It’s always nice to find other people who think like we do, and Trent Walton does. He shares our belief that it’s more about the overall experience we create for our users, rather than the bits and pieces we use to get there. Although we strain immensely over all of those bits, and pour tirelessly over each of the pieces, what brings us the most joy is someone telling us “your work really helped me today.”

And that is what we strive for, because the whole is greater than the sum of all its parts.

“What do race-car drivers do when they want to go faster?” Cooley asks. “They don’t spend more hours driving around the track. They increase the biomechanics of the car.”

And I immediately thought about our apps. It might have been a long shot association, but it was worth thinking through…

If you want to improve your app, you don’t spend hours and hours using the app, hoping to just get better at navigating it. You look at the fundamental backend things you can do that will make your app more useful and efficient. Check its rate; can you up the speed of your app? Check its heartbeat: can you improve the way it makes API calls? Check its stomach; can you add storage somewhere? Check its digestion; how can you improve the export?

Boosting the biomechanics of a car will make it go faster. Boosting the internal forces of your app will get you the same results…

Complex apps “do more.” But they do it at the expense of crashes, and a manual in seven languages. Users use them, they hate them. They’re trapped by some function that no other app has, but that they need.

Take Photoshop for example (please take it!). No other app does RGB/CMYK, and compositing as elegantly. It’s amazing with it’s bezier curve handling and it’s simple yet incredibly powerful layer management. But on awkwardly grafted on top of that are functions like 3D compositing, check-in/check-out, and “share my screen” which nobody uses. These three examples are some of the more egregious, but they’re nowhere near the totality of the list. The whole app is a cruft of duplicative menus, bad help systems, and wanderingly bad UI.

But I still use it. Why? Because those features I need very badly to be good at my job are found nowhere else within a single app. If they were, I would pay not only the (freaking) $700 I normally pay for a license, but I swear on my design career I would pay double. Double.

I would pay double for an app that did the things I need in Photoshop, but did not crash, and did not suck. I want prettiness in a UI. I want logic, and elegance. Like most designers, I love surrounding myself with well-built things. I find joy in interacting with a laptop hinge that slides into place just-so, or a touch screen that actually reacts to my touch.

There are apps like http://www.pixelmator.com/ that I’m dying to use. Gorgeous, well planned, and humanist. But it doesn’t do the things that I absolutely have to have to make the switch. The pain of switching would mean I have to run multiple apps, or keep a copy of CrashyShop on hand for use many times a week. It’s not worth the pain. No matter how much I love beautifully designed things, I have to make a living with my tools, and if anything slows me down even slightly, I’m not going to use it.

So. We have about a million blog articles online today expounding the excellence, and instant success of “simple.” You can even look at our blog to see how we’re devotees of “less.” But I’ll be honest- our most profitable app is our most complex. People pay for functionality if it is done well. People use simple if it is free…

So as developers we’re left with a problem. Feature-rich applications lead to crufty interfaces. It’s not unavoidable, but it’s nearly inevitable. If you’re ever going to launch your app you must (MUST) limit its feature set. But if you’re ever going to make money off your app, you have to keep adding to it.

Gradually, like the ocean tides, you wear down the apprehension of your audience. Keep beating the drum. Keep enticing people who have tried it once before to try once again. Eventually the feature that kept them from sticking before will be the one you just added. But the game is to do it well. To do it smartly. To add features without adding complexity.

We are not experts on the subject, but we’re cracking every book, blog, and beer we can to try to get to the bottom of it. Every new feature brings the chance to add new users, and alienate old ones… It’s the way you add it that makes the difference between winning or losing users.

-The Art of Interactive Design by Chris Crawford

...We don’t know them ourselves.
...They’ll probably change a lot before we’re done.
...After exploring, we might decide not to finish the project due to several reasons.
...It’s a competitive advantage to be somewhat secretive when building niche apps.
...Keeping things a secret builds interest, and makes the whole thing more fun.

Still, keeping everything secretive goes against our nature. We love to share, and we love to help the community. As an experiment, we’re going to share some of the growing pains we’re experiencing as we plan, sweat and think about this new app.

We’ll be as forthcoming as we can about the process we’re going through, and maybe if you’re going through some of the same steps you’ll find this useful.

The first thing we want to talk about is the idea.

When an idea hits, sometimes it smacks you over the head, and sometimes it builds slowly. They can both be valuable, but this particular idea smacked me over the head. It was such a clearly defined niche that it practically leapt out at me.

I always think that’s a good sign. It’s one thing to learn to love, but it’s yet another
thing to fall in.

But, I want to say very firmly, and not braggingly, that I have lots of ideas. One of my jobs here at Paste is to think about our momentum, and where we might go next. I carve out lots of time in my week to just think about stuff. I’ll say this next part firmly and unabashedly, too: most of my ideas are total crap.

That’s what’s great about ideas. You can flirt with them, get to know them, see how they evolve. Several times a month I practically jump out of the shower, or wake from an ebbing sleep suddenly, or have to use the nerdy voice recorder app on my iPhone because I am assured that I have the next huge idea. I’m not especially proud of that fact- anyone could do it if it was their job to do so.

Ideas are practically valueless. Sure some are better than others, but what creates value is time and energy invested in an idea. And that is something that I’m sort of proud of. For every 100 ideas we have, we only work on one or two. There’s a loose, but thorough vetting process we go through.

Here are some of the things we think about.

Will people want this?
How many people?
Are these people identifiable in a certain niche?
Can we get at them inexpensively?
Is this the type of idea that builds its own momentum? If not, are the customers we’re able to get through normal means enough to make it profitable?
Will we be proud of it?
Are we passionate about it?
Do we think we can do a good job of it? Just because we can, and just because it’s a good idea doesn’t mean we can make it great.
Are there competitors? Direct competitors? Can we do better? Does it matter if we do?

These thoughts happen before we even bother with technical stuff. Before we write copy, think of names, or push pixels. Before we waste a single minute on execution, we think about whether we should even bother.

Your time is incredibly finite, so it’s important to be critical of your ideas.

If we think the idea passes these tests generally, that’s great. But you imperatively have to check, research study- make sure. We call people in the industry. We research blogs, forums and anything we can get our hands on to check our facts and see if we’re right.

If, and it’s very rare that it happens, we’re still convinced that the idea is good at this point, we start to chase it. That very thing happened to us last week. It’s not too late- we might still dodge a bullet. All sorts of things could convince us that our time is better invested somewhere else. But for now, our teeth are sunk in and we’re trying to bite off exactly what we can chew.

Next time: Naming.

I’m Kristin, and I work for a web app development company. To be (brutally) honest with you, I don’t know much tech lingo or a lot about web design in general. But I do find it fascinating. So what am I doing here? I guess you could say I’m sort of a journalist inside my own company; I work to pull out the information people might find captivating (or at least, a little bit appealing) about what we do here at Paste Interactive. 

The truth is, I’m not so different from my co-workers, even though I don’t have a design degree and reading code is like reading another language. We’re all here to solve a problem. They’re here to solve the problem of disorganization and they do that by creating great web apps that help people simplify their lives. I’m here to solve the problem of what happens when they’ve dug themselves so deep into their work that they have trouble seeing when something is really interesting and worth sharing. I talk to them, probe a little bit to find out what they’re working on. I ask them to explain things to me. I look it up online, and then I attempt  to translate everything into plain english, which sometimes is the most difficult part.

It’s a really great and interesting gig, though, because as much as I disliked school, I’m thrilled with doing research all the time. Seemingly tedious tasks like that can be so rewarding when there is genuine interest. 

So I’m a writer. Of words, not code. But I’m going to do my best to be a good translator. 

And so, meet Brian, our main developer of both Jumpchart and Staction. Here are 5 desktop apps he uses most often.

1. Things.app
“I use Things on my Mac and iPhone to keep my life outside work organized. I keep wishlists, gift ideas, grocery lists and much more on it. The synchronization with my iPhone makes it perfect to take everywhere I go.”

2. Yojimbo
“I started using this to plan a trip last month, and haven’t been able to stop using it since! It’s my little box of collection of things I’ll need sometime in the future.”

3. Tweetie
“Again, I use it for my Mac and iPhone- it’s just the best Twitter client.”

4. Airfoil and Airfoil Speakers
“Whenever I’m working in the living room, this pair of apps works perfectly to stream music from my laptop to my media center that’s connected to my home theater system.”

5. Audio Hijack Pro
“I use this to mute the sound on Firefox. I hate websites and banners that play music!”

As we watch the US automotive industry get reinvented, let’s take a moment to see what us app developers can learn from the past with a few Henry Ford quotes.

“A business absolutely devoted to service will have only one worry about profits. They will be embarrassingly large. “

“Business is never so healthy as when, like a chicken, it must do a certain amount of scratching around for what it gets. “

“I am looking for a lot of men who have an infinite capacity to not know what can’t be done. “

“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own. “

“If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right. “

“It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages. “

“Quality means doing it right when no one is looking.”

“You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.”

“I let go of the law, and people become honest.”
Such a smart thing to say… And true of app development too. The less rules you give people, the more they can be inventive within the app. The less features they really need (because features are just a reaction to rules)

“He considers those who point out his faults as his most benevolent teachers.”
It’s easy to react to feature requests and complaints with malice. We work so hard on these apps, and spend our waking nights thinking about how to make them better. “Who is this middle-aged schmuck who thinks he knows how to do my job better than me?”

It’s wrong thinking. We should take comfort in the fact that these are their only needs, and that we must have satisfied so many more of the others that they took the time to talk with us about the ones (in their opinion) that we missed. It’s a tremendous compliment.

“He thinks of his enemy as the shadow he himself casts.”
The app market is thick. We tend to react quite sharply when we see new apps in our same genre. Comments, and critiques fly around pretty fast. But these apps exist along with our apps, and because of our apps. You can’t have a coin with a tails, but no heads. We need these apps to drive us forward, to inspire us, to react against.

“He teaches without teaching so the people will have nothing to learn.”
The goal these days is to make apps that don’t require a manual. It’s a response to the crufty mess that companies like Microsoft have heaped onto us for years. But the simple apps that are so simple there is nothing left to learn might be short lived.

At Paste we choose to believe that apps should have a learning curve. Every function does not have to be immediately apparent, but rather the app should “unfold” its hidden features as you use the app. You should not need to know everything about the app on day one to use it, nor should you be out of new things to do with the app on day 100.

“Confront the difficult while it is still easy”
The best time to fix a bug is before it is one… Having simple and sturdy construction in the beginning is the greatest secret to having less bugs later. It’s much easier to fix it before it breaks.

“Think of the small as large”
“God is in the details” is thrown about like tissue paper these days. But lets take a step back and think about what it really means. These many details when taken in sum -become your app. There’s a trend these days to say “good enough” -but there is a fine line between good enough, and not good. Certain personality types benefit from permission to leave loose ends. Otherwise things would never get done… But the majority of us ought to be striving for greatness in all details. It’s important not to rely on self-help books, or quotes to give us excuses not to work hard.

“Accomplish the great task by a series of small acts”
Here’s the best one… We know it, but most of us fail to act on it. Pick one feature, pick one page, pick one paragraph. Make it better. There’s nothing easier than completing a small task, but you’ll be shocked at how much better things get on your app if you can just make small things better every day. Every day.

I take great inspiration form Apple’s latest effort with Snow Leopard. They’ll obviously make less money with this release than with previous releases. But because of their efforts to optimize, and improve, they’ll be the recipients of a better, more reliable, and probably simpler system to work within. They’ll be happier, more productive, and faster in the future. The revenue they lose is only delayed, and will most likely be much greater because of this detour towards “better.” All these very small things are turning into one big great OS.

“Put things in order before they exist.”
The best time to make revisions is before you write any code, or design any mocks. Use your imagination, talk a lot, -think. You will never regret a single day you spend planning your app before you build it. We have avoided thousands of hours of work towards apps, and features we wouldn’t have been proud of by just planning more… Planning saves time, – it doesn’t increase it.

“Forcing a project to completion, you ruin what was almost ripe.
Therefore the master takes action by letting things take their course.”
This is not an excuse to procrastinate. But it is an excuse to take the time to get it right. There is a lot of pressure to push apps out the door, -by your clients, by yourself, by your bosses, and coworkers. But be resilient to the pressure where you are able. We’ve scrapped entire versions of our apps because “they didn’t feel right.” I don’t regret a single hour we spent working on the lost versions, and not releasing them is one of my proudest decisions. We were teaching ourselves how to make a better app. And you don’t have to do that in front of an audience…

“What he desires is nondesire”
Are you trying to finish your app? Or are you trying to have nothing left to add to it? Like most of the Tao, its semantics, but it makes you think more deeply about your actual intent. Trying to “get done” is one thing, but “being finished” just feels different when you really contemplate it. While we plan and debate our apps exhaustively before starting, – we let the apps talk to us about what still needs done, and what features can wait. When an app feels useful, and is not begging for polish in any areas that you use frequently, – when you have no desires left within the app that keep nagging at you, – it just might be time to launch…