Scott Porad

Randy, as he often does, sent me some articles recently…this time related to the speculated arrival of an Apple tablet computing device.

We have some big plans for Cheezburger in the coming year, and there’s a lesson to be learned from these articles, in particular one from Daring Fireball:

I have a thousand questions about The Tablet’s design…but there’s one question at the top of the list, the answer to which is the key to answering every other question. That question is this: If you already have an iPhone and a MacBook; why would you want this?

The epigraph I used to start this piece — the bit about Steve Jobs demanding that a tablet be useful for more than just reading on the can — indicates that Apple will release nothing without such an answer. I agree that such an answer is essential.

This jibes a point that I’ve been highlighting lately: we can develop software faster than we can figure out what we want to build.

These days, with the evolution of web technologies, the problem isn’t exactly figuring out how to do something, but what exactly to do.  What is the thing that we’re going to build?  Answering that question clearly is the “essential” element to which Gruber refers.  It’s the clear answer to that which leads to success.

In fact, that’s what Gruber goes onto explain…not why someone would want it, but rather what exactly it is going to be in relation to other products.

When I think about Cheezburger, and the plans we have for the year ahead, that’s our biggest challenge in web development these days—what is it that we’re building and why would someone want it—everything else flows from there.

For those of you who don’t know, I work at Cheezburger.

We are a geographically distributed team which is just a fancy way of saying that we don’t all work in the same location. Some people work from the office, others from home, and some of those homes are in other cities.

We have an internal chatroom which is sort of like the water cooler or hallway is in an ordinary office. The chatroom is used for a bunch of stuff…informal meetings, asking questions, etc.  And, of course, there is your ordinary water cooler talk.

Except for some times the water cooler talk is really, really random…I suppose because, to a degree, our work is really, really random.  For a lot of the day we do ordinary stuff like manage servers and respond to customer e-mails, etc.  But, a fraction of our jobs are to know about all the stuff that’s going on out there on the Internet.

To illustrate this point, and the impetus for this post, here are some videos that were posted into the chatroom this morning with a little bit of commentary.  (The commentary is the completely unedited text from the chatroom immediately after the link to the video was posted.)  Enjoy!

Scott P.    Good monring
Donna D.    Mornin' Scott 
Scott P.    So, I'm watching this video. Are there people
            really like this? I mean, is this guy for real,
            or does he know that he's a complete poser?
            I will give him credit for one thing though...
            he has the nerve to be out there doing it,
            and that counts for something.
Donna D.    I was under the assumption that it was satire.
            Otherwise my head would asplode.
Scott P.    serious: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africa_(Karl_Wolf_song)
            "Africa is the first official single by Lebanese
            Canadian singer Karl Wolf from his third studio
            album Bite The Bullet."
            I can only imagine how bad his first two albums
            must have been.
Donna D.    Thanks Scott. Now my faith in humanity
            is officially dead. 
            You couldn't just let me HAVE my delusions. 
Scott P.    For real. It just goes to show how far perseverance
            will get you.

Donna D.    That bird hates the commercialization of his genus

Scott P.    is that the official Mayor of Simpleton video?
Kiki K.     yes I believe so
Scott P.    in other words, in 1989 anything could pass for a
            music video.  just do any random thing on camera
            and call it a day.
            life was easy back then.

Kiki K.     add this to Mayor of Simpleton and you have the
            mashup i woke in my head

Following up on my previous post about incrementalism, I would like to share this with you: we are trying to kill the word “redesign” at Cheezburger.

There is no such thing as redesign; there is only adding new things and cleaning up things that already exist.  When you do lots of those activities your site might start to look as though it has a new design, but that’s something entirely different than a “redesign”.

In my experience, redesigns are typically championed by loud voices who think something “really sucks”, but they rarely have data…just a lot of opinions about how things could be better.

On the other hand, incrementalism forces focus on the actual needs of your users.  You will never have a user that says, “Please redesign your navigation so that it better reflects your brand.”  Never.  What a user will say is, “I can never seem to find the widgamacallit page and that’s frustrating.”

When you’re focused on fixing the widgamacallit problem, then you can make changes that address that problem, and measure the improvement.  You can ask the users, “Can you find the widgamacallit now?”

As a result, an incremental approach makes it easier to sniff out the B.S.  When someone says, “Add the widgamacallit to the navigation,” there’s a logical answer: because it will help the user find it.  But, when someone says, “Well, I think we should also add the glibiddygab to the navigation,” the answer is “Why?”

At Cheezburger, we embrace incrementalism.  We’ve found that when we make changes in incremental, small pieces and there are several benefits:

1. Things get done and ship faster.  The result is regular progress and momentum.  Success begets success.
2. Things tend to be less late.  It’s hard to have a 2 day project be 2 months late.
3. You get the thing your making out to your customers faster.  As a result, a) you start learning if it works sooner, b) your customers get to start using it sooner, and c) assuming it’s valuable, you start capturing the value sooner.
4. There is less overhead (design, planning, etc.) in a 2 day project than a 2 month project.
5. Incremental changes have fewer dependencies.  Dependencies add complexity and can cause delays.
6. Developers like small projects because they seem easier and more fun.
7. A small project has less bugs and is easier to test.
8. It’s easier to A/B test incremental changes.
9. It’s less expensive to change your mind because changes cost less.
10. Incremental changes are less jarring to customers.

The bottom line is that we’ve found greater success through incrementalism.  I’m sure there are 101 other reasons that I’ve missed too  (and I’d love for you to share them in the comments…yes, I’m speaking to you Martin).

Customer service e-mail.  I genuinely love answering customer service e-mail.  Seriously, I’m not making this up.  I find real, genuine joy in helping our the fans and users of our web sites.  It makes my heart feel warm and smiley.

But, I’ll tell you, it backs up quickly.  Not to mention, there are a million other things we have to do at Cheezburger.  That’s the thing about building a web site: it’s never over—there are always improvements that can be made.

Honestly, sometimes it’s a little overwhelming and the never-ending-ness of it stresses me out.  Not in a horrible, ulcer-causing way, but in enough of a way to be a constant thread in the background.  Oh brother, how are we ever going to scale this mountain, I think.

What I’m trying to do is not think about it.  Thinking gets me nowhere, but doing results in progress.  To help with that, I keep a list of all the things to do which is important because that reduces the background noise in my head.

Lately, I’ve been focusing on just plugging away at things one item at a time.  They say that when you’re doing actual mountain climbing that you just need to keep on putting on foot in front of the other.  Don’t look up at the hill…just take the next step.  That’s what I’m trying to do.

If you’re a regular reader of this space, you know that I talk a lot about the metaphor of the journey of a thousand miles and a million steps.  I suppose this post is just another variation on that theme.  The lesson in this variation is that the key to avoid becoming overwhelmed by the size of the mountain is to simply focus on the step you’re currently taking, and don’t think about the next one until you’re done with the current and ready.

As I was strolling through the New York Subway earlier this week—I think the 42nd Street/Times Square station—I was moved by this advertisement.

Seen in the New York Subway

As someone in the business of building online services, essentially my job is to build stuff that meet people’s needs.

Often, small, subtle and non-verbal interactions are the cues that allow people to understand the needs of others.  Yet, unlike an ordinary store, those of us working online don’t get the opportunity to interact with our customers very often.  The result is that we end up making a lot of assumptions about what we think our users want, need and value.  And we’ve all heard the expression about what assuming makes out of you and me?

The bottom line is that this message touched me so strongly because, for those working in the online space, it reinforced the importance of user research and understanding.

For example, today at Cheezburger, we were considering an update to the navigation on one of our sites.  It felt like too many our insights were based on personal experience, anecdotal data, and assumption.  Yes: there is room in product design for instinct, however far too often we actually don’t really know what our users, customers and communities value.

As the ad says, we can only meet people’s needs by understanding what they value.  We have big plans for Cheezburger in the coming year, and my hope is that we will put extra effort at understanding our community’s values in order to better serve their needs.

This post, originally written for the Journalism 2.0 blog, is the basis for the presentation I’m giving today at UGCX.

In my view, Cheezburger and news journalism are both in the media business. Although news journalism is arguably more important to society than LOLcats (arguably!), the business models are basically the same: we acquire content (either through licensing or by hiring people to create it), and then monetize that content, typically through advertising and subscriptions.

Compared to traditional humor and entertainment media companies, by relying on user-generated content to harness the wit and intelligence of our community, Cheezburger has found a way to acquire content at a lower cost. This is a significant competitive advantage for us. At the same time, thanks to the power of crowd-sourcing, the content is higher in quality and more relevant than what we could create on our own.

But there’s a catch: the important lesson from Cheezburger’s success with user-generated content is that while content costs less, it is not free. That is, even though we do not pay our users for the content they contribute, there is still a cost associated with acquiring and managing that content. Why? Because only a fraction of the content submitted to us is of high enough quality to be used.

As a result, we incur significant expense to sift and filter and sort through the submissions to find the best. Specifically, we employ a four-stage review process — two phases leverage the user community to help us filter content and two phases of review are done by moderators employed by our company.

Whether employees or users, all of our content moderation is done by humans which is not cheap. We have developed technology to streamline that process, thereby lowering the expense, but we have yet to find an effective way to automate it completely. (Truth be told, we haven’t actually tried that hard to automate it because the primary content on Cheezburger is video and images which are very expensive to machine process. Perhaps it will be worth the investment in the future.)

Regardless, even including the moderation expense, the resulting content costs us less to acquire and is undoubtedly of higher quality. This fundamental win-win is the promise of crowd-sourcing and user-generated content. By committing to the model, Cheezburger has built a profitable business, “something that few others online—not even YouTube—have been able to pull off”. [Slate, March 20, 2009]

I just gave someone admin privileges to one of our Cheezburger systems.  Whenever I grant someone admin privileges to one system or another, I always give them this little speech:

You’ve been given the power, now keep these two things in mind:

1.  Play nicely with others.

2.  Think before you type.

We all have admin privileges in our own lives, so in general, I think these are just good words to live by.

P.S.  I can’t take credit for this speech: it was a given to me by a sys admin named Trey Valenta way back in the olden times.

Below are the videos from my presentations at WordCamp Portland and WordCamp Seattle.

In Portland, the first video, I talked primarily about our development philosophy at Cheezburger.  In the second video, Seattle, I spoke about how we use Wordpress at Cheezburger.

I re-read Hank Wasiak’s Change the Way You See Everything recently which is about differences between asset-based thinking (ABT) and deficit-based thinking (DBT).  The core message of the book is that people who look what life has (assets) as opposed to what life is missing (deficits) are happier and more successful.  I really like the message of asset-based thinking, and have been working to adapt the way I think to it.

The title reminds me of another book I read some time ago called How to See by George Nelson.  If you don’t know George Nelson, he was one of the founders of modern American design.  Some people just have the gift of seeing the world in a different an unique way.

I mention this because I saw something differently the other day.  This LOL was on the homepage of I Can Has Cheezburger?:

and it gave me a little smile, but not a real laugh-out-loud.  What I caught my eye was not the cat, but Marvin the Martian in the background, looking angry and frustrated.

What I like about LOLcats (and New Yorker cartoons) is that they tell a story, but only one frame of the story…the rest is up to the imagination of the reader.  I imagined a different story:

Interestingly, I’m the only person who saw it that way because if you look at all the LOLs made with this picture, none of them address Marvin in the background.  [Update: when I created this LOL, only 9 LOLs had been created from this picture.  As of 9/28/2009 at 4pm, there are 127!]