blogging. metal. technology. games.

Short post but I just have to let some steam out. It seems to me that game designers think their work is done when they finished designing the  actual game. I’ve been playing Bioshock for a little while and prior to that - Metal Gear Solid 4. In both games, the menu design is pretty horrible and confusing. The most annoying part is actually starting the game. For example - 2K Studios (creators of Bioshock) have branches all around the globe. All were involved in the game creation. For some reason they thought that before showing you ANY menu, they need to show the logo of each and every branch involved (all have the same logo only in a different color). You want to skip these annoying credits? Forget about it. Only after they list all of the logos of the studios/publishers/engines involved they start loading. Here’s an idea for you - you can’t get away with loading, why don’t you show off with your nice logos WHILE loading? I know you can…All I want is to kick back and shoot some splicers as soon as I get back home from work.

In Metal Gear Solid it’s even worse. Let’s say you want to shoot some friends online. You have to load the game, wait through the credits and Dolby show-off, press start to get the menu (never understood why not show the menu right away), select the online option and voila - it’s like you’ve started a whole new game. Logos again, hit the start button and another menu. No wonder Snake is so old in this game.

IMHO when shipping a product the core functionality should still be at the highest priority - yes. In order to make it a great one, we have to think about the whole experience. It’s like when you buy a mac - the packaging is part of the product. Buying a mac simply makes you smile.

Earlier this year at SXSW, I saw a great presentation by Robert Hoekman Jr - The 7 Rules for Great Web Application Design. One of Robert’s rules is

SUPPORT THE USER’S MENTAL MODEL

Robert is saying people think like people and not like computers. He’s using the example of deleting a file in the old DOS model vs. today’s trash cans (hold a piece of paper in your hand and try to delete it…).

How do we support the user’s mental model when it comes to shopping? Traditionally, the experience has been very simple (and poor…) - You go to the storefront, you add an item to your cart, you are taken to your cart and you have 2 options: checkout or continue shopping. The latter will take you back to the store front. Can you imagine going into Target and every time you put an item in your cart, you are being teleported back to the storefront and start your trip in the store over?

My wife tells me that one of the reasons she loves shopping at the GAP online is that they don’t do the above - when you add an item to the cart, they indicate it but don’t take you away from the page you were looking at.

(click any of the images below to enlarge)

This works well for the GAP where it’s very possible one would shop for many items at the same “aisle”, but if you just bought a PS3 console and want to continue shopping, there is a high chance you’d prefer to buy some new games or an HDMI cable rather than buying a Wii. This is exactly why Amazon took the “recommendation” approach. It’s like having a good sales person. You add something to your cart, you get to review it but on the same page, you have a few recommendations.

There are also flaws with Amazon’s approach. What if you want to get rid of that annoying sales person and just keep browsing the aisle?  A store like Amazon doesn’t sell electronics exclusively. Sometime I DO want to keep browsing the same aisle (which might be a search results page). Going from the shopping cart back to page 3 on the search-results page is a hassle.

It seems like the best experience would be a combination of GAP’s and Amazon’s approaches which is exactly the solution Netflix brings to the table. I know, it’s not really a shopping site but adding a movie to a queue is very much like adding a product to your cart. When you add a movie to your queue, Netflix pop a modal screen confirming you have added a movie to your queue accompanied by some recommendations. Want to get rid of the annoying sales person? Hit the x on the top right corner and keep doing what you were doing moments ago.

I’ve recently ran into a great post by Glen Stansberry. I couldn’t agree more on the things you have to consider before installing a widget on your blog. Glen points out some (6 to be exact) valid concerns and I wanted to point out some of the things we do at outbrain to address them…

Slow loading pages…Widgets on the other hand typically use larger javascript files or flash

It only takes one bad widget…a slow or unresponsive widget can drastically increase the page load time, if it even finishes loading at all.

One of the principals we follow is GRACEFUL DEGRADATION. Simply put - If we have any issue serving the widget, we degrade gracefully…We disappear as if the widget was never installed. We wait for the most important thing on the page (your content that is) to load before we even call our servers. We keep the Java Script file size to a minimum, our code is highly cache optimized and we use a high availability CDN. If that’s not enough, we are also using what we call internally LAZY LOADING - We only call the widget if the user scrolls to the area where the widget would normally be visible. Great for those homepages with multiple posts.

Widgets take attention away from the most important part: Content

Well, this is a strong statement. I have to argue that this statement is false when it comes to outbrain. You are still reading this sentence but the outbrain widget is right here, just a few lines below. Typically, the recommendation/rating widget will appear at the end of the post. We want the reader to interact with the widget, but only after they’ve consumed the content. The purpose of the widget is to provide THE READER the best possible experience. Once your reader has finished consuming the content and is ready to leave the page, you want to drive them to what THEY will find most interesting.

They take up ad space

We’ve recently introduced Sponsored, But Good. This will enable you to enjoy both worlds - enhance your readers’ experience and make some $$$s. The ads that we show are quite unique…we show links to interesting content which is frequently a blog post speaking positively about a product or service. We assume your readers are in reading mode rather than shooting ducks… Of course that participation in the program is optional in case you don’t want any sponsored recommendations to appear on your site.

They can frustrate users…. Unappealing site designs add to the user experience, and bad experiences can turn users away.

I can’t really claim that our widget is beautiful…it inherits your CSS in order to blend perfectly with your site design. The widget will be as beautiful or as ugly as your site is

Does anyone still look at them?!

Hell yeah! I can’t share our exact numbers but our click through rates are constantly on the rise.  While contextual recommendations will do the job in some cases, the click through rates will stay flat. Our recommendations are personalized for each reader. As we gather more data and use it for personalization, the CTR gets better with time.

I’ll finish with another quote from Glen’s post.

As long as the widget is improving the user’s experience, keep it. Otherwise dump any widgets that don’t achieve that goal.

Today, we have announced the beta release of our “Sponsored, But Good” program. You can read more about the program here.

Many bloggers blog because they are passionate about writing, and are not in it for the money. With the new program, these bloggers can choose a charity to which we will donate a meaningful portion of the proceeds generated on their blog at the end of each year. Each outbrain employee had a chance to suggest a charity they are passionate about. I’ve chosen the ASPCA.

The ASPCA mission is non-debatable, it’s simply to prevent cruelty to animals.

Yesterday, 2 teens from Oklahoma were arrested for torturing their cats and publishing it on YouTube. It’s organizations like the ASPCA that will bring these kind of sociopaths to justice and find a new home for the tortured animals. Bloggers will now have a chance to help the ASPCA (as well as other important charity organizations) by simply participating in the program.

Today, we have announced the completion of a $12M Series-B investment led by Carmel Ventures.

We are excited and thrilled about this investment and most of all, grateful to our bloggers for using us!

You can read more about the investment here and here.

Many can probably tell the following story – You had a favorite restaurant, many others thought it’s great too. People used to wait in line for 2 hours to get a table and felt like the time spent at the door was well spent. A couple of months later, the owner/chef became greedy and introduced 27 new locations. All of the menus are now synched to perfection between all locations and the great food you got addicted to, becomes mediocre at best - even at the original location. This happens when success is being mixed with growth.

It can easily happen to startups once money starts flying around. It didn’t happen to 37signals and one of the reasons I like them so much is that they always keep in mind what their lighthouse is (building the best web-based software products possible with the least number of features necessary), grew only as needed and kept blessing us with great products albeit their huge success.

Balsamiq Studios is one of these small companies that I secretly wish they’d stay small. They become more and more successful by the day. They hit $100,000 in revenue in less than 5 months…What’s really impressive about it is the fact that Balsamiq Studios is a Micro-ISV – just one guy (Peldi) in his studio. I’m addicted to Balsamiq’s flagship product – Mockups and can’t see how I could do my job without it.

Spec’ing shouldn’t be the longest part of a development cycle. When you write long technical Word Documents and create Photoshop mockups just to communicate an idea – this is exactly what’s going to happen. Another side-effect is that you are not going to get an honest feedback from your team. People know how much time you’ve put into these mockups and compromise just so you don’t have to change your beautiful artwork. This is where Balsamiq Mockups comes to the rescue – it’s a super intuitive tool for creating *functional* mockups/sketches. For me, it’s much faster to create a Balsamiq mockup rather than whiteboarding it. It comes in a few flavors - desktop, Jira, Confluence or XWiki so everyone in the company can iterate over software mockups using the same tool. Other than producing great software, Peldi is also providing great customer service on his GetSatisfaction forum and created a unique blog where he is being transparent about everything, including the company’s financials. In short – he is doing things just right and therefore his success is well deserved.

It’s fun to see this kind of success and I would love to see Balsamiq around for a long long time…I wish and hope Peldi doesn’t decide to grow Balsamiq too much and stand behind his promise – to only bite off what he can chew. In the mean time, I recommend to all product managers out there to give the $79 Balsamic Mockups a try (all software updates included).

“How May I Help You” by Sikth. Written, directed and produced by the band’s vocalist - Mikee Goodman

This has to be one of the best music videos ever produced and IMHO – certainly the best Metal video I’ve ever seen. I haven’t seen too many music videos since the dark ages of MTV (even then, I only watched Vanessa Warwick’s Headbanger’s Ball) and never paid too much attention to them. At least I was lucky enough to run into this one and get over-excited about it.

If you’ve seen one Metal video – you’ve seen them all. Actually – there is a slight difference between European and American videos. On European videos , a bunch of fire-spitting gentlemen, equipped with double edged Viking Swords, will be riding black horses through the dark woods of Norway with no real purpose on their agenda. On the other hand, American Metal videos feature a bunch of over-weighed, well tattooed dudes, smashing beer cans with their heads backstage in-between live footage scenes with occasional close-ups on the drummer’s crazy double-bass action.

Stereotypes aside (and don’t get me wrong – I love this shit), my point is – in too many cases, the music video doesn’t add any value to the song. You can hear a great guitar solo or a drum/bass line, you don’t really have to see it…The fact that the vocalist wears a black eyeliner and can dance/headbang like there’s no tomorrow doesn’t affect his/hers ability to sing (or growl…).

The way I see it, producing a video for your song is like adding another feature to your software, and if you add any feature to anything, you should damn well make sure you take full advantage of it. A bad video can’t ruin a great song but it can certainly leave a pretty bad taste. Some lucky musicians out there get the opportunity to do this and add another sense to the game; The smart and talented ones like Sikth, get the job done right.

Sikth took the silly song about a person called Rodney and made it into this amazing animated video. The video creates a whole new experience that can’t be achieved only by listening to the song (even if you are one of those who read the lyrics). It’s telling a story, focuses “the user” on the lyrics and all done in a beautiful and fun animation. Unfortunately, a few months ago the band had decided to split…If Progressive Metal/distortion/growls make you nauseous, you may turn off your speakers but do play this. You can still enjoy it with no sound, and that’s exactly what makes it the best music video. Ever. \m/

10 years ago, I played guitar for a band called Sick Irony (they are still rockin’ with a different name: Seek Irony). I had the opportunity to go into the studio with them and play a few shows around Tel Aviv. At the most, we performed in front of 100 people but yet, this was the most exciting part about being in a band. For a reason which I can’t explain (alcohol maybe?), we all felt pretty comfortable going up on a stage, headbang, scream and jump for 30 mins in front of Tel Aviv’s finest punks. I couldn’t wait for the next gig to come up and I have never experienced any kind of Stage Fright…

…That is, until now.

I’ve been wanting to start a blog for quite a while now. I even set up the blog but could never bring myself to write. When you play in a band, you have 3 other instruments that can cover for your mistakes and the sound system to blame. On these lines, I’m the only one responsible for grammar mistakes, misspellings and stupid insights I’ve decided to share.

I’ve decided to give it a shot, convincing myself that: one - if I’m lucky, I will have 5 feed subscribers (outbrain employees if I had to guess) and two - even if I suck at first, I can only get better by trying.

So please help me out and give me feedback by rating the posts and leaving a comment.

So what is this blog all about?

This blog is about the things I’m passionate about: outbrain, product management, blogging, metal, technology, design, video games and marketing. I can’t say how frequently I will post.

Putting this together, credits etc.

This blog is PROUDLY powered by WordPress 2.7. I always liked WordPress, but I was stunned by the amazing job the guys at Automattic did with 2.7. Installing WP is a breeze (here is an image to emphasize, click it…),

the new interface is simple (and beautiful) and I still have to remind myself that it’s free.

I’m using a modified version of the Neoclassical theme. I really like it…it’s focused on Typography and Simplicity which are the 2 foundations I was looking for. Leave a comment, let me know what you think about it.

The image on the header is rotating and a random image is shown with every page load (come on - refresh this page, I dare you!). All of the photos in the header were taken by my good friend and favorite photographer Noam Galai. Thanks for letting me use these!

Now, stating the obvious: At the bottom of each post you will find the outbrain 5 star rater with a few recommendations below it. Use the rater to rate my post. Click the recommendations so you can actually discover interesting content after reading this post.