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I heard a catchier way to phrase #2 and #4 - the "me, make, meet" schedule:

http://managinguxteams.com/2010/03/27/me-make-meet-how-to-ma...

It's written by a former Google manager on how he used his calendar to maintain his sanity and individual output while also dealing with his commitments to others (via meetings).

alabuton If you see a UI walkthrough, they blew it

You're right - people get confused between a UI's learnability vs it's usability. Just because you need to ramp up on something initially doesn't mean it's hard to use over time.

Plus a new feature can get lost or ignored by people already familiar with an existing interface, so it needs it's own little mini walkthrough just so it'll get noticed. Here's an example of Facebook's mini popups focused on a single new feature:

http://cl.ly/image/3a3c1z2f0j21

I've built wizards of various kinds over the years and I call them "training wheels". The trick is to make it so they can start pedaling on their own relatively quickly, rather than using it as a catch-all where you dump every possible use case.

alabuton Usability Testing: the secret sauce of startups

No, it's not a contradiction to have an agenda in mind and to also try not to ask leading questions.

An example of a leading question in this context would be like asking them "do you see the button labeled 'learn more' to your right?", which really doesn't test anything other than the fact that they're literate and their eyes work.

Compare this to asking them "now what do you see on the page and what do you want to do?" Maybe they'll want more information and hit the learn more button, maybe they want info and don't see it, or maybe they want to do something else entirely.

And sure, you can just give the app to the user and see what they do, without writing up goals in advance. That's the unscripted method that Mark Hurst popularized and I linked to. Here's an even longer article by him on the same method:

http://www.goodexperience.com/blog/2004/12/tips-on-moderatin...

But that's not appropriate for every situation. Unscripted stuff is great for getting the lay of the land and uncovering as many problems as you can, or finding out if they'd use your app at all even if you got rid of all the obstacles. Often times you already know about specific usability issues, however, or you want to make sure they cover all the bases in an app with a lot of moving pieces.

alabuton Usability Testing: the secret sauce of startups

Great idea on using Exec - I hadn't thought of that. We've got Taskrabbit upstairs in our building so that's an option as well.

alabuton Usability Testing: the secret sauce of startups

It depends on the method of testing. If I'm doing an in-person session, I'll record the session with Silverback, review the footage in there and make some notes along the way, then build a quick powerpoint deck with major findings and selected video clips.

If I'm using usertesting.com, then that stuff is all built into the app itself and you can just send the videos around, which'll be annotated with your feedback. Each note is a clickable timestamp that takes you straight to the time slice you want to highlight.

Either way, it's important to not only review the test afterwards but to also pull out clips that you can show the team, because video has such a motivational impact and cuts through debate. It helps if you can take a few minutes in imovie to make a "lowlights reel", where different people all run into the same obstacle.

And if I'm doing the drunken bar testing, I just bring a witness to watch and compare notes with, hopefully also somebody sober :)

alabuton Usability Testing: the secret sauce of startups

That's hilarious. I should've mentioned in the section on testing drunks that the moderator should stay at least somewhat sober :) but I'm glad you got some insights at least.

alabuton The Most Revealing Job Interview Question

It's not given in written form - it's a friendly oral conversation.

alabuton The Most Revealing Job Interview Question

I'm glad you're conflicted! Because it is a trap, an intentional one meant to simulate the unintentional randomization that happens in real life at work. I'm sure we've all had that thing happen when someone threatens to accidentally scramble your work queue because they don't understand the problem domain as well as you do, so you need to be able to steer and guide the work requests that are coming your way and push back when it doesn't make sense.

My dad's a teacher too and boy does he love to lecture. About anything - digital signal processing, the price of gas, whatever - and that mode of communication is useful in its own context, but not so much when a team of people are trying to get something done together.

If it makes you feel better, I fell for the trap too. I asked Kevin for a demo of the question in action so I could see what it was like to be on the receiving end before I used it on candidates myself. I was the guy he referenced in the blog post that compared poker to backgammon and I was in the middle of explaining how Texas Hold Em taught me essential skills of entrepreneurship when he asked me how many board pieces were in a typical backgammon setup. I lost a good 20-30 seconds there trying to remember, until I laughed out loud and called him out on trying to randomize me :)

alabuton The Most Revealing Job Interview Question

For those that can't see the post, try this - it's a cached version from Instapaper: http://www.instapaper.com/text?u=http%3A%2F%2Frefer.ly%2Fblo...

And we're sorry about the downtime on the blog! We're trying to fix it as we speak and it kind of caught us off guard, because the blog's handled being on the front page of HN all through the summer without a hiccup.

alabuton From gymnast to runner: interview with Jason Shen (Ridejoy, YC S11)

Yeah, I had a similar experience. I was inspired by Jason when I first heard his story and tried out barefoot running, only to give myself plantar fasciitis instead. I'm glad it worked for him though!

alabuton Predicting the “iPad Mini” internals

Here's a graphical illustration of why it'll probably be priced lower than $299, whether at $249 or $199:

http://www.iamconcise.com/main/the-reason-for-the-ipad-mini....

Apple has an excellent track record of not leaving price umbrellas under their products (even if it means releasing something super minimal, like a Mac Mini or iPod shuffle) nor do they usually create multiple products at the same price that cannibalize each other.

The second rule isn't as strong because it isn't nearly as big a problem as price umbrellas. They've often said (correctly) that if anyone's going to cannibalize their products it might as well be them, e.g. iPod sales declining because of the iPhone taking off.

alabuton “A Doable Sacrifice:” Y Combinator as a Married Man

"The bigger picture is a lot harder to balance. What happens after those 3 months? How do you run the startup while still maintaining a reasonable work-life balance?"

My theory on how to maintain work-life balance after YC is that you have to try to create some semblance of it during YC as well, then turn the volume up afterwards. That can also help avoid the post-Demo Day postpartum crash that comes with pulling a 3 month stint of nothing but work.

So for us, that meant taking Saturdays off, like I mentioned in the article. And it's not just about not working, it's about planning out some kind of epic release and fun time, like going to Monterey for a concert or kayaking around the bay. I have to admit that I wasn't as good about that before YC - I would work until some kind of internal safety valve would blow a gasket and I was flirting with the crispy edges of burnout, then I'd crash uselessly until I could be productive again - and now I'm hoping I've learned a life skill that can power steady productivity for much longer than 3 months.

alabuton A Summer in the Life of a YC Intern

"I’ve divided this post into four core parts because I know you’re a busy person and I love you."

He really does talk like that. Man am I going to miss this guy.

alabuton Finding a New Voice

Never thought this was how my theater minor would come in handy one day.

alabuton Cracking Turkey

"Most people die here without ever failing, but nobody realises that they died without trying."

That's a heartbreakingly true line about the mentality. My Turkish parents were raised to believe that "making it" meant having careers in much more established and traditionally respected industries, even though both of my grandfathers were small business owners in Turkey and there's a rich bazaar-based ecosytem and entrepreneurial heritage.

alabuton Amicus (YC S12) Uses Facebook To Mobilize Volunteers for Nonprofits

To put the political use case aside for a second, Seth and I first talked over email just before YC started about how I could use Amicus to rescue dogs at shelters from euthanization and getting them into no-kill foster organizations instead.

alabuton I am CDO, bitch

If two products are even in terms of features, design can be the tiebreaker.

Design can be even more critical than that and more valuable than feature parity. Facebook had way less features than Myspace - you could do all kinds of stuff on Myspace like listen to music, customize your page, have photo slideshows - but Facebook's design was a welcome relief from the haphazard Geocities-like mess that Myspace devolved into.

And similarly, Facebook's current crowded interface leaves room open for even better designed networks like Path, Instagram, etc.

alabuton I am CDO, bitch

I'm a CDO and occasionally feel the sting from it being such a new term. When the press covered Referly's big new features last week (an API, shopping experience and design overhaul) the ones that mentioned me put my title in dick quotes - "Chief Design Officer" instead of Chief Design Officer. And it sounds too similar to CTO to just say CDO when you first meet people, so I just say I'm a cofounder.

It's ok though and stuff like that's rare. Overall I feel a growing responsibility to represent design founders and it's what most accurately represents my role anyway. CDO is more fad-proof and less limiting than other titles like Chief UX Officer (too much focus on function, plus UX is industry jargon) or Chief Creative Officer (too much focus on visuals and marketing, plus it makes you sound like a Don Draper wannabe).

alabuton Go Ahead, Feed The Trolls

Pinch, poke, you owe me a Coke.

alabuton Go Ahead, Feed The Trolls

Riiight, sock puppet accounts to get on the front page of HN... on a Saturday night when the traffic is practically zero.

No, Danielle's just having fun writing on Svbtle and treating it as her own fun shiny toy for the day. The scary thing is that this how she blows off steam, you should see her when she really gets going.

alabuton Referly Homepage Simplification Retrospective

Oh god. Showing old versions of my designs is like showing the world my underwear. This thing was clutter city just 6 weeks ago.

Thanks for keeping today interesting, Danielle :)

alabuton A tiny redesign of Basecamp's homepage from 37signals with Bootstrap Design

He's learning design the healthy way - practicing the principles he's learning and also keeping in mind that they're not strict rules, like physics. Everything has to be contextualized to your own circumstances and tested in the wild to see what holds up.

alabuton When to kill your startup

And to think that shortly after you unplugged and went to New Zealand to shake it all off before jumping back into your next awesome new venture (which seems to be going really well).

I bet you would've burnt out if you hadn't and Torbit wouldn't have happened, even if you had the idea or bandwidth for it. I've flirted with the crispy edge of burnout a bunch of times since moving to SF. You haven't really been working hard unless you've at least once seriously considered chucking it all to become a forest ranger, surf instructor or dog walker.

alabuton Bit.ly’s Stumbles Are Refer.ly’s Gains As Hackathon Brings More Features

We've got some stats visualization built in already and getting to it is a bit subtle - you hover over the table cells in your list of links on the account dashboard, then click on "more info" - but agreed that yeah, we could do a lot more there.

alabuton Don't Waste a Single Moment

I'm about to find out if this is true because I'm kicking off a "work out every morning" routine as we go through YC. I figure when I first wake up is the best time to sneak in something that I don't need all the gray matter for anyway and that will serve double duty by kicking the noodle awake more than a cup of coffee would.

alabuton Oh, the Places You'll Go

Shoot, sorry, I didn't see this comment until I left town for a week and left my iPad behind.

alabuton Oh, the Places You'll Go

I noticed it too - I'm on an iPad 2.

alabuton Design-time Versus Meeting-time

A great way to deal with the different modes is to establish habits and routines around each of them. My friend is head of design at Salesforce and turned me on to the concept of "Me, Make, Meet":

http://managinguxteams.com/2010/03/27/me-make-meet-how-to-ma...

Tldr - use your calendar to carve out concrete "me time" to reflect, cave time at the beginning of the day to make stuff when your energy is highest, and set aside meetings and office hours for the end of the day.

alabuton Visualizing How Referly Works

That's a good question. I think making sure to add a personal note would help explain why you recommend something, like "here's a great helmet for going river rafting with, I used it last weekend" or etc.

I get annoyed by stuff that doesn't have context, like those Spotify alerts in Facebook that just lists the track, as opposed to something like "our whole team is jamming to the Budos Band while we jam out the next release".

alabuton Visualizing How Referly Works

We actually have a (very handy) bookmarklet but I de-emphasized it so much in this design (buried on the right in tiny type as the second tip) that it makes it look like we don't have one.

I can see a v2 of this page reversing that and being almost all about the bookmarklet, with little or no mention of the form-based link shortener.