Justin Dunham

's journal about making things

Working and the information problem

Filed under: Everything Else — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Justin Dunham on August 19, 2012

 

Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do

Working is an oral history of work in 1960s and 70s America. Historian Studs Terkel interviews a vast range of different people – bookbinders, parking lot attendants, CEOs, retired people, musicians, and many others. In today’s world, and especially in the world I inhabit where I spend almost all my time talking to software engineers, marketers, and salespeople, it’s fascinating to read about what it’s really like to be a garbageman or a baseball player.

There’s a huge amount I could write about this book; its honest picture of labor and race relations in 1960s America, by itself, is striking, as are the various characters’ reflections on what it means to work and why. But I actually wanted to write about something more boring, which is the information problem. This book will make you acutely aware of it.

What I mean by the information problem is: as good as we’ve gotten at building global communications networks and developing common languages for subjects, we’re still actually not very good at giving basic information to each other. For example, I was telling one of my best friends (an academic) about the interview process at the company where I work. When I told him I had had eight interviews, he almost fell over. In his experience, an “interview” takes all day, and requires you to talk in great depth about a very specific area with people who may know much more than you do. But of course in business an interview may take an hour or less and is as much memorization as it is intensive preparation and thought.

How is it that we had such wildly different assumptions? Partly, I think it’s because we are often so immersed in our context that the important details are ones we fail to notice, fail to realize are important, or are perhaps even completely unaware of. This creates lots of problems in a software company:

  • When a user files a bug report, they don’t know what information to include, or may not include any information (“site is broken”)
  • When an engineer builds a system, they don’t explain (and I forget to ask about) some critical information about the way it is built, which ends up creating problems or miscommunications later
  • Customers are unable to articulate what they really want, so I have to test lots of different designs and product prototypes before they’ll buy
  • I build a user interface that I like, but nobody else understands how to use it
  • I write code that doesn’t scale, because I’ve never had to deal with scale before

It should be pretty easy to come up with examples of this happening in other companies, in your life, in the world, etc.

We’ve developed solutions to the information problem, or, as Don Norman refers to it in The Design of Everyday Things, the problem of getting information out of your head and into the world. These solutions mostly include very thoughtful specifying, testing and prototyping. I write detailed technical specifications that can then be discussed and tested against many people’s assumptions. I do A/B testing on my site to see how people actually act when they see a new user interface or marketing pitch. I build simple prototypes to see whether a product or service I want to provide, or code for that matter, actually works.

Anyway, Terkel’s book will make you highly aware of these problems, and how little you know about the problems other people face, especially as you get further and further away from your area of expertise. Here are some problems that garbagemen have:

  • In some neighborhoods, kids yell at, and taunt you (“they’re too stupid to realize the necessity of the job”)
  • Once in a while, people often throw away extremely heavy (plaster) or dangerous (acid) materials
  • The compression mechanism at the back of a truck can sometimes cause things to shoot out

And stonemasons:

  • When building a fireplace, it’s possible to reflect varying degrees of heat back into the house depending on the design
  • Stones (even of the same type) will break and split different ways, sometimes unpredictably
  • Having a good hod carrier (who carries building materials and makes mortar) is critical for productivity

This is a tiny sample of the obscure bits of the information I never even considered, that have come up in reading this book. It reinforces to me (a) how difficult it is to really understand someone else, i.e. a potential customer, when that customer isn’t you, and (b) how many problems there are to solve, and perhaps solve very profitably, that I likely have no way of learning about.

(And this is only, of course, restricting my thought to the mechanics of a job or task, never mind the far more complex and arguably more important understanding of how other people live their lives.)

Grape Bread 2

Filed under: Cooking Journal — Tags: , , , , , — Justin Dunham on August 13, 2012

Been meaning to write this up for a long time now, but a few months ago I decided to make this grape bread again. This time, I used a different recipe, one that caused it come up much more like a flatbread, rather than something puffy. I also used actual concord grapes (seeded of course).

Really excellent served with a sharp goat cheese and some additional grapes on the side. Because this recipe is much crispier – or at least came out that way for me – and because it has a much more savory flavor, brought about the heavy rosemary usage, it was a great appetizer course.

With an herb-wrapped goat cheese and more grapes.

Crisping in the oven.

Fixing your own laptop, and the importance of do-it-yourself to society

Filed under: Everything Else — Tags: , , , , , , , — Justin Dunham on August 5, 2012

Removing the keyboard...

With the screen bezel removed. The hinge is the reverse-L-shaped thing in the lower-right corner of the gray bezel; you can see at the end, next to the yellow circuit board, how the covering (which provided the hinge's friction) has worn away.

Fixed laptop. The hinge actually holds the screen up now!

I have a snazzy new Mac now, but for about six years before that I had a Dell Latitude D410. It was top-of-the-line when I bought it, and the build quality was so awesome that it survived six years of nearly constant all-day usage, including dozens and dozens of flights, very long bus trips, and bumps without any problems. (It also, by the way, handled all the apps I needed it to run pretty well until the last two years or so).

A few months ago, however, the hinges broke. This happened to the only other person I know with this kind of laptop, so I’m guessing the hinges are the weakest point of the laptop’s construction (“weak” being a relative term). I wasn’t ready to buy a new laptop yet, and I didn’t want to pay someone else to repair it. So I decided to look into fixing it myself.

It turns out that this was an extremely good option. For about $20, I found someone selling the very hinges that I needed, on eBay. And after some Googling around, I found enough clues to how to do the repair myself.

The first step was to pry up the plastic strip with the power and volume controls, which is held in place with snaps. The keyboard can then be carefully slid out, which gives you access to the screws that hold the hinge covers in place on the keyboard half of the laptop. Finally, after removing the various rubber bumpers on the monitor bezel, you get access to enough screws to loosen the bezel, and you can very carefully use a shim to slice through the remaining glue that holds the bezel in place. After that, the hinges are fairly easy to replace, and the laptop can be reassembled. I’d suggest not reassembling fully until you confirm everything works.

From a maker-friendliness perspective, I’d give this laptop a B – not too difficult to find documentation, very easy to find parts and disassemble, with one major exception, that being the glue around the bezel.

As a final note, I think that’s all you need to do but I also took some unnecessary steps, like removing a bunch of screws from the bottom of the laptop, thinking I needed to do that to get the case open – I don’t think this is necessary but it’s worth knowing. As it turns out, the top cover of the laptop comes off too, and I could have bought a new replacement if I wanted to spruce it up a bit.

The main advantage of doing it myself was that I saved an enormous amount of money. It’s interesting how much value is trapped in old electronics and machines – value that is usually destroyed when the item in question is thrown away, but which can be easily realized by a skilled technician.

The problem is that there is so much that needs fixing, and there are usually relatively few skilled technicians. So it makes sense for them to concentrate on the highest-value repairs (the hinge in your snazzy new Mac instead of the hinge in your six-year-old Latitude). Also, there are many cases where it’s more economically efficient just to buy something new – do you repair your ’78 Crown Vic or do you buy a used Corolla which will probably give you much better gas mileage, thus paying for itself very quickly?

One wonderful thing about do-it-yourself, as a movement, is that it is a powerful way of creating more skilled technicians, lowering the cost of a repair. Also, because it’s fun, you’re realizing value that is difficult to capture in an economic analysis – conservation, thrift, self-reliance, and, if you’re doing a project with other people, community and social interaction. In this case, the repair was easily justified by the value of my time (low), and this is true in many other cases, too. But these reasons are why do-it-yourself is important culturally, not just from a purely monetary standpoint.

Building Kitify, my first modern web app (in Rails), Part 2

Filed under: Everything Else — Tags: , , , , , , — Justin Dunham on August 4, 2012

This entry is the second in a series about Kitify, a web app I built that was intended to let DIY project creators easily sell kits for their projects. You can see all the published entries by clicking here.

The first thing I did when starting to work on Kitify was (attempt to) validate the idea. There’s a lesson in this very process, which is that in retrospect I would have worked on Kitify no matter what the results had been, thus largely defeating the purpose of doing the experiments and surveys! Nevertheless, I’ll talk about what I did, and how, here.

Concept statement

The concept statement is a great tool that lets you succinctly , yet thoroughly, summarize a business idea, how much value it will create and for who, how much of that value you expect to keep and how, and why it will survive competition. The elements are (a) name, target customers, benefits, product form, and price, and (b) differentiating attributes and how they will be achieved, and (c) cost. Here’s the product statement for Kitify:

Kitify makes it easy and fun for do-it-yourself project creators to document, share and sell kits for their projects, via web-based “kit creation software” and a backend logistics network for selling complete kits when requested, at a price of 90% of kit revenue.

Kitify will be differentiated from Instructables, MakerShed and other kit sharing and selling sites by integrating project creation software with the business and operational capabilities necessary to sell products.

This will be achieved through modern web development frameworks that allow complex web applications to be built reliably and quickly, and backend software built to make pass-through ordering and processing quick for Kitify.

The approximate cost to deliver the kit-packaging service will be half of kit revenue, and a relatively small amount per month for providing the kit creation software.

Surveys and primary research

After informally talking about the idea with some friends, and also getting some feedback based on an informal video describing the idea, I ran some surveys on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Mechanical Turk is great for this – it’s cheap, it lets you build surveys quickly, and a reasonably broad segment of the American population is available for surveying. (Note that while this is true in general, the Mechanical Turk respondent population is skewed toward lower-income participants, which means that while you can get some participants from most demographic segments, you’ll need to pay extra to run enough surveys such that they participate.)

I ran a few surveys, mostly concentrating on how much markup people would expect over the parts cost of a kit, and what sorts of problems they faced in building projects in the first place. I also asked a lot of questions about do-it-yourself habits. One of the problems with the Kitify idea in general is that a lot of people who are interested in doing do-it-yourself projects are doing it to save money – which Kitify’s business model doesn’t help with.

Of those respondents who had completed do-it-yourself projects, about 70%, home improvement and construction projects were the most popular. These would also be the hardest for Kitify to deal with, unless we teamed up with Home Depot or some other large retailer that could take care of the shipping and logistics for us (potentially an interesting future idea).

I asked a lot of questions about specific experiences with projects, as well. One of the things I was most interested in was why people did do-it-yourself projects, and what problems they were facing. These would be important in figuring out whether there was a problem for Kitify to solve. I phrased these questions as assessments of respondents’ agreement or disagreement with particular statements. For example, I might ask whether participants did DIY projects to save money, or whether they did them for fun.

A chart showing the various problems people have had with do-it-yourself projects.

Here’s a summary, but interestingly, most participants did experience problems or worry about completing projects, but tended to complete them anyway. Participants did not seem to have problems actually tracking down parts, also. You can also view the full survey results, and download them, here.

Pitch decks

Since I happened to be taking an entrepreneurship class at the time I was developing Kitify, and since I ended up raising a (very small) amount of seed funding, I ended up writing a couple of pitch decks as well. The video here is my one-minute pitch presentation, which I used to assess initial interest in the idea.

There’s a lot of advice on writing pitch decks on Google and the various hacker blogs, so I won’t reiterate any of that here. I ended up focusing on the basics of the idea: the size of the market, why and how much customers would be willing to pay, and how we’d expect it to work. I’m good at presenting ideas and convincing people, so this was a fun exercise, though not at all helpful from the perspective of launching the business. I think the most amusing part was coming up with a set of financial projections.

A flight deck with a million gauges

Filed under: Everything Else — Tags: , , — Justin Dunham on

A VC10 cockpit, from Wikipedia user L-Bit. (Click to go to image page.)

I think a lot about numbers:

  • I have a fairly quantitative professional (and graduate education) background, including a stint in finance and a few years at a refreshingly quantitative nonprofit
  • I cook, which requires a lot of attention to measurement, time, temperature, conversions, and adjustments
  • I exercise with specific quantitative goals in mind (intervals, speeds, distances, reps)

It’s easy and sometimes very satisfying to track lots and lots these numbers, and enter them into a spreadsheet and then perform various calculations on them; the Quantified Self movement is a good example of this in practice, outside the green-eyeshade world. Tracking data and thinking about it is a prerequisite for success in a lot of different areas, in personal and professional life.

The operational level of data-gathering is performing experiments, which today I mostly hear about in the context of the website-improving tests that companies like Facebook and Google run. “If we change the text on this button, how many more people will click it?” That sort of thing.

More dramatically, I think, the Green Revolution is a major reason why the planet is able to support as many people as it can, and the massive agricultural productivity improvements it entailed came via data-gathering and experiments. In general, the whole idea of scientific progress is underpinned by the idea that we do tests that yield measurable evidence, i.e. that we can gather and compare data from a lot of simulations.

One area that I think is really difficult to deal with, though, is what data actually matters – what numbers, what measurable statistics, actually correspond with the results we want? There are a few problems here:

1) Data doesn’t tell us anything about what goals to pick in the first place.

  • If you’re a business, do you test with the aim of maximizing revenue or profit?
  • If you participate in quantified self, are things you’re measuring and maximizing actually contributing to your quality of life?

2) Achievement of your goals might end up being difficult or impossible to measure, so you have to judge what measurable evidence acts as the best substitute.

  • “Family and friends” are important to me; do I measure that in minutes spent, or quality of those minutes, or some other measure like the amount I (subjectively) contribute to their lives? The self-reported strength of the emotional connection? Does the very measurement of these goals interfere with achieving them? Does it change?
  • Even in a business context, I find that things like filling out a timecard significantly detract from my enjoyment of the job, though I really like measuring my impact.

3) We may be constrained in the types or amount of data we can actually gather.

  • I work out a fair amount, and I probably should measure things like the level of various nutrients and hormones in my bloodstream in order to assess the success of a workout. Instead, I do it by minutes run or pounds lifted, how sore I feel the next day, and how I think I look in the mirror, which perception in turn is heavily influenced by the workout itself (since I’m usually in a very good mood after going to the gym).
  • You want more people to sign up for your newsletter because you know the newsletter is an important tool for generating sales leads. But if your customers are other companies, you may not know the success of those efforts until a year, or more, later. But you can’t wait a year to make changes to your strategy.

So I think there’s much more of a need for what maybe I’d call analytics strategy. Analytics strategy is not finding stuff to measure, or implementing measurement tools, or making sure the tools work correctly. It’s answering more of the questions I asked in the list above, about what to measure and how it connects with your goals, and maybe even what those goals are.

It also probably involves the decision process for figuring out how to link measurable data with goals (since there are often lots of different things you can use as a proxy for the results you’re trying to achieve, each of which has its own tradeoffs). Maybe “analytics strategy” could even involve a process for evaluating how well analytics are working (meta-analytics). Lastly, I think there’s a part of this which is your experiments strategy. In most cases, you are constrained in how many experiments you can run, sometimes heavily. How do you determine which experiments to prioritize?

Another way to think about this might be: you’re flying a plane with a million gauges. Which ones should you read, what do they mean, and how do you use them to get where you’re going faster?

Creative Commons License
.