More Feedback From Our Craigslist Job Post

By Cody in Business

We continue to receive feedback about our Craigslist job post. It seems people either love us or hate us for it:

Your ad is very opinionated without being overtly offensive, which is an accomplishment; congratulations.

Thoughts on Clay Shirky’s “Arrogance and Humility”

By Matt in Design, Commentary, Usability

If you’re not following A Brief Message, the new venture in insight, brevity, and forward-thinking presentation masterminded by the inimitable Khoi Vinh and Liz Danzico, do yourself a favor: visit the site and absorb the complete archive. Don’t worry, it’s only five posts long at the moment, and each one runs about 200 words. (The average so far is exactly 210, actually.)

The latest article in the series is Clay Shirky’s “Arrogance and Humility,” wherein the esteemed author discusses the extremes on the spectrum of motivation in design and how those values manifest on the web and in society at large. It’s one of the better posts so far, and like all good writing, has spurred some interesting dialogue. What follows are my thoughts on Clay’s column.

Why I Think Good Design is Not Arrogance

I don’t like calling good design “arrogant.” Designers can be arrogant, of course, but a well-designed thing shouldn’t necessarily imply an inflated sense of importance on the part of its designer or its owner. That great designers can tell what people want better than the people know themselves isn’t arrogance; it’s talent. And it’s something for which we should all be thankful.

I would also argue that the iPod is objectively better than MySpace. The form and functionality of the iPod are so brilliantly and complementarily designed that they have, as Clay put it, “created, then owned, a category.” (Which category? Todd G. put it best in his comment: “The category is ‘MP3 player that millions of people would actually buy and be able to use.’”) The iPod is a cultural phenomenon for a reason.

MySpace, on the other hand, just happened to be the site that caught on early in the social networking space, due mainly to situational factors and the realization that customization was a key to the user experience. The idea behind the site is a useful but unoriginal one, and its social networking aspects are neither innovative nor impressive. What makes MySpace special is the ability to completely customize one’s profile, which is ultimately an aspect of functionality, not design. And that’s especially true of MySpace: the tools that make that customization possible, like the rest of the site, are an abomination of usability, and their shortcomings very likely engender the poor results we love to hate. Of course, it doesn’t have to be that way, and if MySpace hadn’t provided the option, another site would have, potentially with a well-designed implementation. But now that MySpace and its myriad features have crystallized into a relied-upon vehicle for social networking, the chances of an extensive repurposing and redesign are zero. I would question the long-term success of this model, but the millions of other poorly designed things to which we’ve all grown accustomed prove that people make a lot of allowances. Clay is spot-on in this regard, pointing out: “MySpace demonstrates that users prize participation, even at the expense of clarity.”

The iPod and MySpace are not opposites. MySpace is useful but ugly. The iPod, however, isn’t pretty but useless; it’s pretty and useful. This is why the age-old contraposition of “Function vs. Form” is misleading — I don’t like the implication that the two are at odds, and I believe the most perfect products are those that wed good design and good functionality.

The hideous result of putting users in charge of aesthetics doesn’t mean they resent good design — it’s simply evidence that most people are not talented designers and don’t care about design at all on a conscious level. Of course, that doesn’t render it unimportant to them. I’d wager a healthy majority of MySpace users own at least one iPod.

My concern is that this widespread attitude is actually regarded as evidence that good design is inherently a product of arrogance. Instead, I believe it’s an unfortunate trend in which design is unjustly cast as a pretentious artistic endeavor, rather than a craft focused on the harmony of functional elegance — that is, making the things that allow us to do what we want to do quickly, easily, and with eminent aplomb.

Note

Clay Shirky’s research and wisdom in these matters far exceeds my own, and I feel honored to share this space in such a way that allows me to respond to his ideas so easily. Indeed, without his post I never would have been inspired to spend a few hours organizing my thoughts here. I recommend taking the time to read a few of the essays on Clay’s website for a sampling of his intuition and intellect.

Sakuzaku’s Making Waves!

By Cody in Business

We received the following email today in response to one of our Craigslist posts looking for graphic designers. I guess this guy had some spelling or grammar mistakes in his résumé.

What are you guys a bunch of high schoolers? Don’t post shit like this on craigslist. You make us people in Hawaii look bad and unprofessional.

And your coders suck a$$. Bunch of generic cms driven websites that you probably didn’t even code in the first place.

Grr

And this:

I was compelled to post after reading the previous post by Sakuzaku.

What a bunch of ****ing baloney! They sound like they have no clue WTF they are talking about nor do they have a “clue” in business ethics. “Elitist” Highschoolers just scream out from their post.Mac-only designers? LOL how stupid is that?! “Should be in San Francisco but for some reason your in Hawaii?” What is this exactly suppose to mean? If you good you can be anywhere. Like I said a bunch of stupid High-Schoolers who have no clue WTF they are talking about.

tsk~

Apparently some people here are already unhappy we’re not settling for offering half-best. Just wait until we really have something to show them!

Faster Internet… Finally!

By Cody in Successes, Challenges

For those of you who don’t know (that is, everyone), Sakuzaku is stuck in the middle of the Pacific Ocean on the island of Oahu. In terms of weather, recreational activities, unbridled natural majestic beauty, hula supplies, and ra-in-bo-ws, it’s an unparalleled place to be. In terms of high-speed internet, it’s like living in a repelling drainage cesspit.

Oceanic Time Warner is the de-facto ISP here in the islands, with their own brand of Road Runner offered for $44.95/month. That considerable sum buys us what they advertise as 5Mbps downstream, 512kbps up. As pathetic as that sounds compared to Verizon’s new FiOS on the mainland, we take what we can get. That said, though, it doesn’t even live up to it’s promise — rarely if ever do you get download speeds faster than 200Kbps. Upstream bandwidth is a joke. Accessing a server in your apartment is as fun as sawing off your own arm. (Note: Sakuzaku does NOT run a server in our apartment. That, of course, would violate the Time Warner terms of service.) This doesn’t even mention (except, now, it does, since I’m mentioning it) the fact that it took Time Warner literally six weeks to send out a guy to test the line and hand me a cable modem (and attempt to install Time Warner’s specially-branded version of Internet Explorer on my Powermac). And the joy of 40 minute wait times to talk to their customer service, even at 10 o’clock at night.

When Sakuzaku first arrived here the only alternative was Hawaiian Telecom DSL, available for substantially the same price as Road Runner, but with the added caveat that you had to have local phone service, amounting to an additional $20/month. That brought the total cost of DSL to something like $65/month — even less of a deal.

After spending nearly a year shuttling back and forth between Honolulu and Tokyo, I grew more and more envious of their 100Mbps fiber connections to the home for ridiculously low prices. I bided my time.

Lo and behold, while reading an article on Engadget a few days ago, what did I see at the bottom of the post, but an advertisement for Hawaiian Telecom’s new residential high speed internet service. 11Mbps?! No. 1Mbps up?!?!? NO… WAY.

Well, it is true. The Internet told me so. According to a Honolulu Advertiser story, this new service was just rolled out. And I just called and signed up. Ah, the advantages to living in a major metropolitan area — we are within the 6,000 wireline feet required to get the 11Mbps service.

Not only is it way faster, but they’ve eliminated the silly local phone service requirement (who has a home phone anymore — what is this, 2003?). That makes it only $10/month more expensive than Road Runner (well worth it). And perhaps even more importantly, this has spurred us to get rid of our cable altogether — a good move in any case.

Sakuzaku is soon to be one of the first customers in Honolulu with 11Mbps service. Yes!

A Good Day

By Matt in Diversions, Business

The sun is shining, a faster internet is coming, and the mail brought wonders aplenty:

Homemade corn chips (not mail), Caribou’s latest masterpiece, some stylish new Field Notes and a package full of Japanese pamphlets and goodies from my friend Sam, who’s abroad and fashioning baline, cat skin, and human hair into puppets. Awesome!

And we have a new mascot for September, Bruno:

A lot of you have been asking a few important questions:

1. What exactly is Sakuzaku? What do you do?
2. What is Addressful, and why should I sign up?
3. How’s it going?

We’ll address these questions in a short series of posts over the next week or so, as work on Addressful continues and we continue to organize the business and start on a number of different projects. But, briefly:

Over the last few weeks Cody’s been handling the daunting task of ironing out the production, staging, and development environments for our applications, setting up our internal systems, and dealing with the myriad business-, accounting-, and tax-related issues an LLC entails. And all while starting graduate school in computational linguistics, and still doing 20 hours a week of consulting work for Japan! I’ve been designing interfaces for our projects, sorting through dozens of résumé submissions, moving and organizing a couple months’ worth of notes, emails, and conversations into our internal wiki, and reading some really good books. And we’ve been to two AIGA Honolulu talks by some great designers.

We’ve done a little sightseeing, swimming, and surfing around blue Hawaii, too; look for more pictures in our Flickr photostream. And we’ll be uploading videos to our Vimeo account.

But it’s not all pictures and movies around here; we’ve got a lot of web development work to show off, too — what will hopefully be the start of a growing portfolio of different projects. We’ve also got some things to say about design and usability on and off the Web.

So if you haven’t done so already, go ahead and sign up for the Addressful beta. When we’re ready to launch Addressful, you’ll be the first people who get to try it out and help us iron out the bugs and make it just perfect.

All right, back to work. Stay tuned.