Simplicity Rules

Adam DuVander on keeping it simple

Mapping Out a Book

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Most of my time these days is being focused on something I haven’t talked about publicly yet. I’d been waiting to finish the site for the project. With that done, I’m ready to spill it: I’m writing a book!

MapScriptingThe book’s focus is creating web maps and location-based applications. I’ll be covering several mapping APIs in a cookbook style that will allow even non-programmers to be able to embed interactive maps into their web pages.

I’m excited to have the opportunity and thrilled to be published by No Starch Press, who do the Wicked Cool series, among other great technical books.

Looking back, this topic makes a lot of sense for me. For years I worked with location data at BestPlaces. In 2004 I started my Portland hotspot finder. I had to roll my own geocoder, because this was nearly a year before Google Maps was released.

When I started writing for Webmonkey again, I wrote up tutorials on mapping APIs. I covered WhereCamp Portland. I wrote up other location-based services and libraries. So, bringing my experience to a book seems natural.

There’s a lot of hard work ahead, but I’ve found the writer’s groove and am well on my way. If you’d like to follow my progress, I’m writing at the book’s blog.

Create Some Ground Rules

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Rules of the InnHow do you decide what features to include in a new product? The simple answer is to reduce to only the essentials. That’s a lot of what I write about here, so there are many methods, such as the 60 second deadline.

Portland-based site Shizzow has a set of rules that it uses to determine whether a new feature will be added. I had a chance to sit down for a Webmonkey Q&A with one of the founders, who shared the list with me.

  1. Simplicity
  2. Community
  3. Trust

If a new feature does not match all of those criteria, it doesn’t get added. This has helped a small team, all with other fulltime jobs, create a cool site with a feature-set that’s “just enough.”

Yes, I’m delighted that simplicity is one of their core requirements, but the balance of the list is what really makes it work. Rather than adding something to Shizzow just because it’s cool, the team needs to apply the feature to their ground rules.

A simple list like Shizzow’s can help you make good choices, avoid feature creep, and create a better, simpler product.

[Photo by Duncan Cumming]

The Online Store Around the Corner

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Cluttered deskIt’s late in the evening and you’ve been working so hard you forgot to eat dinner. By now you’re tired and really don’t feel like cooking. Is your favorite restaurant open? If you’re naive, you check out their website, but you probably already know that’s a useless endeavor.

Except in rare circumstances, restaurants don’t have much of an offline-online connection. If they did, you’d be able to see the menu, learn about wait times, and maybe even get your order in before going down in person.

There has yet to be much to force restaurants to innovate online. One brick and mortar industry that had no choice but to change is the bookstore.

In 2009, Amazon will celebrate its fifteenth year and in that time it has changed the habits of many a book shopper. You can browse just about any book ever, look inside many, search inside some, and then buy it for 30% less than if you drove on down to your local store. It’s incredibly convenient.

Of course, you can’t physically turn the pages or feel the weight of the book. And you can’t have it now. There are many things a real bookstore has going for it, which is why I often go.

Powell's stock chartRecently I was searching for a few specific titles and wanted to share a tiny way that my hometown store, Powell’s, is embracing the offline-online connection.

When viewing a book listing, such as this one for Designing the Obvious, a table shows which locations I can find the book in stock. I could go down to their technical bookstore, one of my favorite places to go anyway, and grab one of the two copies of that book.

Powell’s has an online presence that allows me to be an offline customer.

Borders stock chartWhen I wasn’t able to find a particular book at Powell’s, I grabbed my iPhone and was happy to see that Borders has a similar system. It doesn’t tell me the number of books in each location, but does list whether or not it is there. Or, well, whether it is “likely” there, phrasing that doesn’t inspire much confidence. At least I knew which Borders to head to and I did find the book there.

The physical bookstores that stick around are going to embrace this offline-online connection. It will become easy to shop both online and in person. And hopefully it won’t just the big guys that will do it, but the small bookstore that really is around the corner.

Similar concepts will expand to other areas. It may take awhile for restaurants to get there, but eventually they’ll have to. And finally, after a long work day, you’ll be able to reserve yourself a table, order an appetizer, and walk down the street to your online eatery.

You are a curator

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If you want to make a simple website, or have a simple product, you need to become well-versed in letting the good in and keeping the bad out. You can’t do everything and you can’t have every feature someone could possibly want.

You are a curator, and Jason Fried has a great talk (15 minute video) about what a curator does:

“Think of yourself as a curator. You want to be a curator. You have to decide what comes in and what goes out. Curator’s job is to say no. Curator takes an entire universe of options to decide whether or not something makes it into a museum.”

The hard part, I think, is how to decide what is essential and what is not. When I need help with that, I turn to a couple of the concepts from Designing the Obvious:

How do you decide what belongs in your museum?