was that it focused on solving 3 problems really elegantly: 1) most people’s mobile photos looked crappy, 2) it took too long to upload photos, and 3) sharing with multiple social networks was hard. They solved the first 1 with beautiful filters, the second with background uploads, and 3 with easy one-tap sharing to the main social players. They weren’t the first to do any of them, but they were among the first to package it all together with simplicity and focus. Of course timing and name recognition help, but that’s more luck than art or science.

Mint.com is another great example. What they did well was 1) consolidate all your accounts into one view, 2) auto-categorize all those transactions, and 3) made looking at financial info less taxing. In so doing, they helped people simplify their money management in a smart way, by helping them track all their financial activity, saving them time, and alerting them of things they needed to pay attention to. 

So, what problems are you trying to solve?

Just ask. 

When you travel everything changes. It is a humbling experience and you see how insignificant you are and how little your world matters to the rest of the world. How much harder people work in the rest of the world, how difficult their lives are and how terrible things can happen to really good people. Those things make an impression. When you walk in another person’s shoes for just a minute it’s a life changing thing.
Anthony Bourdain
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
Ira Glass

The Importance of Last Impressions

On Churchill:

The first time you meet Winston, you see all his faults, and the rest of your life you spend in discovering his virtues.

The all important first impression is important yes, but what brings people back is the often overlooked last impression. The last impression is filled with all sorts of goodness, and tells more about a product than the much sought after first impression. The last impression has the imprint of actual usage, of derived value and meaning, leading to lasting loyalty. 

We all have positive first impressions that ultimately fade, some quicker than others. But while it’s important to focus on designing something with a great first-time experience, spend most of your time obsessing about making their most recent impression amazing. In some ways, this is much harder to do than first impressions, which can be easily manipulated. A person’s last impression is all that lies between you and them telling a friend about you.

In some ways, you should make your first impression less impressive. If you look at dropbox or even google, you’d never think that their service is as amazing as your first impression would lead you to believe. But their last impression drives home a different point, one that you’ll remember. The old adage of under promising and over delivering will become the key to your success. Having a first impression that is too strong risks alienating or worse deceiving the very people you want on your side. It’s like dating. You want to see the real thing, and not be seduced by an outdated photo or overly done makeup job.

If your last impression is a good one, it means you’ve been genuine, you’ve delivered (or over delivered) on what your first impression promised. And for that, you’re sure never to disappoint. 

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