Hi All,
Hope you all are well! I have a cool exercise for you at the end of this newsletter; this exercise will test your design chops. However lots to get through and let's start off with a bit of humor since last week was a bad week for the United States, ones I hope we can forget. As always if you like this please share :)
I saw this on Facebook, a “BOYCOTT MADE IN CHINA” T-Shirt, made by uh well China. I thought it was hilarious but I suspect it will also probably be true. Interesting that the word Boycott comes from a name of a British captain.
On tech layoffs (data from layoffs.fyi) : Coronavirus Unemployment: How the Tech Industry Has Fared
Side note : If you work in the Bay Area and are curious about comp take a look at levels.fyi
On the Zeigarnik effect : Don’t send your employees emails at night …
In psychology, the Zeigarnik effect occurs when an activity that has been interrupted may be more readily recalled. It postulates that people remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks. In Gestalt psychology, the Zeigarnik effect has been used to demonstrate the general presence of Gestalt phenomena: not just appearing as perceptual effects, but also present in cognition.
A phenomenon called the Zeigarnik effect points to why unread email can haunt our days and even our dreams. In the late 1920s, psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik discovered that incomplete tasks create psychic tension. They can lead us to ruminate on an unfinished activity, regardless of its relative importance, until it’s resolved. Her research also explains why cliffhangers at the end of TV shows compel us to hit “next episode” instead of going to sleep. The habits represent our brain’s longing to close open loops.
On the Streisand effect (huh who’d have thunk!)
Streisand effect is the phenomenon that attempting to hide information attracts more attention to it. The Streisand effect is a social phenomenon that occurs when an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information has the unintended consequence of further publicizing that information, often via the Internet. It is named after American entertainer Barbra Streisand, whose attempt to suppress photographs of her residence in Malibu, California inadvertently drew further attention to it in 2003.
On American Savings! Now that is hockey stick growth!
US savings rate hits record 33% as coronavirus causes Americans to stockpile cash, curb spending
COVID-19 related reads this week:
From Scott Galloway : Covid 19 and the failed education bundle, come fall : Post Corona: Higher Ed, Part Deux
This week’s chart from Pew
Reads for this week:
On stoicism. If you haven't read or heard David Foster Wallace’s “This is water” you have missed out on one of the most interesting pieces of literature written in our times.
From This is water:
By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.
From : Stoicism is Not Enough - Simon Sarris
The stoics have serious advice to offer: Life can become terrible at any moment, you should equip yourself to be prepared for difficult situations. Almost everyone could use more personal responsibility and personal strength. But stoicism is not a sufficient philosophy for a good life, only a survivable one. We must remember what that responsibility and strength are ultimately for. It lies beyond ourselves.
On Facebook Shops and the Shopify App. Shopify is playing someone else’s game and they have no choice …
Platforms in an Aggregator World
This is the harsh reality for Shopify and anyone else competing in a value chain with an Aggregator: you are not going to beat Facebook at their own game, particularly given the technical limitations increasingly facing infrastructure providers. At the end of the day overcoming Facebook’s skill at acquiring customers must be the responsibility of the merchants themselves: what works — and what will always work, as long as the web exists — is creating something so compelling that people will go to you directly, and yes, fill out a payment form.
On product teams and outcomes ...
What are the customer behaviors that drive business results?” This helps product teams because product outcomes become things people do, which are observable and measurable.
Labor marketplaces in 2020.
The New Generation of Labor Marketplaces and the Future of Work
For those of you who know me, you all know how passionate I am about labor marketplaces. The key thing we all forget is that both sides (demand - companies, and supply - workers) are incentivized in different ways. Companies want only the best applicants, Workers want to (for most of the part) “Spray and Pray”, which is why I think an experience change on the supply side can result in less frustration (than combing a resume) for the demand side. From the article : It cannot be underemphasized how much demand-side value can be accrued by improving the efficiency of search.
Types of innovation
7 Innovation Frameworks To Navigate Disruption: Apple, Netflix, Amazon, & More
Conjuring Scenius — Packy McCormick
What is scenius? : Brian Eno, musician, producer, and inventor of the term “scenius”, describes scenius as similar to genius except embedded in a scene rather than in genes.
From the article:
“There’s a healthier way of thinking about creativity that the musician Brian Eno refers to as “scenius.” Under this model, great ideas are often birthed by a group of creative individuals — artists, curators, thinkers, theorists, and other tastemakers — who make up an “ecology of talent.” If you look back closely at history, many of the people who we think of as lone geniuses were actually part of “a whole scene of people who were supporting each other, looking at each other’s work, copying from each other, stealing ideas, and contributing ideas.” Scenius doesn’t take away from the achievements of those great individuals: it just acknowledges that good work isn’t created in a vacuum, and that creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds.
On Moats (and a shameless plug for my write up on moats - Building Moats)
Business quality is about defensibility. Defensibility comes from moats. And while high gross margins are often a reflection of moats, they are not a moat in and of themselves. And when faced with a low gross margin business, you need to focus even more on moats: without those extra points of revenue to invest in sales & marketing strategies or research & development, you need other ways to generate cash flow over time.
Down memory lane - Web 1.0 and the internet of the 90s : Rediscovering the Small Web - Neustadt.fr
The love that lays the swale in rows
The relationship between technology and man. Tech as the enabler from Nicholas Carr. Carr breaks down Frost’s poetry and digs deeper into the power of the tools that we use and the ethical responsibility. If you havent read some of his work on technology you are missing out. I especially loved his read “IT Doesnt Matter” (this is a slimmed down version of the PDF, which I am surprised to find out in the open)
Working with a tool is never just a practical matter, Frost is telling us, with characteristic delicacy. It always entails moral choices and has moral consequences. It’s up to us, as users and makers of tools, to humanize technology, to aim its cold blade wisely. That requires vigilance and care.
…
The constraints inherent in taking and developing pictures on film—the expense, the toil, the uncertainty—had encouraged him to work slowly when he was on a shoot, with deliberation, thoughtfulness, and a deep, physical sense of presence. Before he took a picture, he would compose the shot in his mind, attending to the scene’s light, color, framing, and form. He would wait patiently for the right moment to release the shutter. With a digital camera, he could work faster. He could take a slew of images, one after the other, and then use his computer to sort through them and crop and tweak the most promising ones. The act of composition took place after a photo was taken. The change felt intoxicating at first. But he found himself disappointed with the results. The images left him cold. Film, he realized, imposed a discipline of perception, of seeing, which led to richer, more artful, more moving photographs. Film demanded more of him. And so he went back to the older technology.
Inside the Mind of Jamie Dimon
He told the David Novak Leadership podcast in 2017: “I’m going to separate leadership and management a little bit … In management it’s follow-up, get it done, it’s analytics, it’s get people round the room, it’s follow-up, it’s get on the road, it’s put in the hours, it’s learn, learn, learn. It doesn’t necessarily make you a great leader … Leadership is a lot more about heart and humility and learning and sharing than it is about how smart you are or follow-up or detailed analytics.”
From context collapse to content collapse
This is exactly the reason that most feeds are trash. Reading is different from watching, which is a different cognitive load. First off, I am very strongly against a newsfeed. What makes this feed even worse is that the “news” you get is mostly trash, and likely not engaging. The point Carr makes is absolutely a correct one - how can a cat video and a news item have the same weight. Facebook tries to correct some of this with a dedicated newsfeed but the end result is that after years of mistreatment worthy publishers such as NYT and WSJ are doing their own thing and not depending on Facebook for revenue. The result? Poorly written, factually inaccurate content. For your own sake stop reading your news on facebook and pay for content. Good content costs good money!
It was that the whole organizing structure of the newspaper, its epistemological architecture, had been junked. The news section (with its local, national, and international subsections), the sports section, the arts section, the living section, the opinion pages: they’d all been fed through a shredder, then thrown into a wind tunnel. What appeared on the screen was a jumble, high mixed with low, silly with smart, tragic with trivial. The cacophony of the RSS feed, it’s now clear, heralded a sea change in the distribution and consumption of information. The new order would be disorder.
First, by leveling everything, social media also trivializes everything — freed of barriers, information, like water, pools at the lowest possible level. A presidential candidate’s policy announcement is given equal weight to a snapshot of your niece’s hamster and a video of the latest Kardashian contouring
The secret to user onboarding: Value action, making your user work for it…
Lots of companies focus on getting the user to value as quickly as possible, but they miss an important part: correlating the user's effort to the value.
And finally, the design exercise. This exercise will show you nuances in 2 designs (Easy,Medium, Hard) and you have to guess which one is incorrect and why. Here you go ...
Thank you as always for reading. Stay safe, be well and if you enjoyed reading this please consider sharing or subscribing using the links below ...