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Brooklyn Beta

In Design, Presentations, Technology, Work on 3 November 2010 tagged brooklynbeta

A couple of weeks ago, I attended Brooklyn Beta, a new two-day intimate web conference put on by Cameron Koczon of Fictive Kin and Chris Shiflett of Analog. I had the honor of being invited to present on some of our thinking and process behind #NewTwitter, the redesign of twitter.com.

Smaller, Smarter, More Intimate

The conference had only 150 people but all the speakers and attendees were incredibly bright and talented, working on a lot of great projects. By comparison, Twitter seemed like a large company which is amusing as we’re a mere 300 people working on one of the largest services worldwide. I’ve never once felt like I worked in a large company while here and in talking to the others, I understood why. Much of our approach and practices are identical to three-person startups and agencies and, if anything, our execution time is at least as fast if not faster.

Though there wasn’t any explicit theme, the talks all centered around having passion in the work you do. Christ Shiflett even said the conference itself was crafted out of love and you could tell from each presentation how much love was put into each project.

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Our Vows

In Personal, Wedding on 10 October 2010 tagged 101010

K: Coley, as your husband, your friend, and your partner, I promise to love and care for you.

C: I pledge to you, Kevin, as my love, my friend, and my partner in life… to love you and care for you as long as we live.

K: I promise to be dependable yet independent,

C: reinforcing our individual spirits,

K: reflecting your true self to you

C: so you can see your real beauty

K: and stay true to you.

C: I will never stop dancing, singing and laughing

K: and I will never try to stop you.

C: I want to show you nature and the beauty of life around us,

K: I want to show you the world and the diversity of cultures around us.

C: I promise to keep you childlike and crazy, even as we get much older.

K: and I will look after you even when we’re old and crazy.

C: I promise to help you stay positive,

K: helping each other keep perspective,

C: and always reminding you of the wonderful little things.

K: I promise to be fun

C: I promise to have fun

K: I promise it will be fun.

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Augmented Reality: Is It Real? Should We Care?

In Design, Presentations on 17 February 2010 tagged #ixdar, ixd10, p52

This talk was given at Interaction ’10 in Savannah, Georgia on February 6, 2010. Normally, I would put the slides up on my SlideShare but because so much of this talk was in video form, it seemed to make more sense as a post.

Update: The video for this talk is now online thanks to IxDA and I’ve included it here. If you’re in San Francisco, we’re also doing a redUX on March 6th, 2010 for free at Adaptive Path. There will be a number of local speakers that spoke at Interaction ’10.

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The Meaning of Our Wedding Date

In Personal, Wedding on 21 January 2010 tagged 101010

Update: We’re married! And our wedding date story was covered in the New York Times. We’ve also shared our vows as a public promise.

When Coley and I got engaged in late 2008, the first question people asked us was, of course,

Have you guys set a date yet?

We got to talking about dates and initially felt that 09/09/09 would be a good date. We’re not mathematicians nor numerologists but a date like 09/09/09 just has a good ring to it. With the Indian Summers that San Francisco has, a wedding in early September would be perfect. And though neither of us are superstitious, there was the added bonus that “9″ was considered by Chinese people to be a lucky number in weddings.

Alas, 09/09/09 also fell on a Wednesday.

So, at our friend Diana’s suggestion, we looked at 10/10/10 to see if that fell on a weekend. As it turned out, that was a Sunday. Then Diana suggested something which made both our geeky ears perk up:

You could have a binary themed wedding.

Indeed we could.

The next natural step was to determine what 101010 in binary equated to in decimal. Let’s see … 2 plus 8 plus 32 …

42

As in 42—The Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything.

Perfect.

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Time, Mental Readiness, and Productivity

In Personal, Work on 19 January 2010

Last September, Coley and I spent nine days at Redwood Forest Ranch. The ranch, located 45 mins off a dirt road between Fort Bragg and Willits, CA, was owned by an architect named Charles.

The land includes three houses, all built by Charles with the help of his family. They are powered entirely by solar panels he installed in the sunniest places. Additional heat and light are powered by gas lamps and a gas stove. Charles provides food to his guests that he, himself, grows on his land. During our visit, the fresh produce he offered included corn, grapes, Asian pears, tomatoes, asparagus, and much, much more. This is a truly sustainable style of life.

Our stay there really reminded me of how little we truly need to have a content and serene lifestyle. It also created a heightened sense of awareness around life’s details which are easily overwhelmed and muted by our daily stresses and interactions.

This awareness lead me to discover a different mode of productivity.

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2010 Theme Word: Listen

In Personal on 9 January 2010

Last year, I had the privilege of spending New Year’s Day with Tantek Çelik, Julie Melton, Matthew Levine, Silona Bonewald, Mark Trammell, April Buchert, and Jonathan Zittrain. We were gathered for LifeCamp 2008/2009, a regular meeting where we help our friends and peers both reflect on the past year and plan for the next.

One concept born from the original LifeCamp (2007/2008) was the idea of defining a year with a theme word. Rather than a laundry list of resolutions, the challenge was to distill the coming year and what you want to achieve into a single word.

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From Dino to Bird: Moving from Raptr to Twitter

In Personal, Work on 21 December 2009 tagged raptr, twitter

Update: Contrary to reporting, I’m not “overseeing Twitter’s products”. I’ll be a product manager. One of many people contributing to Twitter’s future.

A couple of weeks ago, I announced that I had left Raptr to explore other options. Raptr was an incredible experience for me and I learned a lot there. I watched and helped the company grow from 8 people to the near 30 it is now. (They’re hiring for more, by the way.)

At Raptr, I took on more roles and responsibilities than I have ever had before in my professional life. The team that I left behind consists of some of the most talented people I know whom I hope to work with again in the future. I have a little bit of insight into what’s coming for Raptr and, believe me, if you play any videogames, the service is going to be even better than it already is.

But for me, it was time to take my newfound skills and apply them to new challenges.

Today, I signed an offer letter from Twitter. I’ll be a product manager there working primarily on the web client. As you might guess from my Twitter username (@k), I’m a pretty big fan of theirs and see a lot of potential for the medium next year—for that’s what it is; a medium, not a service.

I’m looking forward to what’s ahead …

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So You’re Thinking of Becoming a Designer

In Design on 30 July 2009 tagged bobulate, bokardo, coudal, Design Discourse, jmspool, portigal, simmy, sva, video, whitneyhess

A few days ago, my friend Liz Danzico asked a number of designers, researchers and other industry vetarans including Jim Coudal, Jared Spool, Joshua Porter, Ryan Sims, Steve Portigal, Whitney Hess and many others to answer this:

So you’re thinking about being a designer? If I could tell you only *one thing* about going into the field, my advice would be ________.

I thought of a lot of different answers, many of them quite cynical. I imagine my time watching the industry’s discussions and throwing peanuts at it from OK/Cancel makes me think that way a lot. For example, I considered answering with, “don’t use convoluted phrases just to make yourself sound smarter.” In the end, I erred on the side of practicality:

The other answers have been collected on the School of Visual Arts blog.

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Macroscopes

In Design on 19 July 2009

I’ve always been a big fan of the work that Schulze and Webb do and the insights from everyone in that company. I wasn’t able to see this talk in person but definitely recommend checking out this talk by Matt Webb on macroscopes.

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Virgin America: How a Bad Website Can Kill Good Will

In Personal, Thoughts and Rants on 17 May 2009

Please make sure you read updates below on how Virgin America resolved our issues with the help of Twitter. Great customer service there but the same couldn’t be said for their phone support at the time.

Ever since Virgin America launched, I’ve been eagerly waiting for the opportunity to fly with them. I’m a frequent traveler and while living in London, was exposed to a lot of Richard Branson and Virgin’s antics and marketing. They’re a fun company with a lot of character and personality. They’re irreverent, they buck trends, providing quality where none used to be expected.

Today, a simple error has caused us a lot of pain and cost VA a lot of good will.

It all started last week when Coley was booking flights for us for a trip we’re taking to LA. She went to virginamerica.com, looked up appropriate times, and booked the flights. However, when she was done, neither of us received a confirmation e-mail even though she’d entered both of our email addresses.

Two days later, we still hadn’t received any confirmation emails. We checked our spam folders to no avail. Coley logged into her VA account and the website said “no pending flights”. No charges had been made to the credit card, either.

As it was two weeks from when we needed to fly we needed to get tickets soon. We assumed the booking hadn’t completed and proceeded to book another set of flights. However, the original itinerary was no longer available as they were booked so we booked slightly different times to fly (but kept the same days).

Another two days pass, and we discover that Virgin America has charged us for both sets of flights. “No big deal,” we thought, “we didn’t receive any confirmations at all and the flight still doesn’t show up on the website. We’ll just call them up and they’ll fix it.”

As you might have guessed, it turns out that even Virgin America with all its irreverance and snarky humour has a Big Corporation side. Coley was on the customer service line for 2 hours, during which time she was subjected to two disconnections and multiple attempts to charge us $150 cancellation fee — again for a flight which we didn’t even know existed.

After the first 2 hours, Coley finally got through to a manager, David, who was reasonable but unable to give us a refund on the flight. Instead, he offered to waive the $150 but the ticket cost would have to stay as airline credit. We reminded him that they were keeping our money for a website error but after an additional hour of back and forth, it was clear he wasn’t empowered to do much else.

His proposed solution? Use the “contact us” link on the website—the website that broke and charged us $300 without telling us we had any flights booked.

This episode shows how a business must invest in more than just its core service. Virgin America may have created a stellar flying experience that outclasses most but that doesn’t mean they can compromise in their online experience and their customer service.

The most frustrating part of this entire episode is how it feels like we’ve been blamed and then penalized for an error on their part. All the good will garnered through their savvy multi-million dollar marketing, fancy mood lighting and in-air WiFi was washed away because of one website error they wouldn’t take responsibility for.

Update 11:00AM 18 May 2009: @VirginAmerica responded to our Twitters. It probably helped that others also retweeted us (thanks!). I’ve given them my email address and we’ll see where it goes from here. I’ll be happy to have this resolved but it really shouldn’t have needed this much of a fuss in the first place.

Update 02:41PM 03 June 2009: @VirginAmerica told us we should expect a refund within a week of the last update but it didn’t come through. It turns out that this may have been due to our end because the credit card we booked with was lost and replaced in that time. They have been incredibly quick and responsive in their Twitter responses. Our friend @ang also ran into the same issue yesterday where she booked a flight but it didn’t show any confirmation, didn’t send her an email, didn’t show up on her Elevate account and didn’t show any charge on her credit card. She’s also been in touch with VA because she Twittered about the issue.

I’m really glad Virgin America is coming through so well with the social media tools and customer service but I really hope they fix that web issues that are plaguing them. I also sincerely hope the phone support staff will be empowered and educated on not putting the blame on the customer when the company’s technology fails. I’ll give a final update when we do sort this out but it looks like it’s under control.

Update 05:38PM 07 June 2009: The money has been refunded to our account! Hooray for Twitter and companies using social media!

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