EXISTENCE.
First things first (the toothbrush test)
First things first
I love Larry Page’s “toothbrush test”. The toothbrush test goes like this: a service passes the test if it is useful enough and important enough that people will use it at least once or twice per day. I believe Page was using this as a test for companies Google should be looking to acquire. This test can be applied to all sorts of services: social, utility, search, mail, productivity, messaging, communications, networking, security, home, wearables, internet of things, &c. What an incredibly clever way to summarize how valuable a service truly is.
A smaller variation of such a test is perhaps one I woke up with last week: your first service of the day. This won’t work for all types of services, and likely is only good for messaging, social networks and some types of personal productivity apps.
A week ago on Tuesday morning, I asked on Twitter “What’s the first app you launch when you wake up in the morning? (Mine is Mail.)”
I don’t know if it was the time I posted this tweet or if it’s something enough people felt connected enough to and wanted to answer, but I got a lot of responses. I got sixty-six replies on Twitter, which might be more than I’ve ever gotten on any tweet in the past. Incidentally, even though this same question was automatically cross-posted to Facebook, I got no replies at all there. (I’ve got more than a thousand friends there, and more than twenty-five thousand followers, which is roughly the number of followers I’ve got on Twitter as well.)
The Twitter responses I did get were interesting and varied enough so I decided to tally them and write them up here. This is nothing scientific, this is not a representation of any age group or background. If anything, it’s just what my Twitter followers, many of whom are already in the tech world, have as their number one.
1 aeropress
1 calculator
1 circa
1 cliq
1 clock
1 fitbit
1 forecast.io
1 frontback
1 kiggit1
1 meditation
1 messages
1 nytimes
1 okcupid
1 on purpose
1 shower
1 soundcloud
1 timehop
1 twitterific
1 vine
1 weather
1 whatsapp
1 zite/flipboard
2 calendar
2 sleepcycle
2 tumblr
3 mailbox
3 tweetbot
5 gmail
5 notifications
6 mail
7 twitter
9 instagram
I was expecting Whatsapp and Messages and other messaging apps to be ranked number one, but perhaps messaging is just too fragmented across too many different apps, depending on who’s in your circle and where you live. It’s also entirely possible Messaging apps are all sitting in Notifications anyway – which is why that gets the number four spot in this list. (Add up all the different messaging apps that I got as replies, and that count goes up to seven…in second place).
Four were sleep and clock-related (fitbit, clock and sleepcycle) – it makes sense that the first thing you’d do when you wake up is to turn off the alarm or let your sleep tracker know you had woken up.
From an individual branded-app perspective, Instagram makes a solid appearance in the number one spot with nine votes. But if you tally up all the different ways one gets at Twitter (the main app, 7; tweetbot, 3; twitterific, 1), you find it passes IG with 11 votes.
If you tally up all the ways to get at e-mail, it takes the number one spot with 14 picks overall. Nothing will ever unseat e-mail; our children will be using it and our children’s children will be on it forevermore.
I was expecting weather apps (forecast.io) and news (New York Times, Flipboard) to rank more highly, but perhaps that doesn’t happen until you get going with breakfast and you’re getting dressed and leaving home. In a way, it’s possible the overall number one and two (E-mail and Twitter) serve some part of this “news” need: a lot of how we consume the news comes at us in the form of newsletter summaries like Quartz and via tweets from what friends are reading.
Given that the first thing you do in the morning might be “reactive” (shut off the clock; look through notifications from the night before; when’s my first calendar event; do i have any pressing emails I need to attend before my shower; &c.), I wonder if I should have instead asked for both your first and your second picks. The second might actually end up being an interesting choice in itself: I suspect we might see things like Timehop (my second) ranked higher.
Empire State of Mine.
Yeah, I’m out that Brooklyn, now I’m down in Tribeca
Right next to DeNiro, but I’ll be hood forever
I’m the new Sinatra and since I made it here
I can make it anywhere, yeah, they love me everywhere
I went for a Vespa ride this Memorial Day afternoon.
Thinking back to that delicious chicken-and-waffles situation at The Tasting Kitchen in Los Angeles earlier this month.
Mari is doing a little studio photography at home and I get to be her muse. 5/24/2014.
credit: mars (Playing with some studio lights at home.)
Expa
I am excited to announce that I am joining Garrett and Expa as a partner based in New York City. Expa is a startup studio that works with founders to develop and launch new companies. We have a few things in the works already at Expa HQ in SoMa. I will be helping on all these existing projects. And soon, I will launch some new products based in SoHo. We plan to work on just a few companies at a time, with our focus directed at areas we love and in which we have deep experience: mobile, platforms and marketplaces.
I spent much of the last year tinkering, reading and learning as much as I could from others. In all these explorations and sketches, one desire stood out: I want to create things that are good for the web. I want to leave the internet in a better place than I found it. With this new model in Expa and with a great team behind us, I hope to bring a lot of these ideas to life.
We’re always looking for great engineers, designers and product minds to come join us. I’d love to work with you on our new projects both here in New York as well as in San Francisco, so please get in touch at [email protected].
What works in motivation
After playing around with many quantified apps and health services and fitness devices over the years, I’ve come to realize a few things about what works for me and what doesn’t. So I wanted to write these up somewhere, perhaps to keep in mind when designing other things in the space, but also to come back to and see how these rules hold up in future.
• Small groups work.
Social, after a certain point, doesn’t really work. If the full-size of a social graph actually worked, your progress would grow according to how many followers you have. And this isn’t true at all. (If so, my Twitter-backed six-pack would be SO good right now.)
If anything, the “social” that works is your very immediate real-world group. I think this is perhaps limited to four people:
• your spouse or significant other: because, after yourself, you have to look good for just one other person.
• your doctor: he essentially gives you homework and goals to meet.
• your trainer or nutritionist, should you have one.
• your close friend(s) with whom you work out and go for runs and with whom you compare notes.
• A currency for comparison works.
On the topic of social, a currency for comparison works and is more engaging. Activity points of some sort across all activities is the best here: Health Month points. This way you can be good at running and that’s your goal. And my goal is sleep and I work towards that. (Nike Fuel also comes close: my tennis is your running.) And then we can compare progress towards goals without comparing who ran more miles. Because at the end of the day, it just comes down to whether we were active or not.
If we’re talking some specific activity a bike tracker (Strava), then the only currency that matters is miles – the currency is fine being all distance-based for everyone.
But if the service wants to play across activities, then a new currency for tracking and comparison is needed.
• Changing goals every once in a while works.
Goals aren’t forever. Goals aren’t once a year on New Years. Goals are rolling. This is why I felt a really nice connection with Health Month. Even if you never gave it much thought, I’d like to think your goals in life are naturally seasonal. In the winter, you think, “I’m wearing jackets and heavy clothes anyway, so I’m going to eat comfort food to keep warm and no one is ever going to see me.” In the spring, this becomes, “I’ve got to eat a bit healthier and get back into a routine.” In the summer, well, “beach body” mentality takes over.
Health Month happens to make them monthly and asks you to change them on a monthly basis. I love this. What I’m thinking about this month is not what I’m thinking about a couple of months from now. HM allowed me to “roll over” the goals I wished to and allowed me to pick new ones depending on how the rest of my life was going at a particular point in time.
Contrast this approach with nearly every fitness app out there: you set up a single goal or a series of rules on initial launch and then you just go through the same motions for the rest of your life. That just seems broken to me.
What’s worked for you? And what are things everyone seems to be doing that don’t actually work?
An iOS wish list
Before you start thinking “this man should just switch to Android”, please read the last paragraph below and then come back here.
I feel as though everybody has one of these lists. Some take a “developer’s view” into how the OS should behave. (“Yeah, I’d like, uhh, for you to expose an API for blah so that I can Apple TV with my bloo.”) Others are more front-end and user experience focused. For still others, it resembles a “power user’s” hit list of crazy things they want an OS to do. (“Yeah, when I’m driving, right, and the phone is clearly away from my face, make the default audio interface the car’s bluetooth and go to speaker – but only if my mom is also not in the car.”)
I think I’m somewhere between the developer-view and the UX-view. I think my list isn’t just some “wouldn’t it be cool if” but rather features that should be cleaned up to deal with scale: things compounded and getting worse because of the scale of messages we get, the ever-growing number of apps we use, the number of people we talk to regularly, the number of taps and authentications we must perform to even do the simplest of actions. These things weren’t an issue too long ago, but now that we live in a world where I have a giant folder just for “anonymous apps” on my phone, well, we need to clean the game up a bit.
So, here’s my currently pressing iOS wish list:
• Allow me to set protocol handler defaults. That is, “mailto:” always opens in Gmail.app and “http://” always opens in Chrome.app. (As opposed to some apps taking me to Chrome and others taking me to Safari when I wish not to). For political reasons, this may never happen, but I hope it eventually comes mirroring behavior as on our desktops.
• Share cookies across web views. I understand the reason for application-specific sandboxes and the reason web views are not shared between applications. But I wonder if there’s another way to do this. Perhaps, by default, the app gets its own web view sandbox, but then the user is given the option to “use” an existing keychain/cookie store. Otherwise, you keep having to log into the same services across different apps. And let me tell you, with ever more applications using two-factor authentication and with the use of password helpers like 1Password, logging in feels like it takes up a quarter of my day. I wonder if the “use shared store” action alone is enough to get around the security issues that a separate sandbox solves. It’s not only keychain, but also your cookies and profiles as well that might need this sharing. By explicitly asking the user for permission to drop their keychain into a view, might we be able to get around attacks that might originate inside the web views? Anything else on the security front I am missing here with this thinking?
• Give me dark-silent. One of the hacks I’ve taken to using is to turn off all lock screen notifications. I don’t need to be interrupted hundreds of times each day. Most of the time, I’m not around to see the notifications anyway and each just end up waking up the screen for a few seconds at a time (and, therefore, eating up battery life). For a while, I wished that the “silent” hard button wouldn’t just go to silent sound/vibrate mode, but make the screen silent as well. A dark-silent, if you will.
• That hack notwithstanding, we still need a better way to manage notifications. What a disaster these are on our phones. With every new app wanting to turn them all on in order to get engagement and repeated usage, it seems to me that managing them individually is just crazy. There are too many notification toggles per app. Perhaps a different method is to introduce some sort of notification buckets that apps could be dropped into that all have a different notification profile. I like the following four buckets:
•• No thanks, never, nothing (the way I force apps that really misbehave…my punishment is to block them fully forever)
•• Yes, thanks, app icon notifications only (the way I force nearly all apps)
•• Yes, thanks, notifications in the drawer and app icon adjustments (the way I have WUT and most other apps setup)
•• Yes, and wake up audio & screen; very important (like Phone and iMessage)
• Send my iMessages (and SMSes) in the background. Just send it – that’s what I told you to do in the first place. My Sony Ericsson candy bars from 2001 had this feature. By default, the message should send at the next available opportunity (or, in the case of total network failure, at least try three times before giving up so as to save battery). I always liked this simple feature back in the day: you could compose a text and jump into the subway or elevator and it would get sent whenever the next signal opportunity arose. (I never have to send the same text twice after waiting the progress bar to take its sweet, sweet time only to let me down with a failure.)
• If I see a notification, mark it as read/seen not only in the notifications drawer, but inform the app to clear it as well. Nothing more infuriating than to “read” a text in Notifications, only to read it and mark it once more inside iMessages. I can’t tell you the number of times a day I have to do this. If you’re anything like me (maybe a little OCD), you do this every hour to make for a clean inbox.
• A better way to manage apps. I currently have it setup so that anything I buy on the desktop shows up on automatically on iPhone and iPad. That’s nice and that’s the way it should have always worked. But managing the long tail of apps that are on the phone is just impossible. Some are in folders, some are on different screens and, most of the time, I can’t remember where an app actually is. If an app is not on the home screen, I’ve taken to just using Spotlight to get to it. So it makes me wish Spotlight was better – and that Spotlight was accessible not only from the home view, but from any view, even if you’re in an app. We type URLs to get to web sites, not too hard to think I could just type an app’s name to get to it. This is sort of like bookmarks in your browser: we used to bookmark every single site and put them into neat folders and hierarchies, but now you have a few common ones on your “bookmarks bar”; everything else is solved with search.
• As someone who develops software as well, I’m tempted to put in an API request or two in here. But I’m not convinced a Siri API or a Spotlight API is at the top of my list. For instance, It would be great if Spotlight would index and allow deep links into apps: a place search for “Lever House” goes straight into foursquare, but such an index is expensive to create and to store, so I don’t know how one could elegantly solve that. It’s one thing to index all 16 GB of your phone’s disk, but another thing entirely to pull in an index of 50MM+ venue names from foursquare into your local store (or all your files from your 100GB Dropbox). Didn’t greplin try to solve something like this back in the day? One new API wish I would add is to introduce a TouchID API: but one that is only for secondary “unlocking”, much as it works with iTunes app store now. There are plenty of apps out there for which I have long, complex passwords: 1Password, bank apps, Oscar Health. These apps should auto-lock as soon as they background for security reasons, but if I foreground them within a certain time window, it would be nice to TouchID myself into them. I’d worry that too many apps might use this as a primary means of authentication, something that it is not meant for, but let’s just leave that to app developers to decide.
And before anyone jumps in to ask/scold me to get an Android: I use both OSes, but time and again, I keep coming back to iPhone as my primary interface. I could ask Android many of these same questions, too. I prefer iPhone at the moment and like it despite all its faults, because I have the best of Google software (all their apps like Gmail and Maps and Drive and its ability to keep my profile synced) paired with the things I like about Apple software and hardware. I also like that many pieces of software are still iOS-first, so why would I want to miss out on trying new things and staying up to date? I also prefer to develop in XCode and iOS because the environment is just so amazing and quicker for me to prototype and play with ideas.