1) Ensure people know what the date is in December through a yummy visual reference

2) Potentially re-asses the level of mess on their desks after deciding where to put their calenders

3) Get to work on time with the added incentive of chocolate in the morning
All well and good but could we find Advent Calenders anywhere in town? No is the answer, well actually I lie, the card shop in town had one left and our favorite corner shop had two left, slightly battered and £4 in price.

Feeling defeated, we turned to the internet and purchased them online. I guess being a Creative and Digitally based media company you would think this could have been the first port of call but there is no real adventure in that. The only option left was to purchase ‘Hello Kitty’ Calenders online for all no personalised selection or team allocated choices allowed in the digital age.

All well in good – however, upon the delivery yesterday we were informed that ‘one item had been updated in the order’ – no longer did we have 24 Hello Kitty Calenders but instead Peppa Pig had intruded and Kitty was pushed aside to just the two.

The Result of the great advent calender hunt of circa 2011 has resulted in pure happiness (plus 6 days of chocolate in one day in the making of this) :

Pure advent calender happiness

Now on to the Christmas trees

A very cool idea from local agency Pixillion led to them making the lovely site The Work Cycle.  They have some pretty big agencies on there and some really nice photos of pretty bikes in proper use.  An early morning start with Matt, Corwin, Ben, Tom and Ally polished our submission which today has gone into the site.  Lovely.

To celebrate ten years of Team Rubber this weekend we are off to a nearby site to burn some rubber but where will it be held exactly? Not sure Beccy knows yet that’s for sure…..

Different individuals in the office do of course work in different ways. Ben for example aids his creative process through biscuits – and has subsequently been renamed to ‘Biscuit Ben’.

Biscuit Ben

At Team Rubber we are always ensuring people feel comfortable in their working environment and Ben feels most comfortable when in his own creative working environment:

For more information on how biscuits can aid creativity please visit Ben’s Biscuit Blog.

Corwin makes a start

As a great man once said “a place for everything and everything in its place” and I think I once said “a tidy office is a productive office”.  However, I have overheard discussions to the tune of “a militantly organised office is a boring office”.

So here at Team Rubber we like a healthy blend of the two.  Today Andy decided he wanted a project, and tidying with Lorna, Corwin and me was the one we chose for this afternoon.  Some pictures of it for proof that we had a productive Monday and made the world a better place:

The work and chaos before. Sandwiches and happy work after.

Oh and if that looked a bit too easy you can see our ‘to-do pile’ that was created.  It didn’t make Tom too happy:

All things an office needs but probably doesn't want all that much.

Unlike the the Go Programming Language that Google released a while ago, Sawzall is a DSL tailored for fairly specific kind of jobs – processing large amount of log data in a map-reduce style to get statistical summary data.

Working on the Viral Ad Network, I do quite a lot of this kind of work, so when I first came across the Sawzall research paper a few years ago I was quite interested.

I’ve seen a few opinions about Sawzall from ex-googlers online, and the opinions at completely different ends of the spectrum. Now I’ve had a chance to play around with the language myself, here are my initial thoughts:

Firstly, the language itself isn’t exactly pretty (I’m comparing it to Python here), but as far as I’m concerned it’s actually quite good compared to languages such as R, or GLSL.

Sawzall is a remarkably compact language for some kind of jobs though – I quickly ported a simple hadoop streaming map-reduce step from Python to Sawzall, and (to my surprise) what was a 55 line Python program just for the mapper became a 22 line Sawzall program! (admittedly that’s because half of the python code deals with reading key,value pairs in and emitting the values – which are fairly much built-in to Sawzall.

One thing that did surprise me was that having ported my code to Sawzall, my application was slower than the original Python version. (That’s surprising because Sawzall is supposed to generate native code). I’m assuming this is something I could optimize away, and would become negligible for more complex processing for each row.

Of course the Sawzall compiler / runtime isn’t really designed to be run by itself – it’s designed to be embedded into a larger application as part of a distributed map-reduce flow – I haven’t had time to try integrating it into a larger application yet, but I’m guessing time will tell.

While I’m generally pretty old-school when it comes to grammar, my gripe is not really with the new-fangled use of ‘creative’ as a noun (“I’m a Creative at XYZ Media Agency”).  My gripe is that people use it as a job title, on its own, with no qualification or explanation.

“I am a general purpose Creative.  I am a one-stop shop for all your creativity needs.”

There are a great many jobs (and not all of them in the arts) where creativity goes without saying.  My understanding of creativity is about making something original (or at least original as far as the creator is concerned; I don’t suppose it has to be entirely original in the grand scheme of things as I think that’s the definition of ‘genius’).  But anyway, there needs to be some kind of spark, a moment of “Ah-ha! That’s it!”, and a fair bit of autonomy over what you do and how you do it.

I daresay everyone at Rubber could list a fair few creative aspects to their job.  In fact, I can’t imagine any job being much fun unless it included a large chunk of creative license.

So how come the noun “Creative” has come to describe only a subset of such jobs?  By this I mean people in the visual arts and media.  Graphic designers, film directors and game designers are clearly creative (you’d hope), but they aren’t the very definition of the word.

Surely the point of a job title is to differentiate what you do from what other people do. You wouldn’t call yourself “a Competent” or “a Conscientious” – these are just parts of being good at your job.

If you call yourself “a Creative”, you might be implying that the rest of us aren’t capable of being creative, that our work doesn’t require it.  Or perhaps you’re saying that you provide some kind of latent, abstract creativity, but without any specific skill (be it painting, drawing, writing code or closing a deal) that would let you actually express it.  Either way, that single word seems like a pretty unhelpful title to me.

Andy’s post is a philosophy on how to make “good” apps. It’s a great post on the principle of having 80% practicality, 10% glamour and 10% character. Ideologically, this will provide you with an app that people will love and make you a multi-millionaire! However, it doesn’t always work out that way. We’ve seen it many times on Dragon’s Den where a young, hopeful entrepreneur presents their idea, only for the dragons to rip them apart and leave them empty-handed with their dreams in tatters……So who says it’s “good” – my argument is stress the importance of user-centred design.

Who holds the purse strings? Your wife, your boss, the queen? I work in part of a team that develop large scale websites for government organisations as well as advertisers with large budgets hoping to attract millions. The app / pitch can sometimes appear to be king. It’s what wins the client over and wins us contracts. However, that doesn’t always define your app as “good”,  just because the CEO of the company loves your app doesn’t mean Joe Bloggs who subscribes monthly and uses your app day-in day-out will too. If Joe Bloggs and countless others like him, hate your app and it flops……is your app still “good”.

Andy’s model sits perfectly in terms of assessing the values of the user. Ultimately, an app needs to work – 80% practicality. Too often products are thrown by the way side for not solving a problem or doing the job it was meant to do. This is particularly emphasised in our consumer culture today. The user’s value may indeed fluctuate between glamour/character and practicality as good marketing is always effective in blurring a user’s sense of need.

For an app to succeed, the user’s voice is priceless. An app will either thrive or dive by the user’s voice. This can be seen in Apple’s App Store. Angry Birds is currently no. 1 paid for app. This follows Andy’s model of 80% practicality – it’s essentially a great game. It’s engaging, not to difficult, but challenging enough to leave you wanting more. 10% glamour – it looks good, but more importantly it doesn’t distract from the game. The graphics don’t slow the game or make things difficult to see. 10% character – the birds are fun. There are talks of a TV series based on the strength of the characters in the game.

The user ratings and reviews for Angry Birds has propelled the app to the top of the store where it has sat for a good number of months. When making a transaction decision, advocacy is key. A recommendation from a friend, a high rating or positive feedback can carry a lot of weight for a user in whether to take the plunge with your app. Andy’s model is the foundation for creating a “good” app but ultimately the end user will decide whether the app is indeed good.

Hopefully, you’ll see the importance of valuing the user in every stage of the development of an app. User-centred design starts and ends at the user. It continually comes back to the issue of “who is this for?”, “what problem are we solving” etc. it uses usability testing to measure how we’re doing in the process, whether we’re still on track or veered way off course. It isn’t a launch and cross fingers….

This is a rule I’ve been using for a while now. Great for making web apps “good”, but can be used in other places too (product design, customer service, copywriting, advertising). Being “good” is a route to “win”.

80% practicality (“job done”); 10% glamour; 10% character.

So how does it work?

“Job done” practicality is the price of entry for your app (or product etc). You need to to give the user what they want, helping them achieve their goal easily and with minimal fuss. If you can’t deliver on this, the app or product will probably fail. It won’t be good, it won’t sell, it won’t gain users. You need to at least do what it says on the tin. That can be a lot of work, as rule of thumb, probably 80% of your effort.

Being ruthless about delivering practically is a great tactic for many reasons, including:

• can reduce your overall costs (by removing un-needed stuff that you have to make and support)
• benefits users (by decreasing the friction of using your app or product)

Practicality also has a couple of serious limitations:

• doesn’t distinguish you much from your competitors. Being better at “job done” might keep your existing customers, but it probably won’t create passionate advocacy and recommendation. Passionate advocacy and recommendation is great, it’s a route to “win”.
• practicality alone tends to lack warmth, soul, personality….the stuff that makes us human

Glamour make people feel smart, make things shiny, make people go ‘ooh’.

Emphasising glamour might sound shallow, but – take a peek – we can take glamour to mean beauty, elegance, chic, style; charisma, charm, magnetism, desirability (worth). The word ‘sprezzatura‘ might be better, but I’d be forgetting how to spell it

In a web app, glamour comes from the appearance of effortlessness. This could be things like outstanding graphic design or providing interactions that feel just great. Using javascript drag-and-drop to make a list much easier to use is glamour. Slideshows and lightboxes can be glamour. One way to increase glamour is by showcasing the user’s stuff and keeping your app out of the way – perfectly crafted background can enhance the glamour of a foreground subject.

Be ruthless with glamour. The goal is to flatter the user, not the designer. Make the user feel smart, make them feel they’ve made great choices. Glamour done wrong = tawdry, cheap, nasty, irritating, and might give you a rash.

Character is who we are. Who we are is a factor in having users come back to us, and in creating passionate advocacy and recommendation. Be ruthless with character – you’ll be judged by it. Be ruthless, but be generous. Character comes out in tone of voice, customer service, and (worthwhile) quirks. I could write more on this, but I couldn’t think of anything useful and I’m running out of time. You probably get it, ‘cos you’re smart people

– postscript —

This rule *is not* an 80-20 law, although it might look like one » Learn why.

This rule *is* effectively a variation of “Sell the sizzle, not the steak”

A quiet moment during casting earlier gave me time to reflect (You’ll get it).