Mess with Silverlight™

October 12th, 2009

It’s ok for software to have a soul.

Or, more importantly, it’s ok to design and develop things that are injected with your beliefs, desires, and point of view.

We were in a team meeting today, discussing tuning some features for the next release build of rssTunes. Jack threw out something that I pretty vehemently disagreed with (specifically, having the software AutoTweet every individual track a user is listening to).  Immediately, without  doing A-B tests, or supporting my case with an online survey, killed the idea dead in it’s track (pun).  If I had thought about it for a minute, I could have tried to justify it by explaining the app is growing out from a pretty niche community organically, and it’s probably not necessary at this stage for these circles. But in reality, I remembered seeing someone’s stream that listed every track they played as they played it- they did not stay in my friend list much longer. At any rate, as Creative Director of the project, it’s within my right to make decisions that affect the user experience.

Apparently, that right doesn’t exist everywhere. I just read this pretty interesting post about how things work in the design group at Facebook.  This bullet lept out at me:

There is no creative director at Facebook, instead use a bottoms up process to get alignment. It’s critical for the team to share what they are doing.

Sharing is great. We love collaboration. We also like to throw titles aside and accept that good ideas come from anywhere, etc. But, taken to the extreme, like it apparently is with facebook, where A/B testing and “office hours” guide design- something else happens in the process. You end up with something utterly generic.

To be fair, it’s generic that works– you probably have different parameters when you have to service 250 mm users in however many countries. And let’s give it points for being infinitely more useable- and attractive than myspace- which is generic in a completely different way (instead of listening to users, they simply took every multimedia file Rupert Murdoch’s various media properties asked them to toss up on the page).

But at the end of the day, no one is going to think Facebook looks especially awesome, or that it has a real point of view- other than being voted the least offensive option by the largest group of testers.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

You don’t need to be making skatedeck graphics or anime-influenced XBLA games to inject a healthy dose of personality.  Amy Hoy has filled her time tracking application to the brim with personality- down to the URL, LetsFreckle. Shaun Inman’s stat tracking package, Mint, has a unique (and functional) look and feel that’s oozing style as well.  These are both serious web applications that anyone can pickup and use, but even a casual user can tell at a glance that SOMEONE made decisions.

A committee didn’t send Freckle off for A-B testing. Amy drew on her experience and insights, and put together her take on the future of time keeping.

There’s a point here, other than to poke fun at Facebook. The rssTunes UI  is “neutral” by design at the moment. But now that we’ve got the backend wired up and working (for the most part) and begin to craft our next release, we’re not going to be A-B testing anything.

We’re going to think hard about what’s worked and what hasn’t.  And– more importantly– what we like. As a silverlight app, we resolve to give it some personality, some soul. We hope you like it- since we’re not going to be A-B testing it.

Posted by Rob