I’m a fan of Reelights. As I wrote in an instructable, three years ago:

For staying safe at night, magnetic induction lights are a great way to go. They just bleed off a tiny sliver of your momentum to generate nice, bright light. They’re perfectly silent (unlike dynamos) and need no batteries (unlike clip-on bike lights.)

The reason that I had to write an instructable, though, is that I had to hack the lights substantially to work around a number of drawbacks. Here were the things that I had to fix:

The problem with Reelights, though, is that they are mounted directly on the wheel axles. This makes the actual product small and compact (the coil and light are in one integrated unit) but has a number of shortcomings:

• The lights are very low to the ground, making them less apparent to drivers
• The arms can flex a bit as the magnets pass by them, so they have to be adjusted every so often
• The arms are kind of ugly

Fortunately, Reelight finally got their act together and are releasing new versions of the lights. They address every problem I had to work around. They upped the slick factor, to boot. Since I had one stolen off my bike in the Tenderloin last month, I’m going to get a new pair when they’re available on the Reelight site. A rep told me this should be by April 1st at the latest.

Here’s a PDF catalog of the new product.

NoahW, of my last company Instructables.com, decided that it made sense to write an instructable on breaking wooden boards with no training. Here’s me giving my try:

Yes, it was fun. However, I was lying about the profit.

UPDATE: The full instructable that this video comes from is called “No-Experience-Necessary Board Breaking”. Below is the video from Step 4. Highlights include Sarah’s amazing face of joy upon board breakage and also Christy breaking a board while nursing her baby!

To celebrate our 1,000,000th registered user, last month, Instructables.com celebrated by getting lessons from Trapeze Arts. We did some basic trapeze and messed around with the roomful of circus gear they had on hand. Here are a couple vids:

Workshop Title
Fake It Till You Make It: Rapid Prototyping Using Flash

Presenter
Philip Fierlinger (Xero)

This was one of the most fun presentations of the conference, mostly it addressed a task that I want to like, but find to be a pain: mocking up interfaces. Usually I just do this on paper, and don’t iterate much. Fierlinger showed off how he could effortlessly and visually throw together UIs in Flash. He’d do dozens of iterations a day, sometimes in the middle of user testing. It struck me as incredibly agile.

Interestingly, Fierlinger was barely using Flash at all: He was basically using it as a drawing tool with a timeline. The sweet spot he settled on between interaction and static mockups are what he calls “screenflows.” These are scripted interactions where the viewer is guided through the interaction. These are useful for testing the expectations of users, as requirements documentation for engineering, and as the first pass of a testing plan.

Click through to see the full notes on how he came to this process and all the places in the development cycles that it pays dividends.

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Workshop Title
Even Faster Websites

Presenter
Steve Souders (Google)

This was the third year in a row that Souders has presented his findings at Web 2.0. Here are my posts from year 1 and year 2. As usual, Souders has been hard at work running experiments on the performance of every part of the web browser, from initiating HTTP requests to rendering CSS. His central nugget of wisdom is that the vast majority of a user’s perceived wait time can be attributed to the frontend. This was an unconventional idea when he debuted it several years ago, but it’s common knowledge now and has only become more true over time. We frontend engineers are writing richer and richer browser-side code, nowadays.

However, my impression of this particular talk was that much of today’s research into frontend optimization is achieving diminishing returns. Instructables benefited greatly from Souders’ first talk, back in 2007, but the CSS optimizations introduced in this talk would shave very little off a user’s wait time. I was reminded, however, that I should install YSlow, which is an open-source plugin that will automatically identify performance bottlenecks on Instructables. I’m pretty sure there is plenty low-hanging fruit that we haven’t harvested, performance-wise.

Practicality aside, Souder’s talk was very interesting. The fact that CSS rules are parsed right-to-left was an eye-opener. I’m not going to go back and optimize all Instructables’ CSS, but this one nugget will allow me to avoid writing any egregiously slow selectors in the future.

You can find full notes and a link to the slides after the jump.

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Workshop Title
Designing Social Websites

Presenter
Christina Wodtke (Boxes and Arrows)

It’s true. I attended two workshops pretty much on the same topic. The information presented in each was quite different, though, so it was good to have absorbed both.

Instructables has implemented a hodge-podge of social features, many of which have increased user engagement. But it’s hard to know how to move forward: How do we tie these together? What’s the full set of user behaviors we’re ultimately aiming to support?

The prior workshop (my last post) went into detail on a comprehensive set of social software design patterns. What problems can be addressed, what behaviors encouraged, and how? Christina Wodtke’s talk delved deeper into the theory of social software. What is the case for doing it in the first place?

In this workshop, Instructables was used as a case study at several points in small groups and by the whole room. I gleaned a lot of insight from these conversations on why social features would improve Instructables, and how. More importantly, I’m recognizing now that a number of buzz-worthy features won’t actually benefit us much.

Detailed notes, links, images, and the full slide deck can be found after the jump.

Note: By the way, I’ve noticed upon reading over my notes that it can be unclear what parts are the speaker’s thoughts and which are my comments. Sometimes my interjections are bolded, sometimes they are in brackets, and sometimes neither. I hope it can be inferred from context, but I apologize for any confusion.

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Workshop Title
Designing Social Interfaces: Principles, Best Practices and Patterns for Designing the Social Web

Presenters
Erin Malone (Tangible UX) and Christian Crumlish (Yahoo!)

This was the first workshop I attended this week, on Tuesday. Malone and Crumlish have done a ton of work assembling a comprehensive set of design patterns that can be applied to social software. In their workshop, they ran through a number of scenarios, each showing how various patterns might be applied.

What’s interesting here is that each pattern codifies not only the justification for its application, but also the pitfalls that can be associated with each. One example of many: Letting users form an identity through your software forces them behave as there is now something at stake. Give them a reputation system that incentivizes too much competition, however, and your networks will break down.

Detailed notes, links, images, and the full slide deck can be found after the jump.

Note: I mention Christina Wodtke’s presentation a number of times in my notes. This was a workshop on the same topic that I attended later that day. Those notes will come my next post.

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To celebrate my two-year anniversary at Instructables, Eric W., Noah, Rachel, and I went to iFly to go indoor skydiving. Two vids are below. The lighting is terrible, but you get the idea. I go second in each video. At the end of the second vid, you can also see the instructor showing off what someone can do after a few hundred hours of experience.

I picked up the basics after about thirty seconds, stabilizing myself and even following the instructor around a bit. You’ll see him communicating with me via hand signals a couple times, though, telling me to make smaller, more controlled motions. Noah picked it up even faster.

You can also check out video from when I went actual skydiving with Logan.

More about it, and the artist, on my instructables slideshow.

We’re developing a new set of features at Instructables, with the potential of making it easier for many new users to interact with (and get useful information from) the site. With that lowered bar, however, comes an increase in the many problems of social software and group interactions online. To prepare, I’ve been reading about a lot of similar features on other sites.

While surfing, I came across this entertaining piece by Clay Shirky: a 2003 ETech talk entitled “A Group is its Own Worst Enemy.” I’ve included a snippet below; click through to see my outline, which I created simply as a crib sheet to refer back to in the future.

Writing social software is hard. And, as I said, the act of writing social software is more like the work of an economist or a political scientist. And the act of hosting social software, the relationship of someone who hosts it is more like a relationship of landlords to tenants than owners to boxes in a warehouse.

The people using your software, even if you own it and pay for it, have rights and will behave as if they have rights. And if you abrogate those rights, you’ll hear about it very quickly.

[...]

The patterns here, I am suggesting, both the things to accept and the things to design for, are givens. Assume these as a kind of social platform, and then you can start going out and building on top of that the interesting stuff that I think is going to be the real result of this period of experimentation with social software.

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