Mike Monteiro's Blog, page 2

★ Let’s Get Curious!

I love being right.

I mean really love it. Being right is the most satisfying thing in the world.

I was the kid in class whose hand shot up FIRST to have the answer to the teacher’s question. The one who always knew the precise dictionary definition of that word you were using not-quite-precisely. The one who would fact-check your joke.

Studying philosophy in college only served to weaponize this tendency. Our papers were typically graded on how well we made an argument. And the first step of making that argument was always to define the terms. Learn to do this well and you can create a bulletproof argument because you have set the conditions of the universe in which your reasoning is valid.

And then I encountered the real world. And slowly, over time, I realized (or was encouraged by others to realize) that racing to demonstrate my rightness resulted in a few undesirable effects:

It made me very annoying.

It made me a very bad listener.

It increased the chance I was actually wrong.

The illusion of control

Being a designer (or an entrepreneur) means exercising control over a limited set of factors to create something new, and then sending your new creation out into the wider world over which you have no control. The real world doesn’t conform to any designer’s preferences, as much as we wish it did and bitch mightily when it doesn’t.

You can try to set terms, but that doesn’t necessarily work because those terms are often just assumptions. This design succeeds assuming the production team follows the required workflow. This design succeeds assuming that the people who attempt to use it understand the interface. This design succeeds assuming that the target audience is willing to switch from their current method of solving that problem. This design succeeds assuming Facebook doesn’t change their current strategy.

Unverified assumptions are simply wishes. And self-satisfied certainty is sadly not self-fulfilling. We’ve all encountered (or even had a hand in creating) products and services that held marvelous promise, but came with a set of embedded assumptions that did not sufficiently incorporate reality.

A couple years back Netflix tried to spin off their DVD-by-beloved-red-envelope service into a separate company called Qwikster. The folks in charge were confident in the rightness of their decision in the face of the emerging popularity of streaming media. But what Netflix defined as the “additional convenience” of totally separate websites and billing systems, the 12 million users with combined DVD and streaming accounts interpreted as “an assload of hassle”. In an assessment of convenience, the customer is most definitely always right. (What defines “convenient” is the key to an entire category of terrible assumptions worth studying.)

The fact that at the time of the announcement, the @qwikster Twitter account already belonged to a rowdy stoner was the icing on the failcake.

And we’ve seen products falter from the supply side as well—desirable from the user’s perspective, but completely unsustainable or onerous as a business, hence doomed. This may be worse than the simple disappointment of a bad solution when a significant number of real people have gone to the significant trouble of developing habits and attachments. And I’m not talking about business models in decline at the end of a long and glorious lifespan—pour a little for the venerable print newspaper—rather the shiny new products that demand attention, then disappear. Lately, this flavor of demise happens through acquisition and dissolution, as with the nifty Flipcam and roughly a thousand websites a week.

At the moment, the most distressing trend is the number of new online services quickly formed, funded, and launched at the wall like so many half-raw noodles, leaving a vague and messy impression in their wake. Maybe 80% of new products will always be destined to fail, but there are ways to improve the odds it won’t be yours. And these ways are what we call research.

But don’t let that scare you.

Say no to the yes-men

The best designed products and services are useful, delightful, profitable, and sustainable. Some of them even articulate needs previously unrecognized. And this is what we should all be striving for. Committing to create the best possible designs means exchanging short-term certainty for lifelong curiosity and cultivating a deep and genuine desire to be proven wrong.

Maybe this sounds simple and Alice-in-Wonderlandy and all, but in practice it’s excruciating. Ignoring what your target customers actually want or fudging what your existing organization can accomplish is quite simple and extremely satisfying. Often it is shockingly easy to find cheerleaders to back you up, so you (or they) don’t have to feel the gnaw of uncertainty.

Hype makes right, right? No.

We once worked with some very smart, experienced people who had built a very powerful semantic search tool with a lavishly impenetrable interface. At launch these very smart people were blindsided by the fact that many visitors who arrived at the site immediately left without even attempting to use the tool. “All of our accomplished, powerful CEO friends to whom we gave personal one-on-one demos said it was fantastic.”

It is painful to say “I don’t know.”

It is painful to think up something clever and fun and expose it to honest critique.

It is painful to admit to ourselves that each of us is small and that our success depends in large part on the whims of that wider world far beyond our control—that the answer may be out there rather than in here.

(OK, that might sound scary, but hang in there.)

Repeated exposure is the only thing that will diminish this pain:

Practice letting go and ceding control.

Practice asking and listening instead of asserting.

Embrace the opportunity to invalidate your assumptions as quickly as possible.

Your reward will be vital, often unexpected insights you can use an an input to your design process and decision-making. Paradoxically, admitting what you don’t know gives you more control over the situation.

A sharp poke in the why

Philosophy also offered a path out of isolated speculation—a tradition of criticism, of asking why, of focusing on the penetrating question rather than the pat answer. Even the weakest question has a longer shelf life than the most perfect answer.

These days I strive to hear “That’s a good question!” more often than “You’re right”. I try to see my responsibility as helping to find the true answers and the best solutions wherever they originate, not hoarding credit for my cleverness.

Unfortunately, I also think there is way too much ado about who has the right to ask which questions, and this dissuades many designers and developers from going there at all. You don’t need a PhD, you just need the will to think critically and a willingness to listen. (There will always be a need for design research specialists and academics. How and when to make the best use of their expertise, I’ll save for another time.)

And this is how I came to write a book about research. It’s called Just Enough Research, and I wrote it for you. This slender volume aspires to provide an easy entry point into the most immediately useful research principles and practices for everyone busy doing other things.

Just in time for your new fall wardrobe, the book comes out September 10, and I hope it raises some questions.

★ Take the survey: Evening Edition is one year old, and we need a report card

Friends, do us a favor, please? We are approaching our one year anniversary of the launch of Evening Edition, and it’s time for us to gather some feedback.

We launched last year, on July 16, and we began with a focus on summarizing the day’s news, written by journalists, published once a day at 5 p.m. Since then, we’ve evolved a bit and now publish four written editions – Paris, London, New York and San Francisco – plus a podcast.

Now we’d like to hear from you. What brought you to Evening Edition today? What types of stories have you most enjoyed from us? What are we doing well, and what could we do better? Meaningful feedback is essential to our growth, vitality and the future of this publication. Plus you, our loyal Evening Edition readers and podcast listeners, I promised to get to know you better. We are so grateful that you like us, so please, don’t be shy.

This won’t be your only chance to give us feedback. And of course, you can always send us messages directly through email: editor (at) evening-edition (dot) com. But we’d appreciate it if you take five minutes to respond to our survey.

Thanks for reading and contributing.

★ Good Evening (Edition)! Let’s play.

Dear Mule Design, the expanding Evening-Edition team, our loyal readers and listeners –

I am excited to be here, to be joining this incredible team as your new editor-in-chief. In fact, I have had a stupidly silly grin across my face for hours as I have been thinking about what to write.

I remember when I first came across your project last year. A friend from my news design world, Justin Ferrell, was on Northwestern campus for a few days and stopped in for a chat. He asked if I had seen this project and, ever since, I have admired you from afar. In fact, my Knight Lab colleagues and I have often spoken about, even written about, your impressive and ambitious beginning, going from an off-the-cuff Twitter exchange to proof-of-concept in about a week. Hot damn!

And now, dear team, [internal squeal] … I am so proud to tell the world that we are going to work together.

I am so looking forward to exploring the potential of this project as we go on an adventure. All new publications take some time to find their editorial voice, to find their stride, and I have enjoyed your fearless approach to the highly competitive journalism startup community. Perhaps we’ll pivot to something more locally focused. Perhaps we’ll shoot for something more dinner-party-esque. Wherever we end up, we are going to have a ton of fun getting there because we want be the ones who always have five great stories to deliver at 5 p.m.

And you, our loyal Evening-Edition readers and podcast listeners, I am looking forward to getting to know you better. We are so grateful that you like us and we would love to know more about how we have been doing so far. So please, don’t be shy. Reach out to me on Twitter, @jmm, or email us and let us know what you think.

Now, let’s get back to work.

Miranda Mulligan

Editor-In-Chief

Evening-Edition

★ Welcome, Recent Graduates!

It is with great pride that I welcome you to the workforce. I realize many of you are still preparing for finals. Getting your portfolios together. Preparing oral defenses. That sort of thing. But I’m guessing that right below the surface of those immediate and real concerns, the anxiety of what comes next may have started to take hold.

It’s cool. I am here to help you.



I am a job creator. And contrary to what you may have been told in school, you are about to enter a market awash in opportunity. Especially if you’re entering the technology and interactive design market. Which doesn’t mean that you’re not gonna have to go out there and nail an interview—because you will. So if you’ll give me a few minutes of your precious time I have a few tips that may help you land the job of your dreams.

1. Get your house in order

Don’t even think about looking for a job without an online presence. If you’re a designer you better have an online portfolio. If you’re a developer, show me some code samples. And don’t just show me your work is pretty, describe what problems you were solving.

And as much as I hate to say this, get a LinkedIn profile. Otherwise, prospective employers are gonna look at your Facebook page, which should be cleaned up but not to the point where it’s obvious you’ve cleaned it up. Leave a beer bong shot or two.

Buy a decent outfit to interview in. Tights aren’t pants and flip flops aren’t shoes.

2. Where are these jobs at, fool?

Good question. There are a few excellent job boards you should get familiar with. Start with Authentic Jobs and 37 Signals Job Board. Stay away from Craigslist and stuff like that, they’re shit shows for stuff like this.

3. Get names

When you finally find a job you want to apply for do some research. Find out the name of the person who’ll be receiving your email. Hint: They’re not called Hiring Manager. (Also, if you assume the hiring manager is a man, you suck.) If it’s a small shop, just address it to the principal by name. Don’t address your letter to the dog, even if the company is stupid enough to list a dog on their website with the rest of the staff.

4. Even better, network

“Networking” is kind of a gross word. It’s true. But, nepotism is real and making those connections will serve you throughout the duration of your career. Hiring can feeling like an exhausting crapshoot. People hire their friends and their friends’ friends before they start picking random strangers from the jobs@company.com inbox. Tell everyone you know what sort of job you are looking for and ask for introductions to anyone they know who works in your desired field. Then, when one of these people is asked “Hey, do you know anyone looking for a job?” your name will come up.

You can go to a “networking mixer” if you like drinking with sad people in uncomfortable clothes, but it won’t be nearly as effective as working your existing friends and relatives. Even your professors. They had dreams once.

5. No one wants to read your cover letter.

Write a good email. The goal of the email is to get an in-person interview. Explain why you’re qualified. Explain what you’d bring to the job. Sound genuinely excited about this new field you’re entering! Do not apologize for your lack of experience. It’ll be obvious when you tell me you’ve just graduated from college. Don’t be overly familiar, no matter how “wacky” you’ve heard the workplace is. You’re not applying to be anyone’s friend. The fact that you can write a solid, straight-forward email that gets right to the point and maybe shows just a glimmer of personality goes a long way.

Put the message in the body of the email. Plain text formatting. Do not attach your letter to the email. I’m not going to open any of those attachments anyway, and I’m certainly not going to open them when I’ve asked you not to attach anything. I may click the link to your website. If your email was well-written.

Also, I’ve never read a resumé in my life. But if you insist on giving me one, don’t lead with “Photoshop” as a skill. Tell me you know how to combine typefaces and have a solid understanding of color theory. Those are skills.

6. Prepare for the interview

You got an interview? Fantastic. Time to prepare. Find out as much about the company you’re applying at as possible. Google them. Read their site. Get familiar with the type of work they do and who they do it for.

Prepare questions for them. At some point during the interview you’ll be asked “Do you have any questions for us?” You should have some.

“What’s it like to work here?” is a dumb question. “I notice a lot of your work is in editorial, do you worry about the economics of that market?” gets you a second interview.

7. Dress the part, be the part

There is a school of thought that says your brilliance will shine through even if you’re wearing a ratty hoodie and a stained t-shirt. It’s stupid. You’re gonna get some graduation money. Spend it on some decent clothes to wear to your interview. Your Flickr-stalking/research should tell you whether a suit will impress or terrify your prospective employers.

Don’t hug any of your interviewers. Before or after.

8. Not to be a self-serving douchebag, but…

Read my book. I wrote it just for you. It’s got a ton of good lessons that will guide you through your career. Trust me on this. It’s only $18.00.

9. Don’t apply at Facebook

Seriously, do you think so little of the sacrifice your parents made sending you to college that you’re willing to just throw your life away?

Lessons Forecast learned building their web-based mobile app

Forecast is easily the most impressive mobile web (meaning HTML5 as opposed to native) app I’ve ever used. They’ve got some great recommendations based on lessons they learned, from managing user expectations to testing.

★