Prologue: To App or Not To App?

The question comes up with every project:

I want to bring my app to mobile phones. How do I decide where to put my app?

Slow down, buddy. Do you really need a native app?

By “native”, we mean that the app is installed by visiting the mobile platform’s respective app marketplace (Apple’s iTunes App Store, Google’s Android Market, Windows Marketplace, etc.). There are all sorts of advantages and disadvantages to the native approach to be talked about in Part 2 (coming soon).

Your app doesn’t have to be specific to iOS or Android or Windows Phone or anything else. It doesn’t even have to be a native app in the first place.

Part 1: In The Browser

You could choose to completely forego a native app in favor of just a good experience inside a phone’s web browser. For these reasons:

• It’s easier to support multiple phone platforms at once with a single website, rather than several separate native apps.
• There’s no need to learn a new programming language or find a new development team.
• Website users are guaranteed to always be using the latest version of the website.

Even if you do go this route, you still have some choices ahead of you.

Do Nothing

There’s no shame in not having a mobile-specific version of your website at all. The WebKit engine that powers the browsers for both Android and iOS can handle almost all of HTML5 and CSS3, just like your new desktop browser can.

With the right decisions made from the start of your desktop website design, your mobile visitors will be able to use your site just as well as anyone else. Be mindful of the user experience in general. Don’t make important links so small that they’re easy to miss with fat fingers. Keep your site clear of Adobe Flash and onMouseOver events that are necessary for navigation.

If a user looked at a whole page without zooming it, would they be able to tell which parts of the page are important to them?

The best part is no extra development cost, provided you thought of these when you started. Run some tests on mobile hardware just to be sure.

Responsive Web Design

If you have the resources, a mobile-optimized site may still be a good idea.

Your typical user could be someone in a hurry and on-the go. They won’t have time to navigate a site via pinch-to-zoom to find the limited set of data they need.

You have probably seen cases where a followed link on your phone takes you to a special m.company.com website instead of the original link. Too many sites still do not get this right. It might get frustrating when trying to share those links on your social networks.

To avoid this problem, you can practice something called responsive web design. This is where the layout of a site changes dynamically based on the device and context it is being viewed in.

Give it a try at the Boston Globe website. This is what you happens if you resize your browser window.

Try it yourself. It’s the same content on the same page at the same URL. What’s happening is that the page is adapting to your screen (in this case, window) size. On a phone, you’ll see a layout like the one on the right.

Granted, this can take some work. But if you keep to the semantic design principles emphasized in HTML5, it will be much easier.

A Mobile Web App

You can make your website even more app-like by supporting a few small touches.

• Customize the icon that represents the site when a user bookmarks your site to the phone’s home screen.
• Change or hide the status bars. (iOS only.)
• Add a loading screen. (Same.)

Drawbacks to mobile web sites and applications

Never trust a cellular network further than you can throw it. The mobile web can be dreadfully slow, or non-existent. The loss of connectivity will cripple any web app.

Even if you do have a speedy connection, the normal processing overhead when using a browser makes user interactions slower than they could be in a native app. When it comes to the user experience, speed counts.

Now, what about those native apps?…

Look for the conclusion in the coming weeks.

OK, you wrote a killer new article for your company, and you want to share it with the world. So, you tweet it, you post it on Facebook, and you copy it to LinkedIn. Then you email it to everyone else in your company, because you want them to read it and share it with people as well. One week later, you check out your analytics, and you see a spike in traffic. Great, people like your article.

Then you think, “I wonder how many people got to my article via Facebook,” and “I wonder how many people found the link via my Facebook page, and how many found it via my colleagues’.” With proper UTM tagging, you’ll be able to answer these questions.

Unfortunately, tagging is a little cumbersome, especially when you want to tag your article differently for different sources and media. Let’s say you have 10 people on your team that you’ll ask to help get the word out, and you want your posts to go out to Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. In that case, you have 30 different tagged URLs to create. Not fun. To make matters worse, your URLs all have all the UTM values and parameters in plain sight. Nothing says “I’m watching you” like a tagged URL.

Fortunately, we’ve got a little tool that will make these problems go away. The steps below show you how to create your very own Google Docs spreadsheet for URL tagging and shortening based on a template we created to make it nice and easy. With the template and a Bitly account, you can quickly tag any number of URLs in no time.

Step 1. (Skip if you already have an account with Bitly)

Sign up for a free Bitly account

Step 2.

Log in to your Bitly account, and go to your account settings page. Scroll down to where you see “API Key”, and copy the entire string in the text box just below.

Step 3.

Open the URL tagging and shortening spreadsheet template and make a copy (File > Make a Copy).

Step 4.

On the settings sheet of your spreadsheet, enter your Bitly username and the API key you copied in step 2.

Step 5.

Switch to the shortener section of the spreadsheet by clicking on “Shortener” in the bottom left side of the page. Replace the values on row 3, columns B through F, with the values you want to use. You’ll probably want to keep row 2 (which has example values) as is, so you can refer back to it.

Step 6.

Select row 3, columns B through I, and drag the selection down for as many rows as URLs you need (hint: multiply the number of people you want to help you share the article by the number of places you want to encourage them to share it)

Step 7.

Right now, all the rows are exactly the same. Go through the rows and update the Last Name, First Name, and Source columns with the appropriate values. Source should be the sharing method (e.g., Facebook). Last Name and First Name are the names of the people who’ll be sharing the article. You’ll probably want to leave the Campaign and URL values the same for every row.

Step 8.

Send the URLs out to your team and ask them to use the appropriate URL for sharing.

Step 9.

See who’s clicking! Go to your analytics page, click Traffic Sources > Sources > Campaigns. Once people start clicking your URLs, assuming you left the campaign name as “blog,” you’ll see a blog link and the related statistics for the campaign. You can drill down further into the analytics to see which accounts are getting the best results, by clicking the blog link.

And that’s all…well, except for writing awesome articles. Let us know how it goes.

I blame it on movies like Rambo, and Die Hard. Many of us watched these movies, or movies like these, growing up. So it’s no surprise that, as adults, we all want to be cowboys (or cowgirls) too. I’m not saying that we’re all chasing after bad guys, drinking whiskey, and shooting whoever and whatever gets in our way (though I must admit, there are days where alcohol and firearms seem ideal solutions). I’m saying that we all want to be heroes. Many of us, myself included, have a deep-seated desire to be the person that everyone else looks up to. We want to be the person who saves the day, and who does it all by themselves.

When I co-founded Setaris, I was ready and rearing to brand the software industry, and specifically, Setaris, with a hot Josh Fialkoff iron. That, and my history of watching too many episodes of Dukes of Hazard, led me to become the type of leader I like to call the Office Cowboy.

I know, Office Cowboy sounds like an oxymoron. Let me clarify: an Office Cowboy is the person who carries all the cowboy characteristics into the office. This person needs no help from others, and thrives on recognition as an individual rather than as part of a team. An Office Cowboy can be a great asset to your company. If your goal is to build a scalable and sustainable business, however, you might want to mind a some pitfalls of the cowboy mindset.

Creating and implementing a process without first discussing it with the people it affects

It might be true that your position in a company makes you responsible for establishing effective processes within your organization. The fact that you’re responsible, however, does not mean that you’re the only person who can participate in creating and implementing those processes.

A while back, we created an operations committee. Every week, we meet to discuss operational issues at Setaris, and come up with and implement solutions. In these meetings, my voice (though I am a co-founder and COO) has no greater weight than anyone else’s, and my ideas are regularly challenged if not tossed away completely. I admit, I occasionally think to myself in exasperation, ”Hey, aren’t I one of the owners here?!” Personal pride aside, however, we have had better team buy-in (no surprise, the team participated in the creation of the process), less overhead (since all ideas are challenged), and more general solutions (since everyone brings their experiences to the table, we’re forced to think generally rather than design for a specific individual).

Assigning tasks to people (or being the middle man)

Say you had a random group of strangers, and a series of tasks. You have two options: 1) assign the tasks to the people in the group, or 2) give the list to the group and tell them to get it done. We regularly take the first approach in our organizations, but there’s really very little value in it. While we know a bit about what our team members are capable of, you’re not likely to know as much as they know. Your marketing guy might surprise you one day with his WordPress skills if you let him.

At Setaris, we used to have our Concept Architects (a.k.a. Product Managers) discuss a problem with our clients, and construct a solution. They would then tell the rest of the team what to do. I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that we used to operate in this manner as it implies that our Concept Architects are better equipped for coming up with a solution than the entire team. Not likely! We hire many smart people, and we now get everyone involved in the problem solving process. Again, we have better buy-in, and better solutions since we’re leveraging everyone’s knowledge and experience.

If I were to sum up this article in one phrase, I’d steal a line from the classic business book Good to Great: “Get the right people on the bus, and then help them figure out where to drive it.” I have personally seen and heard described many cases where the first piece of advice (i.e., get the right people on the bus) is heeded, and where the second is ignored. If you have good people, but aren’t putting your trust in them, then you’re just paying for the whole package and letting most of it go to waste. So no matter how much it might hurt, put the cowboy hat away, and start thinking about how you can help your team to work more effectively.

One of our clients recently asked us to develop a piece of software that would allow them to run an iPad sweepstakes to incentivize people to subscribe to a new monthly newsletter. The software would take a list of invitees, and handle the rest itself. Though we do love working on new projects, we try to leverage existing tools whenever possible to keep costs down. In this case, we figured that Mailchimp would suit our purposes nicely. Turns out, we were right. Not only did Mailchimp fit the bill, but the campaign has been a huge success. If you’re looking to pile on the subscribers, consider leveraging the draw of the iPad, and a lesser known Mailchimp feature for pre-populating forms. As always, make sure you have permission to contact people before you send that initial email. Keep reading for the details.

Step 1: Create a list of invitees

Your invitees list will include everyone you want to invite to your drawing. Rather than enter everyone manually, you’ll probably want to import your list.

Step 2: Create a list for subscribers

Create a new, empty list for subscribers. When a user signs up for the drawing, they will be added to this list (more on this to come).

Step 3: Get the signup form URL for the subscriber list

1. Click on the forms link for your invitees list.
2. Click “Signup Form.”
3. Find the message “Your list’s signup form is hosted on our server at: http://eepurl.com/…” and click on the link. This will open the signup form page in a new tab.
4. At this point, you’ll notice that the URL in your navigation bar is much different than the one you clicked on. It’ll probably look something like this: http://setaris.us2.list-manage1.com/subscribe?u=[some crazy string]&id=[another crazy string]” This is the URL you’ll need. Copy it and keep it for later.

While you’re looking at the forms, you might want to spend some time customizing the signup process so that it matches your brand.

Step 4: Create the invitation email campaign

The invitation email will go out to all the people you want to invite to enter, and will include a link to the signup form (that link you copied in the last step). The trick here is to pre-populate the signup form based on the information known about the recipient. If recipients were required to fill out that information, you’d very likely lose a number of people that would otherwise have entered. Fortunately, Mailchimp allows you to pre-populate their forms using this method (warning: this stuff gets a bit technical).

Let’s use an example to make things a little more clear. Say that both of your lists have first name, last name, and email fields. If you created these fields in order, you’ll probably find that first name is associated with the merge variable MERGE0, last name is associated with MERGE1, and email is associated with MERGE2. In this case, using the example URL from step 3, you’d use the following signup form URL:

http://setaris.us2.list-manage1.com/subscribe?u=[some crazy string]&id=[another crazy string]&MERGE0=|*MERGE0*|&MERGE1=|*MERGE1*|&MERGE2=|*MERGE2*|

Things like |*MERGE0*| are replaced by the value for that particular merge variable, while “MERGE0=” tells the signup form to use the value after the equals sign and before the ampersand (i.e., &) to populate the form.

If you’d like to give it a try, click the “Popup Preview” at the bottom of the screen where you’re editing your campaign email, and then, at the bottom of the popup, click “View live merge info.” Once that’s clicked, your URL should incorporate the information you have about the intended recipient. For example, it might look like this:

http://setaris.us2.list-manage1.com/subscribe?u=[some crazy string]&id=[another crazy string]&MERGE0=Joshua&MERGE1=Fialkoff&MERGE2=joshua.fialkoff@setaris…

Even better, you can click on that link to make sure everything is in working order.

Step 5: Reap the rewards

Once you’ve sent a sample email or two, and run through the signup process to make sure it’s working smoothly, go ahead and schedule your campaign for delivery. Next up, how to deal with all those new opportunities ;).

Your Business Is a Flow Chart

I like to visualize Setaris as a flow chart, and the same paradigm is useful for thinking about other businesses. Each box corresponds to a particular department or role. For us, the main boxes on the flow chart are:

• Marketing: Finding people who might want to work with us.

• Sales: Proposing solutions to them.

• Development: Building their product.

• Testing: Making sure it actually works!

• Project Management: Keeping things on schedule.

• Finance: Bookkeeping, taxes, paying bills, all the fun stuff.

But All These Departments Are Really Just Me!

When we first started, all these roles were filled by the founders. We marketed, sold, coded, tested, and managed each project. The problem is that there are only so many hours in a day. So as the business grew, we had to start bringing on other people. One of our first moves was to find some other developers. This came naturally to us because our background in engineering made it easy to assess which applicants were strong technologically. As we made progress finding developers, we had more time available to build other parts of the business. On some products we’d work exclusively as project managers or testers, and this helped us to better understand those roles. We’d keep at this until a position was well-defined and we knew what to look for in candidates. After that, we’d begin searching for people who could fill those roles. When we found them, it freed up time to work on the next department. By repeating this cycle, Setaris was able to do more and more without always needing the founders to be involved.

Dipping Your Toe In

Even if you know very little about a particular field, you can get started by running small experiments. Set aside a small budget and find something that looks interesting to you. For example, you might spend a few hours selecting keywords and running a Google AdWords campaign. The idea here is to break through the inertia that can develop when facing uncertainty about how to proceed. Just pick something small that won’t kill you if it doesn’t work, and then get to it.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

After following this approach for a while, you will develop an intuition for which departments are ready to become more formalized. Maybe you’ve organized the sales process well enough that you feel comfortable going out and hiring someone to take it over, or perhaps you realize that your current marketing approach is so disorganized that it is holding other parts of your business back. Once you make some changes, you should see a nice improvement in productivity as your time is freed up to work on other areas including (of course) organizing the next department.

Your search engine of choice, whether it is Google, Bing, or my recent favorite, DuckDuckGo, uses pieces of software called “robots” that crawl the around the web and map the Internet.

Your job is to ensure that when a user is looking for X on the map of the Internet, your web page marks the spot.

Ideally, these robots are meant to traverse the web just as humans do: Get your bearings, read the content, and follow relevant hyperlinks. They are always getting better at this, but there are a few things one can do to help the little HAL-to-be out. The side effect will be that the user experience for flesh-and-blood will get better as well.

One more thing. As I mentioned previously, accessibility for the vision-impaired also depends on software being able to make sense of your website. Screen-reading software and search engine crawlers share the basic concepts of reading web sites.

In the end, you’ll end up with a web site that is simply easier to find and use. Onward!

Please, please, please don’t use Flash.

Content inside Adobe Flash is not easily searchable. That alone should disqualify it for everything but for the most dire circumstance. You would also be shunning your iOS-using audience, along with the increasing number of users who decide to forego Flash entirely. (Macs no longer come with Flash pre-installed.) If you need animation or other whiz-bang effects, there are newer, HTML-based solutions available today.

Use HTML5′s new semantic structural tags.

HTML5 introduces new tags that just plain make more sense than <div> ever could.

<header>, <nav>, <article>, <section>, <aside>, <footer>

Hardly any explanation required.

Title everything appropriately.

Your page title is what will stand out the most in a sea of search results or browser tabs. Give each page a distinct title that accurately describes what a person can expect to find there. Sadly, this is going to preclude a lot of the wit that comes from lede-writing in general, but try to work in the key words at least.

Eradicate “click here”.

The clickable text for links should have something to do with where it leads. “Click here” itself tells you nothing about the page behind it. A robot will better understand the relationship between pages if you use real words in link text.

Fill in metadata.

You hear this over and over again about images and their alt and description attributes, but metadata is useful for entire pages as well. Within the <head> of each page, you should have these:

<meta type=description content="This is the text that most search engines use as the excerpt in their search results. Stick to fewer than 155 characters.">

<meta type=keywords content="these,are,not,used,as,much,but,can,still,help">

Tell the search engines where you are.

Let your creation unto the world and tell the search engines about it directly.
* Google Site Submission
* Bing Site submission
* (DuckDuckGo claims it doesn’t need site submissions.)

Both Google and Bing provide webmaster tools that allow you to see what they see. They’ll tell you about the relevant keywords they found in your content, as well as any errors and broken links at your site.

Content that matters

In the end, though, nothing is going to help you more than having content that’s relevant in the first place. Write with clarity of thought and purpose, and you’ll be rewarding yourself and your users for finding your content. That will only increase the likelihood of them sharing it with their friends.

As search robots gets more sophisticated at mimicking human behavior, they too will be get better and better at recognizing quality.

The solution seemed simple, so I decided to knock this one out myself rather than bother one of our engineers. I figured that Joomla would have the tools for accomplishing this task and that I just need to find them. Well, I figured wrong. While you can copy a menu item in Joomla, you can’t conveniently copy an entire menu hierarchy. So, I rolled up my sleeves and went to work. Three great things came out of this experience that I want to share.

First, you’ll find the entire Python script for performing this task below. All you have to do is change some of the constants and run it on your server. Please make sure you take the time to understand the code before you run it though. I did use this script to solve my problem, but your problem and setup is probably different. If you have any questions or, if you use the script and it works wonderfully, please feel free to contact me.

Second, while I started Setaris as a co-founder and coder, I haven’t done much coding over the past couple years. Nowadays, I leave it in the most capable hands of our engineers. However, as a COO and project manager, most of my results only show up in metrics. It’s good to occasionally give yourself tasks that culminate in a concrete thing - something that you can call yours. Even better if you can hold it, but let’s not get too crazy.

Finally, as managers, it is sometimes difficult to empathize with the people who are actually getting stuff done. No matter your industry, there’s real value in jumping into the trenches occasionally and helping out in whatever way you can. I guarantee your team will appreciate you for it.

import MySQLdb
import sys

#DB Settings
DB_HOST = 'host.com'
DB_NAME = 'db_name'
DB_PASS = 'db_pass'
DB_USER = 'db_username'

#Table Info
TB_PREFIX = 'tb_prefix' # leave empty if your tables aren't prefixed
MENU_TABLE = '%s_menu' % TB_PREFIX

#Misc Settings
MENU_TO_COPY = 4 # the ID of the menu to copy

def make_row_copy(row_to_copy, parent_id):
        print "Copying '%s' with parent %d" % (row_to_copy[col_lookup['name']], parent_id)
        sql = """
                insert into %s(%s, published, parent)
                select %s, 0, %d from %s
                where id = %d;
        """ % (MENU_TABLE, col_list, col_list, parent_id, MENU_TABLE,
                row_to_copy[col_lookup['id']])
        print sql

        cursor.execute(sql)
        row_to_copy = list(row_to_copy)
        row_to_copy.append(cursor.lastrowid)
        return row_to_copy

# make a connection to the mySQL DB
conn = MySQLdb.connect(host=DB_HOST, user=DB_USER, passwd=DB_PASS,
    db=DB_NAME)

#get table columns and set up lookup and list
cursor = conn.cursor()
cursor.execute('show columns from %s' % MENU_TABLE)
cols = cursor.fetchall()
col_lookup = {}
col_list = []
idx = 0
for col in cols:
        if col[0] not in ('id', 'published', 'parent'):
                col_list.append(col[0])
        col_lookup[col[0]] = idx
        idx += 1
col_list = ', '.join(col_list)
# add new_id column for after the copy
col_lookup['new_id'] = idx

# get root menu
cursor.execute('select * from %s where id = %d' %
        (MENU_TABLE, MENU_TO_COPY))
row = cursor.fetchone()

print row[col_lookup['name']]

# cycle through and get the children
new_row = make_row_copy(row, 0)
parents = []
current_parent = new_row
copy_queue = []

i = 0
while current_parent:
        # find children of current parent
        cursor.execute('select * from %s_menu where parent = %d' %
                (TB_PREFIX, current_parent[col_lookup['id']]))
        children = cursor.fetchall()

        first_iter = True
        for child in children:
                if first_iter:
                        new_row = make_row_copy(child,
                                current_parent[col_lookup['new_id']])
                        first_iter = False
                else:
                        copy_queue.append((child,
                            current_parent[col_lookup['new_id']]))

        if first_iter: #no children
                if len(copy_queue) == 0:
                        current_parent = None
                else:
                        tmp = copy_queue.pop()
                        current_parent = make_row_copy(*tmp)
        else:
                current_parent = new_row

cursor.close ()
conn.close()

I was about 13 when I first watched What About Bob? and so the power of the Baby Steps program devised by Richard Dreyfuss’s character wasn’t immediately apparent to me.

In the movie, the baby steps program is presented as the path to a life free of fear. The idea is simple enough and is an oft-used psychological tool. As an example, let’s say that you’re deathly afraid of spiders. To overcome your fear, you might start by putting a vial with a dead spider in your office. Then, maybe you put a caged live spider in the room with you. Next thing you know, a spider scurrying over your foot no longer causes you to run for the highest point in the room screaming for your cat.

Baby steps become infinitely more useful when you realize that the principle can be applied to any goal you want to achieve. This became particularly apparent to me during our search for a CRM system to use at Setaris. At the time, we were doing what a typical startup does. Lead tracking for us was a messy combination of e-mails, post-it notes and fuzzy memories. Eventually we realized it would be good to establish something a little more robust.

Given our high computer geek density, we initially decided that custom software was the way to go. We reasoned that, though there were plenty of free and open source solutions out there, none of the existing solutions met our needs. Either they were too complex or failed to meet one of our requirements. We eventually reconsidered this decision in light of budgetary constraints and, instead, began using vTiger and then eventually SugarCRM. We spent a bunch of time getting Sugar set up just right and then guess what happened? It hardly got used.

There are plenty of reasons why Sugar failed at the time but it mostly came down to there not being enough leads to make the features Sugar has to offer worth the extra time it took to enter leads. Unfortunately, this lesson came with a pretty hefty price tag. It’s in helping to avoid mistakes like this that the baby steps mantra becomes priceless. The next time you want to make a change in your organization, channel Bob and  follow these steps:

1. Write down the ideal solution – this is usually the first solution you’ll consider. For example, we decided to set up SugarCRM.
2. Write down your goal for the solution. What is the problem you’re trying to solve? Very often, you’ll find your ideal solution solves much more than the problem you describe. We only wanted to track leads in a centralized place.
3. Reconsider your goal. Are you sure you need all that stuff? You might try the 5 whys method here to ensure you’re being honest with yourself.
4. Once you have your minimal goal, determine the simplest solution that satisfies that goal. In product development, we call this the Minimum Viable Product (MVP). Our MVP was a simple google spreadsheet.
5. Execute your solution. Remember, though, that even a simple, low friction solution is going to have more friction than the previous solution (which might have just been a free-for-all). If you want your solution adopted, you still need to create the appropriate environment for those affected. More on that later.

Good luck and let us know how it goes.

Which of these two buttons could you hit the fastest?

That’s easy. The big one.

Not so fast.

There is one instance where hitting the smaller button is faster: You are already directly on top of it.

Fitting In

This is a prime illustration of the most basic principle in usability and interaction design known as Fitts’ Law.

The time it takes to point to an object is a function of the distance to the object and its size.

To be even simpler, “The closer and bigger it is, the easier it is to point at.” When you think about it, this is obvious. However, Paul Fitts managed to derive an actual formula to calculate the time rather accurately. Countless research papers have confirmed his mathematical formula to be about 95% accurate.

If the buttons are exactly the same size, the button closest to your pointer wins.

Here, the bigger button would usually be easier to hit simply by virtue of its size. However, if you happened to be positioned on top of the small button already, you won’t have to move at all. Just click.

Could I have the menu?

If it weren’t for the current trend of completely removing or obscuring the menu bar in modern web browsers, I would have led with a different example.

Quick: Open your Edit menu.

The problem is that some browsers in Windows force you to show menus by tapping the ALT key. In Mac OS X Lion, Apple has built-in a Full-Screen Mode into Safari that hides the menu bar unless you bring your pointer to the top of the screen. No matter. Let us soldier on.

In Windows, each main application window has a menu bar shown inside the window, underneath the title bar. To get to the Edit menu, you would likely shoot your mouse up towards the Edit menu, overshoot it, then reel back downwards slowly to finally hit it. It takes some precision.

The Windows 7 menu bar

On a Mac, the menu bar occupies the top edge of the screen, no matter what application you are in. To get to the Edit menu here, you’d shoot to the top of the screen, not caring about how far you go.

The Mac OS X menu bar

Can you see where Fitts’ Law comes in?

The Mac OS menu bar is easier to hit because it’s not just a strip of 18 pixels you have to aim for with the pointer. Because your pointer won’t go past the edge of the screen even if you try, the menu bar is infinitely big. You can keep moving your mouse and pointer will stay put, ready to open the menu right at the edge of the screen.

Where else can we see Fitts in play?

The Menu In Context

The engineers working on Windows 8 have graciously turned to blogging their experiences while working on the next version of Windows. Some changes are radical, while others may seem backwards.

Consider this graph from Microsoft’s examination of how people use normal file commands in the current version of Windows:

To see the menu bar last is not surprising. In Windows 7 and Vista, it’s hidden unless you tap the ALT key. Even so, it’s tiny and not the easiest to use, as we’ve seen. But why is the context menu so much more popular than everything else?

Again, it’s Fitts. When you’re working with a file, it’s likely you are already pointing at it. To get to the context menu, you don’t even have to move your hand. Just right-click, and the menu appears right under your pointer. The commands in the context menu are nearly guaranteed to be easier to target than any of your other options, such as the keyboard-shortcuts, toolbar buttons, or menu bar items.

Bigger and Closer is Better

That’s the short of it. Always keep in mind how much effort it takes for the user to hit a particular control. Make the controls easy to find and hit. Think about where the user is likely to be at the moment they want to invoke a particular control.

Fitts’ Law has proved remarkably accurate in describing user interactions with controls in a vast number of scenarios. Remember it when designing controls, whether they be for mouse, trackpad, multi-touch, or even just the eyes.

There’s just one problem…

The Ford Model T is about to be released, ushering in the automobile age, and drastically changing the landscape your business is operating in. The market for your product is going to shrink drastically and the revenues from your existing product lines will plunge.

Uh oh.

This story has played out again and again, for example: the typewriter, the cassette tape, and the CRT monitor. The constant creative destruction that is part of our economy requires business owners to cope with tremendous amounts of upheaval. Since you don’t have a crystal ball, how do you make sure you don’t end up getting buggy whipped?

Focus on the Fundamentals

At Setaris we use the following principal: focus on the fundamentals. Building a business requires a tremendous amount of learning, but it’s essential to think about how durable the knowledge you’re acquiring is. Knowing the ins and outs of a particular manufacturing process or social network may be valuable today, but what happens when things change? In contrast, there are skills, like the ability to read basic accounting statements or keep teams working together productively, that have stood the test of time. If you focus on learning the fundamentals of business, you will be in the best position to adapt when the world changes.

A few of the fundamentals that we focus on at Setaris:

• Managing people and teams
• Executing projects on schedule and on budget
• Scheduling resources to optimally handle a large number of projects in parallel
• Designing sales processes and refining them based on experience
• Managing marketing campaigns
• Using CRM systems to track data relating to our sales and marketing departments
• Optimally managing finances to minimize capital requirements
• Making strategic decisions by rigorously analyzing each business opportunity quantitatively and in a probabilistic framework

If Setaris was running its own business school these would be the required classes. We attempt to focus on the things closest to being the “laws of physics” that there are in the business world, i.e. mental frameworks that will be useful in future years regardless of how things play out. So we view building Setaris as similar to studying calculus, differential equations, probability, etc. In contrast, we try to avoid investing time in learning about topics that we view as potential trends or fads. We see many business opportunities as “electives”: material that may be interesting but quite plausibly won’t be of any use five years down the line.

Reducing Risk, Adding Appeal

One side benefit of this approach is that it reduces the risk of starting a business. When you’re just getting started there are any number of chance events that might derail your business: another recession, a competitor with deep pockets, the list goes on and on. But if you’ve developed several of the abilities outlined above then your prospects for successfully starting another business (or gasp! even getting a day job!) are much better. If you’ve got a couple of years of hands-on experience getting the word out about a product, negotiating with vendors, and keeping your team happy, then you’re going to be appealing to a lot of potential business partners and employers.