In western culture my name is Hsu Ken Ooi. The individual name followed by the family. In eastern culture my name is Ooi, Hsu Ken. The family name followed by the individual. To take it further, the “Hsu” part of my name that I share with my brother Hsu Han signifies our generation. A concept that doesn’t exist in western culture. Examining my name in eastern culture again, the order is family, generation then individual.
The difference in ordering isn’t surprising, western cultures have traditionally celebrated the individual while eastern cultures focused on the group especially the family. I think what’s interesting is what something as subtle and seemingly arbitrary as the ordering of your name can tell you about the values of each culture.
Posted Apr 19, 2012
I was happily using a Product A for months. I started to follow the people that built it, they seemed like nice people, I liked them.
Recently a competing product (Product B) was launched. Being a sucker for all things new and shiny, I tried it. It was functionally identical but with a better experience. Better in the way it gets dozens of invisible things right. I started to use it regularly instead of Product A.
A few weeks later, I read some distastful comments from the people of Product B towards Product A. In support of the people behind Product A, I started using it again.
That didn’t last.
I tried to convince myself that Product A wasn’t that much different. There were things it did better. More importantly, the people behind it were better people. I wanted to support them by using their product. That matters to me damn it.
Apparently not. Tonight, I started using Product B again. It’s undoubtedly better. I haven’t mentioned the names of each product because I don’t want to endorse Product B. I don’t want it to win. It’s a better product though and whether I like it or not, apparently, that’s more important.
Doesn’t mean I have to like it.
Posted Apr 10, 2012
I read threw my entire Instapaper queue yesterday. These were worth sharing:
Posted Mar 18, 2012
From andrewchenblog.com:
Today, I think you see a lot of this customer hitchhiking whenever companies string together a bunch of unrelated features just to please a target audience.
Of all the things listed, this is the worse.
Posted Mar 18, 2012
From paulgraham.com:
Maybe it’s a bad idea to have really big ambitions initially, because the bigger your ambition, the longer it’s going to take, and the further you project into the future, the more likely you’ll get it wrong.
Working on a post about this but I’m becoming increasingly convinced that trying to come up with a really big idea from the beginning is not only implausible but detrimental.
Apple’s revenues may continue to rise for a long time, but as Microsoft shows, revenue is a lagging indicator in the technology business.
That crystallized for me the feeling I get when people defend how relevant a company is based on revenue. Especially for very large technology companies, it’s a slow, invisible death.
Posted Mar 18, 2012
We started Milk Inc. (the company behind Oink) to rapidly build and test out new ideas. Oink was our first test and, in preparing to move onto the next project, we’ve decided to shut it down to help focus our efforts.
This is fantastic. Not that the app is shutting down (good people spent a lot of effort making it) but that they have the discipline to shut it down. Too many companies keep adding features to a product thinking that the next feature will get them traction. Throwing good money after bad, I believe the saying goes. If the fundamental idea of your product doesn’t work, an additional feature isn’t going to save you.
Use what you’ve learned and work on the next idea.
Update: Apparently there was more to the story, Google acquires Milk.
Posted Mar 14, 2012
Carl Sagan had the following to say about this photograph of Earth from about 3.7 billion miles. Earth is the dot in the middle of the right most beam.
We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
More info on Wikipedia.
Posted Mar 08, 2012
When someone who works at Pixar was asked which movie was his favorite:
This is such a tough question, because they are all good. And yet at the same time, it can be hard to watch one that you’ve worked on, because you spend so many hours on it- and you know all the little choices you made, and all the shortcuts that taken. And you remember the riskier things you could have tried but ended up not, because you couldn’t risk the schedule. And so when you are watching the movie, you can see all the flaws, and it isn’t until you see the faces of your friends and family that you start to forget them.
Brian sent me this article saying: “Thought of you when I read this post”. This is how I feel all the time.
There are times when I have a hard time looking at our product (decide.com). Just like the quote says, all I see are trade-offs, designs we didn’t use, things I wish we tried. Talking to users, I’m routinely surprised they find it so useful, some even really like it. That’s a weird statement coming from the guy who works on that product everyday.
The happiest I’ve ever been with a product was probably the first one we ever built. I didn’t know enough to see the flaws, wasn’t conscious of the trade-offs I was undoubtedly making. As I’ve spent more time designing, and hopefully gotten better at it, I’ve become more critical, more conscious of the decisions we make. Are the priorities of this page clear? Should there be less space between this text and this element so they’re better associated? What are we trying to communicate to the user? I’m constantly asking myself hundreds of questions like these every day. These aren’t questions I asked myself when I first started and I was happier for it but the work wasn’t as good.
It’s the price you pay.
Posted Mar 07, 2012
A great video about the legendary designer whose work inspired many of Apple’s products, not to mention a new generation of designers.
Design should not dominate things, not dominate people, it should help people, that’s the spot.
He’s got this sage thing going on. Thought that was a particularly insightful quote.
Posted Feb 27, 2012
Steve Wozniak in his memoirs:
Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me … they live in their heads. They’re almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone …. I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.
When we were bootstrapping, we only met once a week (on Monday) and did most of the work at home or in a coffee shop by ourselves. Now that we have an office and there are almost 30 people, coming into the office is the norm.
I felt more productive working by myself and was definitely more creative. Creativity is different for everyone but for me it’s being alone, a cup of coffee or tea, without distraction for several hours at a time. Coming to work everyday in a office and interacting with co-workers has a lot of benefits but it’s hard to do the really deep work.
Different types of work require different types of environments. Maybe the solution is to get up early and start the day with the deep work, before coming into the office and tackling everything else.
Posted Feb 23, 2012
