Adam DuVander on keeping it simple
In many ways, the times of sail-powered ships were simpler. Now one company wants to help cargo ships go old school.
SkySails tested one of their large sails on a Germany-Venezuela voyage and saved $1,000 per day. In buzzwords: SkySails has a hybrid system to bring green energy to the gas-addicted seas.
How can we make things simpler on the web by turning back the clock? There must be something good we can learn from 1995.
Here is a graphical view comparing Google and Apple products to most everything else:
Now what can we do about making it simpler?
Via Duffy
Sometimes when I introduce myself to a group of people, I say I’m in charge of stopping feature creep. For anyone who works on the web, it should be a big part of your job.
Feature creep is when, usually a little at a time, a small project becomes a big project. Even if you aren’t a designer or programmer, you’ve probably experienced it. You know when you go on a vacation to a new city and you have a huge list of things to see that keeps growing? That’s feature creep, too.
A web company called Six Revisions has Eight Tips on How to Manage Feature Creep:
To not combat feature creep is to let your project become too complex. If a new feature isn’t necessary, scrap it, especially if this is a new project.
Read the full article to see their explanation of these eight tips.
My buddy Tom from MySpace (he’s probably your buddy, too) has a message for his users who have been subject to phishing scams: it’s your fault.
Phishing is the name given to the practice of making a web site that pretends to be another site in order to gain your credentials. For years thieves have been using this for serious damage, such as getting into bank accounts. It’s a big problem, one that browsers and sites themselves have been tackling.
Lately I’ve noticed a number of my MySpace friends sending me advertisements that I wouldn’t expect them to send. Likely, they had been phished. Tom decided to take action with a call to “protect yourself from phishing!” (color choice all his):
“Phishing is a trick people use to steal your email & password. It is not a “security” flaw, and you’re not getting “hacked.” It’s entirely preventable by you, if you know what to look for. “
I appreciate his position. It must be difficult to watch millions of his users fall prey to something that can, from his perspective, be so easily avoided. Lack of user education is definitely part of the problem (knowledge makes everything simpler, says the Laws of Simplicity). But he isn’t meeting users in the middle in this post. Even his “simple” solution sounds like a lot of work and is asking users to change their normal patterns:
“This all may sound complicated, but there’s a simple way to make sure you NEVER get phished. If you are ever clicking around MySpace and you are asked to login, don’t do it! STOP. Go to the URL bar in your browser, and type in ‘myspace.com’ and then login. If you always type in myspace.com yourself, you’ll be sure that you are on our real login page, and not some fake designed to steal your login credentials.”
Especially for a site as notoriously lacking in design as MySpace, they have to accept some of the blame. They have to come up with some sort of change on their end to become more phishing proof. They can’t expect a post so long most MySpacers won’t even skim it to make a significant impact. Most of all, there needs to be less “it’s not my fault” and more it’s all my fault.
A couple years ago I found a really cool formula for determining how much an idea is worth. It proposed that ideas were just a multiplier for execution, which is where the real money is.
Seems right to me, but then I’ve also always suspected there was something else going on.
I think Elliot is on to something about finding a proper balance:
“Let your idea inspire you to start executing, then let your execution continue to inspire your ideas.”
It’s not as simple as hard work. It takes idea refinement, some of which can only come from executing on the idea.