With Google’s engineering-first, consequences-later approach, we’re hitting a point where the brooms are getting out of control and the water is starting to rise. With Buzz, we have yet another deployment of their notion of a well-meaning science experiment that ignores our human reality. While it’s never classy to link to TechCrunch, this post by Robin Wauters deserves mention for bringing to light a failure in trust and social savvy on Google’s part. The quotable section is actually pulled from another blog that is now behind a password wall:

I use my private Gmail account to email my boyfriend and my mother.
There’s a BIG drop-off between them and my other “most frequent” contacts.

You know who my third most frequent contact is?
My abusive ex-husband.

Which is why it’s SO EXCITING, Google, that you AUTOMATICALLY allowed all my most frequent contacts access to my Reader, including all the comments I’ve made on Reader items, usually shared with my boyfriend, who I had NO REASON to hide my current location or workplace from, and never did.

The practice of foisting a new social networking reality onto people who happen to use your product is inexcusable, and Google is not alone in doing so but its mass (like that of Facebook’s) brings along with it the responsibility of treading more carefully.

Given Google’s preference to beg for forgiveness rather than ask for permission, their impulsive changes to the terms of social engagement through their tools have tarnished the trust around their brand, and may have put people in physical danger at the extreme end of things. The problem is, there’s no wise wizard who can come back and right the mess that these well-meaning apprentice’s have made.

Lots of techies are upset, seeing the future of making software as a Facebook experience: whitewashed, right angles and the turfing out of anything not deemed to fit by corporate interests.

How did that happen? There were plenty of chances to make things easy and for everyone, like the marketing copy we keep slapping onto our product descriptions. But we blew it.

When anyone could install any software, we never learned constraint. We couldn’t resist stuffing capability in over usability, to let go of options that only spoke to our peers, to reduce non-technical people to ‘users’. We dared everyone to climb higher while only a few of us knew how to land on our feet.

We wrote our tools first for each other, dismissing customer requests that didn’t interest us by saying they can customize with APIs or CSS or complex gestures, knowing full well most people couldn’t without our help. We hid poor quality behind clickthrough agreements, knowing that customers didn’t read them, and relieved ourselves of real responsibility.

Apple took the opposite approach: consumers can play, too, no matter their technical skill. The App Store approval process took over the chore of vetting the software’s trustworthiness because we did such a crap job of it ourselves. Think I’m exaggerating? Check out this result of the easy-breezy Android Store process: a rogue app that phished for banking info made it through. What techies lose in flexibility and direct access, the rest of the world gains in enjoyment, productivity and security.

As the disruption settles in, techies wear on their sleeves what fear of change really is, the fear of loss: loss of options, and loss of status as high priests. Techies have invested a sense of worth in a mastery of complex devices, and now The Normals will have the same capabilities. The barbarians are at the gates, ready to throw money at us for a better experience. And someone went and let them in. Those bastards.

Managed Platforms

The reconfiguration of the landscape that the iPad signals is a wakeup call to the tinkering bullshit that has mostly been product-making in software. What counts now isn’t capability, but reliability, polish, vision and professionalism. There are opportunities emerging to a much wider market than we’ve ever experienced, but we needed stronger lines to colour within to get there.

As we let others dictate the hardware environments we create within, we now have to accept that the software environments are also managed for us. This comes with advantages: we get access to the mobile data infrastructure, licensed content and massive resources like EC2 or S3. It’s a growing web of partnerships that defines the new environment.

We shouldn’t be surprised, really. We’ve been conceding control over our software environments since updates over the Internet became the norm. We implicitly accepted the new deal with every update we installed, and over time the temperature of the pool we all swim in changed without us noticing.

I call this new way of working Managed Platforms, where the platform is not released to developers but instead is actively managed with approval processes and other gatekeeping tools that create a policy-based buffer between code, hardware and people. The partnership between platforms like Apple’s App Store or Facebook’s application infrastructure and developers is a new relationship that doesn’t devalue developers. Why else make every iPhone app run on the iPad from day one, turning it from Apple’s content delivery device to a robust creation device under different rules? While they’re taking some of the keys back they’re also bringing us in to drink from the big revenue firehoses that only large companies could enjoy until now.

Jobs ended his name change announcement with Gretzky’s famous quote about skating not to where the puck is, but to where the puck is going. We now have a good idea of where the puck was headed, and how far ahead Apple was looking. How well we do as independent designers and developers in the era of managed platforms will depend on how far ahead we can look, and how well we skate.

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Photo by Engadget.

• treat each new product class as a combination of hardware, software and services.
• innovate on all three of those facets in tandem

Let’s jump in the Memory Lane machine and look at how that approach played out.

2001: iPod

The iPod is largely recognized as a now-iconic hardware design that eschewed the maximum capability goals that engineering-driven approaches value. The clickwheel control was among the first gadget to recognize that human hands are made in a particular way, something every other higher-capacity mp3 player at the time aggressively denied.

The iPod software fitted browsing by nested menus to the clickwheel hardware, but the software innovations extended outside of the device to iTunes and its store to provide an end-to-end content acquisition and consumption experience that needed no technical knowledge. No mounting it as a drive and dragging files, no thinking about format compatibility: one didn’t need to understand how it worked to use it, and to use it well.

On the service side, Apple made a breakthrough with the music industry with license sales by individual track (as opposed to albums), and to price those tracks at $.99 with a cap on album prices at $9.99. Combined with easy to use software and a stylish and simple hardware device, the three combined into a whole product offering with unparalleled success.

2007: iPhone

Nice trick, but can you do it again? The answer to that challenge was the iPhone.

On the hardware side, there’s no denying that its radically simple surface and finish make the iPhone stand out among hundreds, maybe thousands of mobile device designs already on the market. While not the most powerful phone in any one way, it combined mobile technologies with an even hand so that no one part stood out.

With the iPhone, we learned to appreciate the more obvious marriage of hardware and software, designed together to be used together, not cobbled into various configurations by third party vendors. The result is a signature look and a remarkably stable experience given its underlying (and hidden) complexity.

The third arm of innovation with the iPhone was what Apple got the mobile carriers to agree to. Before the iPhone, only Nokia had convinced carriers to allow a device with wifi on their network, and a pretty geeky one at that. Moreover, they cracked the nut of unlimited data plans (or very high data plans in international markets) for a monthly rate that consumers would accept.

That breakthrough can’t be undersold: it was key to the iPhone’s acceptance that using it at any time was not paired with fear and uncertainty about data rates. We take it for granted now, but that we can and do use as much mobile data as we do is owed to the iPhone’s innovation on services as much as hardware and software.

2010: iPad

The introduction to the iPad played out the same three-pronged approach once more, without missing a beat.

The hardware is what most people are looking at right away, and the innovations are easy to count: it’s thin, bright and touchable over the place. Word is that the physical design quality of stands out most when experienced in the hand, and not as a series of photos and videos. Under the hood, Apple has turned out its first self-designed chip at the heart of the iPad, designed specifically for the device with all the advantages that this confers.

The software is familiar, being a modified iPhone OS, but there are some clear innovations with an expanded inventory of multitouch gestures (selecting non-contiguous elements in Keynote especially stood out for me). On the software side there is a huge leap in being able to run all the apps made for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

This advantage cannot be undersold, as for every criticism of what the iPad doesn’t do out of the box, there is likely an app for that. Apple might have presented a content consumption device, but I see huge potential for this as a content creation device too, so long as one considers the App Store.

And then the services. Apple made progress with mobile carriers by getting them to welcome the device on their networks without contracts, unlocked and with a new lower cost data plan. It’s a great move, not earth-shaking but still progressive, and contributes to the product as a whole.

What’s Your Innovation Field of View?

And that’s what we’re really talking about: designing products as a whole, not just throwing out your specialization into the world and hoping that everything else supports it. Jobs mentioned at the end of the presentation that Apple sees product design as an intersection of engineering and liberal arts. But he sells the approach short by not including the ability to forge new service agreements that complement the hardware and software innovations. A third rail to that intersection is partnerships, which take a certain kind of toughness and class to make work.

The holistic approach to product design, the willingness to take responsibility for every part of the stack that creates the end user’s experience with a technology, is not easy. But the rewards of doing it well are clear and the philosophy can be applied to any product: to see it as a combination of technology and other factors, and to innovate on all those factors in tandem to the extend you can. We can’t all be our own chip or device manufacturers, but we can take the wide view and work inward to create great products rather than geeking out on a narrow slice.

Version 1

I met my good friend Sheila West in a previous life at MPS Development in North Vancouver. We worked together and found ourselves of like mind on the importance of usability, design thinking, and the importance of aesthetics in software design.

When I decided to go solo, Sheila created the first visual treatment of the brand, along with a site design that conveyed the creative and more technical aspects of what I do. The focus at that time was requirements discovery and documentation, only to shift to a more full product and interaction design focus a couple years later.

Sheila’s was the only version of the site to feature the crow imagery. On knowing that Corvus is the family of crows, ravens and magpies, I’m usually asked ‘why that?’ The answer: I really like these birds. They’re clever, social, curious and can be a little loud; I share those qualities in different degrees, so I went with it. I got some feedback that crows do historically have a bad rap as symbols, so in the next version the crow image went away, but I stuck with the name. If you didn’t know it, crows are also a bit stubborn.

Version 2

I never met Damien Tanner in person but I got to know his work through his Ma.gnolia Blossom dashboard widget. Motivated to get on the content management bus, I chose Rails-based Typo and contracted Damien to set one up with a fresh look at the theme. He did so, and came up with something quite transformative. I don’t have a screenshot of the site as Damien did it, but his work was the basis of the theme I was using until today.

It was in this version I dispensed with a formal homepage in favour of brining visitors directly into the lifeblood of what I do: thinking about what makes great software. To stand in for the orienting value of a homepage, we brought in the Introduction Box, the yellow space at the top that can be closed from view for those who know me and what I do.

Version 3

A couple years later I asked Eric Grossnickle of Mighty Dream if he would do a little touch-up work on the theme. I knew Eric from advising on his social web app thesis project, and was impressed with his talent, now evidenced by his growing portfolio.

Eric freshened up Damien’s theme and added some convenience macros to Typo, but his most important contribution was off the website where he came up with a new business card. It was a radical departure in brand, but came at the right time as I was well into working with Ma.gnolia and had grown more interested in product design and strategy, as well as the social web.

Version 3

As the Typo project get more and more quiet, WordPress really took off, so I eventually asked Tzaddi Gordon of ThriveWire Media to migrate the site to WordPress and to re-create its look in a custom theme. She did so, adding some considerate additions like a dynamic 404 page to go with a well-coded theme and setup.  I’m really happy with WordPress, but couldn’t have made the move if I felt like I was giving up something in Typo. Tzaddi made sure that didn’t happen, and it’s been smooth sailing since. Except when I break it, which is when Tzaddi steps in again to fix my completely innocent missteps.

Version 4

Today I’m happy to unveil another big jump forward for the site, this time crafted by local designer and musician Frederick Brummer (aka Overmind Productions). I met Frederick through his day job at LiFT Studios when we worked on a project last year, and really liked his design style and insights.

Frederick did an extensive collaboration with me to figure out where to take the site, bringing a great deal to the new theme beyond pixels and code. He also put a lot of work into the site’s typography, something I had only given passing attention to in previous versions. The improvements that a change in typeface can bring are striking. Yes, I have seen Helvetica, but I can still be surprised by the impact of type.

The Twist

Here we are, then, up to date. I have a weird thing about my site: I only ask someone to work on it once. I’ve been very happy with and recommend everyone I mention here, but I love the idea of every revision being a totally new look at where I’m at. Doing this keeps me mindful that design isn’t just about making something, that its process often reveals what is otherwise unnoticed.

I don’t take this approach in my regular work, saving the eccentricity for my own properties rather than clients’. That makes it more fun, of course, and turns my own site into a project that pushes me into new areas in unexpected ways. I couldn’t do it any other way. Here’s to a great 2010.

Amazon today announced a revised royalty program for its e-book Kindle Store, significantly increasing the potential return to authors and publishers in exchange for commitments to meet certain feature requirements. The move, which takes effect on June 30th, essentially bumps the royalty payments to 70% of an e-book’s list price, up from the existing 35% rate that will remain in effect for publishers who do not wish to meet the requirements of the new program.

Firstly, a correction to my own statement that Amazon was sharing only 30% of revenue from Kindle titles with authors. But 5% doesn’t change that the pressure Amazon brought to bear on authors was threatening to reduce author returns to sweatshop wage levels, a position that could only be enjoyed from a de facto monopoly.

The timing and degree of the revenue share is particularly interesting, as Apple seems ready to spring a tablet onto the market that would likely inherit the App Store model of a 30%-70% revenue split, with App (and soon ebook) authors taking the bigger slice.

While it’s great that Amazon is making this move, it’s a sad statement that from the position of first mover their impulse was to impose such harsh terms on authors. The move also shows the threat to the Kindle that Amazon sees in an Apple table ebook reader.

Instead of listing a bunch of things I think the tablet will do, I wanted to step back and try to boil down the design thinking that would drive such a product to market.

The shortest way to describe my take on the still-mythic device is that it will assert a new class of mobile device, optimized for multi-modal content consumption and communication, with content formats that envelop print into a world already drunk on hyperlinked text, images, digital music and video, delivered through wifi (old news) and bundled 3G access.

It won’t be an upsized iPhone nor a downsized Macbook, because either would eat into its siblings. But that we need something in between is clear. Painfully clear, in the awkward poses we strike to use laptops on the couch or the bus, or when we inelegantly share a laptop screen across the table at a café. I can see the Apple tablet stealing the thunder from Microsoft’s Surface years after Surface promised us a better way to work together for about 10k a pop. They thought of it first, but wanted 10k a pop. No wonder Surface isn’t in every Starbucks, but in 18 months a tablet could be.

The deep use case for a tablet derives from an already-shifted reality in the way people use multiple channels to experience content: laptops open while watching TV, trading comfort for the connection to a screen that talks back with the voices of our friends and families, letting us follow curiosity and share moments as they happen.

The Apple tablet, I think, will invite you to experience all these things without giving up any of them, leaving behind awkward device juggling that’s a hallmark of digital cool today but in a few weeks could feel as modern as making your own butter. To the cynical, the ability to obsolete the now is the pinnacle of consumerism. But even for the cynic, it’s hard to scoff at a smoothly flowing connection to a world of interest as big as a few sheets of paper.

This is true for technological evolution as much as biological, where what we end up with isn’t a matter of the perfect design, but rather the good enough for now, or provisional design.

Exhibit A: Bee-powered Pollination

Bees rock: colourful, a little dangerous (or a lot if you’re allergic), and steadfast survivors. So dependable is the bee that many species of plant have come to rely on them to carry pollen as a critical reproductive link. If the bees don’t show up to the party during the flowering seasons, there’s no next year for that species of plant unless another agent fills the niche. That, aside from great

This reproductive strategy just sorta happened; it worked, so it kept being used. It’s not perfect because it makes the bee a single point of failure for plants that rely on them to reproduce. It doesn’t make the process any less wonderful, but most conscious designers wouldn’t allow this system to go forward without a failsafe. It works as long as it works, and as such is provisional.

Exhibit B: The Human Appendix

In humans, the appendix is a leftover piece of an earlier herbivore biology. It has no known function (which doesn’t mean it doesn’t have one), and causes nothing but trouble when irritated. Where conscious design would remove the appendix, nature leaves it there in the absence of pressure to remove it. In this sense the appendix in modern humans is an example of provisional design, remaining in the absence of pressure to remove it. It lasts because nothing works hard enough against it.

Exhibit C: The QWERTY Keyboard

The keyboard layout that dominates our computing lives was consciously designed to slow down typing speeds in the days of early typewriters to prevent the mechanism from getting stuck. A more efficient layout, DVORAK, should be the standard in our age where computers can keep up with our typing. But even though you’re operating system supports the layout, you’d have a hard time buying a DVORAK keyboard, because QWERTY is good enough. It’s provisional, and even in the world of consciously designed products, the unconscious pressures of evolution still rules.

And Then There’s the Kindle

From day one the Kindle has straddled extraordinarily good and bad ideas. The good ideas are easy winners:

• mobile connectivity to a trusted online vendor, with wireless fees bundled
• a smooth purchase and delivery method that reproduced the core of the iTunes-iPod success model
• great battery life

The bad ideas are deal-breakers:

• laugh-out-loud ugly industrial design, improved in version two
• the physical keyboard, surely used less than 5% of the time but taking up nearly 30% of the device surface
• the grayscale e-ink display, with awkwardly slow refreshes despite sharp character rendering
• venemous business decisions, from the 70% cut that Amazon takes from each sale of a Kindle title to the infamous 1984 retraction, wherein Amazon remotely removed copies without notice from Kindles along with the intellectual property of customers who had used the device to write their own notes on the title.

Because the business model is as important as the industrial and software design to the overall product, I consider Amazon’s current Kindle service terms poor design.

Given my uppity opinion, imagine my surprise when I kept hearing how much people liked their Kindles. Surprise, until I realized that e-book readers were sliding down the slope of ‘good enough’. If the Kindle were to reign unchallenged (Sony’s offering still seems like a dead-end) the future of e-readers would be pretty bleak: colour could no longer be counted on for expressive power, writing commodified to compete with the price of sweatshop labour, wrapped up in a rather clunky form that denied an already-unfolding period of converged media devices. This dinosaur seemed poised to lock up the next ten years of reading in technology that felt like the revenge of the 80s instead of the promise of the future.

Boom (Soon)?

What may well be the next Boom! from Steve Jobs could be the asteroid that saves reading from the Kindle dinosaur that currently rules. (You really should follow that Boom link; like Sideshow Bob and the rakes, it gets funnier as it goes along). Many signs are pointing to Apple releasing a tablet form-factor device this month that will include a robust e-reader strategy for newspapers, magazines and maybe even books. It will also be in colour, play video, games, run applications. It would also likely embrace its App Store revenue split that takes only 30%, leaving 70% for authors.

Anyone who knows me knows I’m a fan of Apple’s product designs, and if I had to sum up why it’s because they design comprehensively and they design for the future. They push the envelope on every aspect of their products instead of settling for good enough, settling for the refinement of a few things rather than doing a lot of them in mediocrity. There are many times when we don’t want the perfect to be the enemy of the good, but reading is a pillar of culture that’s too important to leave in the hands of provisional design attitudes that would be content to stick us with the QWERTY keyboard of e-readers.

At its heart, the Kindle lost me in trying to re-create the experience of an older media rather than trying to re-invent the format to fit the new class of platform. Does the Kindle solve the problem of reading a lot on the go? Yes. Is it the right solution for the long term? Absolutely not, and that’s why I so dread this product becoming stuck as the standard for e-readers.

I respect a lot of what Amazon does: I buy my books there (7 in the last 2 months), I see EC2 and S3 as prime movers in cloud computing, and respect Bezos’s ability to stick with a vision. But in the Kindle I see only a transitional form, moving the imaginations of bookstore customers into the digital age, but not being enough to really open the door or to thrive in that new environment.

The Kindle might well respond to an Apple tablet by changing and surviving, optimally as a multi-device service. But, if the tablet pans out as I’ve thought it will since iPhone OS 3 debuted with in-app purchasing, I think this ipod from hell will soon see the dustbin and take Amazon out of the hardware business and back to what it does best: online retail and computing services.