Cold Caller: I just Googled “Software+Developers+Chicago” and your company didn’t show up on the first three pages. You can use our help!

Me: I just Googled “Search Engine Optimization Consultants.” Your company didn’t show up on the first three pages either.

Cold Caller: Thanks for your time, sir.

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Q: What is the NewNet?

a) The increasing prevalence user-generated information on the Internet
b) Push-web triumphs over pull-web
c.) Social media
d) An attempt to sell subscriptions to Om Malik’s new “research” service

Answer: d. GigaOm Pro: Fresh Internet buzzwords, unsullied by the taint of the latest crash. Can I have my Web 2.0 back, please?

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From John Graham-Cumming, an excellent point about pie charts: they fail to convey information as well as bar or line charts. Why? Apparently, people aren’t able to perceive changes in area nearly as well as they perceive changes in length. It’s easy to see in this example from Wikipedia. Something to consider next time you’re designing that executive dashboard.

Related Services: User Experience Design, Flex, Flash and Air, Custom Software Development

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Google recently announced a new netbook operating system to great fanfare: Chrome OS. It’s named after Google’s browser for a very good reason – all applications run within the browser framework, rather than being downloaded, installed and run atop the user’s desktop operating system. Much of the subsequent analysis has revolved around the battle of the titans that is expected to occur now that Google has moved directly onto Microsoft’s turf.

Here’s my take: Google’s approach is gonna win.

Why? Developers, developers, developers, developers. And installers, installers, installers, installers. Developers because people don’t buy computers to run operating systems – they buy them to run applications. And developers write those apps. Installers because having a seamless installation experience doubles or triples a software developer’s customer base. And nothing is more seamless than clicking on a link.

At least, that’s Pathfinder’s experience. We’ve build hundreds of software applications in the past 10 years. Most web-based. But some were native desktop apps that users would download and install locally. And for a huge portion of the population, the everyday process of downloading and installing desktop applications is completely broken. Here are some numbers, based on our experience:

• 50% to 75% of users who visit a software download web page abandon the page without starting the download.
• Roughly 30%-60% of users who download the application never install it.

These two numbers are why companies pay Dell and HP to pre-install crapware on every PC they sell. It’s why Google pays to have the Google toolbar piggyback on the installations of Adobe Reader. It’s why AOL carpet-bombed North America with installer CDs in the 90s. And it’s why the Chrome OS – or something like the Chrome OS – is the future for netbooks. Sure, Windows XP has a head start of 15 million or so netbook installations. But if you believe the numbers above, a cloud-based, browser-based OS like Chrome only needs 25% of that number to be a more valuable platform for software vendors. That’s a pretty powerful advantage for a company looking to break Microsoft’s stranglehold on some part of the netbook operating system market.

Related Services: Custom Software Development, User Experience Design

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Check out the reader comment on this characteristically astute Dvorak screed from 2007. Kudos to MarketWatch for giving readers a voice equal in visual prominence to the headline of the column. Click to view in all its full-sized glory.

via Daring Fireball.

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“I have tried Campfire, and I’m still not quite sure why people pay for it. I think you can take simplicity too far personally. It could be replicated on a weekend (As was done at google with huddlechat) so I don’t see the value proposition there.” Source

With apologies to Mike Godwin, I like to think of the following as Nolker’s Law: As any technical discussion of a web 2.0 product grows longer, the probability of a claim that it can be built in a weekend approaches 1.

Inevitably, it’s part of a larger claim: X is trivial to implement, therefore X is not valuable. You see variations on this argument everywhere: Netbooks are made of cheap components and yesterday’s technology, therefore they’re a fad. My 6 year old could paint that Rothko.

For the last time:

Cost: How expensive it is to build.
Value: How much your customers will pay for it.

They’re not even close to the same thing.

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Photo by Jason Permenter

I haven’t visited Slashdot’s site in quite some time; blame it on my desperate addiction to my iPhone RSS reader. So I somehow missed their rather interesting approach to pagination – in place of the typical “Previous/Next” navigation controls found on most blogs, Slashdot detects when the reader has scrolled to the bottom of the page and uses an Ajax pattern to simply append more stories to the page. No clicking required – just keep on reading. Try it out for yourself. The overall effect is something like a bottomless cup of diner coffee. Just as you’re about to run out of content, along comes Slashdot to fill up your page.

The implementation is not without problems – the Slashdot footer contains a daily quote and several navigation links. Which no longer stay in one position long enough to read/click, leading to the worst kind of link whack-a-mole. And the visual cue that new content is loading is entirely too subtle; the first time I reached the bottom of the page I was surprised and mildly annoyed by the way the browser suddenly stopped responding to my attempts to scroll. Perhaps the most interesting issue I experienced is entirely psychological. Having new, compelling posts suddenly appear (just as I thought I had finished reading the front page) has definitely resulted in more than a few oh-my-god-it’s-2 am-already moments.

I’m not sure I’d include this particular implementation of clickless pagination in one of our designs just yet. That said, I’m looking forward to exploring it a bit further – particularly for long lists like search results. With better visual notification and a reconsideration of how to use a footer, I think it could be a winner. And the idea of removing yet another clickable item from a user interface is certainly a compelling reason to see how far we can take the basic concept.

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Photo by Cayusa

Dave Arneson failed a saving throw against cancer yesterday. He was 61 years old. Along with Gary Gygax, Dave created Dungeons and Dragons, the ancestor of all role-playing games, table top or computer. If you’ve ever played World of Warcraft, Mass Effect, or logged into an virtual world like Second Life, you’re part of the legacy that Dave helped create.

I moved about 20 miles away from Dave and Gary’s home town of Lake Geneva, WI when I was seven, but even without the close proximity to endless GenCon conferences, I would have been hooked. I started playing at age 9 and was an enthusiast until I left for college and Chemistry 101 erased nearly all of my available free time.

Pouring over the D&D manuals late at night was the first time it ever occurred to me that a complex, incredible system like this could be designed. Designing a world or a module within Dungeons and Dragons was, for me, the most fascinating aspect of the game. For every hour I spent playing the game with my friends, I probably spent forty drawing maps of the dungeons I would create, or inventing new monsters out of whole cloth. In my teens, when personal computers became a reality, it dawned on me that designing systems was an actual job, and that you could get paid for it. I’d do it for free.

More than anyone else, Dave and Gary taught me that design isn’t how it looks, it’s how it works.

Thanks Dave. Rest in peace.

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Hofstadter’s Law – It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter’s Law into account.

- Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

photo credit: randomduck

At least once a week, I sit across from an entrepreneur or business person with an early stage concept for a software application. And every week they ask some variant of a question that’s been weighing on their minds for months, probably.

“So… how much do you think some software like this would cost to build?”

The problem with this question is that I suck at software estimation. Just like, as it turns out, everyone else in the world. In the past, I would mumble something about not having detailed requirements and try to change the subject .

Not anymore. Here’s how I handle the question today:

“Ms. Entrepreneur, the software that Pathfinder has built that comes closest to resembling your idea cost $1 million. If you believe in Steve McConnell’s Cone of Uncertainty in Software Estimation the way I do (and I believe in it the way some people believe in an omnipotent God), that means I can fairly confidently predict that your application will cost somewhere between $250,000 and $4 million. That’s a big range, but it’s really the best I can do. Your choice now is how you want to go about narrowing that down.”

And then I lay it out very clearly.

• Option A – A forced march of waterfall-style planning, analysis and specification. Culminating in a ton of documentation, much of it immediately obsolete, and fees totaling nearly a third of your budget. And after all that, I’ll be able to narrow my estimate to something like $1.3 million to $3 million.
• Option B – Set a budget cap based on what you can afford or the value the application has to you. Start software development as soon as possible, using the Agile development method and aggressive, two week Iterations. In eight weeks, we’ll have a lot of working, tested code. And we’ll know pretty confidently which of your desired features will and will not be complete within the budget you’ve set.

Of course, some potential customers choose Option C – hire one of Pathfinder’s competitors. But that’s fine – they’ll be happier with someone else, and so will we. Far fewer end up going that route than I might have expected. Best of all, I can look my clients in the eye when I answer their question about development costs. And just like software development, the price of that is pretty damn high.

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