Rob Haitani on Palm OS from Designing Interactions:

One bit of advice that I gave to people designing the Palm OS was, "If you can really understand the one thing your customer wants to do most frequently, and make that a one-step process, then I guarantee people will like the product."

Just say, "What is the one thing you want to do?" and even if you have to throw out conventions of logic, architecture, and hierarchy, you should make that one step. The more "illogical" your approach is, the less likely it is that it will blindly follow the conventional wisdom, and hence the more likely it becomes that you will be able to differentiate and create a successful product relative to your competition, If you take the conventional approach, by definition you're not innovating. If you just say, "Here are all the features," and you lay them out in a logical pattern, then that's not going to be a successful product.

From Michael Lopp's interview of Instapaper's Marco Arment:

Were there design decisions you made early on in order to manage that? What were they?

Absolutely.

The biggest design decision I’ve made is more of a continuous philosophy: do as few extremely time-consuming features as possible. As a result, Instapaper is a collection of a bunch of very easy things and only a handful of semi-hard things.

This philosophy sounds simple, but it isn’t: geeks like us are always tempted to implement very complex, never-ending features because they’re academically or algorithmically interesting, or because they can add massive value if done well, such as speech or handwriting recognition, recommendation engines, or natural-language processing.

These features — often very easy for people but very hard for computers — often produce mediocre-at-best results, are never truly finished, and usually require massive time investments to achieve incremental progress with diminishing returns.

If a one-person company is going to build a product, it can’t have any of those huge time-sink features. At most, I can afford to have one or two components of moderate complexity, such as the HTML-to-body-text parser and the Kindle-format writer. But even those are barely worth the time that I put into them.

Top photo is by Nicholas Zurcher from Designing Interactions.

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II. Causality is selectable

All interconnection is apparent

Otherwise, complicated explanations would be necessary.

The end supports the explanation of the means

A successful person’s explanation of the means of his success is highly credible by the very fact of his success.

You can succeed by emulating the purported behavior of successful people

This is the key to the cargo cult. To enjoy the success of another, just mimic the rituals he claims to follow.

Your idol gets the blame if things don’t work out, not you.

You have a right to your share

You get to define your share.

Your share is the least you will accept without crying injustice.

Celebrate getting more than your share.

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Online fundraising is no different than offline fundraising—heck, people of my generation don’t even recognize that there is a difference between on– and offline.  What people want when they give is no different no matter where they give or where they are.  The only difference is efficiency.  Everything you can do online, you can do off-, except the reason you didn’t do it before was that it was so inefficient that no one expected you to.  And now that the online sphere makes it so cheap and easy (well,  if you’re doing it right), people demand it.

So what are people demanding: Community. Donors want to be linked with clients, linked with providers, linked with other organizations through you.  If they don’t, it’s because they don’t realize yet that they can be—just like Britain didn’t have good food because no one demanded it because no one supplied it because no one demanded it (yes, that’s Krugman). I’m not saying that everyone will be an A-type personality—a healthy community is diverse both in participants and modes of participation—but people want the opportunity for participation.

So how do you build a successful community? What do people really want that will lead to a healthy community?  I’ll just quote my notes from a conference session I attended called What Freud and Buddha Understood (and We’re Forgetting) about Online Outreach:

• Need 1: To be SEEN and HEARD
• Need 2: To be CONNECTED to someone or something
• Need 3: To be part of something GREATER THAN THEMSELVES
• Need 4: To have HOPE for the future
• Need 5: The security of TRUST
• Need 6: To be of SERVICE
• Need 7: To want HAPPINESS for self and others

When you build a campaign—whether on– or offline— that includes these components, it has the best chance of being successful.  This will cause the taste-makers to stop staring at their navels and the Facebook crowd to stop poking eachother (or throwing sheep)—and start talking about you.  And possibly create something else that you didn’t realize would happen in the first place… that will bring in the money.

As an ending thought, think about why churches are so successful with fundraising.  They link purpose with practice with people—and do such a good job that you may not realize when you are serving the church, serving the community or when they are serving you.  If a church can do that because of a shared moral calling, think about what you can do with a shared ethical and social calling. Think about it!

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