Features

• whole-page screenshot, not just the visible area
• using latest Chrome versions, it screenshots also Flash content
• real one-click screenshot, the easiest extension possible
• fast drag’n'drop or right click to save the image in PNG
• the screenshot is saved with page name, date and time

How to use it

The extension is published as Blipshot on the official Google Chrome Extension website. Just go there and click on the big “Install” button.

To use it:

1. Click on the Blipshot icon in the toolbar: the screenshot will be done straight away, no options, no delays.
2. The screenshot will appear on the right side of the website you’re on: from that you can just drag’n'drop it on your computer or right click if you prefer.

It couldn’t be as simple as this! :)
To dismiss the screenshot just click on any dimmed area.

Development

I was thinking since a long time ago an app to take screenshot and map website hierarchies in order to ease benchmarks and simple image archival. So I decided to try doing it in Chrome since its javascript Extension API looked very nice to me.
Unfortunately I hit a few walls due to the limitations of the browser sandbox and so even if I think it’s still probably something that I will be able to do, I changed my plans because it would have been be too time consuming.

But to not throw away any work done, I’ve re-packaged it in a simple extension, because all the current ones in the Extension Gallery are able or just to screenshot the visible area or they are too complex with annotations and such. With Blipshot, I tried to be as straightforward as possible: just one click.

Unfortunately again, while making screenshot was really easy, making whole-page screenshot was a bit harder due to limitations in the screenshot API (chrome.tabs.captureVisibleTab) and so the internals of this seemingly simple extension are quite complex due to all the workarounds I had to make (mostly, a ping-pong between the extension sandbox to do the work and the page sandbox to get the screenshot and move the page).

The source code is published on Github under an opensource BSD license.

Known issues: waiting for Google

Even with my workarounds, even with this simple extension I hit two bugs that avoid a perfect experience:

1. Chrome doesn’t handle URL images bigger than 2Mb.
2. Chrome have a bug for PNGs under Windows (the fonts are missing).

Both those issues seems to be fixed in the current nightly versions, so they should land on the next Chrome update, probably the 6.0 release.

So, for now, it’s limited to Mac OS X and Linux and 2Mb screenshots.

Changelog

1.0.2 — First public release.

In a 1981 paper published in the American Economics Review, the economist Sherwin Rosen worked through the mathematics that explains why superstars, like Pavarotti, reap so many more rewards than peers who are only slightly less talented. He called the phenomenon, “The Superstar Effect.”

Though the details of Rosen’s formulas are complex, the intuition is simple: imagine a million opera fans who each have $10 to spend on an opera album. They’re trying to decide whether to buy an album by Florez or Pavarotti. Rosen’s theory predicts that the bulk of the consumers will purchase the Pavarotti album, thinking, roughly: “although both singers are great, Pavarotti is the best, and if I can only get one album I might as well get the best one available.” The result is that the vast majority of the $10 million goes to Pavarotti, even though his talent advantage over Florez is small.

— Cal Newport (2010) “From CEOs to Opera Singers – How to Harness the Superstar Effect”

The Superstar Effect once explained is simple to get, but of course hard to do: it’s hard to get at the top and to compete to be the superstar.

But the article is also about “hacking” the Superstar Effect. In fact, Cal adds a corollary:

The Superstar Corollary
Being the best in a field makes you disproportionately impressive to the outside world. This effect holds even if the field is not crowded, competitive, or well-known.

The concept might seem strange but again it’s quite obvious to understand. However I’ve got an issue about this.
It doesn’t make things simpler.

Even if we are going to assume that it’s completely true, it’s still quite hard to be such a person. In some ways, it’s even harder than being the first of the class, because the first of the class needs just to “follow the orders”, while to be the first in your field you have to build your own path.
And that’s a talent by itself, exactly like being the best at something.

But still, if you consider the suggestion in a smaller, daily dimension, it can be inspiring. Cal adds that to facilitate your effort you should:

1. Sloganize: the field you want to conquest must be precise and easy to explain (communication and focus).
2. Apply the 1000$ wager test: check if you’re willing to bet 1000$ about being able of succeeding in 6 to 12 months. If not, then you aren’t maybe ready and you have to build up a bit more before trying.
3. Negations diligence: instead of hard-work doing one thing, try just not doing other things.

The part about sloganize reminds me the theory of social representations by Moscovici and a core step to create an efficient communication of what you’re doing – because without communication power you won’t be a superstar: unfortunately the point is that talent alone isn’t enough.

Caffeine actually binds to those receptors in efficient fashion, but doesn’t activate them—they’re plugged up by caffeine’s unique shape and chemical makeup. With those receptors blocked, the brain’s own stimulants, dopamine and glutamate, can do their work more freely [...]
In the book, Braun ultimately likens caffeine’s powers to “putting a block of wood under one of the brain’s primary brake pedals.”

— Kevin Purdy (2010) “What Caffeine Actually Does to Your Brain” (and updates)

This is an interesting post about the effects of caffeine on the body, citing the book “Buzz” by Stephen R. Braun, with some correction and updates in the comments.

A few useful details about caffeine:

1. Caffeine doesn’t accelerate anything, instead it avoids the brain to go sleepy.
2. It helps keeping the speed, not the accuracy: “think speed, not power”.
3. The body becomes tolerant to the daily dose of caffeine, regardless of quantity, in 7 to 12 days.
4. Caffeine withdrawal happens after 12 to 24 hours (it coincides with the next morning coffee).
5. Caffeine withdrawal symptoms could be: headaches, depression, fatigue, lethargy, irritability, nausea.
6. The body restores from the withdrawal in around 10 days.

(hat tip to Mark for the link)

The basic rules are:

1. Have all the styles inline.
2. Have a graceful text-only fallback: think always how the text will appear without any CSS or markup.

Safe CSS properties

Full support by: Outlook 2003-2010, Windows Mail, Apple Mail, Entourage 2004-2008, Thunderbird 2, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo Classic, Google Mail, MobileMe, iPhone, Android, Palm.
Note: items market with * are supported by almost all clients with the specified exception (boundary “safe”).

• background-color
• border
• color
• clear — *Outlook 2007/2010
• display — *Outlook 2007/2010
• float — *Outlook 2007/2010, Android
• font
• font-family
• font-style
• font-variant
• font-size
• font-weight
• letter-spacing
• line-height
• margin — *Hotmail
• padding
• table-layout
• text-align
• text-decoration
• text-indent
• text-transform
• width — *Outlook 2007/2010
• word-spacing — *Outlook 2007/2010

Enhance-only CSS properties

Styles unsupported by many clients but that could allow a look enhancement when used on the enabled clients without modifying the layout.

• background-image
• border-radius, -webkit-border-radius, -moz-border-radius (add all of them)
• opacity
• text-shadow

How to make CSS email signatures in Apple Mail

Each client might or might not allow you to add email signatures styled with HTML and CSS. On Apple Mail you can, but you need to follow a few steps.

1. Create your signature in a single HTML file without body and head.
2. Open the HTML in Safari and save it as a Web Archive (File -> Save as… -> Format: Web Archive).
3. In Apple Mail: Mail -> Preferences -> Signatures and create a new one clicking on “+”.
4. Close Apple Mail.
5. Open the folder: ~/Library/Mail/Signatures (it’s under your account).
6. Locate the .webarchive file you just created (it’s probably the one with the latest modification date).
7. Replace the .webarchive file with your .webarchive exported signature.
8. Open Apple Mail and test the signature.

The road to a good signature

There’s a strong opinion that emails should be “text only”. I disagree, but still I think that when you add some styling to your emails you should think very well before doing it and also you should consider what happens when it’s going to be displayed as text-only. To check this you can just send an email to yourself in Apple Mail and then open it using View -> Message -> RAW Source.
Consider also that I’m not talking about newsletters: for those you should use a tool like MailChimp.

Designing a good email signature is even harder, because it shouldn’t be intrusive but it should still convey in some ways the personality of the author or the company.
While it seems obvious, the important part of the email is the body, not the signature. Yet, you often see email with signatures going from 2x to 10x the length of the email content (and no, the legal disclaimer isn’t enforceable, drop it!).

Also, different signatures needs to convey different contents:

• A business signature requires name, surname, company name, a link to the company website, maybe the role and the phone number. A great idea would be a link to the author’s profile on the company website, where you could add all the details that you need to without creating huge signatures (and it’s also more flexible).
• A personal signature probably doesn’t have any requirement, but it’s nice if it contains at least the name and maybe some kind of characterisation of the person.

Some tips:

1. Keep the font size on par with the body, or smaller. Think three times before increasing the font size: it could become ugly really fast.
2. Images shouldn’t be embedded, use CSS but remember that not every client will see them.
3. The ideal number of lines should be around 2, with a good balance for business signatures around 5. More than that should be always avoided.
4. The signature should be noticeable, so I can find it immediately when I need it, and I can ignore it when I’m just reading the text, but not too much, since it’s not the important part of the email.
5. You can use characters in the signature to improve it without adding images, but remember that non-ASCII ones could be visualised in strange ways, so check them before use.

Examples

I’m sure there are a lot of ways to create stunning signatures within those CSS limits. This is a small and simple showcase of what you can do to express your unique identity.

If you’d like to send me an email with your amazing CSS signature, I’ll gladly add it here. ;)

While others sat in class and doodled to later become great artists, I sat in class to take notes and become a great test-taker.
While others would come to class without their homework done because they were reading about an interest of theirs, I never missed an assignment.
While others were creating music and writing lyrics, I decided to do extra credit, even though I never needed it.

So, I wonder, why did I even want this position?
Sure, I earned it, but what will come of it?
When I leave educational institutionalism, will I be successful or forever lost?

I have no clue about what I want to do with my life; I have no interests because I saw every subject of study as work, and I excelled at every subject just for the purpose of excelling, not learning.
And quite frankly, now I’m scared.

— Erica Goldson (2010) “Valedictorian Speaks Out Against Schooling in Graduation Speech”

This is an interesting talk about the current USA’s education system (but it’s valid also for Italy, sadly), and it curiously matches pretty well many parts of “Solitude and leadership” (William Deresiewicz).

I agree.
I couldn’t agree more.

I lived all my school years trying to get the maximum “for me” while doing just what was necessary to get the grades. Some teachers understood this, and that made me happy and motivated. But often this system made me angry, because “you’re asking me to do something completely pointless”. In the end, I was lucky enough to probably win on all the fronts (human, professional and for that final sheet of paper).

Erica in her talk explained the problem that troubled me too with a great clarity. A must read.

The designer doesn’t have a style,
he doesn’t have a personal style.
He shouldn’t have a personal style.
I humbly suggest that a designer shouldn’t have a personal style.

Because he gives a style to a product.

— Bruno Munari (1992) University lesson in Venice, italian language

This is something really difficult to do, because it means putting aside one’s own ideas and use instead the best style possible for that project, even if it’s different.

The shortcoming of operating with a style is that the object, the manifest, the announcement made with a style recalls the author but not the product.

The problem is that often a designer is chosen also for his or her style. That’s the first thing that the client will see. And if the client loves a designer and wants him or her, it’s also for his or her style. While of course it’s impossible to avoid one own’s style completely, it should be the aim of any designer working with a specific product.

Bruno Munari was a great designer, one of the rare 360° designers, and I think today he’s mostly neglected. He’s greatness wasn’t just expressed in his stunning ideas and works, but also in his design teachings for children. Dig deeper, you’ll find a lot of surprises.

But wait…a trend in design where the subject is “reduced to its necessary elements”? As opposed to a design where unnecessary elements are added or kept? Isn’t the removal of the unnecessary a definition of what “good” design is? Design is communication. Design is what allows us to interact with our products and make them work. Good design makes this interaction easy. Naturally, good design also tends to simplify, unclutter and organize.

I can see how minimalism can have a clear meaning in art, where the artist is free to create their own rules and ideas. Minimalism is a style that can be characterized by that use of simple, basic forms and white space. But when we apply this term to everyday design, the term begins to lose meaning. Clear, clean and simple design isn’t minimalist. It’s just good, clear design.

Simplicity isn’t a design trend, it’s an attribute of good design.

— Dmitry Fadeyev (2010) “It isn’t Minimalism”

Dmitry’s point is correct, but I think it doesn’t apply to “design” intended in the overall, complex, sense of the term. I think that you’re talking of a narrow, mechanical definition of design.

I’ll play a bit with an example:

• Why the XBox and the Wii are so different?
• Why the iPod (MP3, not Touch) and the Creative Zen are so different?

They do the same things, so why?

The main reason is that XBox and Creative Zen were designed with a few ideas in mind, it’s more complicated than this but I could summarise that they went for the “technology power“: the glowing parts, the “look at me I’m great” features, and all.

On the other side, the Wii and the iPod were designed with other ideas in mind, that could be summarised as minimalist.

As you can notice, there’s a huge difference between the final results of those objects. I will not argue here that it’s better or worse, that’s another discussion, but the difference is clear, I think.

Also, you said that “Clear, clean and simple design isn’t minimalist.”, and that’s absolutely true: you can make a clear, clean and simple design without being minimalist. But still, the reverse is true: minimalist design means also simplicity and clarity. It’s quite clear that they are two different dimensions.

Also, even if you’re “reducing to its essential elements”, you can still make a choice if you want to be minimalist, or not. It’s a matter of choice: it’s not rare to have in front of you different but similar in the result design choices. Ditching the minimalist choice doesn’t mean that you haven’t reduced to its essential elements.

We could grow this conversation a lot, for example we could even go deeper asking “what are the essential elements?”. Because I can consider just the functionalities, as it seems you’re implying, or you can consider also the perception of the user. Simplifying the functionalities *and* the perceptions are two different processes: I can reduce functions, in order to create faster, simpler flows, or I can take any set of function and reduce the perception of them. Those are two different processes.

“Design” should and must be a multi-factorial approach, with different disciplines converging (i.e. visual design, user experience design, industrial design, psychology, social psychology, etc.) and to do a good design you have to choose, consciously or unconsciously, a direction for each one of them. “Minimalist” is one of those choices. :)

What’s the main difference between successful Google applications (search, maps, news, email) and a successful social applications? With Google applications we return to the app to do something specific and then go on to something else, whereas great social applications are designed to lure us back and make us never want to leave.

— Adam Rifkin (2010) “Pandas and Lobsters: Why Google Cannot Build Social Applications…”

Rifkin in this article does a really nice analysis of the online social network barons using some animal metaphors.
With those fluffy words, it does an interesting thing: it shows how all those social networks are filled with “tricks” able to leverage our motivations and the most ancient parts of our brain. It’s almost a subtle action-reaction game, and Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Foursquare and all the other players are using them really well.

What’s scary for me is that while Rifkin shows a lot of dirty tricks — at the point of suggesting that Google should use them — he’s completely ignoring what does those things mean!

Why people play Farmville, for example?

The secret to Farmville’s popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness. We play Farmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people.

— A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz (2010) “Cultivated Play: Farmville”

Ouch.

Our brains are usually wired in a certain way and we can easily use that wiring to induce some kind of actions. Statistically, it works. But:

• It can be used for good, helping us to perform tasks, to learn, to improve ourselves, to improve our character, to make our relationships better, to grow.
• It can be used for bad, deceiving us to buy a product, to spend some more time somewhere, to think something else, to try a new drug.

Knowing this, we could try to avoid them, exactly like we are able to ignore commercials or to develop our banner blindness. But since our brain is wired that way, we have to make a continuous conscious decision to avoid those tricks.

This is why that article troubles me: it shows almost everything, and never, ever, he stops for a second thinking about the ethical implications of those choices to build a social network.

From the strict perspective of Rifkin’s article, I would say: hooray Google. You keep trying not being evil, at the cost of ignoring the evil power of those tricks and trying instead to use them in a good way. Buying social companies and integrating them in a useful way instead of keeping the social rat running, for example, could show some more light on some companies acquired and disappeared. Please, continue this way if this is the reason.

What you can do

Since those tricks are designed to make use of how you brain is wired, you have to make a continuous conscious effort to avoid being caught.

More pragmatically, you have to pay a lot of attention because they are everywhere and they are designed to steal the most precious thing you have: your time.

…and consequently your money and your health.

How could you see the difference between a good use and a bad use? It’s hard and easy at the same time: check if the sociality is forwarded to an objective.
And note that even strictly social activities are objectives: keeping in touch with friends is good, by itself: it’s good when you “open Facebook to talk with your friends” (the service helps you) instead of “checking Facebook” (the service itself is the subject). It’s good when you are sending a tweet to your friends to tell them that it was a bad day but now it’s okay (service helps), instead of retweeting the last lolcat (again, the service itself is the end).

When you think about it, the difference isn’t even so subtle between the two: are you using a social network for sociality, or are you using a social network… to use the social network?

The medal has always two sides

All of this doesn’t mean that those are all bad tricks.
All of this doesn’t mean that you can’t make a good use of those social networks.

I’m not saying that the tricks – or better wording: cognitive and attention hooks – are bad. They are neutral.

But you can use them to an end. And that defines if  you’re stealing the life of your users, or if you’re helping them.

It scares me thinking that not many people in my industry are thinking about the ethics of their companies and design choices. Shouldn’t we consider it a bit more?

Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running things—the leaders—are the mediocrities? Because excellence isn’t usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering. Kissing up to the people above you, kicking down to the people below you. Pleasing your teachers, pleasing your superiors, picking a powerful mentor and riding his coattails until it’s time to stab him in the back. Jumping through hoops. Getting along by going along.

— William Deresiewicz (2010) Solitude and Leadership

Marvelous. A must read.

But let’s go on, there are more interesting parts:

We have a crisis of leadership in America because our overwhelming power and wealth, earned under earlier generations of leaders, made us complacent, and for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them.

I would add a detail here: setting goals is one of the most important things, all around. It’s a matter of making our own life better. Setting goals is a skill, of course, can be trained. But it’s also an instrument for our happiness.

The other side of this medal is that you can see clearly why those kinds of hierarchies and midsets creates discomfort: the people going up the hierarchies are harming their peers to move up, and they are being told how to do instead of thinking and making choices for their own day.

No wonder those places are the hive of frustration.

And then the central passage:

No, what makes him a thinker—and a leader—is precisely that he is able to think things through for himself. And because he can, he has the confidence, the courage, to argue for his ideas even when they aren’t popular. Even when they don’t please his superiors. Courage: there is physical courage, which you all possess in abundance, and then there is another kind of courage, moral courage, the courage to stand up for what you believe.

Great definition, I agree. I don’t know if it’s exhaustive, but it’s good enough. I would even add: and turning it to reality.

Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.

Then he cites an interesting study (Nass et al, 2010, Cognitive control in media multitaskers) made by Stanford and published in july. I’m not sure if today we are measuring the multitaskers in a correct way, so I’m not sure if the results will hold the test of time. I don’t think that multitasking and monotasking skills are exclusive, at this time. But even considering this, the objection holds: the ability to be concentrated – monotasking – is a great skill to have.

It seems to me that Facebook and Twitter and YouTube—and just so you don’t think this is a generational thing, TV and radio and magazines and even newspapers, too—are all ultimately just an elaborate excuse to run away from yourself.

Another detail that I think it’s worth for one’s life, and not just about for the ones that are pursuing real leadership. I see every day this problem in myself and in many, many people around me. You tell yourself “just 5 minutes of TV” or “I’ll just read the latest updates from Friendfeed” and bang. Your focus is blown away, a storm of thoughts comes in.

Sometimes it’s worthy. Sometimes… not.

And then, he shows a little more depth in the extreme simplification of ‘solitude’ adding a great exception:

So solitude can mean introspection, it can mean the concentration of focused work, and it can mean sustained reading. All of these help you to know yourself better. But there’s one more thing I’m going to include as a form of solitude, and it will seem counterintuitive: friendship. Of course friendship is the opposite of solitude; it means being with other people. But I’m talking about one kind of friendship in particular, the deep friendship of intimate conversation. Long, uninterrupted talk with one other person.

I’ve experienced this kind of action in a deep friendship, it’s something that adds a great value to the results of a solitude thinking, but I think that it’s not a substitute for solitude thinking by itself. It’s a great integration.

It’s a great lecture, indeed.

Setting goals.

Concentrating thought.

We need to find a balance.
And it’s not just balance for balance’s sake. It’s the fundamental value in thinking about how much of anything is good for me.

Apparel design is too utilitarian to qualify to copyright protection.
[...]
Because there’s no copyright protection in the fashion industry there’s a very open and creative ecology of creativity.

— Johanna Blakley (2010) “Lessons from fashion’s free culture” at TED

Fashion world don’t have any copyright protection, because “apparel is an utility”. There’s just trademark protection.

I didn’t know this, but to me this is really interesting and impressive by itself because it means that while some industries are trying to enforce strict laws… others are thriving exactly thanks to the same things the other industry wants to deny!

Tom Ford: And we found after much research that, actually not much research, quite simple research, that the counterfeit customer was not our customer.

Johanna Blakley: Imagine that. The people on Santee Alley are not the ones who shop at Gucci. (laughter)

Also, very interesting thing about jazz:

And that actually reminded me of jazz great, Charlie Parker. I don’t know if you’ve heard this anecdote, but I have. He said that one of the reasons he invented bebop was that he was pretty sure that white musicians wouldn’t be able to replicate the sound. He wanted to make it too difficult to copy.

But that would be just a few nice words… where’s the money? Well. First of all, here a few industries without copyright protection:

1. Recipes
2. Automobiles
3. Furniture
4. Magic tricks (no wonder they’re so secretive!)
5. Hairdos
6. Tattoos (“It’s not cool”)
7. Jokes
8. Fireworks
9. Rules of games
10. Smell of perfumes

And then the money: this is a screenshot from that video.

The text is small, but it just says that le left bars have low IP (intellectual property) protection, while the right ones (music, books, films, etc) have hight IP protection.

Oops!

Even if maybe that isn’t the only factor playing in those sales, the whole Johanna Blakley video is still making a few strong points. Watch it.

Thanks to Lawrence Oluyede and Sara Lando (in italian).

This kind of solution was great in a less wired world, and is still great for a lot of people. But what if we were able to find a design that could leverage different emotional responses such as satisfaction, instead of anxiety?

For example, I might borrow some design ideas from my friend Federico and think a bit about game design. In detail, what if we will use the basic logic of prizes instead of warnings? Think about powerups, levels and badges – Foursquare or Gowalla badges.

What if Mail could be able to award me a trophy for each Inbox Zero?
Or another one if I’m able to avoid checking the email for around 30 minutes – the time of a Pomodoro?
Or another one if I’m able to check the email just once a day for 5 days?
Or again the shamed email bankruptcy badge!

With this simple design solution, wouldn’t we have a good motivation to pursue a better way to manage our time, without any alarmism, without anxiety? Maybe, it could help to live a bit better just by changing the way we are motivated to check our mails.

Maybe it is a Wild West free-for-all. What a fucking mess.

— Gruber, “Jon Lech Johansen: ‘Google’s Mismanagement of the Android Market’”

Google’s answer to a closed and protected Apples App Store is an open and unprotected Android App Store.

From my point of view, that’s the wrong answer. And I think in some ways it’s not even very Google-y.

What I expected from Google was:

• A managed store, exactly like the Apple App Store
• An unmanaged and simple way to add apps to my Android device
• A common developer API to handle payments and setup

In this way, you’ll have the best of both worlds and you allow even third parties to build their store… but with your API. And Google could even add an extension to its search engine to search for apps and directly install them.

The workshop on Social Usability is designed for an audience ranging from 10 to 30 people and it lasts for about two hours, while the discussion part usually goes on a little more, informally, so probably the best timeframe is 3 hours, as it is now.

The workshop is splitted in 4 different parts:

1. Social Usability (20′): theory, checklist and method
2. Analysis (45′): group work and discussion
3. Design (50′): individual work, pair testing and discussion
4. Wrap up (5′): closing remarks

I’m usually stunned by the results of this workshop, because interesting ideas, solutions appear so often and also interesting discussions will arise. During Frontiers of Interaction I’ve seen at least two great ideas that alone could make an interesting service (if not business!) and a few other that merged together could make some interesting tool. Sorry, but I can’t say which ideas they are. ;)

As a sidenote on the workshop: I find interesting when imprecisions in my slides or in my speech are able to trigger interesting questions and debates. I wonder if I should build workshops deliberately missing a few pieces of the puzzle. :)

What matters far more is the intensity of sensation, whether it’s excitement or pain or contentment. And it’s not the overall average of the experience that people remember, but how they felt at the most intense moments, combined with how they felt right as the experience ended. Psychologists call this the “peak-end rule.

— Drake Bennett (2010) The Best Vacation Ever

In synthesis, I can extract from the article those points:

1. Intensity: what matters is the intensity of the sensation
2. Peak-end rule: the intensity peak is in relation to the intensity at the end
3. Short duration: more days doesn’t mean more enjoyment
4. Breaks: stopping the sensation and then resuming increases its perception
5. Variation: enjoyment also stems from avoiding routine and doing novel things

The article gives also some hints to researches that showed the validity of these results if you’re interested in.

1. Pull the rug out from under them. Tell them something so surprising that it overturns their schema of how things work.
2. Create a mystery. The Heaths tell the story of a professor named Robert Cialdini, who studied popular science books and analyzed the way they engaged their audience. He found books that presented the scientific question as a mystery to be very effective. Cialdini started applying what he learned to his teaching – presenting a mystery at the beginning of each class and revealing the answer at the end. This approach was so successful that when he ran overtime, students refused to leave until he revealed the answer.
3. Give your audience enough information to create a gap. “Gaps start with knowledge,” say the Heaths. Give enough context to make the audience care, and then present the question.

— Livia Blackburne (2010) “How to get (and keep) people’s attention”

It’s a fast reading, and she also hints for a book, Made To Stick. The post can easily be summarized with another sentence from it: “The easiest way to get attention is surprise.”.

It’s interesting in relation to my work both on presentations and on writing. I have surely a lot to learn about those topics.

Last week, we launched the ability to set an image of users’ choosing as the background for the Google homepage. Today, we ran a special “doodle” that showcased this functionality by featuring a series of images as the background for our homepage. We had planned to run an explanation of the showcase alongside it—in the form of a link on our homepage. Due to a bug, the explanatory link did not appear for most users. As a result, many people thought we had permanently changed our homepage, so we decided to stop today’s series early. We appreciate your feedback and patience as we experiment and iterate.

— “The art of a homepage”, Marissa Mayer, Google Blog

The post is dated July, 9. The update is dated June, 10. The uprising and the revert of the change lasted almost one day.

I think that there are two big issues:

1. The process: they could have rolled it out as every other Google product before it, with sample A/B testingand incremental updates.
2. The user comprehension: it seems they aren’t able to understand the users when it comes down to motivations, emotions, personal space, privacy.

It’s similar to the huge issue they had with Google Buzz, but at least there we should be able to argue that it was a malicious idea to get most of the people on it using the power of defaults and then tell the world it was “an error”.

I can’t imagine that there wasn’t a single person inside Google able to say “Hey, don’t force random images on the Google homepage, it will be a really bad intrusion in the user perception of us”.

The afternoon nap is something that hasn’t a really good reputation: it’s seen as something that you do when you’re old, it’s perceived as a symptom of weakness, maybe even related to something you eat at lunch, and on the work place it’s associated with slacking. But is it really bad?

Let’s see a few studies about this topic.

“A study of planned rest periods in long-haul flight operations demonstrated the effectiveness of in-flight naps to promote performance and alertness during subsequent critical phases of flight (descent and landing).”

— Rosekind, Smith, Miller, Co, Gregory, Webbon, Gander, Lebacqz (1995) Alertness management: strategic naps in operation

This is a study from the NASA Ames Research Center, 1995. They add some criterion to define when it’s good to plan a mid-flight nap (an identifiable benefit, opportunity, corporate culture, operational demands, safety) but they are all external consideration to the suggestion of having a nap.

We now report that sleep-dependent learning of a texture discrimination task can be accomplished in humans by brief (60− 90 min) naps containing both slow-wave sleep (SWS) and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. This nap-dependent learning closely resembled that previously reported for an 8-h night of sleep [...] and it was additive to subsequent sleep-dependent improvement, such that performance over 24 h showed as much learning as is normally seen after twice that length of time.
Thus, from the perspective of behavioral improvement, a nap is as good as a night of sleep for learning on this perceptual task.

— Mednick S., Nakayama K., Stickgold R. (2003) Sleep-dependent learning: a nap is as good as a night

Yes, it requires to have a deep sleep, with both slow-wave sleep and rapid eye movements, two phases that seems related to memories, but nonetheless with 60-90 minutes you get the equivalent learning sedimentation of an entire night of sleep. It’s interesting also that there’s almost no difference between 60 or 90 minutes.

Another study — Nishida M., Walker M. (2007) Daytime Naps, Motor Memory Consolidation and Regionally Specific Sleep Spindles — shows that a 60-90 nap is able to increase the consolidation of a morning motor-skill training, raising the speed of the learnt task by as much as 15% with no loss in accuracy.

Ok, but so how much sleep is required? Well, for some kind of improvement such as the learning task above you need SWS and REM, so it needs some time, but for other tasks?

A nap during the afternoon restores wakefulness and promotes performance and learning. Several investigators have shown that napping for as short as 10 min improves performance. Naps of less than 30 min duration confer several benefits, whereas longer naps are associated with a loss of productivity and sleep inertia. Recent epidemiological studies indicate that frequent and longer naps may lead to adverse long-term health effects.

— Rajiv, Harjyot (2006) Good sleep, bad sleep! The role of daytime naps in healthy adults

In this research a flag is raised: there could be adverse health effects from longer naps. However, reading the paper, it doesn’t seem evident a causation, but just a correlation: the facts are related, but we still don’t know in which order.

The sleep inertia issue is addressed by another research:

The 5-minute nap produced few benefits in comparison with the no-nap control. The 10-minute nap produced im- mediate improvements in all outcome measures (including sleep latency, subjective sleepiness, fatigue, vigor, and cognitive performance), with some of these benefits maintained for as long as 155 minutes. The 20-minute nap was associated with improvements emerging 35 minutes after napping and lasting up to 125 minutes after napping. The 30-minute nap produced a period of impaired alertness and performance immediately after napping, indicative of sleep inertia, followed by improvements lasting up to 155 minutes after the nap.

— Brooks A., Lack L. (2006) A Brief Afternoon Nap Following Nocturnal Sleep Restriction: Which Nap Duration is Most Recuperative?

So the sleep inertia appears with 30-minutes naps (or longer), but it’s a temporary period after which you gain the same improvements of the 10-minutes nap.

And how should we nap?

The post-lunch sleepiness is considered to be part of biological rhythm. [...] Measures of subjective sleepiness, mood, fatigue, and P300 component were taken before and after a 20 min nap. Results showed that sleepiness, fatigue, and mood for both nap-in-a-seat and nap-in-a-bed were improved after napping. Moreover, objective alertness was enhanced in nap-in-a-bed relative to nap-in-a-seat and no-nap, which showed the larger P300 amplitude after nap.

— Zhao D., Zhang Q., Fu M., Tang Y., Zhao Y. (2009) Effects of physical positions on sleep architectures and post-nap functions among habitual nappers

This research added to their tests also the analysis of the P300 brainwave, and discovered that the best position to nap is lying in a bed, while you can still get some improvements sleeping on your desk.

Some evidence in businesses

1. Google in Mountain View installed some special beds to allow power-napping, by Metronap. It’s interesting to see a solution like this one, that partially solve the silence requirement to make a healthy nap during work time (2010, via PSFK).
2. Le Gourmet’s CEO, Cynthia McKay, designed specific rooms to allow his chefs to nap. Many other companies are offering the “nap rooms” as a perk (2006, via Time).

Conclusions

So, all those researches are telling us that:

1. A 60 minutes nap with SWS and REM is equivalent for learning as a night of sleep.
2. A 60 minutes nap can increase your speed in a motor-skill task to up to 15%.
3. If you sleep more than 30 minutes give you some time to recover from sleep inertia.
4. A 10 minutes nap improves you performance for 2.5 hours.
5. It doesn’t matter how you sleep, but try to sleep laying in a bed or on a couch if possible.

All those suggestions will allow you to plan better study days and work days, however don’t take them as strict rules: even if we have a lot of confirmations that an afternoon nap works well, every person is different so you have to try it for yourself and check the effectiveness before using it.

How to nap with maximum efficiency

Before napping we should ask ourselves a simple and obvious question: is it possible for me to have a nap? If you’re in an office, the answer is probably no, but you still can find a way to have a small rest or suggesting your boss how much a nap would be valuable to improve the efficiency of the work.

Analysing those researches we could safely say that the best way to nap is:

1. Lay: lay in a bed or on a comfortable surface.
2. 10+2 minutes: set a timer to 12 minutes, in order to give you a few minutes to get asleep.
3. Up: get up right when the timer rings, don’t lay more than the required time.

I suggest also to avoid harsh timers to wake up, use gentle ones. I might suggest Pzizz because it’s designed to help also to getting asleep, but in the end just use what works for you, even a soundtrack can get the job done.

It’s not all about the leaders. It’s not all about those who take decisions. Well, on a second thought, it actually is. It’s all about decisions. Because to decide what to follow is a decision as well, isn’t it? That’s an act of will. They’re as heroic as the ones who started it all. They helped that start to grow and to last. Genius is to create something utterly new. Talent is to recognize it at first glance, and fall in love with it. This is what being a talented follower is all about: to recognize the new frontier of our times. Because once the frontier’s still far away, many see just a thin line. But the very few who see beyond the line are the mighty ones who go after it with passion and dedication. The frontier knows who they are. And now it has decided to give them something back and make them proud of being what they are: Frontier’s Fellows.

— Frontiers’ Fellows Manifesto

Amazing announcement from the Frontiers of Interaction staff.
I think that this announcement goes well beyond Frontiers itself. It’s an ideal.

As patients age, nursing homes risk that they will become disoriented and “escape” the nursing home. Often, they are trying to return to homes in which they lived previously, desperate that their children, partners, or even parents are worried and waiting for them.

When they catch the escapee in time, the patient is often extremely upset and an altercation ensues. If they don’t catch them in time, the patient often hops onto public transportation and is eventually discovered by police. [...]

An employee at the Benrath Senior Center came up with an alternative solution: a fake bus stop placed right outside of the front doors of the nursing home.

The fake bus stop does two wonderful things:
(1) The first thing a potential escapee does when they decide to “go home” is find a bus stop. So, patients who take off usually get no further than the first bus stop that they see. ”Where did Mrs. Schmidt go?” “Oh, she’s at the bus stop.” In practice, it worked tremendously. This meant that many disoriented patients no longer needed to be kept in locked wards.
(2) The bus stop diffuses the sense of panic. If a delusional patient decided that she needed to go home immediately because her children were all alone and waiting for her, the attendant didn’t need to restrain her or talk her out of it, she simply said, “Oh, well… there’s the bus stop.” The patient would go sit and wait. Knowing that she was on her way home, she would relax and, given her diminished cognition, she would eventually forget why she was there. A little while later the attendant could go out and ask her if she wanted to come in for tea. And she would say, “Ok.”.

— The Bus Stop by RadioLab (via Lisa Wade)

It’s an amazingly simple solution with an incredible result: the fake bus stop uses the natural behavior of those disoriented to obtain a win-win scenario.

The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today.
— On the iPad by Alex Payne

What’s missing today is HyperCard, or an equivalent tool that can be used to create a new wave of applications for the iPad
— The iPad needs its HyperCard by Dale Dougherty

Somehow I don’t think young Mr. Kaplan sees the iPad as hurting his sense of wonder or entrepreneurism.
— The Kids Are All Right by John Gruber

I think that the iPad is a new interaction platform. The iPhone introduced the interaction paradigm, but the platform here will be the iPad because it’s a more universal device, while the iPhone is more “just mobile”.
I do think that there’s a huge and interesting discussion that’s lying beyond the minutiae on the iPad as a technology. I call that “minutiae” because we shouldn’t just be looking at the physical thing, but at the reason why that thing exist. The computer exists to do things better, faster and easier. They exist to improve our lives. Do I really need ‘files’ to do that? Do I really need ‘windows’ to do that? No, I don’t think so.

The discussion above, threading on the web isn’t about the thing, it’s about culture, education and innovation.

I think that Alex Payne and Mark Pilgrim are rightfully worried because the iPad isn’t at this time what I call a ‘recursive platform‘: you can’t build for the iPad on the iPad. It’s exactly like the Microsoft Xbox, the Sony Playstations, the Nintendo DS, the Wii, any mobile phone or smartphone, etc, but unlike the PC industry.

But do we need recursive development tools anymore? I think that John Gruber could be right: today we have a powerful sharing and communication channel and with the free web development tools and a downloadable SDK you can do anything for the iPad.

But all this is now: in the future Apple could do many things, from opening completely the store to making development tools for the iPad. There’s technically nothing blocking Apple to do so, just economic, political and strategic reasons.

And of course there’s also ground for a ‘Hypercard for iPad’. Maybe able to build apps in HTML5, who knows. ;)