This is Signal vs. Noise, a weblog by 37signals about design, business, experience, simplicity, the web, culture, and more. Established 1999 in Chicago. Visit the Product Blog for more information on our products.
I spent almost 45 minutes on the phone with my bank today because of an error with their online banking. I didn’t want to, I had to, after their email support told me my issue couldn’t be handled online. It was such a mind-numbing, protracted, time wasting experience that it made me ask myself, “How can anyone ever ask us why we don’t offer phone support?”
In a perfect world, calling a business for help would be quick, painless, productive, and human. But it’s not and it’s not going to be. That old time ideal of calling the local retailer or company and talking with someone after two rings was demolished by the call centers and overseas help desks that sprung up in the information age. It’s time to stop thinking that phone support is so essential. We’re lucky that we have an email support system that works and is incredibly efficient considering the volume of customers we interact with daily. It works because we’re committed to making it work, and if we can do it every company with a mailserver can do it too.
Now, I know people want to pick up a phone and talk to a live human being. We all want assurance that our money is being spent on something maintained by human beings who speak our language and hopefully live in our same country. I get that instinct, because I share it at times. I also totally and completely understand some people’s experience with email tech support is way too techy, unreliable or frustrating and dialing an 800 number is an escape from that. What I don’t get it is why a person would rather sit on the phone for however long it takes – maybe 45 minutes!!! – rather than send an email and go about their life while it’s read and replied to.
Phone calls require you to stop what you’re doing, go to a quiet place, and concentrate. It requires waiting on the line, listening to hold music, being transferred and possibly having the call lost, all so you have to start over again. You can’t share a phone call with your colleagues, you can’t get someone else’s input or feedback.
Emails can be printed out and saved. They can be sent to someone else who can chime in on th thread. They’re a historical document you don’t have to copy down hurriedly while information is spewed out to you. They can be sent quickly, tagged, labeled, archived. You can send an email whenever you want, there’s no business hours to abide by or schedule to confer with.
We get requests every day from people who don’t think email support will cut it and demand a phone number to call us. Their worries are assuaged when they get a reply from me in less than 15 minutes that is informative, helpful and obviously written by a human being. It’s absolutely 100% possible to provide excellent customer care without a phone or phone number, and our company proves that daily.
They want enough money that (a) they don’t have to worry about running out of money and (b) they can spend their time how they want. Running your own business offers neither. You certainly don’t have freedom: no boss is so demanding. Nor do you have security, because if you stop paying attention to the company, its revenues go away, and with them your income.
I think he’s wrong in general and I know he’s wrong for me personally.
Fallacy #1: Owning a profitable company is like earning a salary
Getting your company to the point where you can pay yourself a decent salary is a great milestone. You created something sustainable that doesn’t rely on spending other people’s money. You deserve to pop a bottle and celebrate!
You certainly shouldn’t curb your ambitions because of that, though. The real economic pay-off for taking the risk of starting a business is what comes after this. That the company starts making enough money that you can take some and put away. After a while, that coveted financial independence you thought would make your life perfect should be achieved (and you’ll realize that it didn’t make it perfect).
But I can see how this line of thought would arise. If you’re building to flip, then profits aren’t really that interesting. If you can just get to break-even, you’re probably doing better than the majority of other companies in your made-to-flip space. So instead you focus on getting more eyeballs, more sign ups, or more of whatever you think an acquirer would place the highest premium on.
I would want to sell a company built like this too. But there are other ways to build companies. Lots of self-made millionaires made their money selling products for a profit.
So let’s strike out the security claim. Most successful business owners could walk away from their business tomorrow and still live very comfortable lives off the money they put away.
Fallacy #2: There’s always something you’d much rather do
You don’t have to work 60, 80, or 100 hours per week just because you run your own business. Many business owners do that, but if they’re successful, it’s usually because there’s nothing they’d rather be doing. Look at the top tech CEOs. None of them need to work, many of them are billionaires, but still Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and others continue to helm their companies for decades because they love what they’re doing.
I don’t personally like to work 60 or more hours per week. Even 40 hours is pushing it. At 37signals, we all try to work just four days a week. That’s a perk in addition to the fact that we don’t count vacation days (I probably spent 4 weeks last year) and many of us often attend conferences and other out-of-the-daily-rhythm activities.
But when I actually do sit down to work, it’s very often that there’s nothing else I’d rather do. And I don’t think that’s really an uncommon phenomenon. I think lots of people really like what they do and for bursts of the time consider it the most interesting thing they could be working on.
If you’re building a company to flip, though, and feel like you have to put in endless hours to please investors and potential acquirers, I can certainly appreciate that there’ll often be something you’d much rather do. And that it can feel like you’re trapped trying to chase a prize that keeps moving. I don’t personally think that’s a rewarding way to live, but to each his own.
For me, the secret has been to do many other things besides work on 37signals. I enjoy working on Ruby on Rails and pursue a lot of hobbies. When you work less than 40 hours per week on something you actually like doing, it doesn’t feel very much like work at all. It feels like I’ve already retired and get to do a little of many things that I like so none of them really gets boring. There’s what I perceive to be healthy balance instead of a constant sprint.
This comes back to the earlier topic of early retirement as a false idol. I’ve talked to many entrepeneurs who’ve thought that they could just sit back and live the sweet life of no work after selling out. Most of them were right back working another idea after six months. Often times, the second idea wasn’t as good as the first one.
Bottom line is that you really should try to find something to work on that at least for substantial amounts of time constitutes that “nothing I’d rather do” feeling. I think it’s hard to be truly happy if the only reason you work is to win a paycheck. Whether it’s as an employee or a business owner.
Seth Godin has a great bit of insight at the end of a post today about how smart companies separate pleasure and pain.
He cites Disney as a good example:
Disney charges a fortune for the theme park, but they do it a week before you get there, or at a booth far far away from the rides. By the time you get to the rides, you’re over it. The pain isn’t associated with the fun part.
And airlines as a bad example:
Airlines, on the other hand, surround the very thing they sell (getting you home) with armed guards, untrained TSA agents, long lines and sneering gate agents eager to take your money when you have absolutely no expectation or choice and when your stress is at its highest. This is a problem in the long run.
Obviously some of the security measures are out of the airlines’ control, but the insight is still a great one. It’s similar to the best advice I’ve heard on PR: Blast the bad news out quickly (to get it out of the way) and trickle the good news out slowly (to keep in the way).
Audi is set to release the next version of their MMI (Multi Media Interface). The MMI powers their nav, radio, and car systems.
While I prefer Garmin’s UI simplicity, Audi’s Nav UI is my aesthetic favorite. They pay attention to type, proportions, opacity, shapes and shading in a way that says “we really care about how this looks.”
From an information design perspective, I’ve always been a fan of how they present and combine distance and time. I’ve used lots of nav systems and somehow, for me, Audi’s is the one that presents the right information at the right time in the right way. I do like Honda’s too.
Here are some screenshots from Audi’s latest effort:
And here’s part of their lab where they test the designs. The different dashes are from different models.
Aza recently posted on modal overlays, those dialogs that pop up and disable the background behind them. You can click anywhere inside modal overlays, but you can’t click anything in background until the dialog goes away.
Usually when we think of modals, we think of dialog boxes like the one below from Google Documents. Aza’s critique applies to this kind of modal. After you call up the find/replace box, you can’t click anywhere but inside the dialog. That means you can’t scroll the document underneath the dialog or copy and paste a word from the document into the dialog box while the dialog box is displayed.
But that’s not the only kind of modal overlay. Check out this Preference pane from Apple’s Me.com. It has nothing to do with modifying the content behind it. It could just as well be a separate screen.
Actually, this fact that it could be a separate screen caught my interest. At 37 we never use modal overlays. All our settings screens are completely independent from the other screens in the app. In order to explore the difference between these two approaches, I mocked up an alternate version of Apple’s preference screen that fills the entire window like a typical web app might.
In the book, Pollan shoots a pig, hunts for mushrooms, slaughters a chicken, works as a farmhand, examines industrial and local farms in person, explains how we’ve come to be dominated by corn, shows how grass is the key to life on a farm, explores the connection between oil and food, and much more (PDF of the introduction and first chapter).
But as I was reading it, something kept gnawing at me: how terrible the title of the book is. “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals.” Yawn.
“The Omnivore’s Dilemma” part sounds like a math problem. Plus, omnivore is a word that most people won’t even get. And “A Natural History of Four Meals” isn’t any better. Sounds like a biology textbook.
The book is thrilling to read, intensely scary, and a real call to arms. So why is the title so lame? (Sure, it sold well, but that’s because the content is so strong. I’d argue those sales came despite the title, not because of it.)
Moving to simple and strong
Perhaps Pollan felt similarly, because the title of his latest book packs a lot more of a punch: “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.” Simple and strong.
He even comes up with a short, tight call to action: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” No way to miss the point there. He explains it in this article.
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy.
Great to see a title and call to action that are as clear and cogent as the rest of what Pollan writes.
There’s a lesson here for all writers: Spend as much time on your titles, subtitles, headlines, summaries, and calls to action as you do on the bulk of your content. If you don’t hook readers upfront, they may never dive in and get to the rest of your message.
Creating color schemes in Basecamp just got easier. Before, you had to understand complicated hex codes to customize your colors. Now anybody can choose colors with a shiny new color picker. Kudos to Sam for the extra attention to detail on the color picker. We think it’s solid and it’s the best color picker we’ve used on any web application. Picking colors in Basecamp is a lot of fun thanks to the live feedback, so load up your Settings tab, click “Color Scheme” and take it for a spin.
Another natural wonder. This time brought to you by ants. Trap-jaw ants use their jaws to propel themselves into the air to evade predators. They can achieve heights of just over 8cm. That translates into a 40ft vertical for an average size human.
Backpack has always allowed you to share pages via email, but the person on the receiving end had to have a Backpack account before they could view the page. We were never really happy about how that worked. We finally did something about it. Big thanks to Jeremy for making this happen.
Now you can share Backpack pages with anyone in the world via email — even if they don’t have a Backpack account. They don’t even need to know what Backpack is.
It’s the quickest and best way we know to share a functional web page or informational page with someone (or some people). Share to-dos, photos, notes, whatever. Pages you share via email are fully functional. Multiple people can collaborate on the page together by adding new list items, checking them off, adding a note, a file, a photo, etc.
And if they do decide to sign up for Backpack, they page will be pulled right into their account as a shared page. It’s all automatic.
We hope you find this enhancement useful. If you don’t already have a Backpack account, sign up for one today.
So comfortable inside, why so ugly outside? Unfortunately, few of the other choices were much better. Apparently sneakers must be FUTURISTIC and have 593 different elements in order to prove they were DESIGNED.
So I went ahead and bought them anyway. Function over form + I didn’t want to spend all day shopping for shoes that I’m just going to use when I run. Too bad. I’d prefer the minimalist look of a pair of Stan Smiths over this overproduced crap any day.
Hmm…I do want to run away from them every time I look down. So maybe it’s a motivational technique.
I can’t even begin to imagine the complexity of rolling out something as big as the iPhone 3G/2.0. You have to coordinate retail, marketing, web services, support, manufacturing, shipping, and many of other business and tech units months in advance.
They all have to be ready by a a date determined by guesswork, pressure, and wishful thinking. Which means that you essentially have to make the call that the product is going to be done long before it actually is.
For the iPhone 1.0 launch, that bet paid off. The software for the phone felt solid. Everything just worked well. Fondling with the phone for the first time was intoxicating. It just tasted so incredibly Apple.
With the iPhone 2.0 launch, not so much. I’ve been using the phone every day for about a week now and it just isn’t up to the great expectations set by the first version. Everything feels so incredibly fragile. Here are just a few of the griefs I’ve felt:
Annoying delays all over the place.
Changing to the SMS view can take more than 10 seconds at times.
Transitions between apps are being dropped entirely or cut short (the latter looks like a UI stutter).
It some times requires 3 clicks on the fast-forward button in iTunes to get a response.
The screen will freeze for 4-5 seconds not accepting any input, then replay ALL your feverous tapping when it finally returns.
Some times the keyboard will not keep up with your input (and I’m not that fast of a typer).
I’ve had applications crash numerous times.
The entire phone has crashed twice.
Restarting the phone kinda helps some of these problems, but not for long and it feels so dirty and Windows-like to do.
Now all of this could probably have been overlooked and forgiven if the payback from the new features was immense, but to me, it just isn’t. I have two screens of applications installed, but don’t really use them that much.
3rd party apps doesn’t make up for it
Twitterific is nice, but not much of a step up from just using the iPhone-optimized web version. I like WeatherBug too to get a doppler radar reading, but nothing a bookmark to weather.com didn’t do almost as well. I’ve installed but not actually used AIM, NetNewsWire, Yelp, Movies.app, Facebook, PayPal, NYTimes, Light, Sketches, and VNC yet.
It seems like the biggest new thing is the games. I’ve been playing some Tetris, some Super Monkey Ball, and a few others. And they’re really impressive! The graphics are great and controlling with the accelerometer often works better than you’d think.
3G is bliss and bastard all in one
The hardware features are also a nice improvement. The built-in GPS is fast and accurate. The 3G is a lot more mixed bag, though. When it works, it’s absolutely fantastic. It’s so much faster than Edge and really takes the experience that 2.0-like step up. The voice quality is also significantly up. But it’s just so incredibly unreliable.
Getting a 3G signal in central Chicago is like playing the corner on roulette. And when it drops back to edge, you lose all your chips of joy. I actually kinda like getting ultra fast just 20% of time and slowpoke speeds 80% of the time less than just being slow always.
As to double down on the insult, the battery life is absolutely terrible with 3G turned on. You’re absolutely required to recharge every day and it’s not unlikely that you’ll flame out in the middle of a day either with heavy use.
The cumulative effect of small problems is exponential
Combined, it’s a rather big disappointment. I’m surprised just how much impact the small griefs have when they add up to a lack of confidence in the system. It’s a great example of the cumulative effects of problems. They have an exponential damage on the experience.
And I haven’t even gone into much detail on how ridiculously bad the buying experience is compared to the first time around. Jason and I bought a EVDO card in a Sprint store the other day and we spent probably 30 minutes there. We joked about how lame that experience was. Buying the iPhone 3G took almost as long and felt almost as bad.
That’s not to say that the iPhone isn’t the best phone I’ve ever had. It is. By a wide margin. But the 2.0 launch itself has been a big disappointment and that’s too bad.
It feels a little like Apple got swept up in knocking down every single detraction point from 1.0 that they lost sight of what everyone loved about the first version. Yes, it got cheaper (not really), faster (some times), installable apps, and GPS, but it lost a bit of Apple soul in the process.
If only there were a service that helps with the struggle of rewriting a 146-letter message to fit in a 140 character limit. Well now there is: Thsrs, the thesaurus that only gives you synonyms shorter than the word you’re looking up. Just enter one of the longer words in your message, and Thsrs will suggest shorter words to use instead.
Posterous
Posterous, a Tumblr-like service, lets you post things online fast using email.
You can attach any type of file and we’ll post it along with the text of your email. We’ll do smarter things for photos, MP3’s, documents and video links.
We’ve been wanting to offer regularly scheduled webcast tours (or is it a webinar??) of our products for a while now, but we’ve been unable to find the right piece of software on the Mac to get it done.
Here’s what we want: We want to be able to share our screen and our voice and allow up to 100 (?) people at a time to follow along in their web browsers. People who wanted to participate would go to a URL to watch the presentation. Voice could be handled via the net or via a coordinated conference call.
At the end we could do a Q&A session. We’d need some way to moderate the questions so everyone doesn’t jump in at once. We could ultimately just take questions via text/email and then pick a few to answer.
We’re aware of services like GoToMeeting, but you can’t initiate the webcast from a Mac. You can watch along on a Mac, but you can’t seem to broadcast from a Mac. Adobe Captivate looks interesting too, but you can only have a max of 5 people on the webcast.
Anyone have any ideas? Anything I’m overlooking? Thanks for your help.
Today we released some improvements to the People and Permission screens in Basecamp. We’ve improved the process for adding new people to a company within a project and we redesigned the Permissions screen with a number of subtle usability improvements. You’ll also find a new Administrators screen to easily control which people in the account holder’s company have Administrator powers. Check out the video below to see the changes.
The redesigned Permissions screen wasn’t really a redesign. 90% of the screen looks and works the same. We worked a lot with subtle changes in text size, positioning, and color in order to bring more clarity and spaciousness to the screen.
Gianforte describes how to build a company from sales rather than enlisting professional financiers. The secret is to stop sweating your five-year plan and start moving the product from day one. If your business idea requires more money than you have at hand, then shrink the idea.
“An entrepreneur getting started doesn’t need a $100 million idea,” says Gianforte. “A $1 million idea is enough. The beauty of a $1 million idea is that big companies don’t care about it. Find a niche within a niche.”
Sweat equity is the best equity. “Taking money from someone else kills more start-ups than anything else does. Do everything you can to avoid taking money. If you must, your best prospects are potential customers. You have something they want, so if they invest in you, it can be a win-win situation.”
Most embedded audio players offer a tiny player with the basics: play/pause and a progress bar.
While this design works great for the casual listener, Soundcloud has another audience in mind. Musicians, producers and sound engineers want to do more than listen to a track. They want to provide feedback on specific details. The bass at 2:36 needs more compression. There’s a mic out of phase at 4:01. Can we try another patch for this one chord in the bridge?
In order to allow this kind of collaboration, Alex and the guys at Soundcloud could have used a standard player and tossed a comment stream below it. Instead they decided to expand the player and allow commenters to add notes directly inside on the waveform itself. The result is pretty cool. People can post tracks and receive a flurry of comments attached directly to the waves.
The player spans the full width of the screen, so it’s easier to set the playhead at the exact spot you want. Commentor’s avatars appear in the bottom of the player, and their comments pop up on hover.
I like how these guys set out to build a collaboration site for music makers, and what did they concentrate on? The music player. It cuts straight to the epicenter (more).
They also scratched my persistant itch for larger link targets in their “Actions” section of the sidebar:
I was in a three-hour meeting yesterday. I’m meeting averse, you know that. But one of the things I liked about this meeting was when the guy in charge stopped someone mid-sentence and said “Don’t say everyone or no one. It doesn’t mean anything.”
We all do this. We try to justify our position by saying “No one knows…” or “Everyone knows…” or some derivative thereof. When you throw around these extremes you weaken your point. There is no such thing as everyone or no one. Don’t justify your position by putting an unjustifiable abstraction at the core.
Even “Most people” is a bad one. “Many people” isn’t as bad, but it’s still loaded. I find myself saying it all the time. “Some people” is better. A clear “these people” is best.
So when you’re making a point or taking a position, watch out everyone or no one — they aren’t really there.
Highrise Why The Demo Coach switched from Salesforce to Highrise
“To my surprise, Highrise turned out to be an amazing SAAS, which allows us to have basically the same functionality as Salesforce. The biggest differences to me is that the user interface is much more enjoyable to work with and the cost is a fraction of what I am used to paying for CRM.”
Basecamp Coming soon: Outpost will let you manage Basecamp projects on your iPhone
Outpost (coming in August 2008 from Morfunk) promises to let you manage your Basecamp projects on your iPhone: “Take notes away from the office. Delegate tasks from the train. Check on deadlines. Upload photos to projects. Anywhere.”
Backpack Blue Flavor thinks the Backpack Journal is “fan-frickin-tastic”
“About a month ago I read about Backpack’s new Journal feature. It seemed very interesting and after about a week of playing with it, I decided to get the rest of the team to try it out. Now we’ve got an amazing status tool (ala Twitter) AND an ongoing record of what everyone has an is working on. I find this really useful in planning my resources and projects. It’s also got all sorts of side benefits; keeping the team in touch in a low-noise way, reducing distraction by allowing people to announce that they’re busy. ‘Hey don’t bug me! I’m heads-down!!’”
Getting Real vi.sualize.us creator on Getting Real and building an app in his spare time with no budget
“I developed the site in five months using only my spare time (nights, holidays…) and $0 budget…I started to read it and after a few chapters I couldn’t believe how lucky I was: a lot of the questions I was doing myself during the development, could finally have answers, or at least guidance! Your book came in at the right moment, completely out of the blue.”
When 37signals first started out, we didn’t make products. We did client work.
From the beginning, we allotted plenty of time for side projects. Things that would get us attention (eNormicom), experiments with new ways of selling our services (37express), ways to show off our design thinking (37Better Project), etc.
Here are a few of the key non-client projects that enabled us to build up an audience before we launched Basecamp:
The 37signals manifesto
We started with a philosophy. The 37signals manifesto, which explained our approach to design, was our original site from 1999-2001. This collection of 37 nuggets of online philosophy and design wisdom was our initial “declaration of intent.”
We’ve changed a lot over the years. But the manifesto set the table for what followed. Usability, valuing people over org-charts, simplicity, speed, anti-jargon, small teams, emphasis on copywriting, eliminating bells and whistles, etc. It was all there, in the manifesto, back in 1999.
The 37Better Project
In “The 37Better Project,” we’d take frustrating online experiences and show how we thought they could be better.
Complaining is easy. Offering solutions is the tough part. When we have an idea about how to improve a specific web site or concept, we post our pro bono “better” design comp here.
The 37Better Project included: 37BetterBank, 37BetterFedEx, 37BetterPayPal, 37BetterMotors, 37BetterGoogle. Some examples (click image for full size version):
eNormicom eNormicom was a parody site we made mocking the new media branding foolishness that was all the rage during the web bubble.
It takes a lot to differentiate your brand in today’s “me too” world of electronic business solutions. At eNormicom, we create and develop campaigns that break through the chatter clearly and consistently.
Gordian worms live inside crickets. Once fully grown, they inject chemicals into the cricket’s brain, brainwashing it and forcing it to kill itself by jumping into water. Once in water, the worm wriggles out of the writhing body and swims off in search of a mate.
90% of it is photos of the products and each piece in the collection has a video showing a person moving in it. Overall it’s a beautiful example of minimal nav and total focus on the content.
Also, Flash is used in a refined way. There’s a lot of hovers and interactivity, but it’s not too much. Just enough to make things interesting.
Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson, Sarah Hatter, Ryan Singer and Sam Stephenson in Chicago, Matt Linderman in NYC, Mark Imbriaco in Wake Forest, North Carolina, Jeremy Kemper in Pasadena, California, Jeffrey Hardy in Ontario, Canada, and Mr. Jamis Buck in Caldwell, Idaho.
