Category: Products and Design

Categories
Audience as Capital Discovery and Curation Making Money Online Products and Design Startups

Rewarding affinity, not transactions

We’ve discussed before the increasing population of what I call CoCoCo – content → community → commerce, and what’s also been termed Linear Commerce.

Infinite reach, micro-brands and linear commerce – Part 1

Now, a recent Harvard Business Review article touches on this in the context of loyalty programs: “Want More Loyal Customers? Offer a Community, Not Rewards“

True loyalty is emotional and irrational and leads to customers feeling like they’re part of an exclusive membership group which then leads them to become loyal subscribers or consumer network participants.

as opposed to

some companies allow you to earn points for following them or writing a product review. This sort of bribery usually attracts the least loyal and least valuable audience — people mostly interested in claiming the reward not invested in the brand… [things like this] have more to do with an economic transaction than with true affinity for a brand.

I have been part of great communities, and they are everything that the first quote talks about. I’ve also seen such communities decline as the company behind the brand failed to convert this loyalty into commercial success. And I’ve seen referral rewards dressed up as loyalty programmes that ultimately attracted the sort of people the second quote describes.

At its core, the most influential customer-facing person at a brand need to be genuinely interested in engaging with customers and understanding what they want, in the context of the brand. Creating products and solutions does not automatically beget a community.

Categories
Making Money Online Products and Design Startups

No-code gives founders superpowers

I’m working with a few founders, mostly first-timers, who are going about building the initial experience for their very first customers in an interesting way. Two short tweets:

When it comes to raising capital, being able to demonstrate traction with a few hundred or a few thousand customers quickly is extremely valuable. Ditto when hiring a team or even a technical co-founder.

When it comes to actually going ‘live’, the founder leapfrogs the usual build phase → market phase transition. The founder is both building and marketing simultaneously. It’s a much quicker road to product-market fit.

Finally, when it comes to the actual tech that the founder’s using, a no-code set of tools is typically built by startups building for other small startups. They’re well-thought-out: they make it easy to build visually compelling, data-heavy pages (Notion), they make it easy to ‘glue’ together disparate elements (Zapier, IFTTT), they make it easy to build and engage with an audience (Convertkit), they even make it easy to collect money from that audience (Gumroad, Memberful) – all are things that would otherwise require complicated signup forms, KYC, licensing/commitments, and complicated technical integration.

This tweet captures this dynamic well:

Categories
Products and Design The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Stress and pressure

In my opinion, this is mostly true. In fact, acknowledging this distinction reveals something important:

The distraction and attention suck that’s skillfully designed into social media, games and other apps is hard to shake because it blurs the line between pressure and stress.

On the surface, this addiction seems to be in our control – we got into it, it’s self-inflicted. Most advice advocates deleting apps, turning off notifications, locking our devices away temporarily, setting our screens to black-and-white, turning off 4G, deliberately downgrading our phone – actions that we’re supposed to take and then maintain. Any subsequent failure is personal because the original responsibility was ostensibly ours, and therefore there’s deserved pressure to stick to our de-addiction goal.

But it isn’t really like that is it? Social media and notification addition cause stress that is inflicted upon us by apps, apps that have been designed by companies with enormous resources and incentives to keep us engaged for as long as possible. The battle is unequal and the onus should be as much on these apps to encourage good, healthy behaviour as it is on you and me to reduce screen time.

Categories
Life Design Making Money Online Products and Design Wellness when Always-On

The Precariat and today’s tech age

The precariat is a neologism for a social class formed by people suffering from precarity, which means existing without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare. The term is a portmanteau merging precarious with proletariat.

Unlike the proletariat class of industrial workers in the 20th century who lacked their own means of production and hence sold their labour to live, members of the precariat are only partially involved in labour and must undertake extensive unremunerated activities that are essential if they are to retain access to jobs and to decent earnings. Classic examples of such unpaid activities include continually having to search for work (including preparing for and attending job interviews), as well as being expected to be perpetually responsive to calls for “gig” work (yet without being paid an actual wage for being “on call”).

The hallmark of the precariat class is the condition of lack of job security, including intermittent employment or underemployment and the resultant precarious existence.

– Precariat, Wikipedia.

We usually ascribe the ability of technology-first companies to disrupt existing industries to the fact that tech brings the marginal costs to service customers down to nearly zero. Tech-first companies can ‘scale’, get things done more efficiently: cheaper, faster, with fewer errors and people.

Another, darker side of many types of technology companies is that they externalise costs that were usually absorbed by more traditional companies.

These costs are often borne by employees themselves. This is more obvious in the ‘gig’ economy, where companies have fought hard to have their drivers, delivery persons and other roles classified as contractors so they wouldn’t be required by law to receive all the benefits employees were due. But this is also evident at several other tech companies, especially those that have moved to remote work (or were remote-first to begin with). Many companies have employees pay for their own computers, phone and equipment, internet, power, and their own home office while saving on rent, IT and utilities.

The precariat isn’t a consequence of the Tech age or tech companies. Its emergence and persistence are more than anything the symptoms of an inadequate welfare system which itself, as Wikipedia article suggests, is a result of “neoliberal capitalism”.

But it is also true that the very things that make some types of technology companies efficient and innovative are those that create precarious employment.

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Carl Campbell/Unsplash)

Categories
Data Custody Privacy and Anonymity Products and Design

On the internet, there’s no such thing as lost forever

Spoonbill snapshots and tracks the changes people make to their Twitter bios, displaying those changes as a timeline. It’s a view into how people express their identity. Especially when that identity needs to be compressed into a couple hundred characters. This article is a good overview of both the service and its implications, using lots of examples such as this one:

The writer says

Spoonbill not only satisfies our tendency for online lurking, but pushes it into voyeur territory; surfacing what’s meant to be hidden is intimate in a way that scrolling a timeline isn’t.

The app isn’t doing anything special in terms of data access. This is an official Twitter API, and it’s how alternative Twitter clients work. What’s special is that it places previously scattered, obfuscated data side by side. That’s what creeps people out.

This is another aspect of privacy isn’t it. We think of it primarily as ‘someone is reading what I type or browse’. It is, but the other aspect is also analysis of data you reasonably expect to be ‘in the wind’.

Say you shopped locally at a grocer’s, a pharmacist’s, a greengrocer’s, your local pub, your barber, and so on. You know that each of them knows what you’re buying. Now imagine they pooled together their receipts and ran a pivot table on them. And now when you visit the greengrocer, (s)he says ‘You bought antacid on Monday? Don’t buy your oranges and kiwis; they might exacerbate it. Here’s some bananas.’ and now you’re freaked out.

Essentially, be aware that most things you put out on the internet that can be seen publicly can also be catalogued, put together and analysed. Just like Spoonbill did. Just because you change something does not mean the previous version is lost forever – no such thing.

Categories
Products and Design The Next Computer Wellness when Always-On

Disturb by default

This Hacker News thread asks an interesting question: When did “disturb” become the default mode for devices? Specifically,

A few days ago I took a nap and set the DND –do not disturb– on a timer for 1h. Once the timer finished it went by default to “Turn off DND”, which is the same as “disturb me please”… Because of this I was wondering when did the “disturb” mode became (sic) the default? This applies to my phone as well, which I always have with DND turned on. How is it that we have to turn on DND. Shouldn’t it be “turn on disturb mode”?

Some of the answers I found worth sharing:

people generally want to be disturbed by notifications. Just consider how many people don’t keep their phone in silent mode. I don’t think it’s the ideal way to live, but people love running over to their phone to see if it’s a new WhatsApp message that cause the ping.

At the beginning of the smartphone era, there just weren’t that many disruptions to warrant a DND mode. Most notifications were interesting. And we didn’t have wearable devices tethered to phones or computers either. The normalization of distraction kind of got us by surprise, society-wide, and it’s only now that new UX patterns are developing to help people manage it.

My theory would be that that:

> “disturbable by default” is a carry-over from landline-only time
calls where rarer in landline-only time because they (sometimes) cost money
> calls where rarer in particular times (eg late at night) because of a social norm
> calls in the middle of the day where probably rarer, but also much easier to ignore because you were not at home and your phone simply run in the void
> calls were mostly done by human beings

Now, the “phone calls from a human being who respects social norms or that I simply never hear” have been replaced by “automated notifications from bots in a piece of plastic that’s constantly in my pocket, or text messages from people that expects me to be reachable at any time.”

Categories
Products and Design The Next Computer

iPhone home screen, February 2021 – widgets-only, again

(Previously:August, September, October, November, December, January home screens)

Little has changed from my home-screen-less, widgets-only setup from a couple of months ago. It’s likely going to stay this way until iOS 15 or later introduces something new.

A couple of comments, though:

I use the App Library as one way to launch my apps [1]. iOS do a good job of surfacing the most used apps in any App Library folder. But muscle memory forms pretty quickly, and I can now locate my most-used applications without even thinking about it. The brain just know, spatially, where they are on the App Library screen

There are two search bars, and it’s annoying. One is Spotlight, activating by swiping down on any screen. The second is the App Library search, activated by swiping down in the same way on the App Library screen.

Because I’ve deleted all home screens but the mandatory one, I have two screens that both reveal a search bar with the same action – but the search bars are totally different. Not just visually, but one searches files, contents in apps, Shortcuts, the web. The other lists apps.

Often I’m not consciously aware of which screen I’m on, I’ll search for some data in the App Library search bar and get no results. When I realise, after a second, that this isn’t the right screen, I need to abandon the search, switch to another screen or swipe down all the way from the top to invoke Spotlight, then type my text all over again.

I’m sure there’s a good reason for designing things this way [2], but it annoys me at least once a day.

[1] Siri Suggestions when swiping down to reveal Spotlight is another.

[2] Most people have a problem of too many home screens, not too few. Apple intended App Library to be a seldomly-used repository for apps that don’t need to live on a home screen or in a folder, but still need to be accessible. I use App Library as my only home screen, the opposite of what Apple designed it for.

Categories
Products and Design The Next Computer

Paradigm Change and Personal Status

A change-oriented mindset, especially for technology, is one where you force yourself to let go of the models you developed for how things work and learn new approaches. Re-wiring yourself and letting go of that muscle memory and those patterns that often took years to develop and perfect is incredibly difficult in a technical sense. It is also difficult emotionally. So much of our own sense of empowerment comes from mastery of the tools we use and so changing or replacing tools means we are no longer masters but back to being on equal footing with lots of people. No one likes resetting their station on the tech hierarchy.

– Steven Sinofsky, “My Tablet Has Stickers”

Categories
Life Design Products and Design The Next Computer

This ten year old Macbook Air

A short comment on the incredible durability of my mid-2011 Macbook Air. I bought it shortly after its release, so it’s nearly ten years old and still going strong.

It’s on its second battery, the logic board has had to be replaced [1], and some key combos work either with only the left or only the right shift keys. It’s also the last machine with the Magsafe 1 charging port, so I guard my two chargers with my life. But it runs just fine as an everyday machine. I’ve had more go wrong with me this past decade.

Replacing the logic board led to the unfortunate loss of the serial number and therefore the capability for Mac OS to list the vintage)
The detailed hardware report correctly identifies the machine as a Macbook Air 4,2 – which is the mid-2011 model

This was my first Mac machine and a return to machines with good build quality after a three year gap. My main machine used to be an IBM Thinkpad R51 – pre-Lenovo – until it was stolen in 2008. It had excellent driver support for Linux even back then. In the interregnum I used, unhappily, a series of Dell laptops. The Mac, and Mac OS, was such an improvement that I have stuck to it since.

Speaking of Mac OS, this machine shipped with OS X Lion. It’s since run Mountain Lion, Mavericks, Yosemite, El Capitan, Sierra and High Sierra, which is the last supported OS. That is seven operating system releases over seven years. Mac OS is backwards-compatible enough that the most recent versions of almost all my everyday software runs on High Sierra (it also helps that my software needs are modest and include many open source tools).

Nearly a year ago, I wrote about Apple’s laptops:

These machines appeal to me because they’re such a terrific example of sustainability. Apple may release new laptops and revisions every year but you don’t have to buy them that often. In fact you can go five years, even ten depending on what you use your computer for. The relatively high price you pay up-front translates to many years of trouble-free use. The ‘cost per wear‘ equivalent of Apple’s laptops is extremely low.

– Oldie but goodie, April 2020

My everyday machine is a mid-2012 unibody Macbook Pro I got for free as a hand-me-down, which will itself be ten years old next year. That machine is a lot more powerful than this Air, and I’ve upgraded its hardware more than once. It’s clear to me I’d have spent a lot more on Dell laptops over this last decade than I did on these two Macs, even including repairs and upgrades.

To close, no one described better than Terry Pratchett why I love my old, wonky Macbooks:

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play

Categories
Data Custody Privacy and Anonymity Products and Design The Dark Forest of the Internet

Are Telegram chats encrypted or not? Here’s what you need to know about encryption, privacy and tradeoffs

A friend sent me this message from one of the groups she was on:

I’ve just found out that chats in Telegram (unlike in Signal) are not encrypted by default (unless started as secret chat) and group chats are not encrypted at all!”

and asked if this was true.

I think terms like “not encrypted”, “end to end encryption” need to be understood better so we can make better decisions about what to use and not. Here’s what I wrote back:

“Yes, Telegram encryption works differently from Signal but it’s just plain inaccurate that Telegram chats are not encrypted. They are. Both “in transit” ie from your phone to Telegram and “at rest” ie on Telegram servers.

So what’s the difference between the apps?

Telegram chats are encrypted by Telegram’s keys, which are stored separately from the data. From their privacy policy:

Telegram is a cloud service. We store messages, photos, videos and documents from your cloud chats on our servers so that you can access your data from any of your devices anytime without having to rely on third-party backups. All data is stored heavily encrypted and the encryption keys in each case are stored in several other data centers in different jurisdictions. This way local engineers or physical intruders cannot get access to user data.

All group chats are also encrypted in the same way:

In addition to private messages, Telegram also supports public channels and public groups. All public chats are cloud chats (see section 3.3.1 above). Like everything on Telegram, the data you post in public communities is encrypted, both in storage and in transit — but everything you post in public will be accessible to everyone.

For 1:1 conversations, Telegram has what it calls ‘secret chats’, where the encryption keys are known only to the two devices – one for each person. Again from Telegram’s privacy policy:

[In secret chats] all data is encrypted with a key that only you and the recipient know. There is no way for us or anybody else without direct access to your device to learn what content is being sent in those messages. We do not store your secret chats on our servers. We also do not keep any logs for messages in secret chats, so after a short period of time we no longer know who or when you messaged via secret chats.

So if you only use Telegram on one iPhone and I use it on iPhone, iPad, and two Macs and I use each of them to chat with you, you will have four distinct ‘secret’ conversations with me on the same phone, and I will have one conversation with you on each of my devices, but all disjointed. In return, no messages are stored on Telegram’s servers.

Signal works this way by default – separate message queue for devices. You can see that the conversion on my iPhone is not synced to my iPad automatically:

But there is a tradeoff. Once again, Telegram’s privacy policy:

For the same reasons secret chats are not available in the cloud — you can only access those messages from the device they were sent to or from.

Without getting into the details, it’s really tough to do all three of the following:

  • a. support perfect message sync between mutliple devices and
  • b. encrypt it on-device and
  • c. not store messages on the server.

With this model,

  • Telegram does b. and c. for secret chats but sacrifices a. Signal works this way by default.
  • Apple iMessage does a. and b. but does store messages on its servers for seven days, after which it deletes them, technically achieving c. but and sacrificing a.
  • Whatsapp does b. and c. but doesn’t do a., which is why Whatsapp Web always needs to connect to your phone.

Hope this helps.”

I’m quite happy with the ongoing conversation around the loss of personal privacy online. There seems to be mainstream coverage of its pervasiveness for the first time, even if it’ll be churned away by the next news cycle.

But this conversation is as vulnerable to being hijacked and derailed by disinformation as any other. I think it’s important for those who can to explain technology and terminology in such a way that people can make educated decisions about reclaiming their privacy.

(Featured Image Photo Credit: Mitchell Ng Liang an/Unsplash)