You’ve made some pretty cool things in the past. Nyan cat and Robot Unicorn Attack are rainbowy good. What The Fox Say and that Game of Thrones song are both sing-it-for-your-neighbors-from-your-shower catchy. Cards Against Humanity is a delightful exploration of boundaries via kinetic poetry.

But, there’s a major strategic area you’ve overlooked, Internet. And I’m a little surprised. Actually, I’ll just say it. I’m a little disappointed. I know how much you love 3D printers. And I know you’ll always have a thing for board games, in all their retro-lofi glory. There’s an opportunity here, at the intersection of maker and player. At the cross-roads of two bourgeoning trends. Internet, only you can yenta two lonely fields together, to forge a brand new atavistic experience.

Internet, you need to make a board game—think space strategy, a la Eclipse—where the ships/pieces are printed in real time. Where the piece build time is the time in takes the 3D printer to build it.

You start with no pieces and as the game opens, you build lots of weak little ships. Their physical size means they don’t take much material and print quickly. That fire power buys you enough time to invest in building stronger big ships. These might take upwards of 15 minutes to build, but choose carefully, you’ll be blocking your production queue. With your 3D printer behind a sheet of cardboard, your opponent knows that you are are building, and for how long you’ve been building, but not what you are building. The whirr of your stepper motors give tantalizing hints of your strategy. Of course, you’ll be able to cancel production mid-way for an incomplete downgraded/vulnerable piece, like the partially constructed Death Star.

As you know, Internet, any good board game needs a limit resources for which to compete. Especially resources that you can steal from your opponent. As you occupy planet systems, you’ll gain more resources in the form of more filament with which to print. Lose too many planets or have your supply line to base disrupted, and your printer will go idle, giving your opponent an advantage. Ideally, you’d also have a Filabot (a machine which makes new filament from old plastic), so that as ships are destroyed, you’d recycle them back into newer ships. Now it’s an ecofriendly, low carbon-footprint, DIY, and organic game. That’s some good branding.

The game would come with a set of pre-designed models to be printed. And you could just play that way. But, there’s more flexibility. Both you, Internet, and I fully understand your dark passion for Voltron. I can’t really blame you. Space robots that form bigger space robots is the up-cycling hipsterism of the future. Some ships you build will absolutely snap together with other ships to make bigger, more powerful ships. And for the CAD-inclined, you’ll be able to design your own interchangeable parts (or even ships) to augment the game. Think of it as just-in-time Warhammer 40k. And, Internet, you love Warhammer 40k nearly as much as you love 4chan’s /b.

This is just a quick braindump of the thoughts I had in the shower while thinking about you, Internet. Where it goes from here is up to you. But I urge you to prototype a game out. Maybe get MakerBot to sponsor. The opportunity to be first to take advantages of these trend confluences is now.

I hope this time next month I won’t still be disappointed in you, Internet. And because awesome, I will fund the first $500 of a Kickstarter to make this happen.

Related posts:

1. Firefox 3.1 Proposal: Tabs in the Awesome Bar
2. Firefox Proposal: A Better New Tab Screen

I started Massive Health as a designer and a founder. These are the most important lessons and psychological pitfalls I learned. They apply to any founder or manager who is also a creative.

Your Job Isn’t To Make A Great Product

As a founder, your job isn’t to make a great product. It’s to build a great team that makes great products. You are who you hire.

If you love doing something, under no condition should you start a VC-backed company to do more of it. You won’t. You are going to spend all of your time recruiting, fundraising, recruiting, aligning team vision, recruiting, and figuring out which fires you can safely ignore.

To maintain your psychological health, you’ll need to learn how to shift the fufillment you get from making to the fufillment of enabling a team to make. You’ll be making vicariously, not making directly. You’ll have to come to terms and internalize it or else your lack of emotional fufillment will trickle down to your team.

Very early on, you’ll be able to make stuff. Enjoy it. It won’t last. In fact, making stuff as your team grows is often more harmful than helpful.

The Dangers of “Helping” & The Power of Words

Because you will spend your time building a great team that builds great product, the moments that you directly work on product will be rare. The rarity will make it insanely tempting—and it will feel insanely good—to get your hands dirty by fixing an interaction flow, pushing around some pixels, doing an information re-architecture, or whatever you may be passionate about. Here’s the thing: that can be insanely disruptive unless handled carefully.

Here’s why:

1

You are a founder, which means each word you say lands like an anvil. Even in a very small company, and especially in a larger one, it takes fortitude and courage for a team member to honestly critique your work. The courage required isn’t a one-time cost. It’s incurred every single time. By nature of being a founder, you are used to saying things with charisma and force and you will undoubtedly be excited by your solution and argue for it. This just makes it worse. A final note: it doesn’t matter how nice you are, or how close you are to your team. As a founder, your words are always more powerful than you think.

2

It’s easy for a brainstorm to be taken as direction. I talked to Tony Fadell of Nest and iPod fame about this topic: To this day, in every conversation he has—every—he tries to reiterate whether he is brainstorming or setting direction. Putting this into practice, you’ll feel like you are repeating yourself. That everyone gets it. Don’t stop. Keep saying it. Get used to saying it.

3

When you swoop in to help with complex problems, the person working on the problem has all the context and knows the pitfalls. You’ve hired this person because they are amazing at their job. Jumping in and then advocating for your ideas is often interpreted as a lack of trust in their ability. This can be a huge morale drain. Not only that, but your suggestions may be shortsighted. You’re jumping in—they’re living it.

You are a founder because of your vision and ability. Your input is, in fact, critical.

So what should you do? Define the problem and its constraints. Framing the problem is the most important step in helping your team find the right solution. You can and should point out what’s wrong with a design or product (sandwiching it with praise), just don’t prescribe how to fix it. Never give a solution unless a team member comes to you for help.

Hype can be psychologically compromising

Massive Health launched with a fair amount of hype. We were glad for it—it gave us good brand recognition while hiring, which is the most valuable outcome of PR for a pre-launch startup. But, it’ll hurt in ways you aren’t expecting. Think back to Color and how the hype overshadowed their product; it set expectations so high that whatever they made probably wouldn’t be good enough. When their product launched, the market thrashed them. That’s the obvious way hype hurts, and it’s not even the one I’m talking about.

The more subtle (and more damaging) way that hype hurts is psychologically. The hype nestled in the back of your mind is constantly tugging, saying that your product is never good enough to launch. That it isn’t big enough. That it isn’t ground-breaking enough.

The single most important thing a founder has to know is where to focus his team’s energy: what is and isn’t safe to ignore, which shortcuts are helpful or harmful, and where and when to invest in absolute perfection.

Hype compromises that ability.

Looking back, this was a major factor in launching only one of the awesome products we were working on at Massive. As a founder, I let perfect be the enemy of the good.

Ego And Reputation

A corollary to the psychological pressure of hype is ego. All product people learn the painful process of divorcing ideas from ego. That’s how great products are made. As a founder, you’ll have to learn how to divorce your ego from your company’s success.

You’ll live with knowing that you are personally judged based upon your company’s performance. That your reputation is tied to your company’s reputation. You’ll no longer be judged on your own work, but your team’s work. It will make you want to get too directly involved in the design. And, as we know, that’s dangerous.

Early on at Massive Health, I did not articulate these worries clearly or directly. It was just a fuzzy haze of emotion that confused my decision-making. Once I was able to articulate what was going on, it helped me mitigate its effects.

Be aware that ego can and will get in the way and be ready to fight it.

So Being A Designer and A Founder Sucks?

Not at all. It gives you huge strategic advantages. The Designer Fund articulates that well.

I founded Massive Health because there was a storm brewing: just over the horizon health was about to become consumerized; that quantified self would escape its geeky beginings and morph to become mainstream; that the Apples and Googles of consumer health didn’t yet exist but were about to. At the center of it all was design; and that design-focus is enabling us, now as a part of Jawbone, to invent the future.

The more you know.

Related posts:

1. So You Want To Be A Designer: Top 5 List
2. Massive Health: Raised Money, Spending On New Hires

No one wants to be a follower. Except Mozilla.

Mozilla rarely moves the consumer needle with its own inventions. Rather, the company is at its best — and its best is revolutionary — when it takes an existing product and re-envisions it as a public benefit product, where the people making have a top-down directive to never include revenue as part of a decision making process.

Mozilla, a nonprofit, must capitalize on its record of fast-second-follow success, identifying products that have already found consumer traction and then remaking them Mozilla-style.

Five years ago, I joined Mozilla as part of an aqui-hire. I was a founding member of Mozilla Labs, and served as creative lead during the Firefox 4 release. While I am no longer on the paid staff, I carry Mozilla DNA and often find myself reiterating Mozilla mantras. Safe to say, any critique I offer here is not meant as a slight; every company has strengths and weaknesses, and it’s important to know how to play to those fortes. “Once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen of Narnia”, noveslist C.S. Lewis famously wrote. And, so it goes in open-source projects: Once a contributor to Mozilla, always a contributor to Mozilla.

When Firefox debuted in 2002, Microsoft had all but abandoned its Internet Explorer development team. By streamlining and improving an existing product, Mozilla revitalized the stagnating browser space to protect the most important shared resource of our times. Today, the space is intensely competitive, with browsers from Apple, Google, and Microsoft each vying to be the fastest, most capable and most compliant. The majority of web now surfs on open-source browsers. That’s a huge Mozilla victory, and a huge victory for the open web.

The story of Thunderbid, Mozilla’s desktop email application, recapitulates the theme. Thunderbird started strong as a second-mover with tens of millions of users. But, as technology and consumers moved to web solutions — relying on heavy servers and light clients that provided rich and instant access to email from anywhere — desktop clients became less and less relevant. Mozilla is culturally distrustful of any product that centralizes user data, so it invested in desktop-centric, server-agnostic solutions. It lost the email space not for lack of trying: Mozilla created its first and only spin-off, Mozilla Messaging, to tackle the problem. Caught between an inability to innovate as a first-mover on mobile and culturally unable to be a second-mover on the web, Mozilla’s email presence atrophied. Mozilla Messaging was soon rolled into Mozilla Labs and the company quietly lost the war, letting the the future of communication fall into the control of companies that are ultimately beholden to their bottom line, and not the user’s best interest. This isn’t a conspiracy-theory what-if: In 2006, Yahoo was called to testify before congress for yielding to the Chinese government’s demand for access to a journalist’s email. Yahoo’s capitulation, which resulted in 10 years of jail time for the journalist. This is, of course, just one example of many.

Late or Strategic Second-Mover?

When it comes to mobile, there’s still hope. Mozilla is a second-mover with the Firefox phone. The company has taken something that we know works for consumers and recreated it with open DNA — the user interest trumping the commercial. It’s a make-or-break moment for Mozilla.

Let’s take another example: Instagram.

The app now has more than 100 million users, nearly a fifth the size of Firefox, with an accelerating growth curve. Its square photos document a society grappling with the sudden ubiquity of cameras capable of capturing and broadcasting every moment. Instagram has always been a good actor, with a fantastic set of APIs, but should we trust the future of this shared resource to Facebook?

MySpace and Neopets taught a generation how to mess with HTML, covertly turning consumers into producers. Mozilla can bring that same educational opportunity to Instagram. We can make it open and add the ability to analogously “view-source.” Why not use Javascript to modify, create and share new filters? Or change the layout of your profile? Or clone and host your own version of Instagram that has video? In other words, let both users and developers remix Instagram.

In doing so Mozilla could become a powerful second-mover in the market. But why stop with Instagram? We should be prying open Mailbox, Gmail, AWS, and many others. By amplifying an existing product and injecting it with our DNA, Mozilla can defend the open web.

Developing products that embody openness is the most powerful way to shape the policy conversation. Back those products with hundreds of millions of users and you have a game-changing social movement. Expanding those social movements beyond the browser is the legacy that Firefox deserves.

Related posts:

1. Mozilla Labs Geode: Follow up
2. Leaving Mozilla, Starting Massive Health
3. Joining Mozilla

There is some problem you are trying to solve. In your life, at work, in a design. You are probably solving the wrong problem. Paul MacCready, considered to be one of the best mechanical engineers of the 20th century, said it best: “The problem is we don’t understand the problem.”

Story time.

It’s 1959, a time of change. Disney releases their seminal film Sleeping Beauty, Fidel Castro becomes the premier of Cuba, and Eisenhower makes Hawaii an official state. That year, a British industry magnate by the name of Henry Kremer has a vision that leaves a haunting question: Can an airplane fly powered only by the pilot’s body power? Like Da Vinci, Kremer believed it was possible and decided to push his dream into reality. He offered the staggering sum of £50,000 for the first person to build a plane that could fly a figure eight around two markers one half-mile apart. Further, he offered £100,000 for the first person to fly across the channel. In modern US dollars, that’s the equivalent of $1.3 million and $2.5 million. It was the X-Prize of its day.

Paul MacCready holding a “Speed Ring”, a device he invented for competitive glider flying.

A decade went by. Dozens of teams tried and failed to build an airplane that could meet the requirements. It looked impossible. Another decade threatened to go by before our hero, MacCready, decided to get involved. He looked at the problem, how the existing solutions failed, and how people iterated their airplanes. He came to the startling realization that people were solving the wrong problem. “The problem is,” he said, “that we don’t understand the problem.”

MacCready’s insight was that everyone working on solving human-powered flight would spend upwards of a year building an airplane on conjecture and theory without the grounding of empirical tests. Triumphantly, they’d complete their plane and wheel it out for a test flight. Minutes later, a years worth of work would smash into the ground. Even in successful flights, a couple hundred meters later the flight would end with the pilot physically exhausted. With that single new data point, the team would work for another year to rebuild, retest, relearn. Progress was slow for obvious reasons, but that was to be expected in pursuit of such a difficult vision. That’s just how it was.

The problem was the problem. Paul realized that what we needed to be solved was not, in fact, human powered flight. That was a red-herring. The problem was the process itself, and along with it the blind pursuit of a goal without a deeper understanding how to tackle deeply difficult challenges. He came up with a new problem that he set out to solve: how can you build a plane that could be rebuilt in hours not months. And he did. He built a plane with Mylar, aluminum tubing, and wire.

The first airplane didn’t work. It was too flimsy. But, because the problem he set out to solve was creating a plane he could fix in hours, he was able to quickly iterate. Sometimes he would fly three or four different planes in a single day. The rebuild, retest, relearn cycle went from months and years to hours and days.

18 years had passed since Henry Kremer opened his wallet for his vision. Nobody could turn that vision into an airplane. Paul MacCready got involved and changed the understanding of the problem to be solved. Half a year later later, MacCready’s Gossamer Condor flew 2,172 meters to win the prize. A bit over a year after that, the Gossamer Albatross flew across the channel.

What’s the take-away? When you are solving a difficult problem re-ask the problem so that your solution helps you learn faster. Find a faster way to fail, recover, and try again. If the problem you are trying to solve involves creating a magnum opus, you are solving the wrong problem.

Related posts:

1. Iterative Design: Towards the Perfect Paper Plane

This blog post is by my cofounder Sutha Kamal, who is Massive Health’s fearless CEO. He is by far the smarter of the two of us. He has previously sat on the other side of the VC table and most recently was the acting-CTO for Fjord, which is the mobile design firm responsible for making the a lot of the mobile experiences you have every day as good as they are. As a side note, the best gift I’ve ever received is having the funds we raised for Massive hit our bank account on the day I turned 27.

Aza and I have spent the last few weeks trekking up and down Sand Hill road, speaking with investors and looking for firms and individuals who share our mission to help people get healthy, and can help us build a great company. As a result, we’re excited that we’ve raised a $2.25 MM seed round from Felicis VC, Greylock Discovery Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Charles River Ventures, and Collaborative Fund. We’ve also got some amazing angels behind us, but our PR folks have asked us to keep the list short.

And now that we are funded, we are hiring.

Our goal at Massive Health is to bring the kind of innovation we expect from the Internet world to health care. As Aza mentioned, we’re excited to encourage a design renaissance in health care. We’re also excited to bring “big-data” analysis and other techniques to discover insights that improves lives. Crowdsourcing, game mechanics, and social networking are cool, and applying it to helping someone get and stay healthy? That’s exciting. That’s powerful.

There are some great companies in the consumer health space today, so what makes us different? Massive Health sits at the intersection of health care and consumer products. There are some great wellness and fitness apps out there. Whether it’s Nike+, or Cyclemeter (my personal favorite), if you want an app to help you get and stay active, you’re spoiled for choice. But what if you’re actually ill? Then there’s nothing sleek or sexy to help you manage your disease. You’re back to the world of clinical health applications that aren’t especially friendly, easy to understand or use, and certainly aren’t social. Today’s apps don’t appreciate that you’re a person. That’s simply not good enough.

We’re not proposing giving you a badge for eating your broccoli or letting you check-in and become duke of ranch dressing. Tweeting the details of your health isn’t particularly useful either. We are talking about tight feedback loops and deep insight into the interface which is your body. There is something magical in the intersection of health, motivation, data analysis, and your social graph. That’s where habits are formed, behaviors are changed, and people get healthy.

Doug Soo—our engineering lead—was employee #6 at Linden Lab, the makers of Second Life. They make enormously scalable systems and a product that’s fundamentally about people. It’s not a coincidence that he’s joined us.

We’re still in ninja mode, so we’re keeping the specifics under wraps. What we can say is that we’re looking for great people who believe in the social mission of helping people get healthier. Not just for wellness, but for the real health problems that plague our nation and the world. If our mission resonates with you, and you’re a great engineer with a lot of passion, we’d be honored if you’d check out our open jobs list. Otherwise, stay tuned… we’re excited to share more soon!

Related posts:

1. Leaving Mozilla, Starting Massive Health
2. Vote! How to Detect the Social Sites Your Visitors Use

Jef Raskin, my father.

Twenty five days before my father died, on my birthday exactly six years ago, he gave me a present. He had the sparkle back in his eye—the one that had been reduced by pancreatic cancer to an ashen ember—when he gave it to me. It was a small package, rectangular in shape, in crisp brown-paper wrapping. Twine neatly wrapped around the corners, crisscrossing back and forth arriving at a bow crafted by the sure hands of a man who built his first model airplane at age seven.

This small brown package will be the final gift my father ever gives me.

My family does gifts strangely. For instance, we have our own mangled interpretation of hanukkah, where each person of the family has a night to give out presents. If we have five people home for hanukkah, we celebrate only five of the eight nights. The joy of gifts are in the giving, not receiving, so before opening your present you must first guess what’s inside. This tradition is “plenty questions”, a more forgiving version than the standard twenty questions.

“Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral?”, I ask.

We are in it for the game of teasing the gift out of the gifter. It’s like extracting a ball of yarn from a kitten. The tugs, pulls, and misdirections are the fun. The question must answerable by a simple “yes” or “no”. Naturally, the later into the questions we get, the more liberal this rule becomes. We don’t break the rule exactly, but answers become not-exactly’s and yes-but’s. In past years, the givers have often spent hours creating elaborate disguises for the gifts. I’ve shaped styrofoam into a fantastic reptilian shape to disguise a pair of earrings for my mother. She guessed them perfectly anyway. There may be collusion going on.

“Mineral”, my father says.

We often waste questions on silly asides. We ask about refrigerators and ostrich eggs when the gift is clearly book shaped. But my father is sick. Where there was once the thought that a cure might be found, only fleeting misplaced hope remains like a high school summer fling dissipating in the face of college. We know there isn’t much time. Still I ask.

“Is it bigger than a bread box?”, I stare at the package in my hands. In it is my father. The man who invented the Macintosh and misnamed what should be the “typefaces” menu the “fonts” menu. He never forgave himself for his incorrect usage of English. He groomed with exacting use of language and considered that mistake a failure of being young and reckless with semantics. The man who invented click-and-drag was now the man who could hardly keep his gaze focused on his son. The box is, of course, smaller than a bread box. It’s a question we always ask. My family smiles out of habit.

“No”, my father says. A long pause. “No”, he says again, “it is smaller than a bread box. Smaller and sharper.” He speeds the guessing game along. Time.

“Sharper?”, I ask. A knife? The box is too small for a typical kitchen knife. It could be a Swiss Army knife. Jef always carries one. The big blade is for food, the little blade for everything else. He gets a bit indignant if you borrow it and use the wrong blade. I have a Swiss Army knife, but I haven’t carried it since airport security theater ramped up after nine eleven. It probably isn’t a knife. Maybe a razor? One can’t just ask outright, that doesn’t give enough information when you are wrong. Something sharp could be many things. Seeking something more strategic I ask, “Can it be found in a bathroom?”.

Long pause.

“Yes”.

Three days before he passed, Jef had an accident. He needed to use the restroom, so—stooped under his arm—I supported his weight as he hobble to his business. There was something quietly unsettling about escorting my father to a toilet that had been taller than me when we first moved into the house twenty years earlier. I sat him down, walked out, and closed the door. Moments later, a crash jolted the house. I slammed the door open. The metallic smell of water fresh from a pipe whipped my nose and water flooded the floor. The toilet was dislocated from its base like an arm from its socket, and lodged between the toilet and the wall was my father. Despite his size, he looked small and meager. He stared up at me with eyes full of innocent surprise. Why am I on the floor, they asked? Why am I wet? The shocked curiosity in his wide-open eyes is the single most haunting image I have of my father. Into the dark space between closing my eyes and falling asleep, that image sometimes steals. When it does, there is no help for it. I have to get out of bed and go for a run. Otherwise, sleep will be overshadowed by those confused, guileless eyes.

“It must be a razor?”, I ask. He nods his assent with a satisfied smile. He gestures for me to open it. Carefully undoing the knot, the twine, and the paper reveals a cardboard box on which he has written “For Pogonotomy”. Of course there is a word for beard trimming, and of course my father knows and uses it. In high school, I played a trick on my teachers: in every essay I used my own made-up word. I used “indelic” to mean something between “endemic” and “inextricably entwined”. No matter how many times I trotted it out, not one of my teachers caught me. I used it once in passing with my father and he immediately but gently pointed it out as a non-word. Some men spend time meticulously trimming their beard. My father trimmed his vocabulary. Language is communication, and my father was fastidious about it. Often when we got into particularly deep conversations, he’d pause and continue the rest of the discussion in written form where he could distill his thoughts into a sharp crystalline relief.

The razor itself was a vintage safety razor. Looking at it, I understood his intent. It is an inventive and simple design. The razor takes a flat blade and arches it under a metal shield, giving the blade both greater mechanical strength as well as a protective sheath that keeps you safe. It’s the kind of clear insight for which all designers and inventors strive: beauty in the simplicity of using constraints as advantages.

It’s that message, rendered in steel and wood, that was my father’s final gift to me. A way of looking at the world through the lens of playful questioning. That razor remains with me as a physical reminder of an incorporeal way of thought. Twenty five days later, the razor remained but my father did not.

Jef, I miss you.

Related posts:

1. Enso Released: In Memory of Jef Raskin

Almost all Mac users have used, at least once, Apple’s solutions to windowing woes: Exposé quickly rearranges all open windows in an ad-hoc grid for quick perusal, and Spaces enables separate virtual desktop which lets you divide your workspace into sensible areas. It’s the second feature I want to discuss. Switching between each Space is quick and easy, but with a simple redesign tweak it could be greatly improved.

Current Condition

The default setup for Spaces provided by Apple is four spaces placed in two rows and two columns. Switching between spaces imitates physical world movements, so the user moves by pressing control plus the arrow key in the desired direction. This grid setup, while seemingly innocuous, is at the heart of a number of usability issues.

Movement

The first problem is the arbitrary distinction between solid and fluid boundaries. User can always go right and left (illustrated by the green and blue arrows), but can’t always go up and down (shown by the red arrows). That is, the topology of Spaces is that the left and right edges connect, but the top and bottom edges do not. Stranger, perhaps, is exactly how the left-right boundary conditions are treated. The mental model is as if you took a horizontal strip and rearranged them in a grid. Moving right from the top-right space moves you to the bottom-left space. In essence, it’s a topological spiral which results in a strange breakage of symmetry. While I can see the argument for why this makes sense, in the heat of the moment, it’s just confusing.

The true problem that comes from all of this is a lack of habituation. I have to know which space I am in order to figure out how to get to the space to which I want to go. Even if I know my email is in the lower-left space, without knowing which space I am in, I’m not sure which direction I need to move. That breaks my train of thought by making me think about the system-state and not what I’m doing.

The Solution

Before you get in a tizzy over whether Apple could ever make a design mistake, here is a simple solution that solves all of these problems. Just rotate the layout of the spaces by 45°.

Here’s why it is better:

• No matter which space I am in, the keyboard shortcut to move to any other space is always the same. To move to the top-most space, I can always use the up arrow command. The same is true for the other three directions. If my mail is in the left-most space, no matter where I am, I can use left to get there. Unlike Spaces as it stands now, with this tweak the interface becomes habituatable.
• There is no strange wrap-around behavior. It’s a much simpler mental model.

That’s about it. A change in orientation seems to solve all of the problems.

Aza’s Note: An open question with Luka’s solution is how to extend it to more than four spaces. If you’ve got a solution, put it in the comments.

Related posts:

1. Redesigning the iPhone’s Buttons

Earlier this year, Mozilla convened a privacy workshop that brought together some of the world’s leading thinkers in online privacy. People from the FTC to the EFF were there to answer the question: What attributes of privacy policies and terms of service should people care about? This lead to a proposal presented for the W3C, among other places, which further refined the notion.

We are now ready to propose an alpha version of Privacy Icons that takes into account the feedback and participation we’ve received along the way. We’ve simplified the core set dramatically and tightened up the language. While the icons don’t touch on all topics, we do think they significantly move the discussion on privacy, as well as the general level of literacy about privacy, forward. We do not want to let perfection or devotion to taxonomy get in the way of the good.

Keep in mind that the target adopters of Privacy Icons are 2nd-tier sites—the sites where differentiation based on privacy matters to their users. Think about the large number of sites which vehemently promise to never share your email address when you sign up for their service or mailing list. Those are the kinds of sites, which make up a significant fraction of the web, that would adopt Privacy Icons.

The Icons

References to Data mean data that is either personally identifiable (including name, ip address, or email address) or associated with some personally identifiable aspect of your identity (such as correlated with your ip address name, or email address).

This means that data is only collected and used to carry out the interaction you are engaged in with the website. The website is only using your data in ways that are functionally necessary to carry out the relationship as users intend. This means if you are buying a pair of shoes, your email address is collected to confirm the order, provide updates on shipping status, etc. An intended use of your email address would not include sending you marketing messages from other companies or for other products.

The European Union has spent time codifying and refining the idea of secondary use; the use of data for something other than the purpose for which the collectee believes it was collected. Mint.com uses your login information to import your financial data from your banks — with your explicit permission. That’s primary use and shouldn’t be punished. The RealAge tests poses as a cute questionnaire and then turns around and sells your data. That’s secondary use, is undisclosed, and feels scummy. When you sign up to use a service you should care if your data will only be used for that service. If the service does use your data for secondary use, they should disclose those uses. If they share your data with 3rd parties, then they should disclose that list too.

This means that your data is collected and used in ways that go beyond what is necessary for the interaction. For example, in addition to collecting your address to ship you a pair of shoes you just bought (which is an intended use of your address), the web site might also sell your address to data aggregators who sell it to junk mail companies.

The site that is collecting data about you is not trading or selling it. It will only share your data with other organizations in order to carry out the intended transaction.

This means that a website is collecting data about you and selling or trading it with another organization, government, or person. An example of this is where a shopping website collects data about your shopping preferences, frugality, and ip address and sells that info to data aggregators or to other e-commerce sites directly.

Besides the information exposed via on-page advertisement, the site does not share the data it collects about you with advertisers.

This means that a site either shares the data it has about you with marketing or advertising companies or allows those companies to collect info about you while on its site.

Your data is deleted before 1, 3, 6, or 18 months from the date of transmission have elapsed, respectively. Alternatively the data is never deleted.

This means that when an organization gets a phone call, letter, or other legally insufficient request for your data, they don’t comply because the law requires the government to take additional steps before getting your data. These organizations require the government to comply, at a minimum, with the legal process provided by the law before getting users’ data.

These organizations might provide your data to a government that asks for it without following the legally required process. They might just send a letter or make a phone call to the company to ask for your data.

Bolt On Approach

Privacy policies and Terms of Services are complex documents that encapsulate a lot of situation-specific detail. The Creative Commons approach is to reduce the complexity of sharing to a small number of licenses from which you choose. That simply doesn’t work here: there are too many edge-cases and specifics that each company has to put into their privacy policy. There can be no catch-all boiler-plate.

Here’s the solution: Have Privacy Icons “bolt on to” an existing privacy policy. When you add a Privacy Icon to your privacy policy it says the equivalent of “No matter what the rest of this privacy policy says, the following is true and preempts anything else in this document…”. The Privacy Icon makes an iron-clad guarantee about some portion of how a company treats your data. This method means that without ever having to delve into the details, everyday people can glance at the simple icons atop a privacy to know if and how their data is being used. At the same time, it gives companies the flexibility required to create comprehensive and meaningful policies.

Nobody Will Use the Bad Icons?

Some of the Privacy Icons have potentially poor normative value The question becomes, why would any company display such an icon in their privacy policy? Wouldn’t they instead opt to not use the Privacy Icons at all? This is the largest problem facing the Privacy Icons idea. Aren’t we are creating an incentive system whereby good companies/services will display Privacy Icons and bad companies/services will not?

First, because the target implementers of Privacy Icons are the second-tier sites, a privacy market-place has a chance of growing. Sites already try to differentiate base on privacy concerns, and these icons simply codify what they are already doing. Second, if Privacy Icons become widely adopted (and I think Mozilla is in a unique position to help make that happen) then the correlation of good companies using the icons and bad companies not using the icons becomes rather strong. The absence of Privacy Icons becomes a warning flag for when you go to sign up for new service.

Asking people to notice the absence of something may be asking the implausible. People don’t generally don’t notice an absence; just a presence. The solution hinges on Privacy Icons being machine readable and Firefox being used by nearly 500 million people world-wide. If Firefox encounters a privacy policy that doesn’t have Privacy Icons, we’ll can automatically display icon with the poorest guarantees during the sign-up phase when Firefox implements identity. This way, companies are incentivized to use Privacy Icons and thereby be bound to protecting your privacy appropriately. There are other options as well; like crowd-sourcing tentative Privacy Icons for a website whose privacy policy does have icons yet (and deferring to the company’s as soon as they put them up).

Get involved

Thoughts, comments, suggestions, and alternate constructive proposals are welcome. This is an alpha proposal for highlighting the parts of a site’s privacy policy you, as a user, should care about. For a more detailed set of thoughts on how these icons can be made enforceable, please read the original blog post. You can also get involved at the Drumbeat Privacy Icons project page.

A huge thanks to Mozilla’s Associate General Counsel, Julie Martin, who wrote the text descriptions for the Privacy Icons.

Related posts:

1. Is A Creative Commons for Privacy Possible?
2. The 7 Things That Matter Most in Privacy
3. Making Privacy Policies not Suck

If you sit and watch people use an iPhone there’s a mistake made often and reliably: They hit the home button when they mean to just go back to the app’s main screen. Going home has heavy consequences—to recover you’ve got to find that app again, sit through its splash screen, and fiddle the app to where it was before. The home button is the grunt-and-touch control of physical affordances. While iconically simple, the one bit of information it lets you indicate is too little.

Android and Palm’s WebOS have a different but related problem. Instead of providing a home button, they provide a “back” gesture/button in addition to a home button. At first this appears to be better with its strong allusion to the ubiquitous browsing metaphor. But back on the phone is unpredictable: it might mean return to the last screen, the last area, or even the home screen. You never know where back will take you. Worse, there is no undo to “back”; without “forward” back becomes a minefield of maybes and didn’t means.

Another subtle problem of “back” is that it adds cognitive overload: you have to choose which to use, back or home. Because the functionality of home and back overlap this adds a non-insignificant Hick’s law penalty. It makes it hard to form a lasting habit, and lasting habits are the hallmark of a good interface.

Solving Simplicity

The home button is too simple, and the back button’s mental model is too complex. What’s a better solution? We need a solution which is as simple and iconic as the iPhone’s home button, but provides a richer range of expression without the complexity of the Android/Palm back mechanism.

The joy of the iPhone’s home button is that no matter where you are, or what confusing app you’ve got into, you can always escape. On the other hand, users often want a way to return to an app’s home-screen, and avoid the sometimes befuddling inter-app navigation. That’s why people make the mistake of hitting the home button when that’s not what they want. They want to escape whatever hierarchy they’re in and get back to the top of the app, but the one-grunt button brings them to the phone’s home instead. So instead of trying to define the ambiguous back from Android, let’s extend the concept of home a bit to have two levels: phone-level home and app-level home. The first goes to the phone’s main screen, and the second returns to the app’s main screen. An escape lightly and escape fully.

The elegance of this system isn’t apparent, however, until you get the physical portion of the interface right. For instance, you could have two disparate buttons, but that wastes space, looks inelegant, and means you have to decide a priori over which button to move your finger. A better solution comes from camera shutter buttons.

Cameras have a two-state shutter button.

Camera shutter buttons have a two-stop action. Half-press them to lock focus and aperture settings, fully press them to take the picture. There’s a delightful tactile indent at the half-way mark so that your fingers know what’s going on. Let’s borrow this two-stop action for the home button. Press half-way to go to the app’s main screen, all the way to go to the phone’s main screen. If you need to fully escape mash the button. If you just want to head back to the main-screen of the app, tap lightly. You can easily convert a light-press into a heavy-press mid-action. It’s as naturally a mapping as you are going to get.

The two-state home button is a more subtle and humane solution than what I’ve seen, while still retaining the iconic simplicity of the current iOS solution. Personally, I hope an Android OEM decides to make it happen. Are they any better solutions? If you’ve got one, put it in the comments.

Related posts:

1. The Seduction of Simple: Hidden Complexity
2. Redesigning the iPhone’s Buttons
3. Track anything for $40?

Firefox is a project you never want to leave, and Mozilla is a company of which dreams are made. No matter where I travel in the world—from Rome to Tokyo—there are engaged Mozillian communities that immediately whirlwind me to a local pub to talk shop. I’ve been extremely lucky to participate in the world’s flagship open-source movement.

After helping to shape and ship the world’s leading browser to nearly half a billion people, there’s little one can do which seems meaningful. Where does one go? It’s been an action-packed time: I’ve started projects from Ubiquity to Jetpack; designed the Firefox Mobile concept and the original W3C geolocation specification; led projects like Firefox Panorama and given a TED talk; helped scale the open source design community; and even invented new forms of phishing. The scale of impact and ability to work in the open for a public-benefit company has been a life-defining experience. The last two and a half years I’ve been inspired by, and lucky enough to also inspire, the best and brightest in protecting and enhancing the open Web—arguably the most precious resources of our time.

Come January 1st, however, I’m leaving to found a new company. Massive Health.

Each of us has a unique ability. I want to use mine—the knowledge to make products which are disruptively easier and more enjoyable to use—to change people’s lives. Life-changing not in the sense of a new social website or better email, but in making people’s lives materially better by helping them get and stay healthy. Anyone that’s been sick, overweight, or had to deal with a doctor knows that health is a field in dire need of humane design.

Health is personal. My entire family – save me – is overweight. My mother is a well-known nurse practitioner and runs a hospice in San Francisco. She’s decisively smart and deals first-hand with the ramifications of the catastrophic affects of obesity on patient’s quality of life. Why then does she struggle with her own weight? It’s because people did not evolve to cope with the calorie-glut we live in now. Worse, the human brain famously doesn’t deal well with delayed gratification. The reason why weight is hard is because the feedback loop is too loose: The cake I eat today doesn’t materially change my body for the rest of today or tomorrow. It’s the incremental amount of cake I eat or don’t over weeks and months that makes me fit or fat. Our brain’s pleasure circuits lead us to optimize short-term happiness (cake!) over long-term healthiness (obesity, coronary heart disease, diabetes).

Think about it like driving a car. While you know it is bad for the environment to drive, that knowledge doesn’t really change your behavior. When the Prius introduced a large screen with instant and average MPG with a pretty graph, Toyota created a small breed of hypermilers and a much larger populace that changed routes and driving behavior to optimize that number. Toyota had tightened the feedback loop and pushed people to drive more green on a daily basis. In fact, people changed their behavior so much that when BMW did an experiment in making the instantaneous MPG readout even more prominent, BMW had to stop the study midway as the rate of accidents dramatically increased due to drivers trying to maximize their MPG instead of driving safely.

And it is not just weight. A couple years ago I was dating an entrepreneur who had type one diabetes. Through that relationship I got to know the condition and the deleterious state-of-the-art. She was silicon-valley technically savvy and despite leading her company to a successful exit, the best technology she had was still just writing down her blood glucose levels and squinting at a column of numbers in an attempt to gain insight into her condition. Even when she painstakingly put her information into a spreadsheet, there just wasn’t enough tool there to give her data actionable meaning. It was clear that a little bit of design could go a long way to giving people back control of their bodies and lives.

With health-care costs rising faster than inflation, a crisis is on the horizon. We need to apply cognitive psychology, the principles of design, and tighter feedback loops to our own health. Health care needs to have its design Renaissance, where products and services are redesigned to be responsive to human needs and considerate of human frailties.

Massive Health, we think, can help make that happen.

Related posts:

1. Massive Health: Raised Money, Spending On New Hires