Archive for the ‘Bumblebee Labs Main Blog’ Category

October 23 2013

The parable of the fisherman

by Hang












“And then what, señor?” asked the fisherman.




Sensing skepticism from the fisherman, the businessman moves onto the next boat and finds a more receptive fisherman. The two, sensing an obvious business opportunity, decide to go into business together. They raise a venture capital round and a year later, return to the pier outfitted with a dozen high tech fishing boats.

Immediately, the price of tuna at the pier drops threefold with increased supply, forcing the young Mexican fisherman to increase his hours at sea just to maintain his existing standard of living.

Shortly thereafter, all of the shallow water tuna have been caught and the young Mexican fisherman discovers his tiny boat is incapable of deep water fishing. Because of his limited savings, he does not have enough capital to invest in a deep water fishing boat and he is forced to sell his tiny fishing boat for pennies on the dollar as scrap because advances in technology have made it obsolete.

After discovering that there is limited demand for an employee whose only skills are watching ballgames, playing the guitar and taking siestas, the young Mexican fisherman finds his only option is to take a job working minimum wage on one of the businessman’s fishing vessels.

Several years later, the fisherman’s joints are shot through from the hard manual labor of operating on a commercial fishing vessel and an ill timed lift of a 150lb pallet of tuna finally causes his back to give way, causing permanent crippling. The fisherman discovers intensive lobbying from the businessman has weakened workplace protection rules and the fisherman is summarily let go with only a paltry settlement.

After years of expensive medical treatments and crippling bills, the fisherman is finally forced to sell his land, passed along to him from generation to generation, to a development conglomerate run by the businessman who is buying large tracts of the entire village.

Unbeknownst to the fisherman, the businessman has lobbied for the village to turn into a protected nature reserve, allowing for the rehabilitation of the environment and the restocking of fish in it’s pristine waters. The businessman painstakingly recreates the quaint, costal charm of the village he once visited, making it a paradise where the wealthy flock to when they want to retire into a life of easy indolence.

Finally, 15 – 20 years after the original conversation, the fisherman and his wife are found dead in a homeless shelter. Meanwhile, the businessman retires to the village having made two successive fortunes first in fisheries and then in real estate development. He spends his days sleeping late, playing with his grandchildren, watching high def ESPN ballgames on a 70″ TV, and taking siesta with his wife. He occasionally strolls down to the village in the evenings where he regales his fellow millionaires with the story of how he found an unexploited niche in the marketplace and then took full advantage of it to make the fortune that got him to the comfortable retirement he enjoys today.

June 19 2013

How to be a designer in 10 years

by Hang







March 30 2011

Announcing my new startup

by Hang

I dashed off a post yesterday entitled Disregard ideas, acquire assets which seems to have gotten an unexpected amount of positive reaction so I figure I would use this opportunity to formally talk about the new startup I'm working on.

In early January, I left my previous job to work on an idea that's been a burning passion of mine for quite sometime. The premise behind it is pretty simple:

  1. Our social relationships are some of the most important assets that we own
  2. We are horrendously inefficient at leveraging those assets

To point number 1, in the past week, I've helped someone navigate which neighbourhoods in Seattle to rent a house, helped a friend spec out a new machine for work, offered to introduce a bright young kid to a potential mentor, referred 3 separate marketing/PR to a promising startup, cooked brunch with 4 close friends, offered to cook dinner for a friend in town from the East Coast and spent 2 hours talking over the social experience design problems with the lead designer of one of the top 10 websites in the world. In return, this week has been of commensurate value with all of the offers of help that have been extended to me by my friends. My friends are like a secret superpower, they make me 10X more awesome.

To point number 2, while these points of contacts were enormously valuable, they were also largely arbitrary. They only really occurred during the points in time when two of us were physically co-located and were able to have genuine, productive conversation. What about the friends who, by whatever circumstance, I only get to see once every 3 months or less? When we do get together, our conversations are so valuable and productive I wish I could continue them once we part ways but it's always so frustratingly difficult to do so that those conversations eventually whimper and die. The web has the potential to turn our 10X superpower into a 100X superpower but the tool to do so is not there yet.This is not a new or original idea. I first had it almost two years ago when I found myself spending close to $3000 to travel to a conference just to be able to have those genuine, productive conversations. But it was only until recently that I finally had the assets to truly feel confident executing on this vision.

  • Asset #1: I've been thinking about the field of Social Experience Design for close to five years now. I'm pretty confident in saying there are, at most, a dozen people who have the depth of thinking at this point in being able to marry all the diverse disciplines of knowledge required to think through this issue (Social Interaction Design: Where are the most interesting uncharted waters in social software design? is a reasonably comprehensive list of everything I've been thinking about)
  • Asset #2: My go-to-market strategy is, I think, incredibly strong and relies on deploying assets I've carefully been cultivating for a while, chief among them is Product Design Guild. There aren't many companies who are able to meet with their customers for 6 solid hours once every two weeks like clockwork and I'm enormously excited about this as a potential asset.
  • Asset #3: The Product Design Guild has been an amazing testbed for many of my hypotheses and large parts of the product have been dramatically warped due to my experiences there. This is the ultimate lean startup, we built a following before we built a product.
  • Asset #4: I spent the formative years thinking about this in Seattle, outside of the Silicon Valley bubble and I think my unconventional thinking on this issue gives this a secret edge. While other people were going gaga over photo sharing and coupons, I was hanging out with academics and salesmen, watching how they navigate their social relationships.
  • Asset #5: My extraordinarily amazing CS educators who gave me an abiding love and appreciation of technology. I asked my friend Sutha Kamal to give me his notoriously tough engineering pre-screen test for Massive Health which rejects 20 candidates for every one it admits and I was, rather depressingly, able to pass it without too much undue effort. My first programming language was Haskell, I've built computer vision systems before, I can still rattle off the performance characteristics of close to two dozen algorithms and yell at you if you aren't using tries when you need to do fast string retrieval. I don't have the operational experience to be and engineer anymore but one thing that's clear is that, while this will be first and foremost a product company, deep in it's bones, it will also always be a technology company.

Which brings me to the one asset I don't have right now, an amazing technical co-founder. Let me be clear, this is not just a big vision, it's an enormous one. While the people I've been meeting in the past few weeks have been great, it's not yet been love at first sight because my standards for this are ridiculously high.

The person I am looking for is:

  • Obsessed over product. If you can't name me four products that frustrated you with their inadequate design that day, then you're not the right person, even if we're meeting at 9AM.
  • Passionate about doing something meaningful. If the choice is between working on this or being the CTO of Zynga and this is a hard choice, you're not the right person.
  • Excited by grand visions. We might try and fail and only achieve something great instead of something world changing but at least we fucking tried.
  • Gets shit DONE. nuff said.
  • Has the operational experience to solve the hard technical problems necessary to achieve truly great product vision. There are some startups that can be made purely with pluggable, off-the-shelf components. This is not one of them. While the MVP is currently deceptively simple, there's some deep technological challenges that need to be solved that are fundamental to this space.

If this sounds like you, email me at [email protected] and tell me a little bit about yourself. If this doesn't sound like you but it sounds like someone you know, introduce me and I'm willing to offer 2% equity as a referral bonus if that person becomes my co-founder. Human assets are important and they deserve to be rewarded as such.

edit: If you're neither of these people but you're intrigued and would like to know more, you can add in your email here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/…

Let's fucking do this thing!

Post on Quora

March 29 2011

Disregard ideas, acquire assets

by Hang

There's the romantic notion of two complete nobodies, coming up with the next great idea and forging off to change the world. While that does happen, I believe that it's not the optimal path towards controllable business success.

There's a ton of brilliant 22 year old kids these days all churning through the same bucket of rather trivial ideas for web startups. Games! Group Messaging! Coupons! The reason why is that when you're 22 and just out of school, there's only a limited scope of ideas that it's actually practical for you to execute on. What I've found though, is that the most exciting startup ideas are mostly not in this pool but are, instead, backed by a hidden asset.

When I talk about assets, cash is the least interesting of all of these. Instead, I'm talking about more intangible assets like skills, reputation, relationships, attention & fame. I'm of the strong opinion that the most reliable path towards startup success is to focus relentlessly on acquiring interesting assets and then execute on the startups that naturally fall out of them.

Stack Overflow is the perfect example of this. The software that runs Stack Overflow is actually relatively trivial and really could have been built by anyone at anytime. What made Stack Overflow possible were two hidden assets:

  1. Without an initial community of high quality users, Stack Overflow would have died. Joel Spolsky & Jeff Atwood ran, at the time, two of the most popular programming blogs in the world and were able to generate sufficient interest and attention to get SO over the initial cold start hump
  2. Without great software design SO would not have been able to retain users at the rate they did. Joel Spolsky & Jeff Atwood had both been thinking very deeply about the structure and organization of social software for a very long time and avoided a number of obvious mistakes in the fundamental foundations of the software. Here's a blog post from Joel in 2003, thinking about these issues: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/ar… and the Stack Overflow podcasts are a secret mine of excellent social experience design insight: http://blog.stackoverflow.com/ca…

Neither Joel or Jeff had any grand, overarching vision of starting Stack Overflow when they started blogging for the first time. Instead, they just diligently worked to each build this amazing asset. But by building this asset, they opened up a thousand new, good startup ideas that were unavailable to most other people in the world and all they needed to do was to pick the one most appealing to them and execute on it.

I talk to a lot of different early stage startups these days and, inevitably, the ones I'm most excited about are those with a hidden asset backing them. Joe Edelman who built one of the most sophisticated reputation systems in the world at Couchsurfing is now deploying that asset towards Groundcrew. Gabe Smedresman who ran real world social games at Yale is now deploying that asset towards Gatsby. Yishan Wong who is one of the one of the world experts at startup engineering management is now deploying that asset towards Sunfire Offices. Sutha Kamal who is one of the most relentless business development minds I've seen at work is now deploying that asset towards Massive Health.

Inevitably, the story was that these entrepreneurs focused on acquiring assets and they reached a point where they couldn't not do a startup with them. It became like walking through a field of low hanging fruit and wondering which ones they should pick.

I think the conventional startup narrative is mistaken in that it casts the world into those who are temperamentally suited towards only doing startups and everyone else in the world who can be regarded as a brighter species of sheep. Instead, practically every one of the entrepreneurs in that list has spent significant time being an employee, quietly building up assets that would later become valuable. Many of them were even reluctant to become entrepreneurs.

What I take away from this is that I would like for a new startup narrative to emerge. One that focuses on the less sexy aspects of building a startup which is the 10 years before you write the first piece of code. I'd like for people to start thinking of startups as less something you decide to do and more an opportunity that gets handed to you. I'd like for people to focus first on making real contributions to the world before feeling like the world owes them a startup success. It's things like this that are the key towards shifting the ecosystem into a more mature startup culture and most optimally deploy the scarce human capital that we have.

Disregard ideas, acquire assets.

Post on Quora

Visual Design is about more than making things look pretty

by Hang



Timelapse of Homepage Design from Jaco Joubert on Vimeo.

Social Software Sunday #9 – Product Design Guild #2: Bottling the Magic

by Hang


Forgot the Bananas












November 28 2010

Brief Hiatus

by Hang

Social Software Sundays will be on a brief hiatus but I’ll be back next week with a meaty post.

Social Software Sunday #7 – Bespoke, Made to Measure & Off the Rack

by Hang

This is the seventh of a weekly series of posts on various aspects of social software design I find interesting, here is the full list. Each of these posts are written over the course of a few hours in a straight shot. Contents may be mildly idiosyncratic. Fair warning: This one happens to be especially idiosyncratic and full of obscure, uncited references.

In the fashion industry, clothing can either be made bespoke, made to measure or off the rack. Bespoke clothing is custom made to the individual, fit with meticulous care, godawful expensive and, as a result, a tiny niche of the market. Made to measure clothing involves some degree of measurement but the patterns are standardized with carefully designed in room for modification. It’s still a tiny niche of the market but much more affordable. Finally, off the rack is the clothes you and I actually buy. We go into a retailer, try something on, find the best fit we can and accept that this is the price you pay for stupid cheap clothing.

Online communities can also be thought of as bespoke, made to measure or off the rack. Bespoke communities such as Quora, Reddit or Kickstarter are custom built, one at a time, for a single community for which they are designed to serve. They are distinguished by having the designers of the code also being the designers of the community.

Made to measure communities are ones which the owner of the community obtain the basic software from elsewhere but then make modifications to suit their purposes. This blog is an example of a made to measure community. It’s based of a stock wordpress installation by with many plugins & custom modifications involved. Similarly, many of the forums I’ve participated in over the years have modified their software to suit the community. Made to measure communities are distinguished by their community owners having limited control over the software environment based on what extension capabilities were built into the software.

Finally, the ready to wear communities are ones in which a completely stock version of community software is used as-is. Blogger, Skype & Facebook Groups are all examples of ready to wear software. They’re distinguished by performing all of their customization of the social experience from within the social layer since the community owners have no ability to access the technology layer.

The comparisons between online communities can be illuminating, especially in relation to how fashion houses manage the complex mix between the three categories and what implications this has for web companies trying to do the same.

A short and mostly remembered history of online communities on the web

The web was social from the very beginning. The entire point of connecting computers together was to allow for rapid communication and a simple, cobbled together version of email was one of the first programs ever written for networked computers. This early phase of the web was hand crafted, in the same way that all of early clothing was hand crafted. People largely cobbled together their own software system from the original source code and every user was also a maker.

The first waves of serious communities happened via Usenet, BBSes & MUDs; ready to wear, made to measure and bespoke respectively. These three systems provide us a view in just how these three different economic models affected the eventual social systems. Usenet was a mass market system (well, as mass market as you could get back then). It was the global commons which provided the most basic infrastructure around conversation and not much more. The endless groups had the same cheerful austerity that you find in low-income housing, where individual neighbors desperately tart up their apartments in order to hide the dreary sameness.

BBSes, on the other hand, were the wonderfully quirky community hangout spots. Each one was run by an individual, according to their own tastes and going into one was like entering into the living room of the sysop who ran it.

Finally, MUDs or Multi-User Dungeons (Think World of Warcraft, only 100% text) were more like artistic experiments, designed to push boundaries and explore radical issues related to this brave new frontier. It’s no co-incidence that many of the studies of radical issues such as gender-bending, online rape or radical libertarianism happened within the context of these game spaces as the custom built nature of them allowed them to go further and faster than most.

The next phase came from the development and subsequent domination of the web as the primary way that internet was consumed. IMHO, the web was actually a pretty big step back for social technologies as the fundamental underpinnings of HTTP do not mesh well with the needs of social systems (only now are we starting to see abstraction layers like the LiveNode system that Quora runs which rectifies a lot of these deficiencies).

Once we finally managed to figure out how to hook up dynamic, database backed websites into the a system designed for viewing static documents, we started to see the holy trifecta of online communities start to take shape: blogs, forums & chat. This was later joined by Wikis to make what were almost regarded as the platonic solids of the community space. It’s hard to remember for many people now but this was the era when “community management” was the hot buzz term and there was almost a Lord Kelvinesque attitude that “there is nothing new to discover, all that remains is more precise measurement”.

This is what I term the “social winter” that ran from approximately 2000 to 2005. With a couple of notable exceptions such as Slashdot, bespoke social software had virtually disappeared from the scene and everyone was fiddling around with some variation of blog/forum/wiki/chat, only innovating in terms of what made to measure plugins could be retrofitted into those basic paradigms.

I place the creation of Digg & Reddit as the first resurgence in interest in online communities again and some serious fresh blood coming into the field. Social news was a completely different beast from the blogforumwikichat and demonstrated convincingly that more social primitives were left to be explored. Since then, we’ve seen a number of notable bespoke communities, all exploring different facets of this space. Aardvark, Stack Overflow, Quora each represent intriguing experiments and even blogs got revitalized with Posterous and Tumblr both providing fresh spins on the concept.

I had originally planned for this to be a piece investigating how the fashion strategy of diffusion lines apply to shifting bespoke designs “downmarket” into more mass friendly designs but it ended up veering into a completely different tangent and this seems like a discussion for another day. I’m going to end this essay here and hopefully take it back up another week to provide a more conclusive conclusion. I’m tired and it’s time for bed, gnight.

Social Software Sunday #6 – The Future of Social Media Evaluation (and how to stop it)

by Hang

This is the sixth of a weekly series of posts on various aspects of social software design I find interesting, here is the full list. Today we have a very special guest post Social Software Sunday.

Amazing Ice-cream Sundae

Today’s Social Software Sunday is written by a good friend of mine, Jonathan Morgan. Jonathan is a graduate student at the University of Washington in Seattle and a member of the dub group. He studies online collaboration and recently worked on the design of ConsiderIt, the crowdsourced deliberation platform that powers the Living Voters Guide. He also blogs irregularly at newsfromconstantinople.com.

There’s a tendency among designers of social media platforms to believe that they can learn anything they would ever want to know about their users by looking at easily quantifiable things. Want to know whether your new question feature is popular? Check the logs to see how many people are using it. Want to know whether your site is sticky? See how long new users stay when they arrive on the front page for the first time.

Questions like these are easy to answer through aggregated behavioral metrics like hits, clicks, links and log ons, or through demographic data gleaned from IPs, webforms and on-site surveys. However, relying solely on such a ‘big data’ approaches to user research glosses over a lot of important information about how people actually use your site. There are other, tougher, sorts of questions that are harder to answer with quantitative methods alone, and that are nonetheless critical for effective design and evaluation of social media, such as  how are people using your comment board? What kind of questions get the most responses on your new Q & A feature? What kind of profile information do people share about themselves on your social networking site? What kinds of features will best support high-volume users?

Neglecting these kinds of questions and the user research methods that have been developed to answer them can get you into trouble for several reasons:

  • Different user groups will use the same features for different purposes. Most social media platforms serve different purposes for different people. Some people use Twitter to advertise themselves to the world, while others use it to maintain an ambient awareness of the trending topics in their field. Still others actually use it to communicate with a distributed group of friends and colleagues (despite claims by some bloggers that it’s purely a marketing vehicle), and many people fall somewhere in between. Not all of these user groups will benefit from every potential new feature, and some people might even find certain features make it harder to do what they want with Twitter. Likewise not everyone is looking for the same kind of experience when they ask or answer a question on Quora. As designers, we need to be aware of the different user groups that are out there, how they use our software, and which users and uses we want to explicitly support.
  • The features that get the most traffic aren’t necessarily the ones your users value most. Facebook is probably to most visible example of how to make sweeping design changes that royally piss off your user base. They may be somewhat bulletproof (for now…) when it comes to feeling the adverse impacts of their constant fiddling with our privacy settings, but you can’t count on your own site being so indispensable. Due diligence calls for at very least understanding the functions or features that your users hold dearest, and often these come down to deeply-held values (like privacy and trust) that you can’t easily detect with an algorithm or represent in a graph.
  • Users will use your site the way they want to, despite your best intentions. The main advantage of social media is their flexibility, which sometimes means that people come up with novel ways to use them that their designers never intended. MySpace wasn’t designed to provide cheap web hosting for up-and-coming garage bands, but once they started losing people to Facebook, they came up with a variety of features that supported this use.

The actual content of user-generated content–the things people say, upload, tag, bump and ‘like’–is often treated as a black box by those who design and evaluate social media, unless it happens to be a kind of content that is easily machine-tractable. One simple example of a feature that probably wouldn’t have happened without someone actually paying attention to how people use their service is Twitter’s @replies feature (since renamed @mentions). @replies would never have been implemented if someone at Twitter hadn’t looked at some tweets and realized that a lot of people were putting ‘@‘ in front of messages directed to particular other users and decided to facilitate that use by hyperlinking the replies and adding notifications to let people know they had been mentioned in a tweet.*

But I think that the case of Twitter is an exception. In many cases, the deepest analysis that user-generated content like the text of a tweet or status update ever gets from SM platform designers is an automatic scan for keywords and links related to current events, trends, etc. To some extent, this aversion to actually looking at this messy human-created content is understandable. For one thing, the volume of text entered into a platform like Twitter, Quora or Facebook is staggering, and human speech, even text-based speech is highly variable and contextualized. After all, people didn’t put it up there for you to glean actionable design insights from. Most of your users probably aren’t going to post direct statements about your interface like “If only this damn comment box allowed rich text formatting I would use this service much more often and be willing to pay for the priviledge even” in your interface itself.

But it’s still a shame, because directly examining what people say and do is one of the best ways of understanding their motivation for saying or doing it. And understanding your user’s motivations, as everyone knows by now, is invaluable for deciding what functionality to add, what interface tweaks to make, or why no one seems to use your new ‘poke’ feature.

You can get at some of these kinds of questions through traditional qualitative methods such as interviews, open-ended surveys, usability tests and focus groups, but these take time and money–making them hard to justify within companies working in the web application world of limited startup funding and rapid deployment cycles. These methods also have the disadvantage of providing findings that seem hard to generalize and turn into concrete design recommendations, since these findings are often anecdotal and contextual, and the sample size is usually small.

While these disadvantages are too often overstated, a more fundamental difficulty of applying these methods to the use of social media is that they elicit information from the user outside of the normal context of use. Because social media are by definition communication platforms, methods that focus on single-user interactions with an interface (like usability testing) or ask users to describe their online experiences and behaviors after they’ve logged out (like interviews and focus groups) can’t always answer your ‘why’ questions any better than quantitative metrics can.

But there are other ways of making sense of user-generated content and gleaning design insights from it that. Content analysis for example, is a lightweight, flexible method for breaking down data that’s too complex to be automatically detected into manageable categories and making comparisons between them. Content analysis has been used in academic disciplines like communication, political science, sociology, psychology and health sciences for decades, and is commonly used in human-computer interaction research today to complement quantitative methods like social network analysis and behavior trace logs.

Content analysis ‘coding’ can be very quick and dirty and still yield interesting results: check out this study of Twitter that classifies tweets according to their purpose. It can also be performed in a more or less structured way: simply having the temerity to actually read through some posts, comments, uploads or tags and picking examples of interesting behaviors to share with the rest of your team can be quite illuminating. On the other hand, there are also more elaborate content analysis coding schemes out there that require some training to employ consistently, but which can allow you to identify and tally certain kinds of user behaviors, infer the motivations behind those behaviors, and even run stats.

However you do it, content analysis methods can facilitate the identification and measurement of socially meaningful behavioral cues can shed light on how groups of users interact with and through technology. Content analysis is an effective method for surfacing user wants and needs and for testing specific design decisions, and should be a part of a the methodological toolkit of any researcher or practitioner tasked with the evaluation of social media.

*Note: I don’t claim to know exactly how Twitter became aware of the ‘@‘ phenomenon, although I would be fascinated to find out. Perhaps they use the service themselves, or got direct requests for the functionality from users rather than poring over tweet logs.  Regardless, read this interesting post on the Twitter blog to read a good example of how the good folks at Twitter make usage and user feedback drive design–they obviously take a mixed-methods approach to user research. Not all designers have the benefit of being in the community they’re designing for though (Remeber: you are not your user!), and you can’t rely on users to always tell you directly what they like about your platform or why they like it–so observation is key.

To read more of Jonathan’s writings, you can visit his blog or twitter page. To be notified of the next Social Software Sunday piece as it’s posted, you can subscribe to the RSS feed, follow me on twitter or subscribe via email:

Social Software Sunday #5 – Designing a Design Guild

by Hang


Chocolate Ice Cream Sundae




Design Principles

















Failed experiments



Future experiments







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